Ju-ne/ly — A Visual Poem/Essay by Yu(u)
In the beginning, the motion picture was a miracle of illusion: photographic images that recorded movement over time. Before movies were yoked with the task of telling stories, images of carriages and pedestrians making their way down the streets of Paris or Los Angeles or New York were enough to leave an audience gobsmacked. Like the computer evolving into A.I., the “magic lantern” had grown legs and started to walk. The human faculty that these early cameras and projection devices had synthesized, albeit crudely, was the act of seeing.
The devices and desires of a capable artist are met with little resistance by the image-making equipment of today. So it is that, were it not for its rectilinear format, the work of Yu(u) on her film, Ju-ne/ly, seems to flow directly through her eyes — a wordless casting about for compositional order in arandom sampling provided by a generous universe to those who are able to see; Yu(u) is clearly one of these.
Ju-ne/ly begins with a contemplative observation of crosswalk markings at an intersection where the Tokyo public works people appear to have outdone themselves.
The rain pours down. Puddles reflect. Gutters guide torrents. The artist sees. The viewer absorbs and learns.
Yu(u)’s camera—a GoPro Hero 12—hungrily scans this geometric potpourri, alighting and pausing briefly where abstract compositions present themselves as street-borne “Readymades.” The sequence ends with a handheld “dolly shot” of the crossing’s parallel lines. And then it rains.
The film’s title is a merging of the words ‘June’ and ‘July’—the months during which tsuyu, Japan’s rainy season, occurs. After the initial crosswalk sequence, Yu(u)’s eye focuses on rain, how this liquid, airborne, natural element interacts with and graces the quintessential human medium: concrete. The rain pours down. Puddles reflect. Gutters guide torrents. The artist sees. The viewer absorbs and learns.
Yu(u)’s work—purely visual, starkly simple—makes an awkward dray animal of language. Words can describe something that is seen but in so doing they translate a thing that is retinal into something laden with meanings layered atop meanings, and the whole thing gets more complicated than it is. It should suffice, therefore, to merely call the reader’s attention to Ju-ne/ly.
That said, Ju-ne/ly is currently being campaigned at film festivals and cannot be made available online. More information about this film, Yu(u) and her work might be found via the filmmaker’s Instagram account. G&S
IG @yu.u_ever
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