Trekking up the familiar trail that mostly follows the bed of the old funicular that linked Rubio canyon and the Echo Mountain Resort. My mind still visually in Japan, dealing with the slight disappointment with what I filmed there. Time was a factor, the lack of time to really explore on foot, to ramble in totally new surroundings, but also purpose. I probably tried too hard and what I captured was not a tourist guide, not a formal exercise, not even really a home movie. I didn’t find the story, or I didn’t let the story find me. As a remedy for further explorations, the opening scenes of the Wim Wenders film “Tokyo – Ga” came to mind. Wenders begins by laying out his objective, namely pay tribute to one of Japan’s most revered classic filmmakers, Yasujiro Ozu, by traveling to Tokyo, the setting of most of his films, where he hopes to find traces of Ozu’s films, or even people involved with the films. This, twenty years after Ozu’s death. Then Wnedres shows the opening scene from “Tokyo Story”, Ozu’s best known work, where an elderly couple prepares to travel to Tokyo to visit their grown children. And finally we get some of Wenders’ images: a black screen, the movie screening on the plane–this is back in 1983, when there was only one film projected on one central screen per section of the plane–the left wing of the plane as seen through a window, and the shinkansen train pulling into a station–tribute to the Lumière bros?. Over these four shots, he speaks:

“On the flight over they showed a film and like always I tried not to watch it, and like always I found myself watching it. Without the sound the images on the screen seemed that much more empty to me, a hollow form, framing and imitating emotion. It felt good just to look out the window. If only it were possible to film like that, I thought to myself, like when you open your eyes sometimes, just to look without wanting to prove anything.”

Wim Wenders, “Tokyo-Ga”

Walking Project 107_winter half moon – Echo mountain from chris worland on Vimeo.

Amen.