Fading Waves: Kazuhiro Soda’s Inland Sea/港町 (2018)

The intrigue of Kazuhiro Soda’s Inland Sea/港町 (2018), the 7th in his observational film series, resounds as much around its shifting subject as any of the particulars documented in its portrayal of the small fishing village, Ushimado, located in Okayama prefecture, Japan.

Following his “10 commandments” of observational filmmaking, the New York based director weaves his camera through the village to reveal personal stories of a number of its ‘late stage elderly’ inhabitants. Most prominent among these is Wai-chan who, at 86 years old and despite his crooked back, travels out on boat at night to catch fish with nets he can barely afford to maintain; Mrs. Kosa, a local merchant who takes the documentarian on one of her delivery rounds selling fish to local customers; and Kumi-san, a villager that flits about the harbour gossiping and running errands, and who displays a conflicting distrust for the camera at odds with her indisputable affinity for its operator.

But then the subject might also at times appear to be the fish themselves who are depicted at various stages writhing for oxygen, crying and spitting water (Wai-Chan explains that they fetch a much higher price if still living at the time of sale) until they lie skinned, neatly wrapped in plastic and still twitching on the shop’s front. Or, if not exactly the fish as psychological agents for investigation, then perhaps their role as commodity, their spiralling dance from the ocean’s depths as autonomous, animal consciousness to items of commerce, their suffocating flesh in styrofoam boxes bartered and sold on the warehouse floor by way of the fisherman’s nets until they are purchased and consumed for sustenance.

Perhaps we might find the true subject in the village itself as a locus of the material/commercial/social life cycle of the fish, or as a representation of life in rural areas around the world in its struggles with ageing populations, changing market values and scarcity due to a global warming of seas. Though these uncertainties are merely hinted at and pieced together through various interactions of the different figures, the film’s elegiacal tone of late capitalist decay — backwards looking though in no ways nostalgic — is tacit and impossible to ignore.

This tendency towards understatement is a constant in Soda’s observational films. The emotion he pieces together is something left to be extracted from beneath the polite veneer of Japanese society on show. It’s in just such a way that his method shines most brightly: rather than chasing down moments of intensity according to any premeditated idea or grandiose intention, instead Soda follows his natural interest within the moment, allowing the focus and overall message of his films to shift in a way which feels organic, eschewing the tendency of much documentary film to provide and demonstrate an underlying thesis point.

There’s a moment towards the film’s conclusion in which Kumi-san, after revealing the harrowing details of her life’s story (however suspect some of them might seem to us) confesses that she often thinks of walking out into the ocean and ending her life. It’s a rare moment in any film which portrays such raw sentiment in a way which neither encourages its realisation nor seeks to valorise such revelations into pathos (pity, shame, disgust, anger, et al.) The moment acts as a powerful summation for the feelings of unprocessed despair which are seemingly disguised throughout the village by way of life’s general busyness, or the compulsion to simply continue on as one has, for lack of any clear alternative.

Inland Sea, however, is not without its moments of joy. Despite the unspoken anxieties of its inhabitants, Ushimado is teeming with dry humour and communal acts of kindness, mixing the mundane frustrations of maintaining a gravestone in an overcrowded cemetery with the overt joys of feeding fish offal to the profligerous families of stray cats which attract tourists to the area.

While Soda’s methods ultimately flirt with the same dangers as any ‘realist’ media (the ambiguities of framing ‘truth’, the seductions of verisimilitude, etc.) his tendencies towards spontaneity and self inclusion seem to distance his films from any pretense of objectivity, resulting in a unique experience in which the subtle nuances of organic interaction are rendered in fresh perspective, allowing a reappropriation of documentary film from its application as instructional archive towards the far more fertile terrain of ideational palimpsest.

You can watch Kazuhiro Soda’s Inland Sea/港町 (2018) on Vimeo on Demand.

To check out the rest of Soda’s work and get info on upcoming releases, visit his website.