Director: Hibiki Toyama
Writer: Hibiki Toyama
Cast: Hisao Kurozumi
Running time: 5mins
As regular readers will know, since we launched our Music Videos category, I’ve been in a love-hate relationship with it, that mostly comes down on the latter side of the equation. Frankly, my suggestion that the medium can live up to the billing we initially gave them – poetic, stylised micro-stories (usually) told without words, which “often serve as a proving ground for filmmakers looking to get their big break” – did not survive contact with the first submission we received.
Recently, though, some artists have given me cause for hope, that maybe there is still something to be said for this art form. In particular, we have received two abstract, imaginative animations, which hint at the kind of opportunities music videos present for storytelling. Taking me back to when my primary school teacher would encourage the class to paint to a piece of music, Rubik’s Cube and Waiting have both demonstrated the kind of wonder, or indeed horror, which can flow forth when artists allow a song to move them.
Waiting is much more in the ‘wonder’ camp, imbued with a bitter-sweet beauty, as director Hibiki Toyama blends painted art from Nakaban with real footage, to explore the ebb and flow of a long life. Takeo Toyama’s music, from which the film understandably takes its title, centres on an evocative piano riff, which cycles throughout its three minutes, occasionally breaking down or embellishing on its structure, but always returning to its original form. What exactly we might be Waiting for could be anything, then – but musically we seem to have been primed for is a kind of life-long nostalgia, to go back to the place of our youth.
Hibiki Toyama’s silent narrative plays with this motif with restraint, sending a digitally-rendered figure (reminiscent of a stop-motion figure) rambling down a painted path. Seemingly drifting without purpose, eventually the figure is carried back to the doorstep they first emerged from; while the journey itself is bookended by a man – initially young, later with white hair – returning to a house where, in his youth, he dreamily gazed out of the window, and where he practiced violin before setting out many years before.
On first thought it is a pointedly sad image; a man cycling back to where his journey began, but only able to connect with it on a superficial level, because he can never literally be in that moment again. The bricks, the trees, even the sky has changed since he left. But the beauty of it is that so has he.
After tumbling down the unexpected painted lanes of our lives, when we return to the place we called home, it can feel almost alienating, not just because the place is different, but because we are too. Conscious of our mortality, we spend so much time waiting, longing for a way to go back to what was – to have more time – but the realisation that that version of us is now as long-gone as the environment we lived in should be seen as life-affirming. We have waited for this chance, and found a new understanding of ourselves, of how our experiences have shaped us – and we should appreciate those moments, because that growth is a sign that we have lived, and that we continue to live.
There are, I would argue, a couple of shortcomings here – and they tend to be the same as that earlier film I mentioned. As with Rubik’s Cube, I would note that perhaps there was room for a little more experimentation with the iconography on display – and as nice as the colours and shapes of
Nakaban’s paintings are beautiful, but we linger for much too long on a couple of specific several landscapes, while our central character slowly paces through them. Allowing the figure to interact with the world in a greater variety ways, or at least a better pacing moving through the paintings would have really helped here. Importantly, it could have given us more of an impression of the possible complexity and richness of life – rather than presenting it as a somewhat two-dimensional A-B journey.
Even so, this is a genuinely moving piece of work, built around an earworm of a song that will circulate in my head for days. Perhaps decades. And maybe one day I will return to Waiting, and appreciate it anew – thanks to the way that the ebb and flow of life has changed me.
