Raya Martin found inspiration for this video essay when he unexpectedly ended up in lockdown, during what was supposed to be a weekend trip to the mountains of Sagada in the Philippines. Living at one with nature and having grown tired of watching moving images, he read the strange story of a Japanese filmmaker who prescribed fascist militarist aesthetics via ‘spiritist cinema’. After searching through reels and clips of this bizarre artform, Raya embarked on a collaborative effort to cut them down into small phone ‘reels’, which he fed through an app. The resulting work asks, “How do we watch movies without cinema?”
Spirit Film is part of Monographs, a new series of essays on Asian cinema commissioned by the Asian Film Archive (AFA).
