A Re-Discussion of KanZeOn

KanZeOn is a feature-length film completed in 2011. Largely shot on the island of Kyushu in

Japan, the 87 minute piece is structured as a series of chapters revolving around three

central characters –Akinobu Tatsumi, a young Buddhist priest who takes care of a temple

near Kumamoto, but who is also a hip-hop DJ; Eri Fujii, a woman who has spent her life

mastering the ancient Chinese bamboo instrument called the Sho; and Noh theatre

drummer and teacher, Akihiro Iitomi who also happens to be a huge fan of jazz. The film

also shows students learning Shomyo Buddhist chanting at Shuchiin University in Kyoto, as

well as a Goma Fire Ceremony performed at Nan’in temple on Mount Koya. Eschewing many

of the traditional conventions of the documentary format, the film invites the audience to

immerse into a transformative experience.

The film is the first production from Co-Directors and Co-Producers Neil Cantwell and Tim

Grabham.

Neil Cantwell has studied philosophy and music. He currently works as Programme Officer

for Japanese Studies and Intellectual Exchange at the Japan Foundation London office, and

has an on-going status as Foreign Research Fellow at Shuchiin University, Kyoto.

Tim Grabham is a film-maker, animator and visual artist who established the independent

studio ‘cinema iloobia’ in 2003. After 23 years of making short films, KanZeOn is his

documentary feature film debut.

Neil Cantwell: I went away and tried to write an essay, and there seemed to be two reasons

why I wasn’t having much luck with it. Firstly, obviously, two of us made the film, so it was

very hard trying to find the correct voice as just one person writing an essay about it –

overall, it just seemed impossible to distinguish where one person’s contribution started and

stopped, just between the two of us, let alone taking into account all of the other people

who were involved in the project. So it seemed that maybe a film is a bad medium to try

and funnel into one person’s understanding, given that it is necessarily such a collaborative

enterprise, but especially this film when it’s been completely co-directed, co-produced, and

co-developed by the two of us.

So that was one reason why the essay didn’t seem to be working and then the other reason

was, from my perspective, the whole purpose of the film was to avoid writing essays about

this kind of subject, because I thought that it was something that didn’t seem to suit the

written word.

And so instead of the essay, I thought it might be good idea to do this article as a

conversation, which would be a bit more lively, something that we are performing, in the

same way that what we are focusing on in the film are actions and things that are done. I

guess it also seemed to make sense to do it in the audio dimension rather than the silent

dimension of writing.

Tim Grabham: Yeah, I like the idea of reading a conversation between people who’ve gone

through a process, and therefore what we’re doing is simultaneously reminiscing over a

period of time and having gone through a creative process, from the initiation of the idea to

now being surrounded by DVDs of the thing. And also another thing that is nice is that we

can look back and have a bit of distance from it, rather than when we were lost in the

middle of it all and it didn’t make any sense. Although I do think that it not making any

sense is also really important to this film.

NC: There are probably also interesting questions about how films made by two people

differ from films made by one person. It would hopefully be a strength for doing this sort of

self-reflection on the film, where we have two separate minds, where we can know a lot

about what each other thought at various stages but you can obviously never know

completely. We would always have seen things slightly differently, and things would have

meant different things at different times, so you would hope that there would be an effect of

the end results of this discussion being more than the sum of its parts, rather than someone

interviewing themselves in the third person.

TG: The point about this is that it was a really interesting challenge, in terms of you being

someone who’s got an academic background and therefore coming from a less practical

film-making route. So there were these ideas and visual pictures that you had – something

in your head that you wanted to get out into some form of visual medium that you thought

would make a good film. And therefore you needed to have someone that could come in

and work with you to make that realisation into a film, and what I was looking for

simultaneously was I needed someone to have those ideas that I was lacking at that time. I

desperately wanted to do something with some real weight to it, I wanted to do something

that had some really interesting ideas, but I didn’t have any myself. I had the technical

ability, I had all the film-making language, I had all of the zest to go to Japan to make a film

there because it was so exciting but I just didn’t have the story or the concept. That meant

that we came with our own very specific roles, and we didn’t collide, and that was really

interesting and really great because it meant that we could just focus absolutely on working

together to realise the final piece which was the union of the two different backgrounds that

we were coming from.

What was really exciting about that was it almost automatically allowed us to be quite open-

minded in the way that we were shooting because it was already quite a give-and-take

process where we were both very much open to each other’s thoughts and ideas. But when

we included the contributors into that, it very much gave them a free licence to take us

where they wanted to be, to do what they wanted to articulate, they could take on quite a

major role in what was going on and we just had to work together to capture it in the

moment and say well “we’re here now, you’ve got us to meet this person in this place, this

person’s brought us here, they’re going to do this and now we’ve got all this kit and we’ve

got to somehow make the most of these 3 hours in this place and capture where we are

between us”. As a way of working, in light of the subject matter, that was really

complementary in terms of the themes that were coming across, because it was incredibly

open and almost improvised. We really had to think on our feet, we had to make decisions

and run with them and we were lucky - sometimes it didn’t work out, but fortunately most

of the time we got enough material that we could use.

NC: Maybe we can start by talking a little bit about the core subject matter of the film

through talking about the name of the film, that is KanZeOn. The Chinese characters that

the word is written with in Japanese can be literally translated as the words ‘see-world-

sound’ but then it is also an alternative spelling of the name of the Buddhist deity or

bodhisattva, Kannon, as she’s more commonly known in Japanese, or Guanyin in Chinese

and Avalokitesvara in Sanskrit. That name came to us about half-way through the project,

just before the second shoot.

TG: I think it developed over time, because The Magical Potential of Sound was dominating

and KanZeOn became a bit of a subtitle and then they shifted.

