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Fumiko Kiyooka
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Fumiko Kiyooka: The Place with Many Rooms is the Body (an interview) (1993)

Fumiko Kiyooka owes her beginnings in film to Simon Fraser University, where a fractious faculty midwifed a new generation of fringe filmers that includes Valerie Tereszko, Mary Daniel, Oliver Hockenhull, Penelope Buitenhuis, and others. With Kaja Silverman’s rigorous feminist psychoanalysis, Michael Elliott Hurst’s staunch Marxism, and Al Razutis’s anarchic avant-gardism, a generation of students were torn between competing pedagogies. Many would not survive these conflicting agendas, but for those who did, a renewed sense of critical cinema emerged — one that is imagistic, historically informed, and politically concise. Amongst their number, Kiyooka has emerged as an enduring and innovative force, marrying the personal and political in a weave that emblematizes the once and future Vancouver fringe. In the four films she has made spanning the past decade she has taken aim at the threat of nuclear annihilation in Clouds and A Place with Many Rooms, the dysfunctional family in Says and childbirth in Creation. Formally trained as a dancer, her films give voice to the body, its cycles of menstruation and maternity caught in the vice-grip of history. Her work speaks of generations of displacement — of migration and diaspora, of broken marriages and single parenthood, all bearing witness to the past without succumbing to it.

MH: What does your name mean?

FK: My first name is Jan, my second name’s Fumiko, and my last name’s Kiyooka. Fumiko’s meaning depends on how you write it in Kanji. There are three written languages in Japanese — two phonetic languages: Hiragana and Katakana. Katakana consists of the foreign words within the Japanese language. And then there’s Kanji, which was borrowed from the Chinese. The meaning of a word in Kanji depends on how it is written. But I’m third generation Japanese-Canadian so my Dad had no idea what my name meant! [laughs] I was named after a friend — Fumiko — and I found out later that the characters can mean “rich and beautiful” or “culture.” It could be literally translated as “letterchild.” I like that one better, so that’s how I write it in Kanji. Kiyooka means “small hill.”

MH: You were a dancer before you turned to film?

FK: Yes. The very first dance I did was in 1970 with Yvonne Rainer when she came out to Vancouver and did a number of workshop performances. Most of the work she did at that time was improvised and very much connected with natural movements. She would give you a word like “frightened” and you were supposed to express that. Then I started taking classes with Paula Ross, Anna Wyman, and at studios in Vancouver, New York, San Francisco, and Indonesia. I’d studied some Bhuto dance in New York as well. It’s a Japanese dance which began after the bombing of Hiroshima-Nagasaki. Bhuto is basically about death and life, which has to do with sex and birth. The guy I studied with — Min Tanaka — would paint his whole body brown and make these really slow movements, rolling from one shoulder to the next and pivoting on all the muscles along the way. The whole performance depended on these small moves of muscular control. He worked completely naked. He’d shave his body and paint it brown, but he kept getting arrested in France and New York, so after that he covered his penis. I thought he had a huge penis for a Japanese guy until I realized it was wrapped in cloth.

MH: And then you took dance at Simon Fraser University?

FK: Yes, but I didn’t like the dance department because it was very competitive and the whole idea of being graded for dance seemed pathetic.

MH: Did each of the schools have a different style?

FK: Simon Fraser was interested in modern dance, which came out of jazz and ballet. It’s better taught in New York because the dancers are extremely well trained, although generally they don’t have much to say. It’s just a question of form and technique.

MH: What is it that separates modern dance from the dance that came before?

FK: Well, ballet has a set number of movements — there’s first position, second position, third position, fourth position, jeté, grand jeté... Every movement is stylized and the way you piece all those movements together is the dance. Everything is turned out. There are big leg movements and pretty little fawny movements. When African dance hit white culture it became jazz — like the way rhythm and blues became rock and roll. Jazz is much more earthy and sexual than ballet. Jazz and ballet are done everywhere; they’re the two oldest forms within the Western culture of dance. Modern dance started around the time of the First World War and it brought the grotesque and the ugly — movements which weren’t normally presented in dance. It started in Germany then spread to New York with Martha Graham, which became a school unto itself, articulating its own forms and standards, its own rules and disciplines, and finally its own style. There’s a Martha Graham style whose movements you can learn. The more styles you study, the more you’re able to do with your body.

MH: You learn a repertoire of others’ styles?

