This text will start with love, for it is the idiosyncrasies of  love the theme of the four feature films contained in this exhibition.  To love is to open oneself up to the other. To be in a love relationship is to become lost, without resistance, in the subject of affection, which is at the same time exterior and interior to oneself; it is as if love kick-starts a process of ‘otherizing’. In his first movie 2/DUO (1997), Nobuhiro Suwa relinquished his carefully crafted script and opened himself up, as well as the movie, to the direct interference of the actors’ improvisation and to the spontaneity of who it would determine the course of the shooting. According to the director, the intention of working without a script was prompted from a random casual impulse, not necessarily knowing where such an impulse came from. As he puts it, “ if I wrote my films with my own words, they would pertain to my internal world only, to something I already know. It would be like acting out my own experiences, and the world represented in the film would be a previously ordered one. However, the way I see it, filmmaking is about showing the world through, and not from, a camera; a world unknown even to myself, but that can be realized throughout the process of making the film”1. Love is also an impulse that no one knows where it comes from, left to chance and improvisation of its authors in its own path to realization.

The cinema of Nobuhiro Suwa springs from the same conditions than that of love relationships, of which his movies fictionalize. The radical minimalist experimentalism with which the director treats the moment where love hits a seemingly unsolvable crisis points towards a crisis of narrative. 2/DUO marks a conceptual crisis. It is the word ‘matrimony’ that causes the strong estrangement between the characters and takes them on an erratic, irritating and strident journey of attempted concurrence. At a certain point, we hear the director’s voice off-camera questioning the actors about their roles, which leads the film – as suggested by a few critics – towards a nebulous zone between fiction and documentary. The way I see it, however, this zone is of another kind: that of fiction and interiority. Suwa talks about the ‘matter of film’, which means being conscious of the fact that the magnetic particles of the film tape itself bear the images that greatly impact us. Suwa treats the content not as a representation of a random reality exterior to that piece of tape, but as illusion within it, which seems to affect the director, actors, filming crew, spectators and characters equally. This horizontality through which his films are conveyed makes us constantly aware of our subjective position, and locates the viewer as silent observers standing somewhere ‘in there’; closer to that illusion than we first realized from our theatre seat.

This spatiality of interiority renders insufficient an approach of the conventional narrative timeline (be it linear, non-linear, fragmented or elliptical); it is more of a mental time, a kind of tableau vivant in motion pictures. A retinal attention is replaced by an empathetic syntony that takes over the viewers’ whole body as spaces of inconclusive gestures and general uncertainties are presented at each silence, each cacophony. The films demand the spectator’s complicity, with such long and silent sequences that the classic shot/countershot seems to dissolve itself into singular planes. Suwa’s cinematography works against the plane - against its stability and integrity as in M/Other (1999) -, but also from it, departing from the solidity and frontality of the fixed plane in Un Couple Parfait (2005).

M/Other offers a more dynamic rhythm than 2/DUO. In Suwas’s second feature, the original soundtrack functions as a powerful tool in the construction of meaning. The fatalist sounds ripping through the first few sequences makes us painfully aware of the rising tension between Aki and Tetsuro, whose relationship had to be redefined once the raising of a family became an imposed issue on them. As the couple’s situation evolves, the sound of the violin tunes up so as to give way to a pleasant melody. The sound is the diapason that determines the film’s rhythm. It alludes to the variability of the failures between the couple at the same time that it punctuates the aleatory emergence of resolution for the characters’ relationship, and for the movie itself. The unfolding of the sonorous narrative provides for the dilated temporality in Suwa’s films, which conveys a state of an ever-present constantly threatened by the inconclusive.

In Un Couple Parfait, it is the silence and the fixed camera in long single-shots that reveal the distance established between Marie and Nicolas, once they saw themselves as two singularities encroaching on each other. The strong presence of mirrors and other reflecting surfaces show the two “I’s” – former “we”- who became confused with their own projections, at the same time that it contributes for the economy of edits. The impression that is given is that the film is rifted rather than cut. During several minutes, we see only but a close shot of the door that divides the hotel bedroom where the couple, on the verge of separating after 15 years of a model relationship, settles in Paris to attend a friends’ wedding.  We are on the divide of this room, uncomfortably witnessing a private dialogue, which consists of a female voice leaking through the gaps of the door, painfully demanding for answers that would make this conflict – the relationship, the film – a bit more accessible to the parties involved (Nicolas, Marie, spectator, director).

The couples’ emotional upheavals demonstrate that once the possibility of being vulnerable to the other drains itself, language becomes contingent as an attempt to rewrite the pact.  Suwa is interested in exploring singularities that only perceive the relationship’s presence when it becomes difficult, when communication is measured by deaf dialogues, when each party protects its vulnerability to the other, when ‘otherizing’ comes to a halt. There is always a patent duality in the films: something that is as common to all of us as love, but also something we do not fully comprehend, which cannot be clearly explained.

The uncertainty that befalls the image as a direct representation of a certain reality is the cornerstone for H Story (2001). Suwa puts together a filming crew in his native Hiroshima to embark in the delicate task of remaking frame-by-frame Alan Resnais’ “Hiroshima mon amour”, of 1959. In his attempt to recapture the difficult past through the reassembling of a representation of the past, the film constantly brings itself towards the present, towards the frustrating impossibility of the remake. “I had nothing to say at first. The Japanese cannot face the trauma or talk about Hiroshima. This issue is at the same time too intimate and too immense to grasp”.

Little is spoken about the trauma; little is shown of the nouvelle vague classic. From the beginning it became established that the documenting images of the nuclear holocaust contained in the original movie will be dismissed in the remake (according to Resnais, each time he would add the photographs, the film lost its horror). Instead, the emotional entanglement between the unnamed characters of Emanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada, fifty years ago, would be the focus to negotiate the loss of Hiroshima. However, French actress Beatrice Dalle – chosen to reinterpret Riva’s character – can’t deal with the director’s obsession in evoking and recreating the memories of the city and of the psyche of his generation. Seeing herself so deeply involved in the director’s own desire to recapture his loss is unbearably intimate and too immense for her to withstand. From the impossibility of resolving a trauma through its representation, a film-experience is born where Suwa is the director of H Story in H Story; Dalle is Dalle, who seems to silently voice out the key-dialogue of the original movie ,“You’ve see nothing in Hiroshima”, through the crisis of communication that has broke out between actress and director.

The films of Nobuhiro Suwa deal with people who lack the liberty to leave or to reinvent their love relationships. The problems encountered by the characters – found also in the professional relationship between the director and the actress, turned characters themselves - is intimately connected to the crazy systemization of our current world. A world restricted by rules of behaviour and of language.  A world of specifications, which demands quick solutions, scripted with a beginning, middle and end, palatable and digested, does not allow for the interruption of communication, nor the incorporation of mistakes in a cinematographic project, or the attribution of new values to cinema. However, to Nobuhiro Suwa, opening up to the inconclusive, to the suspension of language, to the spontaneity of throwing the meanings of his films to each spectator’s interiority, of ‘otherizing’, is exactly where everything begins and not the end.