Chapter 2: Visibility and invisibility of the catastrophe

The impossibility to “get the picture” of the catastrophe

In the face of disasters, what can cinema do? To address this question that I posed in the

introduction of this dissertation, this chapter firstly focuses on the impossibility to “get the

picture” of the catastrophe. To use this expression “get the picture,” I am referring to art

historian W. J. T Mitchell’s reflexion on the crucial role of pictures in terms of epistemology.

“In its most extended sense,” he writes, “a picture refers to the entire situation in which an

image has made its appearance, as when we ask someone if they “get the picture.””1

Referring to Heidegger’s famous concept of “the age of the world picture”—accounting for

the modern situation in which we conceive and grasp the world as a picture—Mitchell argues

that we are inseparable from pictures as we are part of the picture which constitutes our

world:

Pictures are our way of gaining access to whatever these things are. Even more

emphatically, they are (as philosopher Nelson Goodman puts it) “ways of

worldmaking,” not just world mirroring.2

Thus, pictures and seeing them constitute an indispensable part of our existence. However, as

is often pointed out, we do not fully grasp what we are seeing in today’s world, where images

are omnipresent; seeing and knowing are not necessarily equally linked, as visual culture

scholar Nicholas Mirzoeff aptly observes that “the visualization of everyday life does not

mean that we necessarily know what it is that we are seeing.”3

The Great East Japan Earthquake and the subsequent nuclear power plant accident in

2011 (3/11 disasters) surfaced this unstable relationship between seeing and knowing; even

1
Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?
2
Mitchell, What do pictures want?
3
Mirzoeff
worse, the crisis of picturing the world. This issue was raised by both the viewers of the

images of and the those who sought to record the disasters. Hamaguchi, who arrived in

Sendai in May after the 3/11 disasters, says that before visiting the disaster area, he had

watched disaster images while in Tokyo and felt that something was missing from the

images:

The feeling we had when watching the images on YouTube in Tokyo was that we

were viewing images that lacked missing something very important. Normally, the

images are very nicely arranged as a kind of information, which we can process in

our interpretation code. However, [this missing thing in the disaster images] was not

filled in at all. I feel that I have been drawn here by it.4

After arriving at the disaster-hit areas, however, Hamaguchi gave up turning his camera on

the damaged landscape. Together with Sakai who joined Hamaguchi in July, they wondered

that nothing would appear on the screen if they had shot the site. Sakai also underscores the

impossibility of interpretation of the situation in the aftermath of the disasters. He explains

that it was precisely because they were used to working with images that Hamaguchi and

Sakai himself did not know where to place the camera—it was impossible for them to frame,

or grasp with the camera, what they could not interpret.5

Kenji Kai (then director of Project and Activity Support Office at the Sendai

Médiathèque), who organized Recorder311 project6 and received Hamaguchi and Sakai at the

Sendai Médiathèque at that time as part of the project, also remarks that many people came to

Tohoku region after watching the disaster images on TV, but they ended up realizing that such

4
Hamaguchi’s remark, my translation from Japanese to English.
5
Sakai’s remark, my translation from Japanese to English.
6
Recorder311 refers to a platform created at the Sendai Médiathèque (Sendai city, Miyagi prefecture) for
citizens and artists who wish to help document the reconstruction process of the 3/11 disasters and
disseminate the recordings.
mediatized images did not match what they did see on site. They tried to put a proper image

to better grasp the situation, but there were no images to illustrate it.7

This difficulty of picturing the disasters testify to its scale which was too large to

properly visualize and render the severity into information. This fact further demonstrates the

characteristic of the media, which forcibly transforms the catastrophe into information. The

information, however, as Hamaguchi notes, lacked something important. More and more

information was being disseminated while less and less meaning was conveyed. “Rather than

producing meaning, [the information] exhausts itself in the staging of meaning,”8 as

philosopher Jean Baudrillard points out.

Monster as a metaphor of crisis. Anno’s Shin Godzilla (2016)

If the reality is beyond our interpretative code of information, we try to picture it by

means of our imagination. The figure of the monster, for example, has long been imagined

and used to symbolize something that is beyond our realm of comprehension. Monster, by its

Latin etymology, means to “show (monstrare)” or “warn (monere)” of something.9 In the

Middle Ages in particular, monsters were tied closely to the divine.10 The science fiction and

fantasy writer China Miéville explains: “As divine lessons, monsters served as testimony to

the active intervention of the divine in the world. They were often understood to be signs of

something gone awry, of limits exceeded—frightening manifestations that indicated problems

in the social order. […] [V]isualizing monsters—giving shape to them in art and literature—

constitutes an important step toward defining and therefore controlling the unknown.”11

7
Kai’s remark, my translation from Japanese to English.
8
Jean Baudrillard
9
Medieval Monsters: Terrors, Aliens, Wonders
10
Medieval Monsters: Terrors, Aliens, Wonders
11
Medieval Monsters: Terrors, Aliens, Wonders ; As an extension of this medieval history, we should also recall
that skeletons and the Death were privileged motifs in the magic lantern shows as well as phantasmagoria of
pre-cinema history.