FK: Yeah, but at a certain point you have to find yourself, and schools aren’t able to do that. You learn to do what they want, and if you copy well you’re fine. Copying is the general rule of education.

MH: How did film come out of that?

FK: In 1984 I was doing quite a bit of performance art, and sometimes film was involved. I did a big show at SFU, where I built a transmutator — a large black box that can transform one person into another or blend them together. Also in the piece, a film showed two dancers moving, so the two live dancers danced with their own images. It asked questions about presence and absence, reality and illusion, and I called it Reflextions — as in muscular flexes.

MH: Then you moved from the dance to the film department at SFU?

FK: Yes, I was late coming back from Europe, and they wouldn’t let me into theatre, so David Rimmer let me into the film department.

MH: That’s where you made Clouds (26 min 1986) with Scott Haynes?

FK: Yes, I was in my second year, and Scott was in his fourth, and we decided to collaborate. Since Scott had been in the film department longer, he became more involved with the camera and the technical side, and because I’d done performance I worked with the actors. Clouds was born from a shared feeling that the threat of nuclear war is the most pressing issue. We started by getting into a car and driving in search of a backdrop against which we could film a movement evocative of the dread of total war. We found that location south of the border and began with what takes place at the end of the film — what we called “the nightmare montage.” Later, we came across the name of Kinuko Laskey in a peace movement sourcebook which described her as the founder and president of the Canadian Society for Atomic Bomb Survivors. Kinuko has lived in Vancouver since the war. From our first discussion with her, which lasted eleven hours, we were struck by her experience as a sixteen-year-old nurse in Hiroshima when the first atomic bomb was dropped. We realized that the horror and suffering that happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is often blocked by American accounts of the war, should never be forgotten. If nothing else, we felt Clouds should convey some of Kinuko’s story. Japanese-Canadian internment is also touched upon in Clouds, implicating our responsibility as Canadians in the sort of “us/them” mentality that is at the root of war. The scene in the cattle stables was shot at the actual site where Canadian women and children of Japanese descent were interned and held, to be shipped to camps in the interior. We relied on first-person accounts of people who had lived through war in the Pacific. Rather than statistics, we wanted to unearth the horror of war on an emotional level in order to arrive at the question of how we step beyond histories of conflict.

MH: Was your family imprisoned?

FK: Not directly. I found out about it through fairly recent attempts to exact apologies and payment from the government. The first and second generation Japanese wanted to bury the issue because they were so hurt by the racism. They just wanted to fit in and make amends and get on with their lives. It was the third generation Japanese that made a big stink, and they were finally joined by the second generation, who were really the ones put into camps. Thousands were put away, including many children, and they weren’t released until seven years after the war. When they got out, all their homes and possessions had been seized by the government. The Canadian government didn’t put German-Canadians into camps, so it was definitely a racist issue. I haven’t had much racism directed against me, but I’m half-Japanese, so it’s diluted. [laughs] In my father’s generation, there was a denial of history in order to fit in, and now that’s changed as people are reclaiming their heritage. But it’s become romanticized. Japanese-Canadians here are really old-fashioned ,compared to people in Japan because they’ve got a 100-yearold idea of Japan — it’s a period that no longer exists. I was brought up by my mother. She’s British, and her parents were very racist. Her grandparents were colonizers, and my mother rebelled against them by marrying my father, for one thing. She brought me up to be proud of our difference, making that an asset rather than trying to hide it. The only time I felt discomfort as a child was seeing a National Film Board film at school about “Japanese people” and I thought, “Omigod, the clichés.” I wanted to hide under my seat. I felt awful. [laughs]

MH: Do you feel debates around issues of race in the art community are helping?

FK: There’s only a certain length of time you can put a lid on something before it’s going to start boiling over. I don’t think it’s happening strongly enough anywhere to make much of a difference, but it’s gotta happen.

MH: How do you see your work in the midst of all that? Do your films have anything to do with that change?

FK: I don’t make political-activist-type films or even films that are trying to move towards some kind of “correctness.” I think the personal is the political. I think that kind of change is something not many people want to face — it’s easier taking on issues outside of oneself. There are so many people waving flags that art no longer comes from a person. It takes up causes.

MH: Tell me about A Place with Many Rooms (15 min 1987).

