http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2010/issue-54/solrun-hoaas-on-dvd/
“Then I weave a square, and little by little the basket rises.”
- Solrun Hoaas, There’s Nothing that Doesn’t Take Time (1981)
Solrun Hoaas slipped into filmmaking innocuously, initially making films about things directly around her or documenting aspects of her own work and the things that excited her curiosity. Her first film, Effacement (1980), was a record of another of her skills, Japanese Noh mask-making. Her masks had featured in a number of theatre productions in Canberra, where she lived when she first arrived in Australia in the early ’70s, and where she met the filmmaker, producer and distributor Andrew Pike, as well as the documentary filmmakers David and Judith MacDougal.
In 1978 Hoaas went on a journey to the remote island of Hatoma, the furthest island south in the Okinawa group, a distant part of the Japanese archipelago. Hatoma is 1.08 square km in size. This was the first of several visits Hoaas made and, over time, four documentary films were created recording the life of the island. Each film was photographed with a 16mm camera and a separate sound recorder, both operated by Hoaas herself. Her whispered conversations to the women whose work she filmed give these films an individual immediacy.
In many ways, the act of making those films was emblematic of Hoaas. She was an inveterate traveller and explorer, never one to be constrained to the beaten track. The attraction of a tiny place, seemingly on its last legs as a home for human beings and as a source of economic activity, would have been powerful for a person with a desire to seek out unusual extremes. Hatoma once housed several hundred people but post-World War II changes and a lack of water had reduced the population to 47 by the time Hoaas arrived, just two of whom were attending school. Most of the inhabitants were getting old but they still went about their days in an orderly fashion, finding food, making rudimentary goods, repairing their dwellings and coping with the small-scale introduction of new technology including the installation of the first direct dial telephone connecting the island with the rest of Japan. In many ways the islanders’ dogged fight to retain their lifestyle and independence was an early mirror for Solrun herself. She sought out the distant, the exotic and those who were uneasy in their place.
Her education and upbringing placed her as a sophisticated and culture-filled European in Asia. In 1949 her family moved from Mainland China to Hong Kong for a year, then to Kobe, Japan, where they lived throughout the ’50s and part of the ’60s. Their home was a Lutheran church school in the Aotani district of the city. After attending the Norwegian primary school in Shiotaki near Kobe Solrun went to the Canadian Academy, an international school in that city. Thus she had been “embedded” in Japan as a young woman, learning to speak the language fluently and, as part of that, saw the lowering of post-war Japanese cinema, as it happened. For most of us a knowledge of this has come in chunks – Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and Ozu retrospectives to acquaint us with the classical period, and then Oshima and maybe Terayama and Teshigahara on the way through, almost all via seasons assembled by festivals or cinémathèques. Hoaas’ knowledge of Japanese cinema was broader and more random but still encompassed the classical and the modern. That deeper relationship with Japan allowed her the opportunity to take boats to places like Hatoma, no doubt out of curiosity, and allowed her to focus on the small details of the lives she found there.
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