youki hirakawa
The Better Way
The Better Way Back to the Soil / 2017
Video Installation / 4K / Stereo / 07:30
Text Edit: Mari Matsutoya / Voice Over: Brian May
On a black background projected onto a wall, the titles and production years of old films faintly appear and disappear. The titles appear at first like a simple enumeration, yet faint connections of poetic meaning emerge. These titles are films once publicly screened but now lost—a record of which remains in magazines and posters but whose actual motion picture films have been lost. Surprisingly, it is said that the whereabouts of 80% of early silent films shown until the 1930s are unknown. Initially, when viewing a list of lost films for the production of this work, Hirakawa noticed that their titles came together to form poetic sequences of words. Selecting word sequences and rearranging them, Hirakawa has completed what can be called a poem, if somewhat fragmental. The poem, in a sense, gives a ‘voice’ to the lost films in the course of a long history of filmmaking. English title of lost films appears in work" The Better Way Back to the Soil".
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