AMAERU FALLOUT 1972

10m beta sp. col. 1997

PERFORMERS P J HARVEY NATSUME SHIROYAMA YUKIKO ONO

CAMERA NIC GORDON SMITH
EDITOR LUCIA ZUCHETTI
MUSIC P J HARVEY JOHN PARRISH

STILLS ED MILES

‘We are all extraterrestrials in search of home and love.’ Julia Kristeva

Amaeru (v) the attempt to draw close depend and belong

two japanese girls appear in the west country in a radio transmitter field above eggardon fort; they go to school in Lyme Regis; sleep in the same bed; make things; dream; read The Family by Charles Manson and disappear.

I returned to the places of my childhood with the artists Natsume Shiroyama and Yukiko Ono and filmed what happened, what transpired was beyond my memory something spiritual and universal.

Japan’s concerns with past traumas and impenetrable surfaces at once concealing and constricting seemed appropriate to my own memories of growing up as an outsider in Dorset in the late sixties at that time a closed and isolated place. Remembering the sudden death of my maternal Grandmother.

THE FILM

Polly is really pretty

We ate a lot

We get fatter and fatter

So many mosquito and butterfly

Old woman too amaeteru (behind the scenes Natsume and Yukiko are recorded speaking in japanese)

The two commonest words in Japanese literature are sadness and nostalgia

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF AMAE
In his book The Anatomy of dependence Takeo Doi (1971) describes the psychology of amae as a way of understanding the Japanese experience and also as an excellent vantage point for looking at the West and issues of personal freedom.

Amae is the desire to be passively loved- Amaeru is the craving of a newborn child for it’s Mother, this feeling carries into adulthood.

Doi examines the implication of Amae and a vocabulary of linguistically related words that express what happens when amae is frustrated distorted.

HItomishiri repressed amaeru shame and anxiety about strangers

Amaete iru taking advantage of the position of being a victim having a sense of grievance

It would be wrong to say that only youth amaeru today. Adults do it in their own way you could say the whole nation is wallowing in a mood of amae.

Notes on Home

The historical link between home and sickness nostalgia and loss suggests that home in a sense has always been unheimlich not just the utopian place of safety and shelter

For which we supposedly yearn

But also the place of dark secrets of fear and intrigue that we inhabit fur tively

Perhaps in this light the best we can do is bring it in all it’s complexities out into the open.

Angelika Bammer

When mourning becomes telepathy

Experiences which remain exiled in memory are activated by the filmmaking process.

Natsume didn’t want to go home after the shoot she fell asleep on the stairs

Mr Haylock Head Master chose to deliver a class on incest in Hamlet

Another teacher was giving a class about loneliness

‘You’re on your own in an empty house in the country you don’t have to be lonely’

Mr Sweetland recreated a burnt match in chemistry

We attracted a crowd in the playground

Yuki and Natsume (who had never met) talked all night together in all their clothes on the bottom bunk

My mother provided her collection of teddy bears. I was after her brother died of AIDS and she had seventy, they had names they belonged and their histories filled a gap of loss.

Natsume Shiroyama chick performance