2025.10.19

I saw an advertisement hanging in the Odakyu Line train for a flea market at a housing complex I had always been curious about. Most hanging ads feel like expressions of base desires, but the Odakyu Line often features ads that are quite rooted in the local community, so I decided to take this opportunity to get off at Zama Station. The weather forecast called for rain, but it was clear while I walked around the loop, where pottery, vegetables, and handmade accessories were being sold. Even though it had just opened at 10:00 AM, it was already filled with the lively voices of children. There were displays of the city's mascot made from plastic bottle caps, and experiences like throwing trash into a garbage truck; it felt like a school festival and a place to learn about society, showing a gentle expansion that put me in a good mood from the morning. I bought rosemary for 50 yen and Annou sweet potatoes for 200 yen. Thinking that chicken dishes are good, but maybe foil-steamed ones would be nice too, I took a break at a coffee shop directly connected to the supermarket.

This is a sudden change of subject, but I am very fond of the film 'The Turin Horse' by Béla Tarr. Since the screenwriter Krasznahorkai won the Nobel Prize in Literature, three of his works are being re-screened at the Theater Image Forum in Shibuya. I don't really like the town of Shibuya, or rather the streets, and I feel unstable every time I walk through them, but I crossed the Miyamasuzaka intersection and managed to arrive in front of the theater. I planned to watch 'Werckmeister Harmonies' and 'Damnation' in one day, but in the end, I should have stopped. After all, 'Werckmeister Harmonies' is a long-take film that is two and a half hours long with only about 30 cuts, and in 'Damnation,' I felt that a quarter of the screen was just walls, and there was absolutely no salvation. It's like the old theatrical version of Evangelion without Asuka. Under a gray sky, people with dead eyes betray each other and are struck by absurdity, and it all ends quietly. However, this is the Béla Tarr I love. People repeat a certain life, changing slightly, and then quietly reach the end. Even though it's so depressing that it feels like watching clinical depression on screen, and because of that, it gives me the energy to slowly stand up again.

Movies have a cinematic time; for example, when a character walks from A to B, a cut is made at an appropriate point, and it connects to a cut moving to the next location. Therefore, the distance from A to B is shortened to about one-tenth in the film. However, Béla Tarr films until the character completely disappears from the screen. When watching the film, for me, who assumes cinematic time, it reverses and that time stretches tenfold. Therefore, the images he captures feel like endless drudgery. 'Damnation' used too many similar slow-walking pans, and I couldn't help but feel a bit of roughness, but thanks to that, by the time I finished watching it, I was completely trapped in a heavy realm that could only be described as despair.

Even after eating and going to Tower Records, I didn't feel particularly good, and combined with the nausea from drinking 1.5 liters of black coffee to stay awake, it was a day that ended with a sense of floating. At the very least, I wish it had been sunny.