All language subtitles for The Fourth Dimension (Trinh T. Minh-ha_ 2001).eng

JIKANDES - It's time

tell me, is it the fog or is it me?

show a country, speak of a
culture, in whatever way,

and you'll enter into fiction
while yearning for invisibility

ravers' madness
a new form of kindness

how tall is Japan?
height, weight, age?

AGE

PASSAGE

RITES OF PASSAGE

Japanese written on every facets of life

calligraphied in the
thousand plays of neon signs

the speed of light

where are you now?

in a train

facing the window-screen

second-class seat

speeding through Japan's likeness

Kogo tokitsukusazare

As people say here,
"in a good talk, don't explain everything"

GISHIKI

Rituals and the formation of identity

the skill of behavior,

the craft of framing time,

the art of paths

why travel, if not to be in touch with
the ordinary in non-ordinary ways

SHINKANSEN

the bullet train

part of a new class structure

the luxury of going faster

while sitting in one place

start in a room
sealed with darkness

and a window immediately etches
itself onto the viewer's mind

again, it's that unbearable fellow

traveler who won't stay behind

whom one cannot get rid of

opening at dawn, closing at dusk

sorrows forming and falling away

heavy

like drops of water
from a lotus leaf

every day from a blossoming lotus

something's emerging

every day from deep in the mud

someone's being reborn

SUKURIN RIZUMU

SCREEN RHYTHM

painting, photography and cinema used
to offer different realms of images

today the gap
becomes the bridge,

what tends to separate film
from video can offer a passage

a world, not of motion pictures,
but of images on the move

pushing, no piercing

the match last the time it takes

for horns to unlock

no crisis, no bloodshed

when "gravity is the root of lightness"

the seated interface
carries with it a danger

both geophysical and spiritual:

that of body losing
touch with body

everyday, controlled by a
computer brain in Tokyo

over a 150 bullet
trains crisscross Japan

their whereabouts neatly mapped
in tiny lights of wall panels

the truly real world is
there where you see trains.

For Soseki Natsume,

nothing represents better the
civilization of the 20th century

than the train.

Hundreds of people crammed in a box
that rumbles along heartlessly.

All taken at uniform speed
to the same station...

He wrote:

"Modern civilization uses every possible
means to develop individuality,

and having done so, tries everything
in its power to stamp it out.

It allots a few square yards to each person,

and tells him that he is free to lead his
life as he pleases within that area.

At the same time it erects railings around him,

and threatens him with all
sorts of dire consequences

if he should dare to take but
one step beyond their compass...

The railway train which blunders ahead
blindly into the pitch of darkness

is one example of the
very obvious dangers

which are bound in
modern civilization."

inside outside, host guest

the role assigned
like the role assumed

at first seems fixed

carefully enforce,
scrupulously performed

but once the initiation
rites have passed

from one closure to another

the inside surreptitiously draws
its elements from outside

without being any less inside

meticulously adapted,
extended, and transformed

nothing is natural,

for the natural in its most
natural is carefully created

look at how long this fellow
has been sitting here

our original face has
never been hidden

Ko doja

in the matted room

a solitary painting

barely line, barely shape

that frail shadow
of a bodhisattva

shading its human frame

the mask:

what makes the face into a
molding of society and history

performing one's gender

is part of the boring
social contract

commenting on the sexual
ambivalence in girls comic books,

Imaizumi Fumiko insists that

girls' "deepest desire is to
be neither male nor female"

they take on a sexless role

that departs from the adult
woman's subservient role in life,

feeling that reality and dreams

can be reversed by changing
male and female appearances.

only when behavior carefully
rehearsed becomes collective

do difference fully take
on the individual color

the relentless
pressures to confirm

the endless demand for freedom

GISHIKI

like nature, human nature
itself is carefully molded

GISHIKI

the choreography of
everyday activities

and of every stage role

has been kept alive
for centuries

GISHIKI

suddenly here I am

carried by the cadence and a
swift metamorphosis of the line

its continuity, tensions,
improvisations and repetitions

the exact train system mirrors the
structure of the society it serves

machines and people
work in mutual accord

once the choice where
destination is made

it can be altered at any time
in any way during the journey

for the fare registered
by the machine

can always be readjusted
by the human hand

itineraries a modified
has so desired

without any fuss or distrust

for no one seeks
to beat the system

HUMAN TIME - MACHINE TIME

when treated with mutual respect

HUMAN TIME - MACHINE TIME

human and machine share the same
devotion to duty

the infinite lines of railways
regulating the urban space

On the Noh dance, Okakura kakuzo decreed:

"the standard of excellence is
an infinite suggestiveness,

naturalism the one
thing to be condemned."

Nothing is more lustrous than ice

Hitori Goto

Time

-time frozen in its movement.

long ago Dogen warned:

"If you neglect the formality
of guests and hosts,

you can understand neither
the true nor the phenomenal"

In the seventh century

during his visit of
the Shadows' Cave

in the kingdom of Nagara Hara,

the Chinese traveling monk
Xuan Zang noted that,

in olden times, one could see
there the shadow of Buddha,

as radiant as his
natural appearance,

and one would have thought it
was the living Buddha himself.

