Otonashi is Martin Gerigk’s spellbinding 10 minute animation, a visual and musical meditation on themes from the ancient Buddhist Heart Sutra, filtered through the lens of Gerigk’s appreciation of Japanese music and art. (Gerigk is from Germany.)
Gerigk’s sophisticated musical score, for violin, mixed percussion and chanting voices, has a distinctly Japanese flavor. His hybrid musical style highlights the many points of connection between European modernist music and Japanese classical music: a preference for irregular rhythms, harsh tonalities, austere sound textures. The unmetered music has the rhythm of sounds one hears in nature: the surprising counterpoint of a bird’s cry, the rustle of leaves, and dripping water. The violinist, in some ways, plays like a shakuhachi flute: slow pitch vibrato, and an expressive exploration of the microtonal spaces between pitches. The percussion score, for a large variety of drums, wood blocks and bells, creates a constantly off-center dynamic tension. In fact, the whole score creates a series of energetic, shifting textures, skillfully incorporating silences and unexpectedly hushed tones. In this way, the score has a kinship with the music of George Crumb.
The visual elements of Otonashi take place within a large beige rectangle, surrounded by a black frame where fragments from the Heart Sutra text appear. Gerigk builds up a complex and highly dynamic series of visual compositions from simple elements, assembled from collages created for the film by collaborating artist Nikola Gocić: geometric forms, mathematical diagrams, engravings, and old photos of birds, flowers, Japanese temples.
Gerigk animates these elements in tight relationship to the music: practically every note in the score is reflected in some subtle movement, or change of color or texture. The effect of this unity of sound and image is to highlight both of them: while watching, sound/form events ping into one’s awareness, highlighting many areas of sensory awareness at the same time.
The visual compositions, like the music, make generous use of emptiness and negative space. The backdrop, subtly textured at times to look like a painted wall or rough paper, adds to the sense that emptiness can be felt as a tactile sensation, and indeed this is the central point of both the Heart Sutra and of the film, that “form is only emptiness, emptiness only form.”
At multiple points throughout, key visual elements suddenly drop below the picture frame, as if the energy which had suspended them in the picture space had vanished. Other times, squares and triangles, photos of meditating monks, Japanese characters, simply fade from view. This gradual emptying out of the visual field resembles the mind in meditation: the more you relax and deepen your concentration, the more you are able to let go of thought, feelings, impulses, and images, and bathe in the energy of the void. This is a key goal of Buddhist practice, and Otonashi both embodies this practice, and helps the viewer to achieve it. Gerigk’s masterful harnessing of intuition and insight to sophisticated artistic skills enables him to achieve a simplicity which is breathtaking and enlightening.
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