NC: We started with The Magical Potential of Sound, which was a real ignition phrase for the

whole project when I read those words in Richard Bowring’s History of Japanese Religion, so

that was the title for a long time. The impetus for the name KanZeOn came from shooting at

Kanzeonji temple in Dazaifu where – no, it wasn’t when we were shooting there, I’d just

come across it looking at a map I think, or I was just remembering going to the temple a

lot, and it was then just seeing the three Chinese characters and realising it was a perfect fit

with the film, as in we were seeing a world of sound. It felt like it had just been waiting

there all along, like it was an anchor of meaning lurking in my past, waiting to be dredged

up, given that I had spent so many hours in the grounds of the temple. Kanzeonji is a 7th

century temple from when Dazaifu was the capital and then the major town for receiving

visitors to Japan from mainland Asia – now the temple is an incredibly atmospheric place

with very stark, bare grounds containing amazing trees whose roots are above the ground. I

spent a lot of time sat on the steps or the wall there reading and doing research, and also

did a lot of thinking there.

So that was one of my personal relations to KanZeOn / Kannon – and there were other

reasons why it felt right to use this word as the name of the film, as a result of the deep

impact on my life of incidents with Kannon. When I was living in Kyoto, doing research

there, I lived in a temple called Imakumano Kannonji which was dedicated to Kannon - we

filmed there with the priest doing Shomyo chanting. And then it only occurred to me very

recently, that my personal relationship with Kannon went back even further to my very first

realisation of the personal possibilities of Japanese religious faith. When I was doing the 88

temple pilgrimage in Shikoku – I did the whole thing a few years later, but before I just did

it for 2 or 3 days – I had a really revelatory experience of being completely stranded, and

not knowing where to go or what I was doing, and then we got rescued by a man called

Akihiro, a gardener, just as we were coming to a temple that was dedicated to Kannon.

There’s a legendary story of Kukai, who the pilgrimage is based around, being saved from

jumping off of a cliff by Kannon and that’s what caused the founding of the temple at the

base of the cliff. And so we were there, stood at these crossroads, getting rescued by this

guy and then I was just hit by the religious power of this story while realising its parallels to

our situation at the same time as being really exhausted and tired. It just opened a chink of

light in my mind to understanding this sort of religious metaphor in a way that I’d never

really thought possible before. And that was the moment that led to the whole rest of my

time in Japan and pretty much everything I’ve done since then. And so I only realised that

recently, that this was another big push from Kannon in the direction of making this film.

TG: I like the fact that these things happened throughout, whether or not they’re

coincidences or serendipity or whatever you want to call them, some kind of destined

weirdness that happened. It’s interesting that these things were happening to you before

we even talked about the film project but throughout the project we were struck by endless

situations where luck and good fortune was incredibly on our side – there were times during

the film where I felt there’s something, whatever it may be, I don’t want to say looking out

for us because I don’t necessarily know whether that’s something that I adhere to. But I did

feel that during the making of the film, in the filming and when we were editing, I was very

conscious of staying with a particular state of mind, a very respectful state of mind and a

very particular state of thinking about what we were doing, and I thought “If I deviate from

this, it’s going to mess things up”

NC: A kind of acting in accordance with something that you’re not quite sure what it is but

you feel it, but you can’t quite put it into words

TG: Yeah, there was a respect for where we were and what we were doing and, regardless

of my own personal beliefs, while I’m engaging in this I have to engage with a respect for

what we’re doing and where we are, especially as we were in so many sacred spaces. I felt

that because all of us created this incredible energy while we were there, there were a lot of

very positive consequences happening in everything we were doing. It was an unexpected

and exciting challenge actually going over to Japan and finding myself in these situations

and getting lost in the process where I felt I got caught in a slipstream where you’re waiting

for the inevitable to happen and the inevitable in my mind was that we’re going to capture

something very extra special on camera. When I say extra-special I don’t mean that it was

going be super natural, I wasn’t expecting to capture some supernatural act on camera, but

what I did realise after a while was that we were capturing very delicate subtle moments in

a massive web of things that we normally just wouldn’t see or wouldn’t notice, the fine little

details. I felt that the more that we were filming, the more that we were going into these

places, the more of these subtle things were turning up on camera. The lens were

abstracting with what Tom (our cameraman) was doing and suddenly these weird

abstractions were happening for no real reason at all. I was thinking “why is the camera

doing that?”, odd things were happening in front of the camera increasingly, that probably

happen all the time but you just don’t notice them but we were getting more and more

tuned into something. And the more tuned in we were getting to whatever this energy was,

the more I was convinced after a while that we were being led on, and whether or not now

that I feel that that’s ridiculous, in no way would that mean converting myself in any

philosophical or religious sense to the ideas that we’ve been presenting. But whenever we

were filming I was totally and completely submitting myself to this idea, I was like “yeah,

ok, if that’s the way it is, I’m submitting myself - if something’s looking over and going with

us on this, then brilliant”.

NC: It’s interesting to think about what that energy is and how you could package it and

what you would want to call it, and how it relates to the religious inspiration of art across

space and time, that is different people in different parts of the world at different times. I

felt like you while we were filming, and I’ve also felt like that when I’ve been making music

in the past, that kind of following where things lead you. That kind of artistic process is

taking inspiration from mystery that you don’t understand, but these are forces that

historically and culturally people have called a certain name or given a certain form or given

a certain metaphysical structure or philosophy. Almost what we were doing in making this

film was following those forces in the same way that maybe someone 1000 years ago would

have carved a statue and called it Kannon - perhaps in the way that they were inspired by a

certain set of values or teachings that led them in what they happened to be doing to be

working with a piece of wood and some tools, making this 3 dimensional object came to

represent how they felt about what they'd been doing. Obviously built upon teachings and

knowledge and culture that’s gone before them so they’re kind of picking up the symbols

from what they happen to have encountered and then using that as a name for this

inspiration, the thing that has bound the creation together. And that’s especially interesting

in terms of a film about Buddhist ideas, because there were times in the history of Buddhism

when there was no visual representation of the Buddha and it was arguably anathema to

the teachings of the Buddha to create statues or to venerate any kind of physical object.