But for the last few centuries,

one has no longer seen
the shadow clearly.

Whatever one sees is only a
weak and doubtful resemblance."

look at how long this fellow
has been sitting here

our original face has
never been hidden

Ko doja

to survive,

spirituality would
have to come to us

from all the ordinary
images of life

It is said that when Shakyamuni
lost his ordinary sight

one branch of a plum
tree blossom in the snow

“the principle underlying
[Japanese] cultural forms,”

says Nyozekan Hasegawa,

“is the control of feeling”

a control ideally meant
to intensify emotion

without flooding the recipient

bridge, train, passenger

what's in motion?

windows closed

muted soundtrack

no body movement

only the erotic rocking
of human against machine

landscape, image, wagon, viewer

what's moving in the
midst of stillness?

traveling anew with video images
put on line displayed on screen

from one spectacle to the next

mobility of human sense

possession of window images

the landscape wires

now gleams now the longer seen

morphing changing from
one minute to the next

shooting in rural Japan

one often shoots in
corporate mentality

collective highlights

collective shots

collective climax

collective photography

a night heron sitting tense on one leg

ready to strike in clear
water with one single swoop

passing through the torii gate,

one encounters an inside Japan

only to be made more aware
of an outside Japan

torii gate setting off the
mundane from the spiritual

what we see passes away

the more evident
becomes the background

while the minor details

go on shifting what
is seen and heard

the other dimension:

gaseous and liquid

because what appears evident
to the eye is a straight line

normal perception is solid,

geometric, clearcut and divisive

Direct pointing to the human heart

seeing one's nature becoming Buddha
Written by the 83-year-old

priest Hakuin sitting beneath
the Sala tree wuthout his glasses

"vast emptiness, nothing holy"

ingrained in modern social interaction
and political performance

ritual is not compatible

with industrial speed

to perform a ritual
one must slow down

WOMEN'S TIME JAPAN'S TIME

Japanese women of old
are said to have this impassive look of the mask

and to live like masks,

with their deepest
energies turn inward

surface is surface

and yet

boundless is the
depth of the surface

that neither
conceals nor reveals

what if, in this journey,

like Enchi and Soseki,

I were to regard events

as parts of a Noh play

and the people as its actors?

Curbing my emotions

to get near to the
Noh atmosphere;

no, not to probe the whys and
wherefores of the character's behavior

and to pry into their
daily worries,

but to let them move about

and come to me in full lines

from a two-dimensional picture

video: a delight for the drowsy body

screen again screen mutually access

mutually processed activated and shut off

trains, processions, parades, time
organized in sequences

the time of light

The Sanman gate of Nanzenji

massive, unique

one among the thousand gates

gates, bridges, corridors

intricate passages in time

sequences of infinity

in the Nihonshoki,

the introduction of
the art of gardens

is linked to the arrival in the
year 612 of a Korean refugee

who in order to gain
residence in Japan,

called attention to his
talent for representation

and was put in charge of tracing
the figures of mount Sumeru

and a bridge of Wu in the
southern garden of the palace.

People called him then the "pathmaker"

Seen Flower

Not Seen Flower

Unseen Flower

MIENU HANA

FUKASHINA HANA

walking with Basho

the lines of a haiku come to visibility

"travelers' heart never
settled the long in one place

like a portable fire"

small, restrain, evocative

-anesthetic in tune with the
fragility and uncertainty of life

a model of understatement

with its shades of gray

Japan,

"the home of the module unit,

the first of the prefab lands"

- wrote a foreign residence (Donald Richie)

a governing system

whose organization is largely
based on microstructures

and prefabricated cells

stopped by the side of
a merry-making event

and a procession reveals to
the mind's eye clear and loud

as a cluster of
melodic, rhythmic,

actionpropelling and
structure bearing cells

the mobile people
telepresent in a transmitted scene

where? where to?

groping one's way in
the midst of Time

as the fog slowly dissipates

leading to a clearing

a new place, a new picture

all lie uncomfortably
between fact and fancy

there where in the heart
of an insular culture

even the mobile world
of invisible narrators

of uneven times an odd
rhythms finds its place

in the precise framing
of daily activities

Zen picture:

demythologize

Open distance nothing sacred

"In the realm of the
thousand Buddhas

He is hated by the
thousand buddhas:

Among the crowd of demons

He is detested by
the crowd of demons

he crushes the silent
elimination heretics of today,

and massacres the heterodox
blind monks of this generation.

This filthy blind old shavepate

adds more foulness [ugliness] still to foulness”

Hakuin Zenji

May 19. Democracy was
crushed by state power.

The parliament forcibly adopted the revised Treaty

binding Japan
to the American security system.

June 16, 1960

the Asahi evening news and
the Mainichi Daily News

reported the death
of Kamba Michiko

during a bloody demonstration against
the Government of Prime Minister Kishi

and the signing of the renewed
Japan-US Security Treaty

Kamba Michiko, a student
of Tokyo University

and a well-known leader of the
20,000 Zengakuren students

who besieged the
legislative building,

had previously been arrested

for taking part in the earlier
demonstration at Haneda

to prevent the prime minister from
leaving for the United States.

