“Utako Koguchi’s Transformations”
Utako Koguchi is an essential figure in recent Japanese cinema. Her playful, sensual, and personal films place her own body in dialogue with the surrounding world for the sake of crafting stories with unpredictable starts and open endings. She was born in Tokyo in 1961 and emerged as part of a generation of Japanese female directors who created films and videos primarily during the 1980s and 1990s. Today, Koguchi deserves recognition as one of world cinema’s great surrealist artists, following in the tradition of filmmakers who influenced her, such as Luis Buñuel and David Lynch.
The newest edition of the Mutual Films Session at the IMS Paulista presents six films directed by Koguchi: three shot on 8mm during the 1980s and three more shot on 16mm in the 1990s, prior to her moving more fully into working with digital formats. And, as a bridge between Koguchi’s acclaimed works from these two periods—such as O-DE-KA-KE Diary 1 (Koguchi Utako no ODEKAKE nikki, 1989) and A Dandelion, Rosaceae (Baraka Tanpopo, 1990) — the series also features the short film Metaphorical Hands (Anyu no te, 1990), made by Shirouyasu Suzuki (1935–2022). Suzuki was a pioneering Japanese filmmaker of personal cinema who taught Koguchi how to operate a 16mm Bolex camera. Like Koguchi’s work, his films remain unknown in Brazil.
The following essay about Utako Koguchi’s cinema was written by Wakae Nakane, a researcher of Japanese experimental film who currently serves as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. In her essay, Nakane mentions several Japanese female filmmakers whose short, personal, and formally innovative works she has programmed alongside Koguchi’s films in various contexts over the past few years, thus offering a glimpse into the vast territory that Japanese experimental cinema represents.
In addition to Nakane, special thanks for the realization of the series “Utako Koguchi’s Transformations” go to the curators Ute Aurand and Cici Peng, who organized screenings of Koguchi’s films in Berlin (at the Arsenal) and New York (at e-flux) and shared their knowledge of the works with us. Thanks also go to Koguchi-san, who created new digital screening copies and translations into English for several of her films and graciously acted as a co-creator in general. It was she who introduced us to the cinema of Shirouyasu Suzuki, to whose memory this film series is dedicated.
- Aaron Cutler and Mariana Shellard (Mutual Films)
Essay by Wakae Nakane:
A woman in a girly pale pink dress drifts down the Kanda River, an urban waterway that cuts through central Tokyo. She is captured through an unstable handheld camera, yet rarely occupies the center of the frame and instead drifts in and out of view as the image wavers, occasionally disappearing into the shadows cast by the surrounding urban infrastructure. On the riverbank, passersby stop and stare. Some look confused, unsure whether they are witnessing a performance. Others appear alarmed. The scene hovers between spectacle and accident, with its uncertainty emerging both from the ambiguous nature of the action unfolding before the camera and from the perspective through which it is recorded.
The drifting body remains suspended between theatrical gesture and lived experience through its abrupt insertion within the regulated rhythm of urban space. What begins as an image of solitary drifting gradually reveals itself as a social situation; the drifting body encounters a stream of strangers whose reactions—curiosity, amusement, discomfort, concern—become part of the event. This image from Utako Koguchi’s film O-DE-KA-KE Diary 1 provides an evocative point of entry into her oeuvre. Across Koguchi’s films, bodies wander, float, perform rituals, become dolls, or rehearse their own deaths. Yet these transformations do not lead to a deeper knowledge of the Self. Rather, the filmmaker subjects herself to situations in which control is partially surrendered by allowing chance encounters and environmental conditions to play crucial parts.
Her unstable positions are occupied by a variety of figures. Yet one returns with particular frequency: the girl, or shōjo in Japanese, who is poised precariously between passivity and agency. Whether drifting down a river or appearing in dreamlike performances, Koguchi’s shōjo occupies an ambiguous position that resists easy definition as she oscillates between a regressive fantasy of arrested development and a more affirmative valorization of liminality and refusal. What emerges is a porous form of subjectivity in which passivity and agency become difficult to disentangle from one another.
The recurrence of the shōjo in Koguchi’s work resonates with the broader visibility of girlhood in Japanese culture during the late 1980s and 1990s. As women filmmakers gained increasing visibility within Japan’s experimental film scene, their work was often discussed through the language of girlhood. In a 1995 roundtable that Koguchi—then in her long tenure on the selection committee of the Pia Film Festival, one of Japan’s leading independent film festivals—organized for the publication Gekkan Image Forum, in which art and film students gathered to discuss the present status and the future of women’s experimental filmmaking, the filmmaker Naho Murakami remarked that women directors were frequently grouped together as onna no ko (“girls”) despite the considerable differences in their artistic practices.