That’s only something that started when the teachings of the Buddha came into contact with

Greek culture in the Gandhara civilisation and that’s when you see the first statues of Prince

Gautama that were made to be venerated. Once you have these personifications of a figure

to represent an idea, its maybe slightly easier to understand the notion of a visual work of

Buddhism, or something that’s perhaps just bottled a very small amount of the Buddhist

heritage that’s come down through however many hundreds of years and filtered through

however many thousands of people in different times and places into us coming to

encounter what we were filming. So it’s interesting to think about how you can personify,

name and visually represent ideas.

TG: It’s also interesting in that the title of the film itself would suggest, in some people’s

hands, if you were going to make a film and you were going to call it KanZeOn it would

deliberately be making some kind of devotional art in the same way as if you were carving

that statue. If you carve a statue of Buddha are you creating devotional art? Yes and no,

maybe it depends what your motives are, what you are trying to articulate or what you are

trying to understand yourself through a process of making that statue or this film. I suppose

what’s interesting about this film is you can ask the question ‘is it a devotional art film?’ and

I think in some ways it isn’t but equally in some ways it could be interpreted as being that

but what I see it as is trying to comprehend ideas. It’s trying to deliberately not make

conclusions, it’s trying to deliberately present things for the viewer to absorb as neutrally as

possible so that it’s down to them to come to terms with what they think it means and its

down to the audience to try to come to terms with these things that are being juxtaposed

together without being told why they are being juxtaposed together. I think when I see any

kind of devotional architecture or devotional music or devotional art, my main feeling is that

it’s down to me to decide what I make of it. There aren’t answers in that work, the answers

have to be for me to work through, and I quite like that about the film. One of the things

we’ve constantly come across when people have talked to us about it is they’ve told us what

they think it means, they’ve given us interpretations of it and that’s been a real delight.

People have been mentioning the fact that it hasn’t given them a prescribed description of

something and it hasn’t been giving them long passages of talking heads saying ‘this is what

Buddhism is, this is what this is’ – there is a bit of that, but not too much. They’ve quite

enjoyed the fact that they’ve been able to digest and make of it what they make of it and

it’s been an interesting process to see how people respond.

NC: What you’re saying there corresponds to this quote that I wanted to mention, which

had been quite a guiding light for me for quite a long time, both in terms of philosophy and

morality, but it also came to be really instructive in this film. It’s a quote from Gilles Deleuze

- he’s talking about Michel Foucault, who was his teacher, and I think it chimes with what

you’ve just been saying.

“We ridiculed representation and said it was finished, but we failed to draw the

consequences of this theoretical conversion, to appreciate the theoretical fact that

only those directly concerned can speak in a practical way on their own behalf”

From Intellectuals& Power: A conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles

Deleuze, p.209

My understanding of what he’s talking about is a philosophical rejection of Plato and

Descartes and this idea that there’s a separation between us and the world and that there

can be any kind of representation between two things. This is part of a philosophical

movement that happened through the 20th century, coming from Nietzsche and Heidegger,

who had both been big inspirations for Foucault. So as Deleuze says, a certain metaphysical

point had been reached without perhaps really realising the consequences of that, which is

that if there is no representation on a metaphysical level, then on a purely human level to

try and represent someone else is somehow similarly mistaken, and so you should try to

avoid representing someone and always give them the opportunity to speak for themselves

first. That’s as much a moral or ethical point as a metaphysical one and for me that pretty

much sums up how we went about making the film as well. We weren’t trying to say what a

performance means, we were just showing the performance, as much as possible

TG: I think the key to all of this is that you try to do it as much as possible. If you were

being very pure you would have an entire performance from beginning to end with no

explanation or anything – there’s probably two occasions in the film where it’s close to that.

One is the Noh performance, where there’s a little bit of preamble and we’ve some

descriptions prior to the long performance of Kiyotsune. He’s given us some build-up and

understanding of a bit of back-story, for someone who may know nothing about Noh to give

some grounding so that when you watch it, it will hopefully come into a focus a bit more

than if you were just to go into it cold. And then secondly, the Goma Ceremony is probably

the one where you go into it with least help because it just comes in completely without

explanation, it’s only at the end where you get a small description of what it was, i.e. what

it’s called and why it’s done. You could argue that you should strip that away and allow it to

be completely without description but then you’re in danger of the opposite effect

happening, where it’s just meaningless and exotic, like an oddity or a curiousity, without the

depth that it actually has.

NC: It’s good to get onto this point of exoticness, because there is also a question of to

what extent what we’re presenting to an audience sits on a spectrum of Orientalism. I’m

sure someone somewhere could argue that body of critique applies to this film, as could any

film that is made about an Asian subject with a vaguely romantic or mysterious or

mythologizing sentiment in being open to the charge of exoticising in a way that doesn’t

respect the depth of what is being presented and just treating it as a novelty. That’s a whole

other debate that we’re encountering with these kinds of questions, but I feel like if we have

stuck as closely as possible to this idea of just trying to provide an unmediated but

meaningful document, we can’t be accused of Orientalism. But I feel that it’s a spectrum,

and we’ve got to be on the spectrum somewhere, otherwise you fall into the trap of thinking

that only an Asian person or a person from a Buddhist background can make a Buddhist

film, or only a Japanese person can make a worthwhile film about Japanese culture.