FK: It’s also dance inspired, although the movement is minimal. The film is more of a meditation on the body and identity. It started with a search for a place. Three of us piled into my car with some gear and drove south, looking for an appropriate desert we eventually found in Death Valley, California. It was Christmas time and on the way we’d hear bomb testing reports — how they had to be postponed due to weather conditions until after Christmas, things like that. The film starts with this travelling, with very quick images shot out of the car, sun flares, the dead coyote, and we’re moving somewhere. Judy Radul reads her poetry about the body. And then it shows the desert with two people lying in the sand. The camera moves over the bodies, then we see the man running through the dunes, then his footsteps in the sand as a flute plays. The woman lies in a fetal position while the man walks slowly past. The man rolls onto the woman, who’s asleep. We see them together, superimposed over clouds. His hand touches the sand very slowly, then her dance begins, intercut with trees. The man runs for the last time, then they walk together. Finally they’re lying down, and we see details of the body.

MH: Did you arrive with a script or score?

FK: We worked out the movements when we were there — there was no way to plan them. Initially, I wanted more of a relationship between the couple, but it’s better the way it is because the space between them is something the audience has to fill in. It’s like the desert that’s around them, a paper waiting to be written on.

MH: The problem with an open text is the way formulas and clichés quickly take the place of suspended judgment, of anything uncertain.

FK: I don’t think you can get around that. We’re all brought up with the image of mom and dad coming together and creating life. You can’t get away from it, but you can play with it. A Place disconnects from stories because of the presence of the landscape, the sense of loneliness and separation, being unclothed and alone in the world.

MH: Northrop Frye recites a biblical thematic of separation-initiation-return, of leaving home on some kind of quest, being initiated into another way of knowing, and then returning home to share that understanding. The initiation invariably happens in places like the desert or in those periods in your life where nothing feels very certain. The desert’s a place of wandering, testing, and limits. But your film seemed less about these stringent trials of separation because of the lazy sensuality of these two young bodies warmed in the sun. Behind them there’s neither vegetation nor civilization and they lie very still at the beginning, slowly coming into movement. Then you show footsteps in the sand, which are signs of some kind, an early alphabet perhaps, as these sleepers begin to make a world out of this blank Eden.

FK: The place with many rooms is the body, and when you take everything away you find out what’s inside. The film tries to invoke that in the viewer by drawing away context and narrative and setting the body in this featureless place. The viewer has to go into it in their own way, and journey through these spaces.

MH: Why the repeated shots of the clouds superimposed over the two of you?

FK: Maybe that’s all there is — the sand and the sky. They’re lying together, but they’re not really being lovers — they lie still while the clouds move, their emotions turning over the quiet of their sleep.

MH: It reinforces their sense of being together because they’re anchored amid all this change.

FK: They’re separate a lot in the sand, but in the projection they’re brought together. This is where they can join with one another — as an image — dreaming the old dream they’ve been brought up with.

MH: Says (90 minutes 1992) is your longest film to date — an amalgam of dramatic scenes, television parodies, dance, and structural interludes all circling around the family. How did the film begin?

FK: It started with my son, Kai. I was actually pregnant in A Place, but I didn’t start Says until he was quite a bit older, eight months or so, and I just started scribbling down notes and things. This was around 1987. I was walking around Chinatown with a baby stroller, and every year the needles and prostitution were increasing, the downtown was going yuppy, and the food bank lines were growing, and I had this child in the midst of this place that was becoming a city.

MH: What was the biggest change after your son was born?

FK: When you have a child you have to re-live your own coming into the world. You reinvent the world. But it’s brutal to have to show them what it’s like. They always ask, “But why is it...” and then you have to explain.

MH: There’s a focus throughout Says on the nuclear family as the locus of industrial exploitation, emotional bankruptcy, media manipulation, impossible relationships, sexual dysfunction...

FK: I think most problems stem from the family. Its isolation and self-serving relationships make it a breeding ground for incapacities. I show one extended family in Says, who aren’t seen together until the wedding at the close of the film. The mother of this family married very young and had four kids. She says, “It’s no wonder Ed got into his work routine and drinking with so many mouths to feed.” After they split up, the mother becomes a lesbian and the father re-marries. They each take two of the four children they had together. The two kids who went with the father are Bill, the businessman, and the daughter, Linda, who’s getting married. The others are the two youngest and they’re the left-wing of the family — both boys involved in relationships. Needless to say, the two sides of the family don’t really get along. But the personal problems of the right-wing side of the family are just as present in the left-wing side of things.

