Kaori Oda’s Underground is a film built around the meanings of its title, but it’s also apparently built up to 83 minutes out of reused footage from an earlier and shorter Oda film called Gama, which ran for a mere 53 minutes. Fittingly for a film that is always building shapes and forms out of lights in the dark, Oda’s ideas of the underground range from the obvious caves and subway tunnels to cinema theaters and dark exhibition rooms showing non-narrative art. The choreographer and dancer Yoshigai Nao, who serves as a sort of model to tie the travels across Japan together, seems to be awoken from her rest by the subterranean sounds of the earth and proceeds to practically sleepwalk her way through an exploration of these spaces. When she’s above ground, the lighting is so bright that one scene of the film begins developing light leaks that flare in from the sides and provide a flicker effect.
Materiality and sensuality are major concerns of Oda’s, ranging from sequences that explicitly highlight that this work was shot on film via tape splices and superimpositions, to the sight of Nao performing stretches and caressing the undulations of the cave walls. She’s not terribly concerned with locational coherence, which puts Underground in interesting contrast with the most recent masterpiece of cave cinema in Michelangelo Frammartino’s Il Buco. We bounce around from the caves of Okinawa to locations scattered all over the rest of Japan, suggesting a country unified by its undercurrents. Complicating this unifying approach is the recurring use of a talking head, who provides backstory about the mass suicides in Okinawa’s caves that occurred at the end of the Pacific war before literally turning out the lights — we all wind up underground without illumination at the end of the day. Nao wanders around the background of one of his monologues as a dry joke, and the expansion of her part in the film seems to be what sets Underground apart from Gama, which reportedly gives the storyteller a greater part to play in a shorter time frame.
One of the things that makes Underground both interestingly accessible and a little unsatisfying is that it’s almost all technique, and of a fairly straightforward sort. There’s always going to be something a bit pleasurable about seeing mysterious shapes formed out of darkness and droning soundscapes to capture geological time, and it’s not too difficult to put this particular puzzle together even when it’s obscured. This accessibility also means that the overall sense is that of a technical showcase that had to be blown up from Gama’s one-hour running time to this film approaching the 90-minute convention. Where Il Buco calmly and carefully plotted itself out and went deeper into unknown territories and darkness, Underground feels like Oda going for breadth rather than depth. One suspects that in this case, the earlier and shorter trip to these caves would be a more productive one than the longer attempt at greater immersion.
Published as part of Prismatic Ground 2025.
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