TG: I’ve never adhered to this idea of ‘who are you to make this film?’ I think we can all

have our perspectives, I don’t think we were trying to hide anything and for all the people

who we were engaging with that was pretty obvious. But I think the reason it worked is

because we worked on a collaborative basis with everybody in the film, we gave them a

pretty blank sheet of paper, saying ‘this is basically what we would like to do with you’ but

they filled it in. All the contributors would always decide where we’d do things, what we

were going to do, they were very much in control. In the edit you could argue that we took

back that control and manipulated them, Tatsumi we probably manipulated the most as a

character but he was probably game for that because he’d seen cuts of it and he liked it and

he liked being a slightly eccentric night owl who was the priest by day and the hip-hop artist

by night

NC: It’s an interesting thing about Buddhism in particular, that perhaps it is particularly open

to new transnational reinterpretation. Obviously there are various versions of all religions all

around the world as well, but historically you could say that Buddhism is the most syncretic

religion in terms of being able to fit itself around or underpin other ways of thinking or

accommodate them. So the idea that we could identify with a Buddhist figure and call the

film a Buddhist name would hopefully fit within that background

TG: As well I think it’s important not to be afraid of not being precious all the time, be

respectful yes, but you don’t have to be precious about things. The film is quite playful at

times, not just with the theme but also with the film medium and there are times when the

films just does things that you don’t normally do in a documentary of this kind - the film

breaks and there’s moments in Tatsumi’s parts where stylistically it messes with the

structure on purpose. It deliberately disorientates the audience and that is designed to force

the viewer to re-orientate and consider what the hell is going on.

NC: Now we’re in the realm of something else I wanted to talk about where we can perhaps

mention a little bit about inspiration from other films. This whole fiction/non-fiction boundary

is something that I felt was very much inspired by Byambasuren Davaa, who made Story of

the Weeping Camel and Cave of the Yellow Dog. I think forcing yourself to re-orient when

you’re watching the film is something that she does in her films, treading this incredibly fine

line between ‘Is this real or is this manipulated?’ and you’re left in this state of wonderment

because you’re never sure if what you’re seeing is seemingly so incredible that if it’s real, it’s

miraculous, and if it’s not real, it’s so convincing then it is almost miraculous in its execution.

I feel that she is really using the medium of cinema to question topics like the nature of

reality, mythology, divine intervention, serendipity, all these things that we’ve talked about

already and she just seems to have control of them in the palm of her hand.

TG: Absolutely, and just to finish the point I struggled to end a moment ago, the thing that I

feel is quite a mantra for the sort of work I like to do is I always think that disorientation is

an incredible key to greater understanding of something when you finally find your way back

in. In any form of music, art, architecture, any kind of sensorial experience, if you begin by

being disorientated, leaving your normal secure senses and feeling like your roots have been

ripped out of the ground, however subtlely or however dramatically, then you’re forced to

rethink the nature of what you’re experiencing. You’re forced to think about it, it’s not all

just been laid out and you’re aware of not just allowing yourself to be spoon-fed something

that’s predictable at every turn in the classic Hollywood sense. What many people would

criticise as the problem with a lot of Hollywood films is they’re utterly predictable, formulaic

storylines which means every step of the way you in the audience are in possession of the

next step before it happens because that is the joy of watching the film, that you feel

comfortable and you feel safe in the company of this film. Nothing is really going to throw

you out of your comfort zone and you’re going to feel good because it’s going to end in a

satisfying way that you knew it would and there might be a little bit of jeopardy but

ultimately everything is where it should be. But you haven’t learnt or expanded or in any

way gone anywhere because of that film, you’ve just satisfied a gluttonous need in the same

way as eating a massive bar of chocolate in one go. But I think when you really feel

something from a work of art, whatever it may be, disorientation is the best way to begin

that navigational process.

We’re talking about what films influenced us but I think it’s important not just to talk about

films but any kind of art. I remember seeing an Anthony Gormley exhibition at the Hayward

Gallery where there was a big glass white box full of dry ice and I’ve never sensed

disorientation as much as when I walked into that box. It was probably about 8 by 6 metres,

you go in this room and you can’t see a thing and suddenly disorientation overwhelms you

and you have to start again in every capacity. You have to re-calibrate your eyes, your ears

suddenly have to become so much more aware, your sense of touch becomes so important

because you need to feel where the edges of this space are and you need to know where

other people are because you can’t see them so you have to use every other sense you

have to get an idea where they are. But after you’ve spent about 10 minutes in that room,

you do not feel the same person you were when you walked into it, you feel completely

different, you feel an inexplicable sense of enlightenment. You don’t quite understand why

but you walk out feeling exhilarated – I don’t know what happened in there but I lost my

senses as I walked in and then suddenly I regained them in a new refreshing way because I

was ripped from the normality of life and then thrown back in momentarily and for me the

most exciting artwork does that. And the most exciting films do that, where I just go ‘I don’t

know where you’re taking me’ but you put your trust in the director or the film-makers and

the crew and the actors and you go ‘I don’t know what journey you’re taking me on but I

like it and I want you to take me on a wild journey and I hope you’re going to satisfy me by

the end of it’. And although KanZeOn is maybe not a wild journey by any stretch of the

imagination, I think the fact that what we hoped to do was lull people into a sense of

security at the beginning where you go ‘oh, ok, I’m watching a bit of an observational

documentary and I kind of know where I am…’

NC: I don’t know, the way that we go from the chanting to the decks at the outset…

TG: Yeah, maybe that’s a precursor, but I think there’s still a sense that you’re in the realms

of something quite observational for the first two or three scenes of the film. But obviously

there’s a point in Iitomi’s first scene where suddenly it just goes black and the moon

appears – that’s the point where there’s no going back, you realise that something has

changed and you’re either going to go with it or you’re going give up at that moment. You’re

either going to go ‘oh, ok, this is intriguing, this is interesting, I’m slightly disorientated, I

don’t know where I am’ and then it continues to disorientate more and more. But then it

kind of comes back and then hopefully it makes more sense because of that. And I like that,

and that is influenced by the films that I love that do that, anything from 2001, which is a

great example of a film that throws you in where you think you know where you are and

then you just have no idea after a while and you can make up your own mind about where

that film takes you but it rips you out at a certain point and never really lets you back in.