MH: The father used to be a pilot in the war.

FK: He’s the father of all of them. Having gone through the war, he’s experienced all kinds of guilt and trauma that live on in his children.

MH: He seems a little out of it. His son is trying to talk to him, but dad’s dreaming about flying war planes.

FK: Yes, that’s often the case with military fathers. They’ve gone through extreme experiences, which were the most intense time of their lives, and they dissolve back into them. They’re doomed to repeat it, like an endless tape recorder. And these unconscious memories are played out through the children — whether through rebellion or conforming.

MH: Says seems very much inhabited and inspired by your own family. You’re present throughout the film, as well as your son and your father. He plays the grandfather who relates family history to his grandson and delivers his own poetry in a moving voice-over.

FK: Sure, this film is also about me being part Japanese, and growing up in a WASP environment, and the roles I’m expected to assume as a female. So at one point you see me wearing a long white dress and a blonde wig, or as a Japanese woman wearing a kimono. But all these roles are deconstructed. I play the Japanese woman standing in the woods holding a child, but the close-ups reveal that I’m holding a baby doll with a clock head. Japanese society doesn’t have room for children anymore because it’s so ruled by the clock — kids are put into school at an early age and made to compete. In Japan there’s a certain nostalgia for women in kimonos, especially with a baby. It means subservience, care giving, maternity. My critique suggests that “mother” describes a role which requires “baby” to become a clock.

MH: The first time we see you in the wig you’re in the woods and you blow up a large, transparent balloon with a map of the world etched on it. Then you throw it offscreen where it floats down a river, and finally a child finds it in a beautiful slow-motion shot where he enters the water. The next time we see you, you’re entering an abandoned house...

FK: ...and I’m knocking on the stairs with a stick, and then I slowly drag a toaster across a floor as if it’s very heavy. I always think of that role as having a lot of anger because of all the dames who were forced to play it out, and all the times it led to situations of abuse. The role of a sex queen was always a lie — it could never be made concrete except when it was stuck inside the home dragging the toaster. [laughs] I wanted to pantomime the roles women are cast into. I also play a hysteric, dressed in white, skulking around graveyards or abandoned houses. The hysteric is connected with death and virginity. She’s always hitting herself and doubling over in pain, having hysterical fits. Hers is the classic place of the female within our culture because the roles of our society are masculine ones and all the others have been shoved away. When people act out their problems they’re “insane” or “hysterical.” The dance of pain I do was projected very small and then I cut it apart with scissors because this image needs to be destroyed.

MH: Says shows a statue of Christ between titles that insist all patriarchal structures are based on an ideal model of Greek homosexuality that is exclusively for men.

FK: The church, the government, the legal system, and the universities are all based on writings by and relations among men. When Christianity was established, it wiped out the matriarchies and said that females were devils and witches and we can’t live by their cycles, so the calendars were changed. You wonder how long we can continue to deny that we’re a part of what surrounds us.

MH: Is it different in marginal cultures?

FK: It’s the same everywhere. As it says in the opening titles of the film, there have been forty thousand years of matriarchal existence on earth and only the last four thousand years have been patriarchal. And these last have been based on greed and exploitation through war, and have completely conditioned our thinking of what it means to be human.

MH: The images of women in the film are deconstructive — is it possible to make an image that exists outside of patriarchy?

FK: To replace it is very difficult. There’s a scene in Says where one of the sons is taking a bath while his lover recites a text about the nuclear family. Some worry that in getting rid of the family, we’ll lose the last refuge of matriarchy which exists today in the figure of the mother. I think there’s a longing in each of us for that; we’ve all come out of that. Later, it talks about the medieval paintings of Jesus that show blood and water flowing from a wound in his chest — just like a woman in childbirth. The Church took away women’s power to give life — because all life comes from God the Father. Women were only a vessel, empty until filled by men and male ideas.

MH: It seems these ideas have endured in part through images, and part of the point of making another kind of work is to try to make an image of something else. Or to take the images that exist and put them in a different order, to dis-arrange them. What is the relation between marginal culture and the mainstream?

FK: If you’re making work whose sole aim is to effect change, then sure, you go out and make a documentary and fit it into the received forms. But independents move through discoveries, you find things along the way. The problem with the reception of marginal art is that the public doesn’t accept it because of where they find it. The context destroys it before it’s even begun.

