Innocent, aimless, determined, real
Think of Arnold van Gennep. Belgian, round eyes, drooping mustache. In 1909, he coined a concept that would come to congeal in our terminally-online vocabulary, however divorced from its original (ethnographic) context. I’m talking about liminality. Properly speaking, liminality describes a ritual ‘separation’—a moment of transformation in which an individual detaches from the community of the living and passes, however briefly, into the realm of the dead.
Now, think of Stom Sogo (born Osaka, 1975; emigrated to New York and San Francisco before returning to his homeland in 2004; dying—tragically, prematurely—in 2012, aged just 37). What is recalled of his brief but frenetic career is a rebellious avant-gardism that swallowed and spat out the broadcasted and subjective materials of contemporary life. Big talk, but you won’t see his name everywhere; he is screened only rarely. Today, Duncan Taylor suggests that Sogo exists “as a kind of digital ghost, with low resolution copies of his art floating around [the] internet”. If his works are haunting, they also haunt.
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He was also epileptic and – among other things – his cinema was an attempt to crack open the perceptive experience of epilepsy, and to throw it back toward his audience; to create things that (in his words) “taste sweet first, seizure second”. Not surprisingly, his techniques privilege lossiness, artifacting, blow-outs, rips, distortion, noise, rephotography. He tore scenes from everyday life — faces, street scenes, views from train windows—and remixed them with popular broadcasting (cooking shows, commercials, talk TV) through a welter of mediating effects. Real life—which is also ‘banal’ life, everyday life—becomes very strange in the process.
Properly speaking, this connects Sogo with other post-war avant-gardists—Jonas Mekas, Anne Charlotte Robertson, George Kuchar, Ed Pincus—who operated in an impressionistically diaristic mode: sidestepping the traditional frameworks of narrative cinema (sentimental plots, character-driven acting, mise-en-scene) and replacing them with the remixed datum of routine experience. For Kuchar, that was a filled toilet bowl, rain falling outside his window, his body in a mirror. For Sogo, this means hanging out, riding trains, pounding the streets, conversation.
But more than this, Sogo wanted to distort the barrier between reality and spectatorship even further; to pummel-grind his footage until the tether that connected it with ‘life’ was stretched impossibly thin. Watching his films, you struggle to subdue the wall of images that rushes toward you. And if there’s something spectral about all of this (ghostly apparitions haunting the frame, dissolving on contact), then it seems confirmed by Sogo’s own reflections about his work: “I wanted to show a flower that might be growing or dying”; “everything gets old in different levels. Flower got decayed, and film got fucking scratched”; “I show you something so cool that changes our dead life”. Often, this meant producing images that are un-beautiful; roughshod.
The first time I saw his films was in 2022, where they featured at London Contemporary Music Festival (LCMF). In that wide, high hall in Woolwich—a former factory, I’m told, though it shows little of its industrious past today—we sat on the floor, on scattered chairs, and let Ya Private Sky (2001) and Silver Play (2001) slither-crash over us. I’m not sure what I thought at the time, but the image of these frazzled, buzzing images—gnarly in their digital decay—hung around in my mind for days and weeks afterwards. There was nothing polite in them; nor was there anything else that really looked like them. They seemed chewed up; impossible.
Sidebar. This all might bring to mind Hito Steyerl’s oft-repeated consideration of the “wrecked data” of images that, “shak[ing] off servitude and meaning”, appear suddenly “dead”; escaping the stiff container of explication, before passing into derangement. Really, their beauty is in their derangement, not their composition. There’s no Mekasian field of flowers here. The overall effect with a film like P.s. When you are going to die (2003) is muck; a kind of brackishness peculiar to Sogo.
There’s death here. But this is death as something processual and emergent—not as an ending. Sogo takes us to a place where meanings seem unhooked from the things that (struggle to) signify them. Nor is it abstractive; Sogo shows us decontextualized scenes, seemingly without order, the kind that you might find in your camera roll: a woman and a man hanging out in a room, the view from a train window, a mall. Life.
But he’s not leaving us there (the train carriage, the mall). Sogo wants to take us further, to another place. But, how do we know we’ve actually entered this other place? Sogo provides a hint. P.s. opens with a TV test card. Now sound enters the mix; a tonal rising. The card begins to flip. It shutters off. This is a beginning, an ending. Images flash and flicker in quick succession recalling the old adage that, upon the verge of death, a person glimpses flashbacks of their life; we’re at a threshold.
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Now Sogo cuts to the inside of a car, a wobbling camera which—with its groping, muddy field of view—drinks up houses, trees, soft hills. Now, he gives us a heavily artifacted shot—low angle, shifting—of a street. Two (now three) people are talking; Sogo tilts the frame within the frame, creating an off-centered trapezoid whose “lost” edges pass into an unseen beyond. Now, a grainy dissolve; a blue-lit strobing room—zoomed-in, up close. Bands of superimposition give way to a road at night, a freeway. Darkness, light.
