About Eri Makihara:

It is very difficult to put myself into words. Especially when I think in Japanese, my second language.

What I can say for sure is that the formation of thoughts that constitute myself are greatly influenced by experiences in my early years.

I remember going to the local ward office with my Deaf mother. There was a sign at the counter that read “Disability Counter”. As we headed there I asked my mother, “Who is disabled?” and she signed, “We are.”

I felt a tremendous sense of discomfort and repulsion, thinking, “Are we disabled?”. I remember vividly the intense strangeness I felt in that moment about the gap in perception between me and the rest of the world, that deaf people fit the category of “disabled.”

I think that was probably when the pursuit of my own independent sense of self was born.

About Music

My family consists of four people: my Deaf parents and my hearing-impaired sister – and our house was always filled with music. That’s because my father, who is Deaf by any standards, still has some hearing so always listens to music with headphones on. CDs of various singers were scattered all over the house, on the shelves and on the floor. Sometimes I would borrow my father’s headphones and listen to them at the maximum volume, or I would go to the CD store and fall in love with a cover.

I remember listening to the CD of Kubota Toshinobu’s “LA・LA・LA LOVESONG” that he bought for me.

To me it was often just a rough sensation of sound.

It is said that listeners can be emotionally stirred by sound. I could always sense the presence of sound from vibrations, but I was never moved in this way. That made me feel deeply uncomfortable, but at the same time I didn’t want to force myself to assimilate with people from a different world to me.

In music classes, I really liked the alto recorder. When I blew into it, I could feel the vibrations of air inside the tube directly on my fingers. The more delicate the vibrations, the more comfortable they felt, and the more delicate and sensitive my playing, the higher the marks the music teacher would give me. However, if I wanted to play in unison with friends I had to practice a lot, using my eyes and body to grasp and match the rhythm, speed, and timing of everyone else. Playing harmonies, in particular, proved to be tense moments for me; I didn’t feel comfortable, unable to let my heart surrender to the vibrations transmitted to my fingers.

Since leaving school I don’t have much interest in aural music, except for research born out of intellectual curiosity. However, I am attracted to “music-like” things, particularly in cinema. There’s a moment in Takeshi Kitano’s A Scene at the Sea (1992) where a man and woman walk continuously with their surfboards without saying anything. When I first watched this film with Japanese subtitles I fell asleep because there were so few lines. But the scene has always stuck in my mind and sometimes the image comes back to me. When I think about it now as an adult, I am moved by the fact that a movie like this exists.

Accumulating these experiences, somewhere along the line I came to feel that the essence of music for me is not sound. And I always fall back on this sense of the world that I felt when I was a small child, when I knew nothing.

About Deaf Music

The first time I discovered that there was something musical about sign language was when I attended a sign language poetry workshop by Shizue Sazawa, a former member of the Japan Deaf Theater. I didn’t know about sign language poetry before this because the school for the deaf that I attended was led by hearing people and the use of sign language was prohibited. The only thing we learned in school was the culture and history of hearing people.

When I saw Sazawa perform a song called “Hometown” in Japanese sign language I was deeply moved. She didn’t just sign directly from the Japanese words, but translated them into Japanese sign language grammar and expressed it in a way that made it immediately relatable. Her expression of the scene still comes vividly to my mind – moving her index finger around the side of her head and shaking all the fingers of one hand. It was certainly sign language, but what I saw was something additional that was not language, something like a melody. The experience was an awakening for me. It made me wonder, what is the essence of music?

When I searched the Internet for videos of sign language poetry, I realised I could not feel the same “music” from them that I felt from Sazawa. I was receiving the message of the poetry based on its linguistic translation and I wanted to see its non-verbal base – the beauty of the form it took before it was put into words.

I have come to recognise that the movement of hands and facial expressions, the connection between the shape of hands and their next shape, the flow, the interval, the tempo, the breathing, and many other elements combine in a complex way to give sign language a “hand quality” rather than a “voice quality”.

As such, I have become fascinated by the world of non-verbal language within language.

I Stayed and Faced the Wall

The idea of “Deaf music” came to me when I was a short way into pursuing my ambition to be a film director. I was excited to face the moving memory I had witnessed watching Sazawa and answer my own question of “Is there really no music in the world of the deaf?” through filmmaking.

I was convinced that there must be a whole world of Deaf music, that there are deaf people all over the world who play it with their hands. This is what I wanted to film, a form that was purely enjoyable and empathetic all by itself.

I began by reading a lot of books about music theory and attempting to “translate” classical music into visual forms. As I learned about the combinations of sounds that create consonance, harmony and dissonance, I thought that these must also be analogous in the hand shapes of sign language. However, a wall awaited me.

The project I had in mind was based totally on auditory music, and the cooperation of hearing people who understood it their way. They could not imagine the music-like sound created by sign language.

This frustrated me because I knew it existed. Even when I interviewed various Deaf people, they told me that they understood the idea of visual music in sign language but did not think of it as music in the strictest sense. So I came to the conclusion that I should present Deaf music completely in my own way. I am a filmmaker, not a choreographer nor a musician. I was at a loss as to how to construct Deaf music from this material, so I decided to sculpt it from my own physical experiences and trust that I don’t always know, or always need to know, how to explain them to others.

~

Eri Makihara is a filmmaker working with experimental film and installation exploring the “eloquence” of the human body and space, and the invisible oppressions that exist beyond them.

This version of The Path to Resonance is edited from a longer text, found in a collection of texts relating to Eri’s films called Beyond Listen.