家 / Home

Colleen Laird (University of British Columbia)

今、この部屋に誰もいない

ただ一人だけ

あなた一人 

Now, there’s no one else in this room

Only just one person

You alone.

—「ただのともだち」(“Just Friends” ), サリュ バイ サリュ (salyu x salyu),  2011

Recently, I spent an entire year largely on the go. I traveled to four distinct continental regions, nine different countries, and sixteen separate cities. At first, it was for work. Then leisure. Then necessity. Mostly, I stayed in Airbnbs and I lived out of a suitcase. Upon each arrival, I’d do a quick shop: eggs, bread, butter, spaghetti, and a jar of tomato sauce. Every morning was an egg and a slice of toast. Evenings were pasta. This routine created a sense of familiarity in the utterly unfamiliar.

At about halfway through the year I got a divorce, packed up the house, and, eventually, remade home.

Somewhere in between, I thought I might try adapting an article I’d published into a video essay. I started making it in a rented room, my things in a suitcase not far out of reach. Ironically, the article I was adapting from digital print to digital video was about a prevalent motif in the works of contemporary Japanese women directors: female protagonists who leave behind traditional notions of home and family to create familiarity in the unfamiliar, suitcases firmly in tow. These characters, I argued over seventeen thoroughly-researched and tightly-crafted pages, created a sense of home in new spaces through the repetition of behavior patterns and formal cinematic visual similarities. Graphic matches and leitmotifs; eggs in the morning, pasta at night.

If you are thinking about adapting a thoroughly-researched, tightly crafted written article into a video essay, maybe don’t. Catherine Grant has cautioned against this impulse, which seems to be especially prevalent among new videographic makers like me who have an urge to showcase pre-existing expertise. “I am absolutely warning against us trying to copy the signifiers of weightiness in writing in the audiovisual version of our work,” Grant advises (2013). Even so, I conceptualized the adaptation of my article as three components of the written essay: the argument, the evidence, and the literature review. Alas, three signifiers of weightiness in writing.

Depicting the argument was easy because I relied on text-on-screen. This was a simple process of editing; not of audiovisual clips, but the other kind—the trimming and refining of words. The descriptive section of the essay was likewise easy to shift from text to timeline, and did a better job of illustrating my evidence than what I could accomplish in article format which necessitates highly selective focus and an often tedious investment in verbal, illustrative detail. For one, I could include more films and filmmakers. For another, creating a montage of images allowed me to hammer home my point, to more concretely legitimize the argument; that I wasn’t just manipulating readers through the artifice of text that relies on an implicit, albeit peer-reviewed, trust that an author is accurately describing the audiovisual evidence as it really is rather than as they’d like it to be.

The challenge was the literature review. This seems to be a common hurdle for new videographic practitioners, one that often results in deployed explanatory devices like lengthy voiceovers and great blocks of text on screen. To avoid heavy-handed didacticism, I leaned into the rhetoric of citation. By juxtaposing imagery from canonical Japanese films with one of Hollywood’s most famous nostalgic lines accompanied by the elegiac tones of a Hawaiian singer imaging home through an act of remix, I cited, or copied, an act of rhetoric from print. To cite/copy Grant again, “I am aware that what I am doing is developing some kind of rhetoric. I’m working with invention and imitation…I am copying things, I’m copying essay films, I’m copying other forms of documentaries…I’m also copying [or remixing] written work”(2013). 

I made two sequences, sutured them together with a clunky title card, and then set the project aside. I returned to it ten months later, after a considerable series of life changes. But this time, I wasn’t living out of a suitcase or in an Airbnb; I was settled in a new home. 

Maybe that’s why finishing the video felt like a chore. I’d grown tired of the familiar imagery and songs. The repetition of repeating edits of repetition had worn out its welcome. And the underlying argument that linked women and suitcases and home, copied verbatim from article text-on-screen to video text-on-screen, felt, well, a little too close to home.

Even so, the video was almost done. All that was left was to connect the first part, the “lit review,” to the second, “the evidence,” in a way that would convey “the argument” in something a little more videographic than a thesis statement as text-on-screen. As I struggled with the space between, I came to realize that in adapting my published words to audiovisual form, I’d thought first and made later. So I asked myself a different question. Not, what does a print article look like in videographic form, but what can I learn from this thing I’ve made? What does it teach me about these films I think I know so well?

My article (Laird, 2023) includes a lengthy section on what the word “home,” in various forms, has signified broadly in Japanese alongside the history of its representation in Japanese film. Looking for inspiration, I returned to the kanji, the logographic character, for home (also house) itself: 家. Kanji are comprised of discrete units called “radicals,” graphical components with their own meanings. For example, 家 is comprised of 宀 (“roof”) and 豕 (“pig”), which is certainly one way to think about a house. As I was explaining just this aspect of the Japanese writing system to a tolerant companion, drawing the character on paper in my sloppy script, I saw a different combination hidden within: 一 (“one”) and 人 (“person,” handwritten as 人), each of which are also kanji that, when combined as 一人 (hitori) mean exactly all the things you see in my video. 

And now I have a confession. I’m indulging in the conventional affordance of written description through which you, if you don’t have familiarity with the source image, must trust me, a perhaps unreliable narrator. In truth, you don’t find a person in 家, it’s a pig; language purists would have a real fit. But if we leave tradition behind and edit the text with a different font for a little home renovation to get 家, well then we can see things a bit differently. I certainly did. Considering the kanji character in this way, I saw something different about the female characters in my own video, something I did not see at all when writing the article: they are alone, unmarried, independent. That seems significant.  

In the end, I replaced text-on-screen with text-on-screen, just when I’d moved out of a suitcase and into a new routine that’s not altogether new. I still eat eggs and pasta, but not every day; there’s now something else in-between. Which is all to say, if you are thinking about adapting a thoroughly-researched, tightly crafted written article into a video essay, maybe do.

Bibliography

• Grant, C. (2013) “HOW LONG IS A PIECE OF STRING? On the Practice, Scope and Value of Videographic Film Studies and Criticism.” A Presentation Given at the Audiovisual Essay Conference, Frankfurt Filmmuseum/Goethe University, November 23-24, 2013. Published on The Audiovisual Essay: Practice and Theory of the Audiovisual Essay website. https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/audiovisualessay/.
• Laird, C. (2023). “Crossing thresholds: women directors making a home in Japanese cinema.” Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 15 (1), 37-54. https://doi.org/10.1080/17564905.2023.2204797