MH: Says features new narrative trappings, actors, and borrowings from television styles. Were these familiar tropes introduced to broaden the context for your work?

FK: Definitely, the loose narrative line gave people something to grab onto and then destroy.

MH: Why the mosaic form — the bits that are stitched together?

FK: I guess it’s just reflective of the fragmented way we live. In a day you do so many things, and there’s no continuity, no cohesion between all the aspects except you’re going through it. There’s no time, only moments. It’s just a film of the time.

MH: The performances are very flat. Everyone seems a caricature.

FK: In the script they were even flatter — in some ways the film’s a bit nasty. It’s like the National Film Board film I mentioned earlier about the Japanese — only now I’m doing it to the WASP family. It’s a bit rude. [laughs] But I tried to present different aspects of personality as well — like Bill the businessman who is usually making deals and adding money. But I also show him at night when everyone’s gone, upset over what he’s become. He’s trying to play out his role as his father’s son and finds sometimes that no matter what he does, it’s not enough.

MH: After Bill picks up a prostitute he comes home and the family is lounging by the television. The boys want to watch action pictures while the little girl is trying to see pony cartoons. They out-muscle her and put the action flick on while their mother looks stoned on downers. When Bill arrives, he switches the channel and a mud-covered, many-breasted woman shows up on screen and he says, “I don’t want my kids watching this stuff.” But he can’t change the channel and slowly they all collapse on the floor as she dances.

FK: Within the classic suburban home I’ve projected a character who is not allowed to exist there. She’s like the classic Greek form of the mother of fertility, the earth goddess, and she shows up on the boob tube — hence the boobs. They’re unable to get rid of her because she’s that part of themselves they can’t know, but she still has power and overtakes them.

MH: Later on in the film one of the other sons — the guy you’re dating in the film — has a visitation by the gods of plenty. They bring him big plates of food. He’s sitting alone at the desk and things aren’t going well and the door opens and these guys walk in.

FK: He’s supposed to be the starving musician — so he dreams of food. But there’s also a sexual aspect; it also shows his fear of birth. As he looks more closely at the food, he sees that the cake has all these spermy things on it and little babies with bottles, and he’s thinking, “Oh no, wait, what are you giving me?” and then I come in. So the feast is what he wants and what he doesn’t want. I tell him I’m pregnant, but we don’t have a kid; I get an abortion, and break up with him. I come into the food room and walk to the balcony, and when I look out I see the landscape from the beginning of the film and see myself dancing naked beneath those mountains — going back to something.

MH: How long did it take to make the film?

FK: Three-and-a-half years. I got bits of money all the way through, and each took me a bit further. It came from the Canada Council, BC Film, the Secretary of State, and the National Film Board, but never much at once. The editing took a long time. I’d never edited anything that long before, and I still feel I could’ve taken another six months and cut it down even more.

MH: Were you shooting for a certain length?

FK: Yes. I wish I hadn’t, but I talked to a distributor, and they said it should be ninety minutes. Eventually I dropped our correspondence because every time we talked they said they wanted to see a certain kind of film. And that’s not how I work.

MH: Tell me about your next film, Creation (15 min 1992).

FK: I worked on it at the same time as Says. For maybe two years there were little pieces of it that I shot and I did a photo series with a pregnant woman, Hilda Nanning, which the film grew out of. Says is all metaphor. The woman throws the world/ball to the child instead of actually giving birth, so in this film I wanted to show the struggles of creation, the fear of your own death and the child’s, the glorious and frightening aspects of it.

MH: Was the woman a friend?

FK: I didn’t know her that well. I put an ad in the paper and she answered it. Gretchen and I had beepers and we’re waiting day and night, you know, like when’s she going to have this baby? You have to be ready all the time. I called her to say I was leaving for San Francisco in three days and was worried I’d miss it and she said...

MH: Fine, I’ll have it tomorrow.

FK: Right. She’s that sort of person. There are some women who are so organized that they have their whole body function to fit their schedule. She was really good to film because she was so calm and natural with her body — this was her second child and she was very much in control the whole time.

MH: So this is in a hospital?

FK: It was at home, and we had lights and a video camera and a film camera and a midwife. It was a very smooth birth because of the midwife. It was amazing to watch her choreograph it, attuned to all the needs of the woman. We were called at six, and by nine the baby was born. A short labour, although it felt like forever. It was such an intense time because of the contractions and the pain, the stillness and tension in the air, but really it was just so smooth.