Put another way, Sogo leads us through the ‘real’ world—of cars, streets, houses, lights—and, with his jarring, blown-out acts of mediation, takes us on an estranging journey into a netherworld that sits on ‘top’ of our own. We need to be on guard, to intuit—if we can—the scenes that flow toward us, the spectator. These dislocated formations might seem reminiscent of Hollis Frampton (in whose Surface Tension [1968] we see a man standing by a clock, a sped-up street scene, a fish seeming to swim through waves), but where Frampton gave us structural ‘clues’ to divine their overlapping linkages, Sogo abandons us at the edge of understanding.
But the clue is already there, isn’t it? Mortality, death. Really, we are walking between realms, inhabiting the so-called liminal space—an image and its “elegiac aura”—between living and un-living.
Sogo’s music follows suit, veering between clarity and monstrousness—it is a repetitive, insistent, shifting bricolage of sounds that are chipped, gnarled, distorted; often quite discordant, sometimes softly pulsing. Voices, too; diegetic and not. With Periodical Effect (2002) and Take this Tablet (2004), these effects can be aggressively dialed up, bridging connections between Sogo and Japanoise (best embodied by the likes of Merzbow and Hijokaidan). P.s. can be gentler, reassuring; even if that reassurance can quickly lapse into atonality. By 3 minutes 50 seconds into this quite lengthy (for Sogo) film (17:47), we’ve hit our first wall of dismal noise. The images keep pace, strobing and pulsating. Traffic scenes, man speaking, woman walking along a road in a short skirt, the stairs of a mall escalator, a hand in the darkness. They recycle, repeat, jolting back and jumping forward.
Because of the low-resolution in which many of Sogo’s films are found sequestered away on the likes of YouTube and Vimeo, it can be hard to say how precise the ‘actual’ works should be. To what extent does the quality differ between the original and the rip? Sogo’s methodology invites these questions; after all, his images are often already ripped. What difference does one more tearing-apart make?
While Sogo’s films happen in the moment of their shooting—the rushes that he gathered—they come alive at the editing table, where he made vivid use of rewinds, superimposition, slow motion and so on to scramble the pieces together. And if certain scenes resemble a kind of secular filmmaking, of home movies captured by weekend hobbyists, then this is intentional. Sogo discovers the sublimity of these scenes in how he splices and—at times—shatters them together. It recalls an interstitial reflection in Don DeLillo’s Underworld:
It is unrelenting footage that rolls on and on. It has an aimless determination, a persistence that lives outside the subject matter. You are looking into the mind of home video. It is innocent, it is aimless, it is determined, it is real.
The middle “act” of P.s. gives us a moment which looks precisely like the “home video” that DeLillo describes, but Sogo also exceeds it; transforms it. His camera looks down on a city block, a street, at night; he captures the arrival of a fire truck – with its peels of wavering light – and the bodies of the firefighters who subsequently enter the building, and the bodies of the block’s residents who loiter on the sidewalk, pressing close, looking up. It is a “real” moment – a real slice of life – but Sogo pushes the footage further, zooming to the point of his camera’s distorted maximum, shifting his focus from left to right, up and down. At such a zoomed extreme, the image breaks down; introducing scraps of murky artifacting, visual incoherence. It feels like a home movie; it also feels like a home movie that has been consciously estranged (innocent, aimless, determined, real). This same treatment is given to a romancing couple, and to his friends as they hang out – chatting (their voices distorted), smoking cigarettes – on a nighttime city stoop. This is real life; Sogo pushes it to a point of abstraction.
In this way, the real ‘meat’ of P.s.is the everyday transformed into something “fucked up”, as Sogo himself might put it offering an intimation of strangeness reached through materials that seem outwardly banal – the kind of stuff that wouldn’t typically be considered cinematic. Having passed through the chaotic intermingling of death, Sogo gives us life; a thing that is both ordinary and beautiful. His penultimate shot is steady: a piece of wall, and a space beyond it, through which people pass as they shop, commute, hang out. Finally, a little brightness that pushes through barely open curtains. Darkness. Light.
Returning to liminality, I’m still struck (though not surprised) by how much digital traction the idea has gained. You might locate its source in the popularization of ‘backrooms’ memes, r/liminalspace, an image that is almost—almost—“cursed”. There are those who call them “images with elegiac auras”, which—again—brings forth the imaginary of mourning. What works for a series of strange, empty, ill-lit rooms also works for the elegies of Stom Sogo, where his films are laid on our eyes like death-poems, or as texts beyond death (having gone and—through their convulsive dissociations—come back to us). Whether van Gennep would have enjoyed them is a matter of conjecture. He died in 1957, just in time to watch the postwar avant-garde flicker into life. Sogo—its latter-day remnant—made sure that this ‘flicker’ became an explosion.
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