And I think the Weeping Camel film is a brilliant example of the manipulation of cinema to

the point where you’re convinced that you’re trusting the film-makers going ‘yeah, I’m

watching a documentary, I’m watching a special kind of documentary, it’s a bit weird but

yeah it’s real’ when there’s clearly manipulation going on there but it’s so seamless you just

don’t know. Where does the documentary begin and end in that film? Like Ulrich Seidl’s

Import/Export is another example, you can’t have a more extreme comparison than The

Story of the Weeping Camel and Import/Export, but fundamentally it’s a very similar

process. You’ve got real situations, real people used as actors and the line is so unclear, it’s

so blurred you don’t know.

NC: A few other films I’d like to mention with a similar feeling would be, Rockers, in terms of

blurring that line, but also in the direct power of the musical performance to camera. That

was definitely something that I was hoping we could try and reproduce, just the idea of

letting an amazing performer perform in front of the camera in a very raw way. Another film

we talked about a bit was that Chet Baker film Let’s Get Lost – that’s very much a unifying

of style and content in the way that the film is presented; it’s a beautiful visualisation of

jazz.

TG: I’ve only seen part of it but I loved the textures and feeling of what I saw…

NC: I felt there was a similar thing of trying to force the power and the meaning of the

content through to the other side of reality. You’ve got this portal of what reality can be and

then you have the thing that you want to say and you make it fit through that gap and it

changes the possibilities of reality for the person experiencing it.

TG: What’s interesting about all of these films that we’re mentioning is although they’re

unbelievably different to each other, and I wouldn’t want to put KanZeOn in the class of

some of these films we’re talking about, but they’re films that have inspired us in being a

broad interpretation of the film medium and saying ‘look, you can represent ideas in a

multitude of ways’. You can look at the most extreme film examples; you can look at a Stan

Brakhage film where he’ll glue moths onto the celluloid and project them or Dog Star Man

which is an incredible piece of avant garde cinema where you watch the most gloriously

experimental work as one wild wilderness of film-making. Or you can go to the most

fundamentally traditional obvious Hollywood film-making and there’s so much in between

and I think what’s nice is to remind yourself that there’s many many many ways to

represent ideas through the moving image medium and it doesn’t have to be through

formulaic processes that are already laid out by people and used again and again and again.

And documentary is having a real problem with this at the moment, and again KanZeOn is

not strictly a documentary, but if you were to talk about it as a documentary then one of the

reasons that we made it in the way that we did was because there were so many

documentaries around and there still are an increasing number of them that are using

television formatting as its template and insist on laying out the information again and again

and again in the same way. Encapsulating the essence of what the film is about in the first 2

minutes, constantly reminding you about what you’re watching, constantly having to

reinforce the validity of the people on screen by telling you their name, their credentials,

who they are to make their words seem valid. Well, we deliberately didn’t mention

anybody’s name on screen because does it make what they have to say less valid if you

don’t have that information on screen? It could be anything, it could be ‘Jimmy Aardvark,

Toad Conjuror’, does that make you feel ‘oh right, I understand them now because this is

Jimmy Aardvark, Toad Conjuror’. It could be a lie, it could be anything. I think the point is to

strip it bare and just listen to what this person has to say, you can find out who it is later. If

you find it interesting then maybe you’ll want to find out who said it but does it make it

more interesting, does it make it more valid just because there’s a little title at the bottom

so you can go ‘oh yes, that must be something important because of their credentials’. I just

feel there are so many things imposed on documentary film-making at the moment that

suffocate the ability to represent the ideas in a more exciting way and when people actually

do it you just feel like a breath of fresh air has come through the room.

NC: Maybe that’s a good way into talking about the fact that we didn’t use a narrator in

order to avoid those sort of issues, but also arguably that our narration in the film was the

soundtrack. That was also the least documentary part of the film, as in we were creating

sound that didn’t happen, but almost in a way to suggest that it did happen. And so there

were a couple of other films I just wanted to talk about that were inspirations particularly in

terms of sound, one being Into Great Silence, as in arguably our film is the inverse of that

but the way that it approached the lack of sound was similar to the way that we approached

the presence of sound. And then other reference points, maybe visually as well as sonically,

was Kwaidan and the composer of its soundtrack Toru Takemitsu. There is incredible

meaning that comes from the texture of the sound in that film, and maybe there are also

visual references?

TG: I think it was more of a feeling and the theatrical nature that was beautiful in that film

that was helpful in filming some of the performances and also for the Noh theatre.

NC: It was mainly the Hoichi The Earless section that felt relevant to me – I was just trying

to think ‘what Buddhist images on film had I seen before making KanZeOn?’, in terms of

references, and you’ve probably seen much more than I have, and that was the one that

stuck in my mind and obviously we talked a lot about Takemitsu and this fantastic quote

“to me the world is sound. Sound penetrates me, linking me to the world. I give

sounds active meaning. By doing this I am assured of being in the sounds, becoming

one with them. To me this is the greatest reality. It is not that I shape anything, but

rather that I desire to merge with the world.”

From Confronting Silence, p.13

And that quote also links into one other film-maker that we talked about, which would be

David Lynch and that whole unity of visuals and sound, and how the sound can be such a

leader in what’s being communicated by the film. His ability to create this incredible unity is

definitely something that we both felt we really loved.