The official narratives unanimously
condemned the violence of the event

that shook and
shocked the nation,

while alternative voices
blamed the ultranationalist

for having set the
demonstrators afire

by attacking them ferociously.

Such an insurrection -
also referred to

as "Bloody leftwing
riots in Japan" -

happening before President Eisenhower's
scheduled arrival in Tokyo

was said to have appalled Washington
and America's president

who declared "he would not
permit unpleasant incidents...

to interfere with the goodwill
tour he was undertaking

to improve the climate of
international understanding.

Upon looking at how time
is expressed in writing

and how a death can express the passing
of a historical age and its people,

Kenzaburo Oe particularly recalls
the death of Tsuburaya Kokichi,

a young runner in the Olympics,
who committed suicide in 1968

because, in his own words, the man was
"too tired to run" for national prestige.

But in the history of women's resistance
and of women pathmakers of the 60s,

it is the name of Kamba Michiko
that comes to many women's lips

as I inquire about the one political
figure that strikes their memory.

Kamba Michiko's death may be said
to have marked the turning point

for the image the
world had of Japan.

With the repression
of a civic society,

what was then launched was the new
image of Japan as a corporate society

for which the only way to
progress was the Western way.

coed killed in diet demonstration

More than 400 hurt,
56 students arrested in melee near building

Highly advanced and yet not independent

a global economic power struggling
today to reorient itself

to turn to what Asia

without turning its
back on the West

"Ambivalent Japan":

isolated from other
Asian nations

and confined to Her half
scrutable strangeness by the West.

In America, the very nation with which
She signed the Security Treaty,

suspicion is always lurking at the
slightest sign of trade competition

FUTSU
ふつう

the ordinary

IJO
いじょう

the extraordinary

part-time women's labor

the million yen wall

full-time family shadow work

the issue of homemaking indispensable

but invisible

Japan's stigma:

a lot of its millions
of outcasts and others -

natives, exiled and immigrants

discriminated against

(the Ainu, the Okinawan,
the Burakumin,

the ethnic Koreans
and also the Chinese,

the workers from Southeast
Asia and the Middle East) -

all essential to Japan's progress
and identity as a modern nation,

but confined to the underpaid,
underprivileged margins

sliding open the blinding screens

I find myself stepping suddenly
into the fourth dimension

speeding:

everywhere one turns,

someone is trying to sell speed

the fast species

the peculiar vibrations of
graphic space, graphic time

the whole of visual environment

finds its dynamism
in the graphic line

keep to the time as
required by television

screen space, say TV programmers
is always, always limited

but, as novelist Hisashi Inoue once said,

"I don't like bonsaiism...

it's perfectly alright for some
trees to grow big and wild"

the journey unfolds through the unseen
but dominant framing of time

three times in one:

present past future

as soon as one is in time
time the longer flees

standing still, it opens out

TRAIN TIME - NOH TIME

NO

NO TRAIN

Noh performance, as Soseki affirmed,

is "3/10 real emotion, 7/10 technique"
정(情) 3할에 예(藝)7할

layers upon layers,

clad with "art" to weave a tapestry
of gestures of serenity

that is to be found nowhere
else in this world

yet, for Enchi Fumiko, we are Noh actors

moving in the screen space
of ritual, ethical life

the skill of behavior,

the craft of framing time,

the art of path

what else but the
shape of living

caught in the unfolding
course of a digital play?

The determination to
never wage a war again,

as Kenzaburo Oe remarks,

is a resolve adopted not by innocent people

but people stained
by their own history of territorial invasion

ritual on-screen

whenever it happens in a context
dominated by a machine

which one defies the very rhythm

feeding that machine's needs

video time:

a temporal trap

individual inertia

as the result of ever increased
speed of programmed agency

I'm inside the train

looking up at a wide sky

moving on wireless
bootless and black

Kisho Kurokawa spoke
of Japanese aesthetics

as being primarily
two-dimensional and gray

He laid focus on temporal intervals,

intermediary zones and silent spaces;

on the necessity to create with
the ma of things and events,

for a person without ma
is scorned as a stupid fellow,

one who lacks calm

and is unable to tune in with the
gray zone of Japanese culture

images have come upstream toward the traveler

they appear on a screen with each step

front foot back foot one moves with them

one stops by the road to chat with them

and they know how to show certain things

but cannot always tell why they
show things the way they do

He wrote:

"No one knows where and when
this dewlike existence

will drop into the grass."

VAST EMPTINESS
NOTHING HOLY

the fourth dimension:

to be attentive to the
infraordinary

an intrusion of eternity

"When you see autumn colors,

do not be partial to them.

You should allow
the four seasons

to advance in one viewing,

and see an ounce and a
pound with an equal eye."

Dogen Senji

early rice fragrance
pushing through to right

the "Rough Sea"
- Basho

the antiwar is our mind,
the mind of a flower

- Dogen zenji