MH: This birth is part of a weave which shows a darkly lit dance between mother and child, roomfuls of babies...

FK: Those are like little flashes of babies — babies as far as the eye can see! There are flashes of a mother nursing and of a woman pulled on a cart through a barren space. She looks dead and she shows the fear and dread that accompany the screams of birthing. The placenta is presented as the climax of the film because it represents the complete cycle — both birth and death.

MH: There’s a strong feeling of child-mother sexuality in the film.

FK: I’m glad that came through because that’s the main theme. Child sexuality is very much taboo, but children are born as little sexual beings and their first experiences are with their mother — and it’s important in shaping what happens later as adults.

MH: The birth is so beautifully photographed, it also becomes a sexual experience.

FK: Some births are even more so. In a Tennessee commune called The Farm they would actually jerk the woman off so she’s orgasming while giving birth. Or suck on a woman’s breasts during labour, which induces birth and eases the pain.

MH: The film opens and closes with children speaking in voice-over — what are they saying exactly?

FK: They’re saying, “I didn’t want to get out of my mom’s tummy. I liked it in her womb. So I grabbed onto my mom’s bone, but my hand slipped, and I came out and I hated that.” And the other boy says, “Yeah, but then I saw my baby toys.” And then they talk about angels — angels wear stockings, not shoes. Angels are God’s helpers and you can tell someone’s an angel because they wear white with wings.

MH: How old are these kids?

FK: They’re five.

MH: And they still remember their birth. Is that usual?

FK: I think it’s part fictional. Gretchen recorded that dialogue. She led them through the birth experience. She had them lie down and close their eyes and try to imagine what it was like, and that’s what they came up with. They were really quiet, remembering what it was. When a baby is born, its brain is completely open — you can think a thought and watch a baby’s face take it on. You don’t have to verbalize; they pick up whatever’s happening. Then you slowly see them close in on themselves, growing tighter and tighter, their views and how they decide things until a certain point is reached where they’re locked. It’s physical. The body grows out from the middle, but it can’t be joined because in birth the bones have to cross over so the skull is still soft and malleable. After the baby’s born, there’s a hole in the centre of the skull and slowly that hole grows over and your consciousness becomes locked.

Fumiko Kiyooka Filmography
Clouds (with Scott Haynes) 26 minutes 1986
A Place with Many Rooms 15 minutes 1987
Says 90 minutes 1992
Creation 15 minutes 1992

Originally published in: Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film in Canada, ed. Mike Hoolboom, 2nd edition; Coach House Press, 2001.





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Fumiko Kiyooka: early work

Fumiko Kiyooka owes her beginnings in film to Simon Fraser University, where a bitterly fractious faculty midwifed a new generation of fringe filmers that includes Valerie Tereszko, Mary Daniel, Oliver Hockenhull, Penelope Buitenhuis, and others. With Kaja Silverman’s rigorous feminist psychoanalysis, Michael Elliott Hurst’s staunch Marxism and Al Razutis’s anarchic avant-gardism, a generation of students were torn between competing pedagogies. Many would not survive its conflicting agendas, but for those who did, a renewed sense of critical cinema emerged — one that is imagistic, historically informed, and politically concise. Amongst their number, Kiyooka has emerged as an enduring and innovative force, marrying the personal and political in a weave that emblematizes the once and future Vancouver fringe.

Her first film was made in collaboration with Scott Haynes while both attended Simon Fraser. Simply entitled Clouds (26 minutes 1986), this tightly wound drama of conflict, memory, and internment enlists three generations of Japanese to draft a powerfully disturbing anti-war tract. Kiyooka and Haynes begin their reflection with an image of a Japanese tea ceremony photographed in a scratched and grainy super-8. Though the half dozen men are dressed in uniforms of the martial arts and appear in a traditional setting, the feeling is intimate and relaxed. The men joke with a familiar ease, standing finally in a commemorative frieze that summarizes the easy-going attitudes of a lost time. But even as the innocence of their comraderie is set against their martial uniforms, a foreboding tone sounds on the track — and when their image lifts we see the audience for these pictures is a middle-aged Japanese woman seated alone in a theatre, her grim face worn with the understanding of what these men will become. A voice asks, “Is there a history outside of war?” and then we see a picture of Kiyooka standing before the projection screen, her eyes closed to the present. She recites: “Auntie lived for a time in Hiroshima before the war.” And the long dream of the past begins again.

