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| Festival Year |
Festival Section |
| 2014 |
Rediscoveries and Restorations |
| Film Title |
[IL MOVIMENTO DELLE NUVOLE ATTORNO AL MONTE FUJI] |
| Alternative Title 1 |
[THE MOVEMENT OF CLOUDS AROUND MT. FUJI] |
| Alternative Title 2 |
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| Alternative Title 3 |
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| Country |
Japan |
| Release Date |
1929-1938 |
| Production Co. |
Masanao Abe |
| Director |
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| Format |
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Speed (fps) |
| DCP |
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| Footage |
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Time |
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5' |
| Archive Source |
Helmut Völter |
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| Print Notes |
DCP (da/from 35mm)
senza did./no titles |
| Other Credits |
| F./ph: Masanao Abe; compilation: Helmut Völter |
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| Other Information |
| compilation 2014 |
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| Program Notes |
In the late 1920s, the Japanese physicist Masanao Abe (1891-1966) built an observatory with a view of Mt. Fuji. From it, over the course of of 15 years, he recorded the clouds that surrounded the mountain. He was interested in the scientific question of how the air currents around Fuji could be visualized by means of film and photography. Albeit unintentionally, Abe’s motifs fit into a long iconographic tradition: the mountain and the clouds.
Abe saw a combination of individual images, moving pictures and stereo recordings as the ideal form of scientific evidence. Cloud scientists of the late 19th and the early 20th century regularly used photography, and also sometimes film, to record clouds. One reason for this was that words were in many cases simply not sufficient to fully describe the endlessly variable forms of clouds. But in most cases, images were just means to an end, and the results of cloud studies would finally be numbers, tables, and formulas. No other scientist combined photography, film, stereo photography, and stereo film for his research, and no one else collected as much visual material as Abe did.
After several years of research, Abe had gathered hundreds of photographs and film sequences. He had also published several articles in Japanese and English, and his work was followed by scientists internationally. He had seen and documented all kinds of cloud forms and movements, but also different weather situations, the seasons, the changing sunlight, etc. Yet his initial goal to visualize and subsequently understand the air currents was still far off. More and more, it became apparent that the relations between clouds and air currents are too complex to be understood by visual evidence alone. Due to this lack of a comprehensive outcome, Abe’s research was soon forgotten, and is virtually unknown today.
For decades Abe’s archive, which was kept by his family in Tokyo, was left untouched. I discovered Abe’s legacy while working on my book Cloud Studies. When I sifted through his glass plate negatives and film rolls I was captivated by both their scientific precision and their beauty. Abe’s work was not only a study of physics and meteorology, but also of time, movement, form, light, and landscape. I am currently preparing an exhibition on Abe for the Izu Photo Museum in Mishima, Japan, and a book that will be published in November 2014 by Spector Books. – HELMUT VÖLTER
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