PROJECT HISTORY

We had talked about making a movie in Japan. We had co-directed our first documentary a few years earlier—looking back, a spontaneous, disorganized project undertaken with the kind of historical urgency you can feel when you're truly young. We had horrifically incompatible work habits, but in spite of that, general inexperience, and all lack of technical polish, the film clearly had a life of its own. And we were both moved by the subject. There's definitely gambling in my blood, and Mika has never been the hesitant type. We ended up agreeing to move from the States to Tokyo the next year, in 2001.

Mika had already spent time in Japan before, staying in temples, studying and practicing Buddhism. To me, however, the country was more of an abstraction that I had encountered though its art history and particularly its literature. The great prose stylists like Sei Shonagon, Kenko, Junichiro Tanizaki understood themselves perhaps as little more than a sensibility on the page—to quite powerful and noble effect, I think—and they had a profound influence on the way I wanted to live and write. The Mountain of Signs, with its monologue in blank prose, is very much a homage to—and a product of my infatuation with—that literary tradition.

It makes sense to say that The Mountain of Signs is an essay-film: first, in that it is a nonfiction construction; and second, in that it is an equal collaboration between a writer and a filmmaker. Everything that happens to the narrator and how she responds is willful and real in the utmost: from the move overseas and the compulsive photographing of everything, to the fire ritual and the eerie childhood Super 8 footage. But it is enabled and interpreted by the director, a necessary thing—so who's writing the story?

There were many things in Tokyo that were grating, awkward, not aesthetically pleasing, but to omit them would not be truthful, and they are also present through the narrator's struggle for and against consciousness. The departure for Koyasan in fall 2002 was a genuine relief. We spent almost a month filming in this remote monastery town on top of a mountain, a train ride outside of Osaka, then a climb by cable car. Frequented by pilgrims and vigorous travelers, at the heart of the town is a heavily forested cemetery where the founder of Shingon Buddhism is buried. We stayed in a guest house at the Buddhist university, dining with the students and trying earnestly to wake up at the crack of dawn. One of those places you wake up feeling whole, but then imagine having such intense purpose and limited time that you could enjoy it only out of the corner of your eye, always in a bit of a rush. So it continues much like life in the city for us, and consciousness dims.

By Bonnie Huie
Spring 2008