Description of the work:

WALLS, 1896
Directed by SHIBATA Oju
Music, Sound Effects: MusMus
Running time: 46”

I expressed a poem as a typographical essay in motion, not as something to be read aloud or expressed in pictures. I tried
to denote a vision with texts and movements.
I felt “delicate” blocks in the poem, when I read it.
I hope to visualize the “delicate” aspect that I can't describe in words.
Walls was published in 1896. I didn't understand what “wall” in this poem means.
I wonder if Walls has a deeper meaning for the Greeks.
Ancient Greeks attached great importance to funerals and saw them as preparations for life after death.
I heard that suicides, children and slaves were buried. Only citizens could be cremated.
And babies who died within 40 days of their birth were placed in the hollows of a house wall.
The ancient Greeks believed that a body without a soul was dirty.
So they cleansed dead bodies with fire.
It meant a body buried without fire was a very dirty soul.
So unclean souls tried to wriggle out of the walls of houses, creating a heavy and stagnant atmosphere around them.
I shudder and feel an aversion for their funeral customs because they are very different from ours at present.
There is a big “culture gap” between their custom and ours.
About Cavafy's poem Walls, I felt negative and blocked. But I can’t know that Cavafy really wanted to express in this poem
because it was written over 100 years ago. I thought there is a “generation gap” between the “blocks” that I felt reading his
poem and Cavafy’s “blocks” when he wrote it.
I was inspired by these two gaps. And it is most interesting and difficult.
So I tried to spread this gap in a movie.