TG: Now you mention him, I remember something that you said at one point during the edit

and I wrote it on the drawing board next to the edit suite, I think you said the words

‘tumbling through worlds’. We were editing the sequence with Tatsumi where he kept

changing faces – he was on the rope bridge and then he was in the forest and then he was

in this strange limbo place and then he was in a nightclub and then he was on a TV in the

nightclub and then he’s not there anymore and he’s back in the club and then he’s out of

the club and he’s in a car and he’s teleporting and he just kept shifting spaces and I

remember it was an incredibly difficult edit to get right, it took a long time. Around the time

of trying to deal with that I remember the words “tumbling through worlds” appearing on

the drawing board and it became such an excellent way to think about the film, allowing the

audience to tumble through worlds and feel like they were moving between spaces quite

effortlessly. And I remember just thinking about David Lynch and that’s what he does so

well, teleporting you through spaces.

And another influence, I don’t know if it is an influence, although it’s a film-maker that you

can’t not mention, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, for example Syndromes and a Century and

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and all his art pieces. What’s interesting

about him, briefly, is he clearly has a lot of Buddhist themes in his films, but he’s not overly

precious about it, he doesn’t mind being irreverent, he doesn’t mind being playful and he

doesn’t mind making you work quite hard and there’s quite a lot of rewarding stuff in his

films. But he wasn’t an influence at all weirdly, although he makes films that are quite

definitely Buddhist and quite hard to engage with sometimes and quite disorientating but

not remotely an influence, I don’t know if that’s worth mentioning…

NC: Let’s come back to talking about the sound because I wanted to talk about that more in

the way that it very much links in to the underlying philosophy of the film, which comes

from Shingon Buddhism, which is the idea that ultimately you could understand the entirety

of existence as a system of vibrations. What musical performance is, or what religious ritual

musical performance is, is a way of uniting yourself with the entirety of existence and the

entire universe that is in fact the ‘Great Buddha’. So that’s a vast cosmological theory about

what reality is that there’s no need to go into here, but historically in Japan these ideas has

been very influential in terms of what the reason for doing chanting is, so that it’s a practical

means of transforming your body through sound and vibration in order to create certain

mental states and experience realisations. This is very much related to the use of Mandala

diagrams and the whole ritual nature of Shingon that we see in the Goma ceremony, which

is arguably the foundation of all Buddhist ritual in Japan, which is that the purpose of the

religious act is to unite and identify yourself with the true nature of existence, which can be

personified in the form of a deity, so some personification or some symbolism that you

choose to give a certain idea.

These ideas have an interesting resonance with the quote from Takemitsu about “it’s not

that I shape anything, but rather that I desire to merge with the world” as being his

motivation for making music. He’s not trying to express anything, he’s not trying to give

them meaning, he’s trying to be part of the sound and so similarly Shingon Buddhism says

that to perform a chant is not simply some sort of magical incantation trying to do anything

only through having a certain meaning, rather it’s the embodiment of the actuality of

enlightenment. It is the thing, by doing it you become what it is, it becomes part of you,

your physical existence is it, so again this is a kind of transcending of this idea of

representation that we were talking about before. It’s not as if the words that you’re

chanting are supposed to mean something that then unlocks some sort of magical door in

the nature of reality, there’s no separation between the words that you’re chanting as you

chant them and the truth of existence. That also relates to philosophical ideas in another

dimension about the world being a form of text, so you can divide these understandings of

reality into many different dimensions, sound or text, but it’s all about unifying as opposed

to separating, of which the latter is arguably the European mind-set of going about how we

understand the world.

In Shingon Buddhism there are the dimensions of sound, language and also visual

representation such as Mandala. What these visual aids or guides are trying to do is project

from a mysterious realm that others have gone to before where they have understood the

truth of relations between things, and so these are diagrams are trying to project back from

that realm in a way that can be understood from a less realised point. That’s an interesting

way of thinking about what visual representation of Buddhism is or can be and what might

be possible with the medium of film.

One final point about the sound, and the way we tried to use sound in the film, a thing that

really struck me just in the practical technique of making a film was the sound mix. In

particular adding reverb to various parts of the mix brought home to me how strange the

making of cinema is. What we were doing in using this reverb was putting back on to the

sound what the microphone couldn’t capture, which was the sense of space. That can

somehow be reproduced by speakers and you could capture it if you had enough

microphones, but what we did was a kind of touch-up to make it feel when you’re watching

the film that you’re more there than you would be if there wasn’t the reverb. This well-

practised technique of doing the sound-mix is trying to put the audience more in the picture

than they would be, so again there is this action of identifying, with the screen, with the

experience, trying to make the audience part of what is happening in the performance. But

it’s also very opaque in that you’re so obviously not there, and so that kind of disbelief and

that state of mind that we’re trying to allow people to have is very interesting.

TG: Well, that’s the whole conjuring trick of all moving image work, you have to forget that

you’re watching a film and there’s that point where you’re watching something where you’re

so immersed in it that you forget you’re watching a film and you’re just lost in this

experience…

NC: The thing that interests me is how does that state of mind relate to the state of mind

that is trying to be created in a Shingon ritual of identifying with a deity. You’re meditating

and you’re trying to incarnate this deity in front of you – is that like you’re watching a film of

the deity and you forget you’re watching the film? Is that the same state of mind that

cinema is now a modern day means of creating?

TG: I think the word ‘seductive’ has often been applied to the cinema experience, rather

than the meditation or ritual experience. For the film to really draw you in, you have to

eliminate all distractions, you have to get rid of the sense that you’re aware of the camera,

you have to get rid of being aware of imperfections in sound and noise and technical

imperfections that remind you you’re watching something. The camera arguably needs to

stay very innocuous and not intrusive and so you forget there’s even a camera involved in

the equation, the performers have to be naturalistic...

NC: But sometimes you want to do a camera move for effect…

TG: If you execute it in a complimentary way to everything else that’s happening, it

becomes so part of everything that you don’t notice it. Whereas as if the camera suddenly

decides to do a drum-roll and say ‘look at me’ you’ve lost it because suddenly it’s all about

the camera. It would be the same if someone was acting in a film and suddenly they

delivered a wonderful convincing line and then winked to the camera to say ‘didn’t I do

well’. That breaks it because you stop believing or you remember…

NC: It’s this notion of believing and almost the need to have faith, these are very religious

concepts.