Murakami’s observation pointed towards a broader cultural formation. Across photography, literature, visual art, and cinema, the shōjo occupied a conspicuous place within Japanese cultural life during the 1980s and 1990s. And, within experimental film culture, a number of women filmmakers—including Mari Terashima, Hiromi Saiki, Yukie Saitō, Yūko Asano, Haruka Doi, Keiko Utagawa, Junko Wada, and Fumie Kamioka—began exhibiting their work with increasing frequency, often becoming discussed collectively by critics and scholars through the language of girlhood in spite of the diversity of their aesthetic practices and thematic concerns. Significantly, the figure functioned not only as a recurring motif, but also as a position from which cultural production increasingly emerged. Young women artists, writers, photographers, and filmmakers in Japan frequently mobilized images of girlhood while simultaneously being read through the very category their work contributed to shaping. The shōjo thus operated both as an object of representation and as a mode of cultural authorship, collapsing the distinction between image and image-maker in distinctive ways. At once a site of fantasy, projection, and identification, the figure carried a range of often contradictory meanings, oscillating between passivity and agency, spectacle and refusal.
Koguchi’s work emerged from precisely this cultural configuration. Positioned as an onna no ko filmmaker even as she continually returned to the figure of the individual shōjo in her films, she turned the category into an object of exploration. Rather than resolving its tensions, her films hold them open. Her recurring girls inhabit thresholds: between childhood and adulthood, fantasy and reality, Self and Other. In this respect, her work recalls understandings of the shōjo not simply as a demographic category, but as a position of partial incorporation, one suspended between social determination and imaginative possibility. Yet her films depart from romanticized celebrations of girlhood as a realm of purity or freedom. Koguchi’s protagonists do not embody an essential femininity—instead, they occupy unstable positions in which identities remain provisional and are shaped through performance and encounters with others.
This concern with suspension also distinguishes her films from autobiographically oriented works produced by other Japanese women directors during the same period. Filmmakers such as Yukiko Eguchi (MaMa, 1987) and Naomi Kawase (Embracing/Ni tsutsumarete, 1992) similarly explored questions of family bonds, often traumatic memory, and selfhood through highly mediated and performative forms. Yet their films often circle around an absent center—a lost parent, a forgotten family history, or an unresolved wound from childhood. Koguchi’s films, in contrast, are striking for the extent to which they refuse such a search for a center. Instead of moving toward a hidden truth or origin of the Self, the films linger in moments of uncertainty, in which the Self takes shape only through shifting and ever-evolving relations.
When seen from this perspective, O-DE-KA-KE Diary 1 (whose title uses a Japanese word for “exploring” or “journeying”) becomes less a diary than an experiment in shōjo-like becoming. Koguchi’s wandering figure is never fully stabilized as an autobiographical subject. Instead, she occupies a position of incompletion as she is exposed to chance encounters and the perspectives of others. Koguchi entrusted her 8mm camera to more than twenty collaborators, allowing friends and passersby to film her drifting body throughout the city. The decision emerged from a simple but profound question: If our existence is constituted through relationships with others, can a camera pointed at oneself ever be sufficient? The resulting film transforms autobiography into a collective and experimental undertaking. Rather than revealing an interior self or uncovering an originary truth, it stages a process through which a self gradually materializes through the gaze of others. The unstable images—out-of-focus shots, awkward framings, unexpected camera movements—are not technical shortcomings, but rather traces of this experiment. Identity appears not as something possessed, but as continually formed through movement, encounter, and circulation.
This relational experiment takes a different form in O-DE-KA-KE Diary 2 (Zoku ODEKAKE nikki: Dai 2 sho: Kusa no Ie, 1993), which Koguchi made a few years later. If O-DE-KA-KE Diary 1 exposes the Self to anonymous encounters in public space, the sequel redirects wandering toward domestic and affective landscapes. Set around New Year’s Eve, it once again centers on a wandering shōjo whose soul leaves her body and drifts through familiar sites: the small wooden house where she first lived on her own, the apartment of a former lover, nighttime streets, a convenience store, and finally the warm home of her parents. As Koguchi later recalled, the impulse behind the sequel was simply that “The woman’s soul wanted to leave her body and go on another outing.” Wandering thus becomes less a narrative premise than a recurring method through which the films continue to reimagine subjectivity. It no longer primarily generates encounters with unfamiliar bodies, strangers, or anonymous urban and natural environments. Instead, it traces an affective geography shaped by intimate relationships, remembered conversations, and the emotional residues of everyday life.
