Recorded/Edited: Bill VIOLA
Production Assistant/Still Photographer: Kira PEROV
With: MISAWA Shinnosuke
Supervising Producer: Carol BRANDENBURG
Produced in association with Sony Corporation, Atsugi, Japan, and the TV Lab at WNET/Thirteen, New York

VIOLA writes: “I was thinking about light and its relation to water and to life, and also its opposite – darkness or the night and death. Video treats light like water – it becomes fluid on the video tube. Water supports the fish like light supports man. The land is the death of the fish – darkness is the death of a man.” Unfolding in a dreamlike trance, “Hatsu Yume” is a startlingly beautiful metaphorical work. VIOLA fuses a personal observation of Japanese culture with a metaphysical contemplation of life, death, and nature, achieved through a symbolic exploration of the video’s relation to light and reflection. VIOLA’s vision of Japanese culture and landscape evolves in a dramatic language of almost hallucinatory passages and vivid images. An immobile rock on a mountainside appears to change in size and scale with the shifting passage of time and light; an urban scene is illuminated by a single match; fishermen trawl on a black ocean at night, hauling in luminous squids using light as bait. Throughout, VIOLA creates haunting allegories of light as a metaphysical construct.

“Hatsu-Yume (First Dream)—For TANAKA Daien” 1981