Sculpting space with light: Underground (Oda Kaori, 2024)

Underground spaces accumulate traces and memories of past presences, both non-human ones created over thousands of years by geological processes, and those left by human activity and histories. Over the past three years, Japanese artist and filmmaker Oda Kaori has explored and focused her attention on some of these underground places in Japan, seeking to capture and evoke past existences through images and sounds. The result of this research, which has also led to other productions in various media, is アンダーグラウンド Underground (2024), a sonic and visual experiment that was presented at the 37th edition of the Tokyo International Film Festival in the Nippon Cinema Now section last November. 

At least three years in the making, Underground is her most experimental work to date, and a project that concludes a phase of Oda’s career dedicated to exploring subterranean spaces with Aragane (2015) and continued with the underwater world with Cenote (2019), but one that may also herald a new path, more experimental, for the artist. If you want to know more about Oda and her previous work, I’ve written a long essay about her first three works, or there’s also an interview I did with her – although it was almost ten years ago, at the beginning of her career. 

The interest in the Japanese underground and in the past lives it evokes is thus a continuation of the path that the artist took with Aragane and Cenote, but here with a focus on the subterranean spaces of the archipelago. An early result of this exploration of Japan’s underground spaces was released last year, Gama (2023), a medium-length film that brings to light, almost literally, the stories of forced mass suicides of Okinawan people in gamas (natural caves), during the latter stages of the Pacific War. Much of the footage shot for Gama was reused in Underground and combined with images from another project, a nearly ten-minute installation created for the city of Sapporo in 2022. To complete Underground, Oda combined all this material with others shot in Yubari, Shimane, Saga, and Hyogo, although the locations are never specified in the film.

The biggest departure and difference from her previous works is Oda’s decision to use Yoshigai Nao as “shadow” in the film, an almost phantasmatic presence that moves freely throughout the work, connecting different places and different times, and the meaning of which is never explained. This addition brings a performative element to Underground that is almost absent from her other films. Yoshigai is a coreographer, dancer, and director herself, and has made some interesting works such as Grand Bouquet (2019) and Shari (2021); まさゆめ Masayume (2024), her latest – which I have unfortunately not seen – was produced as Cenote by the Aichi Arts Center and screened in Nagoya last November.
Yoshigai also has a prominent role in Gama, as most of the images from the hybrid documentary released in 2023 are reused in Underground. This is probably the main problem I have with Oda’s latest film, the central part is a repetition of what was done and shown in Gama, and although I know that it is the other way round – Gama came out of the Underground project and not vice versa – I feel that the images of Okinawa could have been left out.

While Underground is perhaps less effective when it combines material that is too visually disparate – at least for me the film does not work when it weaves together Yoshigai’s performance with the more abstract images shot underground – it excels in the more visually and sonically experimental moments. In the director’s own words “the underground world is pitch black, and nothing can be seen unless light is shone on it. It is not reflected. The act of shining light on the darkness felt like an act of sculpting the space with light”. This play of light and darkness, the overlapping of the artificial and the natural – the use of film superimposition is first class – and the materiality of the images, which I understand were shot on film, find a magnificent parallel in the sound, a sonic tapestry that, in the most inspired moments, manages to elevate the whole film.

If I’m not mistaken, at the moment Oda is working on smaller projects, she will be screening one of her shorter works, shot digitally, about her mother, at the next Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions between next February and March.