Hijikata: Revolt Of The Body by Stephen Barber

Author:Stephen Barber [Barber, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9781908694614
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Published: 2013-09-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Fragments Of The Human Body

The body oscillates between carrying a profound anatomical shock, and deliquescing into a mist of deteriorating celluloid, in performance films of Hijikata’s work. Fragments of the body in film destabilise it from its axis, and the equilibrium of the images themselves often veers wildly, ineptly, in the film-makers’ attempts to capture those gestural transits through space, against darkness. Filming against that darkness often presented insurmountable challenges for the unsophisticated 8mm cameras used to seize Hijikata’s body in the act of performance, and that darkness bleeds around the edge of the corporeal figure, always threatening to immerse it and render the image into utter blackness. Since Hijikata was resistant to having his performances set into banality by being documented, whole, in the medium of film, the friends and amateur cameramen who shot fragments of his performances worked under a further restriction: that of making their images glance sharply at the body’s surface, subject to that repulsion imposed upon them by Hijikata. And since the cameras used to film Hijikata’s performances had manual focus levers, the film-makers constantly struggled with the imperative to keep the volatile flux of Hijikata’s gestures from blurring into visual incoherence.

In that straitened, pressurised form, the film image became a sensitised medium for recording Hijikata’s body in the act of performance. Like many artists of the 1960s, Hijikata believed that the human body was under threat from a multiplicity of sources: warfare, cultural uprooting, consumerist urban environments, and also from a gradual unravelling of essential obsessions or narratives of the human body in transformation or glorious abjection. The Japanese body had literally changed in shape during the postwar decades, with the radical alteration in diet that the American Occupation and manias for European-style foods had brought: children were growing larger and stronger, and the bow-legged, bent-over peasant body of Japan was becoming rarer. Hijikata’s transformation of the body, however, operated in another dimension from those superficial changes. He worked for a body that emanated vast panoramas of death, each minuscule gesture of corporeal contortion able to project an entire, concertinaed history of the body, in its essential aberrance, resuscitation, fury, and revolt. That transformation of the body in dance formed an ultimately fragile project, whose form of evanescing anatomical traces intimately allied itself to film, especially experimental film, in an era when the visual moving image possessed none of the ostensible indestructibility which it would later attain, in the digital era. Film often possessed a wilful, obstinate movement towards disintegration in the 1960s (a movement especially pronounced in works by film-makers with intractably focused aims, such as Takahiko Iimura), and that movement in film accentuated Hijikata’s own movement into corporeal disintegration and vanishing.

Ankoku Butoh’s rapport with film was one of the most intensive of the encounters between performance and experimental cinema in the 1960s, but it was far from being the only one. Performance artists and choreographers worldwide formed alliances, with greater or lesser degrees of tension, during that period. The films of

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