CAN TAMURA

Screenings

Logline

In Yamanaka Onsen’s mountains, Yamanaka bushi, steaming hot springs, and Bashō’s poetry intertwine, immersing viewers in the town’s music, memory, and seasonal rhythms.

Synopsis

YAMANAKA is an intimate, experimental ethnography that follows a year‑long immersion in Yamanaka Onsen, a secluded mountain spa town where the rhythms of nature, tradition, and memory intertwine. Filmed by director Can Tamura, the work unfolds as a “film‑within‑a‑film”: a black‑and‑white analog presentation runs parallel to contemporary colour‑digital footage, inviting viewers to experience the town through a poetic layering of recordings and context that subtly positions the filmmaker as an unseen presence among the subjects. At the heart of the narrative is Yamanaka bushi, a centuries‑old folk song that reverberates through everyday life. The film shows Yamanaka geigi (the local term for geisha) singing and dancing to the piece, juxtaposed with a rare 1920s 78‑rpm recording of a geigi performing the same melody, and a mechanical clock in the town centre whose dolls dance to the song on the hour. The documentary also foregrounds the poetic legacy of Matsuo Bashō, whose pilgrimage to Yamanaka Onsen in the Edo period left a lingering literary imprint. Bashō’s verses are woven into the visual tapestry, letting the poet’s sense of transience echo the town’s seasonal cycles. Beyond music and poetry, YAMANAKA explores the symbiosis between humans and the surrounding wilderness through the use of natural resources in traditional crafts and occasional close encounters with wild animals. Deep in the mountains, a single geothermal source—tapped since medieval times—remains the town’s shared resource, sustaining body, spirit, and community.

Director’s Statement

I produced this film over the course of one year as part of the Yamanaka Onsen Art Project in collaboration with Art Front Gallery, exploring the potentials of research-based contemporary art practices in a historic Japanese hot-springs town. The work is both observational and collaborative, offering a poetic reimagining of sensory ethnography and ethnofiction methodologies and aesthetics.

Can Tamura

Can Tamura (John Wells), born in 1970 in Dover, Delaware (USA), is an artist, filmmaker, and audiovisual anthropologist working between Japan, Türkiye, and Mongolia. Based in Kanazawa and Antalya, his practice explores how ethnographic film and contemporary art intersect—how observation, memory, and lived experience can be translated through moving images. Read more.