Yet this turn toward intimacy should not be mistaken for a return to autobiographical origin. Rather than abandoning the relational experiment of O-DE-KA-KE Diary 1, the sequel relocates it. The Self is constituted not through the recovery of a hidden center, but through continued movement among places inhabited by intimate others. The former lover's apartment and the family home do not function as psychic ground or as sites of reconciliation. Instead, they remain provisional spaces through which subjectivity continues to drift, never settling into a stable origin or coherent autobiographical truth. In this sense, O-DE-KA-KE Diary 2 reconfigures the diary form itself: memory is not organized as a return to the past, it instead unfolds as an ongoing performance of relational becoming.
This relational understanding of subjectivity finds one of its clearest material expressions in Koguchi's recurring use of water. The filmmaker has described the river as carrying multiple resonances: the flow of blood, the passage of time, and the experience of surrendering oneself to larger currents. Across the O-DE-KA-KE Diary films, water displaces the body from the position of mastery, allowing it instead to drift along with forces larger than itself. To be sure, the image of the drifting female body inevitably evokes the longstanding cultural association between femininity and nature. Rather than disavowing this imaginary, however, Koguchi deliberately inhabits it as a performance, allowing the very act of drifting to loosen the essentialist meanings that such imagery has historically accrued. Water thus becomes a performative figure for the shōjo: neither fully fixed nor entirely autonomous, she remains suspended within processes of transition and becoming.
The drifting figure inevitably recalls the character of Ophelia, from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1601), who provides one of the most enduring images of girlhood in modern visual culture. (Koguchi in fact later made a series of experimental works about literary and artistic representations of girlhood called Ophelia’s Favorite Books / Ofiria no Aidokusho, in 1995.) Yet Koguchi’s floating body is neither tragic nor passive. Her drift is exploratory: by placing herself within public space in ways that solicit reactions from strangers, she transforms wandering into a method for generating encounters.
This concern with displacement extends far beyond O-DE-KA-KE Diary 1 and O-DE-KA-KE Diary 2. In The Rain (Ame, 1981), a film that Koguchi made while she was still a student at Waseda University, a young girl retreats into her room during a rainstorm and performs a mysterious ritual involving a magical book. Surrounded by the persistent sound of rainfall, the protagonist withdraws from ordinary social time and enters a realm governed by imagination and reverie. Girlhood appears here as a temporary interval before the consolidation of social identity, a state in which alternative relationships between Self and world remain imaginable. In this sense, the rain does not isolate the protagonist from reality so much as it alters the conditions through which reality is perceived.
A similar dynamic appears in The Home of Dr. Axolotl (Ahorotoru Uparupa no sumika,1987), albeit in a more unsettling register. Images and gestures circulate between Koguchi’s works from this period, as though she were repeatedly reworking a shared imaginative terrain. The floating figure that will soon drift through O-DE-KA-KE Diary surfaces here as well, though in a markedly different context. The Home of Dr. Axolotl draws heavily on the imaginative world of the shōjo, with its romantic longing, handwritten confessions, fantasy, and transformation. Through a first-person voice-over that resembles a love letter addressed to the titular doctor, Koguchi constructs a distinctly shōjo-like space of desire. Yet this space reveals itself to be inseparable from the body. Menstrual blood, traditionally coded as impurity, becomes pigment; rituals of femininity become theatrical performances. Rather than treating girlhood as a realm of innocence or escape, the film exposes its entanglement with the materiality of the body and the symbolic structures through which femininity is produced.
Perhaps the most revealing example of Koguchi’s engagement with the shōjo as a provisional mode of subjectivity comes through A Dandelion, Rosaceae. Even the film’s title anticipates its broader investment in unstable categories, pairing the familiar image of the dandelion with the taxonomic designation “Rosaceae” despite the fact that dandelions belong to the Asteraceae rather than the Rosaceae family. This playful taxonomic incongruity prefigures the film’s refusal of fixed classificatory systems. By bringing together dolls, human performers, scientific imagery, improvised actions, and experiments with the material properties of 16mm, the nine-minute film constructs a world in which neither identity nor narrative is given in advance. Instead, both emerge retrospectively through the accumulation of heterogeneous fragments.
When looking back on A Dandelion, Rosaceae decades after its making, Koguchi recalled that she began making the film without a script. Rather than working toward a predetermined story, she assembled childhood dolls, scientific photographs, and disconnected images that occupied her imagination at the time. Narrative emerged only afterwards, through the unexpected connections generated among these disparate elements. What is striking is not simply the film’s surrealism, but its method of construction.