Photographed as watery reflections, a young couple stroll together through gardens in their native Japan. Evoking a mood of innocent beginnings, they play in the lotus-strewn path of the forest, their slow motion gestures giving way to landscape pans. Voices sound again, part of an outraged chorus of mourning that weighs a historical understanding against images from the past. War has been declared, and this young suitor has answered the call; the bride-to-be is sent to Canada. Wearing the earth-toned cowl of a monk, an old Japanese man stammers a long poem of war. “Day and night, there is a hum and rumble outside. The ceaseless machinery of war never takes a day off. It isn’t as if there wasn’t enough to feed everyone...” Newly arrived in Canada, the bride (played by Kiyooka) is employed at a fish plant, gutting the barrels of catch that wait to feed a hungry population. The dull repetition of blood and machines, the gestures of the body schooled in the inexorable movements of the assembly line, all this underlines a domestic economy founded on the techniques of war. It is only after the declaration of WWII that full scale mechanization arrived in North America as thousands headed to the assembly lines to work for their countries.

A dramatic re-enactment of one of the sorriest episodes in Canadian history follows. After Pearl Harbour, the Canadian government ordered all Japanese-Canadians interned in camps, their possessions and properties seized. The camera moves over pens containing a confused and frightened citizenry, following Kiyooka, who appears here in her third incarnation. First, she appeared as the close-eyed history student standing before the projection screen, then as Japanese bride, and now as a monied Japanese widow forced to take her place amongst the displaced. She is admitted into a cell with another woman who speaks to her in Japanese, a language she doesn’t understand. The horror of government policed racism which had targeted non-white populations for generations through selective taxation, wage slavery, expulsion, and imprisonment is expressed powerfully in these scenes. It is only in recent years that these actions have been mourned again by the Japanese community, and Clouds reaffirms this political act of memory.

An abstract montage follows, detailing the last flight of the Japanese suitor, shot from the skies. The grim-faced woman from the film’s beginning appears, speaking of her experience in Hiroshima the day they dropped the bomb. “People who came to the hospital were black, burnt skin hanging from their arms — no hair, no clothes, just shoes. I couldn’t believe they were human beings.” A closing epiphany follows. Kiyooka races through the trees while war planes drop their deadly load overhead; light lines flash as photos of Hiroshima’s bomb victims stare back in a horror that would haunt generations to come.

Haynes/Kiyooka’s Clouds steams to the depth of the death drive, drafting a powerful mix of personal testament, dramatic re-enactment, poetry and archival footage. Kiyooka’s multiple personae figure throughout, and the changing garb of the maker would be a prominent strategy in ensuing work.

Clouds’s closing epiphany centres on the figure of Kiyooka as a retreating glimpse through the woods. A Place With Many Rooms (14 minutes 1988) takes up this retreat, orchestrating escape into a featureless, desert. The film begins with a kind of prologue — fast pixillated treescapes rush by while a woman’s voice remarks on the body’s ambivalent posture, its surface a breeding ground of desire and duplicity. “Your hollow is the medium of betrayal, your unclaimed territory where the climate changes everyday... You are meat lined by, and never filled by, the Other.” The landscape grows ever more desolate and roads turn to an unmarked geography as the voice offers the prologue’s final gesture of incantation: “In my time we did dream.” There is a sense of escape here, of a broken landscape recoiling beneath a linguistic impasse, of a fragmented sojourn where names and objects lack any necessary fidelity. The film’s title inscribes the last words of the film — an allegorical reference to the body as architecture, as a repository of difference. “A place with many rooms” implies the openly unfolding text of a body at play, rife with the delicious confusion of possibility. But it may also suggest a house divided, its original unity fractured into habits of withdrawal.

