Hikari (2017)
The thing about analyzing and recommending your favorite movies is that you have to use your words and trust the other party to understand what you mean instead of screaming into a pillow for several hours. Coincidentally, this is what the movie Hikari is about.
When I first watched this movie back in 2020, what called out to me was Nakamori’s grief—I’m also a photographer, a painter, and a cinephile losing his sight. This perspective colored my entire understanding of the movie, but I’m delighted it’s just one of many ways the movie has to explore its themes.
Memory: In the obvious form of Misako’s mother’s dementia and her obsession with her father’s disappearance (don’t forget the exact things that he had on him, don’t forget the few memories you have of him, he lives on in the trees), but also in Nakamori clinging to his identity as a cameraman and photographer, his work being proof of what his life was, not wanting to forget that this is a loss, and refusing to give up a part of his life that, even in absence, defines him.
Translation: Not just in the layman’s notion of it but as an act of conveying the same meaning despite the difference in medium, whether that is a descriptive audio script and the film it is describing, a photographer’s gaze and its subject, a memory and reality, or one person’s understanding of an event and someone else’s.Â
Trust: Learning to accept that we are all observers and there are no neutral ways to experience or retell an event, and all we can hope is that we can get the point across with the tools we have. To trust the audio description to do justice to the images you filmed so deliberately. To trust that he will reach your apartment door safely, even if the last time you saw him he trembled at the feeling of a step. To trust that the last photo you took turned out alright, despite having completely lost your sight by then. To look at the sun without flinching, knowing that tomorrow you might be dead, and still reach towards the light.
I get a lot of joy out of people’s descriptions of the world around me and what they can show me not only about the topic but also about their gaze. Hikari wrestles with two ideas that appear in every conversation about art and access with refreshing straightforwardness:
Language is a small tool to express the boundless reality that we live in. No description will ever be fully accurate or land with every reader. There is no good way to describe anything, just the hope that the person on the other side will meet your attempt to connect when all you have is an abstraction of an audience.
There are no neutral subjects because there are no neutral gazes. The person who created the image, the person who is describing the image, the person who is seeing the image, and the person who is reading the description are very different subjectivities (even when they’re the same person, at different temporal and spatial contexts and emotional states). This chasm grows larger when the creator, the describer, and the audience are separate. Unintended omission is often seen as the biggest issue with bias, but there’s no objectivity at all in clinically listing every visible thing with deceptively thought-of-as neutral adjectives. There is no shame in having a partial perspective, because all perspectives are partial, in art and in life.
One would assume the word “access” implies that there’s an entering to somewhere, an opening to a new experience, but most descriptions of art often feel like being told “there’s a door there” but finding the threshold bricked up. Bias is connection, it’s humanity, it’s what one looks for in art. The thing you’re being granted passage to is the person on the other side, the interpreter, the connection you’ve been offered. Translation, access, must be like putting a battering ram through that brick wall.