Two side of life in ‘Spectres and Tourists’
“Spectres and Tourists”, an exhibition by Japanese filmmaker-artist Daisuke Miyazaki, is at the ArtScience Museum in Singapore until December 17.
The two-part film installation commissioned by the museum and Singapore International Film Festival depicts modern urban life in all its isolation and anxiety, then switches to the temporary freedom that can be experienced in the absence of technology.
There is no admission fee for the show or its accompanying programmes.
In Part 2, “Spectres”, scenes from Miyazaki’s previous films are woven into a multiple-screen spectacle of people trapped like ghosts. Miyazaki lingers on the observation that the modern experience is homogenised and without meaning; without risk and thoroughly monotonous. As one peers into the windows of their uninspired lives, the spectator becomes the spectre himself.
In Part 2, “Tourists”, Japanese actresses Nina Endo (who starred in Miyazaki’s “Yamato (California)”, and Sumire Sato (from Japanese girl group SKE48) play friends who win a free trip abroad.
They arrive in a cosmopolitan city identical to their home country, but find themselves displaced among its unfamiliar monuments when one of them loses her mobile phone. Without the predictability of a travel itinerary found on the Internet, the friends reconstruct their identities with their encounters in unwritten places.
Born in Yokohama in 1980, Miyazaki was one of the Berlinale Talents directors of the omnibus film “5 to 9”. Miyazaki’s first feature, “End of the Night”, was selected for numerous film festivals and won Special Mention at the Toronto Shinsedai Cinema Festival.