As the title lifts, the scene changes, establishing a tempo and subject maintained for the film’s remainder. In the place of words, a soundtrack plays bells, zithers, and wind sounds, and in place of the prologue’s rapid pixillation there are languorous pans surveying desert. They reveal a couple lying naked and asleep, the only movement the passage of wind through hair. These pictures have been step-printed — rephotographed from the original to slow them further still, so even the movement of the grain is arrested. Chained lap dissolves reveal different aspects of the couple’s prone recline — the shapes of the body coiled in a posture of forgetful sleep. This slumbering forms the basis of the film’s leitmotif — a recurring shot of the two lovers lying still while a passage of clouds floats through them. Their bodies in repose learn the rhythms of their surround, absorbed in the cycles of the everyday. Dissolving the difference between figure and ground, Kiyooka enters the wasteland in order to return flesh to its pre-natal sleep, to a rebirth in this desert womb. The remainder of the film surveys their gestures — walking across sand dunes, opening hands, rolling over — before they lie asleep again with clouds passing through them, as if they might one day wake from the long dream of their own bodies.

Says (90 minutes 1992) is Kiyooka’s longest film to date, a feature-length staging of the post-nuclear family that proceeds in episodic fashion. Her cast enacts a single family — each of its members showing aspects of psychic breakdown which has gathered after generations of neglect. Grandfather is an aging widower consumed by memories of wartime service. His son is an unscrupulous capitalist whose first wife left him for another woman. Frequenting whores in his off-hours, his gold-toothed smile assures us that intimacy is another commodity to be bought and traded. His wife is an empty-headed drug fiend whose learned smile and fetishized object relations underline her distracted handling of the three children who remain at home. These three seem the permanent receptacles of broadcast television, urging an increasing violence from the heart of the dream home. Two boys round out the picture. The first is trapped in a self-induced poverty exacerbated by his wife’s announcement of pregnancy. Their interminable arguments dissolve finally with the arrival of the child — a figure who restores, however temporarily, a caring innocence they rally round. The other son is a musician — an artist who has found his way into Canada’s alternative arts scene. Poor and self-obsessed, his recurrent fantasies offer an adolescent vision of rebellion, it’s us against ‘them,’ the abstractions of all he is unable to embrace. He is caught in the aspirations of a lifestyle he has grown accustomed to since birth, while the new ideals of an alternative art practice urge him to seek new solutions. Between these strands, the filmmaker appears in a number of guises — as the Japanese bride nursing a child who has become a clock in Tokyo’s race for efficiency, as a knowing girlfriend to the artist, as the blonde-wigged dancer magically incarnating children in the woods, as a self-immolating hysteric, and as a white-gowned housewife drudge, metaphorically replayed in an abandoned house. While the film’s dramatic portrayals are sometimes strained, the filmmaker’s dance of personae is always compelling, her costumed movements a resonant and deeply felt “acting out” of family dramas.

Says, as the title implies, is redolent with texts. Intertitles, voice-overs, acted scenes, songs, TV parodies, and animated sequences are stuffed with a language of protest which points to the family as the central staging device for an alienated, militaristic technocracy. The family’s patriarchal form, consumer rituals, and sexual repression codify relations of dysfunction and estrangement. Kiyooka often manifests these ideas allegorically. Her film’s ambitious mixture of dance, drama, and documentary is not without moments of invention, like the exquisite slow motion crop of a child moving towards a floating balloon with an impression of the globe emblazoned across its circumference, or the hysteric who scissors apart a moving image of her self-immolating step. Here is the invention of a tragedy strained through a personal mythology, instead of one simply borrowed.

Creation (15 minutes 1992) is a dazzling, sunlit foray into childbirth. While its central image pictures a home delivery, these gestures of labour are interwoven with dance, sex and roomfuls of children — all combining to enact the thoughts of a woman in labour. It begins with a veiled and introspective bride, her hands miming the movements of the child inside. A furious montage of intercourse ensues — swollen cocks, nipples and streaks of light conjure the rapture of conception. While a newborn is slowly pushed through the birth canal a woman and child play in a darkened basement, a naked man slowly hauls a woman lying in a wagon, a pregnant woman dances naked in a frenetic rush of camera movement, hands caress flesh, the bride lies against a wall. These gestures accelerate until the baby slumps out of its first home — bloodied and helpless — finally raised to a mother’s understanding. Sentimentalized notions of maternity are stripped away in the filmmaker’s insistent return to the body, its swollen muscles howling accommodation of the newborn. The soundtrack is filled with wailing, its jarring registers of dissent and anguish cueing the jagged flow of pictures — reminding us of our beginnings in blood. How wonderful and awful and beautiful it all is. If she had not herself been a mother, it is impossible to imagine this film which is made from inside the body, where all seeing begins.

Originally published in: Cantrills Filmnotes, 1992.





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