TG: Yeah, it’s becoming lost in something and so immersed in something that you forget

that there’s a film or any fabrication, that you’re dealing with something that’s been

captured on celluloid or digital. Then it’s gone through an edit process, then it’s been colour-

graded and then it’s had a sound mix and then maybe it’s had special effects put on it and

all of the multitude of things that happen to make reality not-reality anymore because it’s

gone through a whole series of filters and processes of manipulation. But it’s a fascinating

thing to see why you get immersed in something, why do you get lost in something and

what will draw you out of it.

NC: But also, what is the purpose - is the purpose just getting lost or is it for some other

end? Is it to melt boundaries and barriers of reality, or is it just to go somewhere else? You

could say that arguably the same thing is happening in a Shingon ritual but is it for the

purpose of realising religious truth or just to have the experience? If it’s just to have the

experience then maybe going to see Batman or any film at all is having the same religious

experience as meditating and chanting, if the film has been skilfully made.

TG: Yeah, or you’re trying to make the audience feel as emotionally charged as the

character on the screen is supposed to be. A weird, incredibly odd example to use in this

context would be The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The reason why The Texas Chainsaw

Massacre is a really interesting example is twofold - one is it suggests far more violence and

blood and horror than is actually apparent in the film, suggestion is everything in that film,

you see virtually nothing. You’d be lucky to get an 18 certificate on a film like that anymore

because it’s so tame in that respect. But secondly, the reason it’s so intense and the reason

it’s so shocking and immersive and you feel so engaged in it is primarily because from about

half way through you are no longer an audience, you are the central character and you

become so connected with her because she doesn’t do much but scream and feel absolute

abhorrent terror for about 45 minutes. You’re no longer watching anymore, you’re just in

her head, this mania and this hysteria has infected you so much as an audience member

you’re no longer watching the film, you’re just hysterical and manic because the screaming

is relentless, the mania is relentless, and the relentlessness of the film makes you part of the

scenes. You’re in there and that’s why it’s such a brilliant piece of film-making because it

draws you into the level where you’re there, you feel as close to being there as you could

ever want to be. And equally, if you watch a film like Into Great Silence, arguably it’s a

reasonable comparison because what you’re trying to do is immerse the viewer so you really

feel that you’re in that space, you forget that you’re in the auditorium or the cinema

anymore, you forget that you’re in your lounge, the idea is to put you in that room. And Into

Great Silence was interesting in what you said earlier in that it’s about silence but there’s so

much sound in that film, so many creaks, so many wooden cracks and books opening and

people shuffling about, it’s full of sound. But I suppose it’s that idea that you become lost in

the space, you’re sucked in through the portal of the screen and you’re no longer the

observer anymore, you’re drawn in, you forget the physical, you’re so relaxed and caught in

that you forget the physical form…

NC: Arguably though the sound is the physical dimension that helps take you there, and

that’s what we’ve tried to use, as in sound is something that you hear and it vibrates in your

body and can have a hypnotic or transformative effect.

TG: A number of people have used the word ‘transformative’ about watching the film which

I found really interesting. They said there’s a certain point in the film where they’d drifted

off, it has ‘spun them out’, to use their words, which I image means that they’ve drifted off

in some way. They don’t mean that it’s bored them to sleep, but they mean that it’s just

sent them into this other state of mind. And a couple of people have said that it feels a bit

like a meditation to them when they watch it, a couple of other people have said that they

lost a sense of where they were. In a way that’s a massive compliment because I suppose

that is what we were hoping to achieve…

NC: Is it what we were hoping to achieve? I don’t know…I don’t think we ever intentionally

sat down and said that’s what we wanted to do. I think we wanted to try to present the

performances in a way that affects people in the way that they affected us.

TG: What I’m trying to articulate is these people have become so aware of sound, and

perhaps more aware of sound than they were at the beginning of the film, at a certain point

it has triggered an idea in their head so that the film itself has become not the primary focal

point any more. Rather it’s triggered so many things that they’ve drifted off somewhere. I’m

not saying that was our intention…It’s interesting that we’ve created a transformative state

with the film experience

NC: Well, how did we do that if we didn’t intentionally set out to do so?

TG: It wasn’t really engineered was it…?

NC: Well, that’s the interesting thing. There are questions about how a film can ‘work on the

consciousness’ and to what extent is the effect of the cinema dependent on the spiritual

knowledge of the recipient. I really don’t know how we thought about that or whether we

did think about what the spiritual knowledge of our recipients was. You could say that we

really wanted to avoid the standard TV narrative format because we felt that it is a form of

cultural junk food and rather we wanted to give people something that made them work

hard and grow their own thoughts and have new experiences and think about the world in a

different way. So maybe there was some sort of idea of what our audience was like in that.

And what techniques did we use to work on the consciousness? I would definitely identify

sound; you could clearly say that putting this reverb on the cave scene to make it feel like

you were more in the cave, that’s blatant but also opaque because you’re so obviously not

in the cave. But then there were also things we talked about like macro-level detail and

insects and these being reference points that I’d felt really strongly when I was in quite a

developed religious state when I was doing my pilgrimage. Time-lapse was altering the

sense of time, that was another way of working on the consciousness, what else would you

say?

TG: I think one word that was constant throughout most of the film-making process with us

was the word ‘immerse’, immersing the audience into a space and giving them a sensorial

experience rather than a prescribed factual experience. So we weren’t delivering fact after

fact, data after data like you might get on a Horizon programme. It didn’t feel appropriate, it

felt like if you are going to appreciate these people we’re filming and these ideas and their

approaches to their music and the ideas that influence their philosophical trajectories, it’s

more interesting just to allow you to inhabit their spaces. I think what we tried to do was let

people fall into their space for a while, and inhabit the space with them for a while and then

come out.

