The Eternal Traveller

Director: Hara Masato
JAPAN / 1995 / Color / 16mm / 219 min

What would it be like to take what the poet Basho did in haiku and express it in music and images? The filmmaker sets out with his son in a small van to follow Basho’s “Narrow Road to the Deep North,” equipped with a guitar, keyboard, and cooking gear. As the journey progresses, his 100 haiku read to music serve to forward the narrative. As the two run the camera over the month-long trip, the divisions in the family begin to appear and the son, towards the end, reveals why he had stopped attending school. These experimental images reject the modern dualism of “subject” and “object” to thoroughly explore a method of “place” filming “place,” “relationship” filming “relationship.”