In Underground, Kaori Oda proposes a cinematic experience that moves away from conventional narratives to immerse itself in the opaque territories of history, memory, and the body. This film, which expands the footage of her previous work Gama, becomes a visual essay exploring the relationship between the subterranean and human experience. What could have been a mere technical extension transforms into a search for greater sensory resonance, where images and sounds create a kind of meditative trance.
The film is structured around three interconnected elements: the ghostly presence of a young woman, performed by choreographer and performer Nao Yoshigai, who wanders through various underground and urban spaces; a first-person account of the horrors that took place in the caves of Okinawa at the end of World War II; and a series of contemplative shots of natural and urban landscapes, often devoid of human figures.
Nao Yoshigai appears as a shadow drifting through the remnants of the past. Her movement—somewhere between dreaming and wakefulness—conveys a tactile relationship with space: she caresses rocky walls, stretches out on the ground, listens to the murmurs of the earth. This constant gesture of touch reveals one of Oda’s central ideas: a cinema of the body, of materiality, in which the image is not only seen but also felt on the skin.
The second narrative thread is embodied by an elderly man who recounts events deeply marked by tragedy: the mass suicides in the Chibichirigama cave in 1945, where dozens of civilians lost their lives before the imminent arrival of U.S. troops. This testimony, which appears at key moments in the film, brings a historical density that contrasts with the ghostly lightness of Yoshigai’s journey. The same narrator recalls the case of another cave, Shimuku Gama, where the intervention of two residents who had lived in Hawaii prevented a similar tragedy. The editing between these stories and the sensory imagery creates a counterpoint that is never fully resolved but expands the viewer’s experience into emotional and ethical territory.
The film’s third dimension is purely contemplative: long takes of natural spaces, tunnels, bodies of water, and urban scenes in which daily life appears stripped of artifice. In these passages, the film abandons words and plunges into the purely visual and sonic. Yoshiko Takano’s cinematography is dazzling, especially in the aquatic sequences, where light and movement construct images that linger in the viewer’s eye. The editing, fragmentary and deliberately illogical, breaks spatial and temporal continuity. The film does not aim for comprehension but sensation. Oda places her trust entirely in the evocative power of editing, of layering visual and sonic textures. Through this open structure, Underground reveals itself as a meditation on the traces left by collective trauma, on what remains in darkness and what briefly emerges into the light. With Underground, Kaori Oda concludes a trilogy that moves between documentary, performance, and essay film. The film is a sensory descent into the heart of a hidden history, but also a poetic gesture of care for the shadows that still accompany us.