The example is when you meet the character of Iitomi - you’re quite a long way away but

you can hear him in the distance. Slowly you get closer to him and you explore the space on

the way, so you know the space that he’s in through wide shots of the temple, close-ups of

the insects, details of the temple that he’s in. Already you’ve got a sense of who he is and

where he is and you can hear him before you’ve even met him so by the time you’ve met

him you’ve already developed an idea of potentially who this guy is. Then he doesn’t tell you

anything about who he is or what he does, you just have to go with it and you learn as it

happens. You realise he’s a musician, you can tell he’s a musician because he’s playing an

instrument. You know that he has a devotional aspect because he’s holding the prayer book,

he’s in the temple. We learn that he’s a teacher, not because he tells us but because you

see him teaching and its apparent. Then it all spins and you get immersed into this other

layer of what he’s about because you get inside the mystery of the thing that he’s teaching,

the evocative nature of what he’s teaching. And so we tried to immerse the audience into

each space by going on a little journey into it and then going into a very special place and

allowing the audience to exist in there for a while and then bringing them out again,

sometimes quite abruptly, sometimes quite gently. I think that’s one way that we allowed

them to feel an experience rather than be told an experience and I think that doesn’t rely on

their spiritual understanding at all, that doesn’t assume that they either do or don’t have it,

that just allows them to feel it.

NC: But perhaps we need to consider whether even the range of things that you can feel or

understand is to some extent determined by what you would have felt and understood

before that. So there’s a question with regards to standardised images of Buddhism or

Japanese culture - how much have we repeated stereotypes or how much do you have to

repeat existing standards or vocabularies of meaning for something in order to connect with

an audience, so that they’ve got some reference point they can understand. I was quite

struck today by how little I’d thought about that before. It’s almost instinctive isn’t it?

TG: I didn’t deliberately think about it…

NC: Between the two of us, we would have worked out if something doesn’t feel right, that

someone watching wouldn’t understand something and that therefore we would need to

explain it. There was a spectrum between us and people we were showing it to where you

could sense what was right or not. I’m really not aware of these standardised images or

reference points that we were re-creating or appropriating or manipulating

TG: I don’t think they were necessarily there – I can’t think of an enormous amount of

Buddhist cinema that I was using as reference points. For me the reference points were far

more in a cinematic sense classic Japanese cinema that really excited me, especially from

the 1950s, 60s and 70s. The compositions and the atmosphere and the feeling, that was

what was exciting me, the minimalism and sparseness, the compositions of space and

sound. There were things that affected me which were more inspiring than particular motifs

of any particular Buddhist cinema. For example there was the time we went to the

Rijksmuseum in Holland and started looking at The Nightwatch - that was as much an

influence as anything else because of just the sheer power and force of being in the room

with that painting and how you feel when you look at it. I was stood there with Tom next to

me, going ‘wow, feel that picture’, that’s the kind of emotional power that if we can even

grab a moment or a fraction of that in anything that we make, that would feel wonderful.

We’ve talked before about this idea of chiaroscuro, that very strong sense of light and dark

and contrast can be a very evocative tool when you’re trying to suggest things and give a

real warmth and sensorial feel. That was more influential, to make you feel a soulful image,

a tactile image, rather than a classic motif that might make you go ‘ah yeah, ok, that must

mean that this is a particular type of film’. That was never really in my mind and I don’t

think it was in your mind because I don’t think we ever talked about it

NC: The way I thought about it, as we were filming, was that I’d seen films that you’d made

before, so Bassweight and Rackgaki, for example, which were obviously made with other

people, but you were significantly involved with how they look and how they feel, and then I

just kind of imagined Tatsumi in those films. Or I’d seen Thieves and I’d imagined Eri

performing in that kind of environment of those natural settings and knew that the feeling of

the two things would fit, in a way that I liked and found compelling and stylish, and in a way

that I believed would impress people and do justice to how I felt responding to the people

and performances and experiences I’d had in the first place before I’d ever thought about

making a film. Perhaps most important was just treating the people as people rather than

conduits of ideas or any kind of great theory, just dealing with people first and foremost.

The people, and the things that surrounded them, and the country and the setting in which

they live and all of those things that would and did get picked up

TG: That was always very important, and when you said Rackgaki, I’m reminded that there

was something that was really a massive consideration came from that film. When you’re

making a film about graffiti, graffiti doesn’t move very much, unless you’ve got someone

creating the artwork and then you either film it in real time and chop it up, otherwise it’s

going to take an enormous amount of time to watch the scene, or you speed it up. But

when you’re not dealing with a lot of people actually doing the painting and you’re just

dealing with the artwork itself, after the event, you have to think of a way to animate it,

otherwise why not make a photo book? How was the film of Rackgaki going to be different

from the book? How are you going to make this thing come to life? And ultimately the

answer to that was ‘it’s not just about the graffiti, it’s where the graffiti is and what’s outside

the frame and what’s next to it and where’s the bigger picture and when you pull back and

step back, what do you see?’. And I think that was such a wonderful revelation when we

made that film in Japan that’s stuck with me ever since, always pulling back and going ‘well,

there’s that person but if you step back and pull wider what do you see? When you turn left,

what do you see? When you turn right, when you’re close up on ground level, what do you

see?’ And we obviously got lost in that approach in KanZeOn, we’d spend days on these

environs and get lost in the environments but I think the reason we did that was because

we wanted some really wonderful things to happen and eventually we got them. Beautiful

moments happened in front of the camera that were very special and I think we captured

something that the words ‘mystical’ and ‘supernatural’ would be wrong to use when talking

about some of the things, but there was a certain mystery and a certain beauty of nature

doing something wonderful in front of the lens at the very moment we happened to be

filming it, which is beautifully spiritual or magical or just a coincidence or just a happy

accident or downright lucky for us as film-makers.