Des millénaires d’absence, Thousands of Years of Absence

The trilogy dealt with the catastrophe by exploring images produced by the company responsible for the damaged power plant. Each film examined, in its own way, the issues raised by nuclear energy (hyper-visibility/invisibility, the power of matter/human powerlessness, etc.). Without that initial body of work, Thousands of years of Absence would likely not exist. In that sense, it is a continuation of that research. But its relationship to the catastrophe is different –less speculative, more sensory. It is a film of anticipation and projection, whereas the previous three were films of observation and analysis. From the outset, Thousands years of Absence was driven by a desire to think beyond the sole event of 11 March 2011. Hence the film’s hybrid nature, blending observational cinema and dreamt utopia.

The film documents the development and realisation of a cinematic utopia: an effort to counter the nuclear threat, in advance, through cinema. All Japanese people know how precarious human presence is on land so frequently subjected to the destructive force of nature. But the Fukushima nuclear disaster created a rift in this relationship with the landscape: everything remained intact—and yet uninhabitable, unliveable. Exile became the only option. What becomes of a landscape, of a geography rendered uninhabitable, where once rebuilding was relentless? What do we retain once a place is no longer accessible to our senses—hearing, sight, smell, touch? How does one survive that kind of absence? What can cinema offer in response? What can it capture of a landscape, the temporalities it contains, its beauty and its tensions, its sacred power or reassuring banality—before it vanishes from view for good? Thousands of years of Absence was born of all these questions, and with it, the idea of a filmed inventory of every island in the Japanese archipelago—for another world (the world of exile) and another time (the time after the catastrophe).

Formed immediately after 11 March 2011, this group of Japanese filmmakers—Ukishima—decides to film all 6,852 islands of the archipelago before any further nuclear accidents render the country permanently uninhabitable. The film explores this semi-clandestine group’s project, from its original concept to its implementation. One could say the first part tells the story of their idea, but not only that. I designed it as a narrative in which political and artistic questions intersect with the protagonists’ lived experience. Density and speed are key here. They reflect both the absolute urgency and the vastness of Ukishima’s project. This first part combines a process of recollection with an address to the future. I shot it using a camera obscura, giving the images their softened texture, where past and future blend. Paradoxically, this ancient technique allowed me to avoid freezing the story in a single temporality.

This second part is, in a sense, the realisation of Ukishima’s project. It presents a selection of the film archives the collective has produced, following its own protocol. These are the “island-films”: for each island in the archipelago, a short film, no longer than seven minutes. They seek to preserve a trace of a world humans will have to abandon. They are fragments of visual memory from which an inaccessible world might one day be reconstructed.

This second part is more in line with observational documentary. Its aesthetic is that of contemporary digital cameras, without any particular treatment. The sound is direct, and when music appears, it arises from the shot itself. It was important to me that the narrative section and the archival display belong to clearly distinct aesthetic registers—not to oppose them, but so that they might interpenetrate through a kind of transparency.

These are images of a world before the disaster, made to outlive it. They say nothing of the catastrophe itself. But each island-film, in its simplicity, carries its own intensity—the intensity of impending loss.
While working on 4 Buildings, Facing the Sea (2012), I discovered how Japanese landscapes, in the present, condense all the temporal layers of the earth—from the pre-human to the post-human. Each earthquake, each volcanic eruption is a resurfacing of that original geology into contemporary space. Each abandoned village is a scar from a post-human world. Japan’s islands have been steadily depopulating for decades. They are slowly reverting to post-human landscapes. Even before becoming uninhabitable, parts of Japan are being deserted, rewilded. The post-human landscape Ukishima anticipates is already visible. Each island-film thus attempts to capture the present moment of a landscape in order to reveal its past and summon its future. It is a self-contained cinematic block—akin to a crossing through time.

I filmed them all. Thousands of Years of Absence tells the fictional story of a collective utopia—that of the Ukishima group. I invented this collective, its impossible project, and its history, in order to think about and film a territory that, since 2011, has stood at the forefront of our future. Ukishima is a fictional entity created by and for the film. But part of the 6,852 island-films it seeks to archive now genuinely exists. I made them—they are part of Thousands of Years of Absence. So it’s sometimes hard for me to believe Ukishima doesn’t exist—at least not quite as it’s portrayed in the film.

Yes, that was the foundational premise of the project: to conceive of cinema as a tool capable of confronting nuclear power on equal terms –not with arrogance or delusion, but with method and resolve. So that cinema is not merely a grief-stricken witness (as with the films about Hiroshima) or a fascinated admirer (as with the mushroom cloud).
Ukishima and its outsized ambition allowed me to push that reflection further than I had imagined.
The film also taught me much about the power of fiction (a form I had never worked with before), especially its capacity to seep into reality—even to produce it. By following in the imagined footsteps of this fictional collective, by filming the Japanese islands from its imagined point of view, I found myself preceded by the fiction. I could not escape it. I could only document it—until my own bearings began to blur.