In his short film É in Motion No 2, the Japanese artist Sumito Sakakibara sets out to capture ‘a life of one man and the never-ending cycle of life’ in a single moving image. Originally created as a 360-degree video to be played on loop, this web version of the film features a perspective that crawls slowly across a landscape, revealing scenes that draw out life’s many dissonances – all of them bookended by a mysterious abyss.
In Sakakibara’s striking vision, joyful, neutral and dark visions all exist side by side, collapsing a lifetime of pleasure and pain, beauty and misery, into a sprawling moment. In imagery that swerves between the quotidian and abstract, children do somersaults on grass; a molotov cocktail is tossed at riot police; trees with human legs dance in a circle, and much more. All of this plays out against a serene, hypnotic lullaby of a score, deepening the discordance. Throughout, Sakakibara alludes to a variety of famous artists and their works – Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c1485), Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (c1490-1510), Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Hunters in the Snow (1565), and a parade of imagery that summons the surrealists – seeming to hint at our timeless need to mine meaning from the cacophony of human experience.