The central figures of the film, the twin doll sisters Lulu and Lala, occupy an uncertain ontological status. Sometimes they appear as toys manipulated by unseen hands; at other moments, they seem to possess a strange autonomy. Koguchi playfully referred to her visibly hand-operated puppet animation as muriyari anime (“forceful animation”), foregrounding both the artificiality of the image and the pleasures of transformation. Human performers double the dolls, further unsettling distinctions between object and person. The sisters are played by Koguchi herself, while the film was photographed by her mentor, Shirouyasu Suzuki, a poet and pioneering Japanese diary filmmaker who lent her the 16mm camera used in the production and eventually became an advocate for her generation of Japanese female experimental moving image artists. The collaborative nature of the film mirrors its own logic: identities, bodies, and authorial positions continually overlap and exchange places. Scientific imagery intrudes into this world, voices emerge from unexpected places, and nothing remains securely within its proper category.
This instability extends to the body itself. Much of the film revolves around Lulu and Lala’s bizarre bodily transformations as they acquire and exchange male genitalia, dissolving any stable distinction between masculine and feminine embodiment. Gender becomes one more element subjected to the film’s broader logic of metamorphosis: bodies are exchanged and reimagined, just as dolls become people, objects acquire agency, and fantasies intermingle with everyday life. The film further complicates identity through sound. Lulu, Lala, and Koguchi herself are frequently accompanied by male voices performing onna kotoba, a speech style conventionally associated with femininity. The resulting disjunction between body, voice, and language reveals gender not as an inner truth but as something produced through shifting relations among bodies, voices, performances, and cinematic technologies. Subjectivity thus circulates among dolls, bodies, voices, and objects, never settling within any single form.
Seen in this light, the shōjo in A Dandelion, Rosaceae no longer functions simply as a representational figure. Rather, it becomes a cinematic operation through which dolls, bodies, voices, and objects continually exchange places. Subjectivity is not presented as something possessed by an individual, but instead as something assembled through these shifting relations. The recurring presence of girlhood thus signals a formal concern with states of incompletion and transformation, providing a framework through which previously fixed identities can be rehearsed, exchanged, and reimagined.
The logic of displacement explored through the figure of the shōjo is not strictly confined to Koguchi’s films about girlhood. It reappears across her work in different forms and through different bodies. In The Sleeping Flower (Nemuru Hana, 1991), this concern with subjectivity as something relational, provisional, and capable of becoming other than itself takes a more intimate form. Koguchi asks her grandmother to participate in a staged funeral, thus placing the older woman in the paradoxical position of both witnessing and performing her own death. Rather than documenting an existing reality, the film constructs a situation in which future loss can be rehearsed in the present. Ume Koguchi thus playfully occupies multiple temporal positions at once: as a living participant in the filming process, as the object of anticipated mourning, and as a figure whose absence is already being imagined and performed.
When viewed together, these films reveal a remarkably consistent preoccupation. If the O-DE-KA-KE Diary films explore the Self through encounters with strangers, and A Dandelion, Rosaceae disperses it across dolls, fantasies, and fragments of memory, then The Sleeping Flower projects it into a future in which the subject is no longer present. Across these works, identity never appears as a stable interior essence awaiting expression. It emerges through relations, performances, projections, and acts of displacement that continually unsettle the boundaries of the Self.
This relational understanding of subjectivity extends beyond the films. Throughout her practice, Koguchi repeatedly opens authorship to others—whether by handing the camera to passersby, collaborating with performers, or later dedicating much of her energy to supporting younger filmmakers through her work as a teacher (and sometimes producer of her student’s films) at Japan’s prestigious Musashino Art University. For Koguchi, creativity emerges less as the expression of an autonomous individual than as something generated through contingent encounter and exchange.
Long before participation, relationality, and collaborative authorship became part of critical vocabularies, Koguchi was already exploring how a Self might emerge through exposure to others, through fantasy, and through the productive loss of control. The renewed interest in her work today among film scholars and curators is therefore more than an act of historical recovery. Her films offer an alternative genealogy of autobiographical cinema, one that complicates familiar narratives of self-expression, authenticity, and personal revelation.
The drifting girl who traverses her films ultimately persists because she remains unresolved. Neither resistant nor compliant, neither child nor adult, neither documentary subject nor fictional character, she occupies a threshold that refuses easy stabilization. Yet to describe this figure simply as a shōjo would be insufficient. More fundamentally, she functions as a method. Through wandering, drifting, doubling, and transformation, she opens a space in which identity can be imagined otherwise.
The image of Koguchi’s body floating down the Kanda River therefore returns with renewed significance, since to drift, in her cinema, does not mean to become lost. It means to tactically relinquish mastery. It means entering into relations with images, materials, bodies, memories, and others that exceed individual control. The drifting figures that populate her films remain unfinished. And it is precisely through this unfinishedness that they continue to move, transform, and invite new encounters.