(This article previously appeared in Film International.)
Onikuma, Alessia Cecchet’s beautifully rendered 12 minute meditation on myth and violence, opens on a seacoast in winter, the beach covered with icy snow. A woman in a fur hat stands filming the scene on an old 16mm camera, accompanied by her female companion. The title refers to a figure from Japanese folklore, a demon bear who chases horses. The film doesn’t tell a linear story but instead stages fragments of symbolic action on the lonely, frozen coastland, providing a poetic examination of the roots of the legend, and indeed of the very process by which primordial fears and desires are transformed into legends.
The film’s action is occasionally intercut with shots of a mantlepiece where the woman’s film camera is surrounded by mementos: framed photos, and figurines and illustrations of horses and bears. The figurines, bell jars, and tchotchkes serve the same function as the film camera does: they distill the wild freedom of real horses and bears into idealized images, into mythical beings.
When we see one of the bronze horse figurines lying in the snow, we realize that the film’s program is to intermix the mythical with the real, to explore a liminal space between the two realms. The winter coastline setting, where flowing water crashes onto a boarder of frozen ice, emphasizes this same liminal zone, where flowing, living energies become frozen into mythical ideals.
The two women encounter a silent, wounded man lying against a tree, his face bloody. His beard links him to the bear figurines, while the woman with the camera is shown with images of the horse. One can think of the horse fleeing the bear in the Onikuma myth as referring to women’s ever-present awareness of men’s potential for violent assault.
The film moves to a beautifully realized stop-motion animation sequence, using colored felt puppets and landscapes, in a style reminiscent of the work of Belgian animators Emma de Swaef and Marc James Roels. The puppets reverse the process of iconizing: they take the figurines and re-animate them, bringing the myth to life. Film, by setting still images in motion, also lives in the border between the iconic and the living.
In the animated version of the story, the bear growls, threatening a horse who is safe in her barn, and in her fear she knocks over a lamp, setting the barn on fire (the smoke beautifully rendered with cotton wool). In this version of the story, it is the horse’s fear which instigates the danger, since otherwise, she would have been locked safely inside the barn.
In the completion of the process of creating the legend, the terrified horse puppet, fleeing for her life, plunges into the freezing sea where she turns to ice, returning to her inanimate state. Tellingly, Onikuma itself at this point reverts from moving images to a series of stills of the cracked ice and the frozen horse. Fear itself freezes the living flow of life into an iconic image: a terrified horse sinking into frozen water.
Instead of helping the bear-man, the women decide to kill him, and his blood runs onto the snow, freezing in shapes that resemble the figurines. Conquering their fear, they act in their own defense, and regain their safety. But the bear-man was nearly dead to begin with; the real enemy, all along, was the fear.
Onikuma ends, not with a tidy wrap-up of a story, but with an ambiguous and evocative set of images. The women gaze in a hand-mirror. One side, the mirror side, reflects the moving images of life, the other side is emblazoned with a horse symbol, the distilled essence of a myth. Human fears and hopes are mirrored in our legends; they are two sides of a single reality. The film, with its open-ended, poetic sequences of metaphorical action, presents a field of possible meanings, and each viewer will be able to build their own interpretation from the experience of watching the action. Cecchet has used consummate artistic skill in rendering these actions into a wordless assemblage of images and sounds that have the precise force of myth: the ability to take our primordial fears and transform them into legend.
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