Speaking Nearby: Kimi Takesue’s Itinerant Gaze

The Gardner mode of pure observation, which has been consistent in Takesue’s work since her earliest documentaries, has experienced a major resurgence in recent years through the efforts of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (which itself grew out of Gardner’s academic work at the university). Rather than attempting to provide metonymic examples of a singular culture, this more experimental style entails taking the camera into various situations and allowing them to unfold in time without subjecting them to a dominant interpretive framework. The films often become records of their maker’s own curiosity and confusion, as he or she traverses a given cultural zone and tries to make sense of it through immersion. In this way, the films are not the end product of prior research but are themselves both the research and the results.

This guiding principle can be seen quite clearly in Heaven’s Crossroad (2002), which Takesue made in Vietnam. The film is characterized by a peaceful but continual kineticism. Its most common motifs involve transportation, as Takesue’s camera quickly moves through the landscape, jostled by fellow passengers who share at least some part of Takesue’s itinerary. We see boats and beaches, moments of work and leisure, and, above all, close-ups of people the filmmaker encounters on her journey. The film is structured like a mosaic, all of its elements given equal weight in the final edit. It is, to borrow Umberto Eco’s terminology, an open text, one that emphasizes its own incomplete character and implies that it is but one set of impressions among many. In other words, Vietnam cannot be exhausted by any single film, and so Heaven’s Crossroad suggests other possible versions and iterations.

Takesue’s next feature, Where Are You Taking Me? (2010), was shot in Uganda. Beginning in Kampala and working her way to the countryside, Takesue passes through marketplaces and chapels, checking in with hairdressers, weightlifters, newlyweds, and schoolchildren. The result is a composite view of Ugandan life decades after the end of a civil war that devastated the country in the ’80s. As Takesue explained, this film was sparked by a timely commission from the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and came on the heels of six years of preproduction on a feature film that never came together. Going into the Uganda project, Takesue had no agenda but knew that she would not be making “a film that proffers stereotypes around victimization, poverty, or the sensationalizing of violence.”

This freedom from preconception is evident throughout Where Are You Taking Me? Even its title, which might initially sound like a question posed in a hostage situation, is indicative of Takesue’s willingness to follow anyone who will bring her into their quotidian experience. Much as the West has come to mythologize Vietnam as a war and not a country, the news media has made Uganda synonymous with civil unrest, child soldiers, and, more recently, the rise of repressive Christian politics. All of this is refreshingly absent in Where Are You Taking Me?, which instead evokes the varied textures of ordinary daily life in the country.

The film of Takesue’s that has the most in common with Onlookers is Looking for Adventure (2013). Filmed in Peru, it also examines the interaction between tourist groups and locals, in particular the Indigenous peoples of the Andes who have made their traditional practices and handicrafts available for the consumption of outsiders. Looking for Adventure begins with a middle-aged man standing outside a building as pedestrians rush past him. We don’t know what he is waiting for, and after watching passersby going about their business (and a young girl who bends down and directly addresses Takesue’s camera), he simply walks off. As is the case in Onlookers, Looking for Adventure is less about tourism or cultural exploitation than about the point at which incommensurable time structures meet. People come to Peru to experience an “other time,” one that is separate, to some degree, from industrial pressures and the global attention economy. But in order to maintain that distance from the habitus of the metropole, these people must offer themselves as spectacle.

Takesue noted that, in all of these films, “it takes a while to understand where you are and what the context is. They play a lot with the dynamic of overstimulation followed by real reflection, pause, contemplation.” And because she works without a crew, Takesue is able to enter a variety of situations without being a disruptive presence. “I was able to go into more intimate spaces, dealing with people in much more intimate ways. I was using a DVX100, a camera that ergonomically I feel very comfortable handling. There is a lot more handheld in Where Are You Taking Me? and Heaven’s Crossroad, whereas in Onlookers and in Looking for Adventure, I used cameras that I really wasn’t comfortable with shooting handheld. And so that’s part of the reason that those films have a more formal kind of aesthetic.” While a change in equipment may have been the cause for this shift, what carries through all four of these films is an intimacy that seems to result from Takesue’s specific presence and bearing.

She explained: “I am very interested in the interaction that’s happening between me as the filmmaker and the people that I’m filming. I think the gaze is kind of a circulating gaze. I am observing, but I am being observed. In all the films I make, I’m trying to be very upfront about my subjectivity. It comes back to the ideological assumption within film theory, that the person with the camera possesses the gaze, possesses the power, that the camera is a kind of power. But I think that what we see is that if you are patient and you give that interaction time, it will evolve into a lot of different kinds of looks and gazes. And to the degree that there are power relationships at all, they’re actually very fluid.”

In the one instance when Takesue has brought her camera closer to home, she has captured a similar network of multivalent gazes. For 95 and 6 to Go (2016), the filmmaker went to Hawaii to visit her grandfather Tom—one of the most captivating subjects in her oeuvre—to help ease him into a new phase of life following the death of her grandmother. Takesue did not set out to make a film. She was in a bit of a creative lull after spending several years working on a fiction film that never came together. But while observing and speaking with Tom, she began to see him open up in new ways. He had never previously expressed interest in Takesue’s filmmaking, but during this time he spent days reading the screenplay for her halted project and became focused on giving her extensive notes and creative advice.

“He reads my screenplay and I see this whole new dimension in him,” she said. “It animated him in this totally surprising way. Fast forward several years, and the script has not been made. I’m in this complete limbo state, and my grandfather is too. And so we’re together for the first time in our lives. But all the while this is happening, he is saying, ‘If you show this to anyone, I will disown you and I will never forgive you.’ And of course it’s resolved at the end, but while I was shooting I never in any way thought I was going to make the film. I’m from a Japanese family, and that issue of privacy is very serious. People asked me, why would you film him if you weren’t going to make a film? And I said, because this was the way that we were able to connect. It was the catalyst for me looking at him carefully and for him engaging with me.”

Tom is a fascinating screen presence: terse, irascible, no-nonsense, but with a romantic side that comes to the fore when discussing his granddaughter’s script. He suggests the inclusion of 1940s torch songs (and sings a few of them), gives character advice, and, most poignantly, implicitly reads the love story in the screenplay through the lens of his own memories of courting his late wife. In a sense, Takesue’s unproduced screenplay does get “filmed” in 95 and 6 to Go. It becomes the central object by which Takesue and her grandfather are able to understand one another and their very different lives. I cannot say definitively that this is Takesue’s best film, but it is indeed my personal favorite. In it, we see the patience and generosity of the filmmaker, honed through interactions in distant lands and foreign cultures, brought back into the family fold. The result is a bracing reminder that we all contain multitudes, and that those closest to us may benefit the most from having the space to reveal themselves.