Anonymous topographies and impossible pasts: Daïchi Saïto and Jason Sharp

Daishi Saito Ft. Jason Sharp - Engram of Returning, photo by Phileas van Urk
By Lora Markova In the aftermath of Sonic Acts 2016, I recall Daïchi Saïto’s 35mm CinemaScope film Engram of Returning (2015). Accompanied by Jason Sharp’s circular-breathing saxophone score: it stirred Paradiso on Saturday night. An “Engram” is a memory trace – the persistence of memory encoded in physical alterations of living neural tissue, in response to stimuli, and in Engram of Returning Saïto abstracts found footage through re-photography and hand-processed photochemical effects. His cinematic aesthetic has been marked by the recurring use of black frames, which in this case acts as a lack of conjunction between pulsing memory fragments. The black frame acts as an interval, creating the sensation of travelling. Engram of Returning reverberates with flickering vistas of unrecognisable places: hazy landscapes and flashbacks, in a rhythmic journey between internal and external perceptions that traces the intersections between recollection and spatial imagination. Saïto’s film is about his experiences across territories. Originally from Japan, he studied literature and philosophy in the US and later filmmaking in Montreal. Before relocating to Canada, he lived in India, where he was learned in Hindi and Sanskrit. For several of his films and installations (All That Rises (2007); Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis (2009); Never a Foot Too Far, Even (2011), Saïto has collaborated with North American violinist Malcolm Goldstein. The soundtrack for Engram of Returning at Sonic Acts is by Montreal-based bass saxophonist and composer Jason Sharp, whose compositions explore acoustic resonances, feedback, and the relationship between breathing and heart rate. Sharp’s live performance at Paradiso elevated the visceral dimensions of Saïto’s abstracted imagery in repetitive saxophone motifs and sound distortions. Sharp’s presence on the stage and his act of exhaling - the intimate mouth and body sounds of circular breathing audible to the audience – made me think of unfinished journeys, in resonance with Saïto’s expressive moving images and black frame motifs. In his book Moving the Sleeping Images of Things Towards the Light (Les éditions Le Laps, 2013) Saïto suggests the generative role of pausing. At Paradiso, pauses were present in the black spaces between images and the breath between blown phrases. The manifesto of the Double Negative Collective, co-founded by Saïto, states further: “We provide no prescription for what film ought to be, but elucidate what it is: impossible pasts and futures in a trajectory of unravelling present, images pausing and passing from somewhere up there, in the back of the head.”

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