Having previously made films focusing on cities including Los Angeles, Abu Dhabi, Rio de Janeiro, and Beijing, artist Sarah Morris has turned her lens onto Osaka. Her 50 minute film treats the city as a psychological landscape where narrative is eschewed in favour of poetic montage across various internal and external realms of the metropolis.

Filmed in 2018 as March turned to April and blossom from the city’s Sakura cherry blossom trees began to fall, a Japanese symbole of renewal and optimism, Morris’ film cuts between nature and manmade, micro to macro. At moments, the film reads as a slick study of place, but then a shaky handheld shot, or tightly cropped framing which cuts out the expected focus of a scene, reminds that this is not a promotional film but an artist’s gaze.

Various motifs float in, out, and around the work. Occasional the gaze settles upon clocks, drawing questions around the psychology of time, duration, and how both can feel different within different realms of the city. The camera often pulls in on digital screens, whether in a TV production sweet, advertising billboards, figures gazing into mobile phones, or a 3D rendering of Kansai airport, questioning whether mediation of place can ever fully recognise the meaning or experience of place, a meta-question when framed within such a city symphony as Morris has created.

Editorially, the film jumps between seemingly disconnected urban moments. Dogs in a blossom-filled park segue to the Sakura paint and pastel factory, which abruptly cuts into a TV production complete with a presenter in a bunny costume. We visit a confectionary factory, train station, pan across the industrial skyline from a moving vehicle. All set to a score by artist Liam Gillick, Morris’ ex-partner and who regularly creates the music for her moving image works.

Places reveal themselves slowly. A cinematic pull of focus that starts off with an abstracted detail before pulling out, offering more information to reveal the site of study. The camera focuses on the machine-claw dropping refuse into a pile, then we cut to an mechanical panel of lights, buttons and switches, then we zoom further out to the exterior, and see that both these internal scenes were from the Friedensreich Hundertwasser incineration plant. Similarly, in another sequence we focus on an escalator, pull back to see crowds, notice wheely suitcases, then only through the observation of a digital video screen showing a 3D render of the very building we are inside do we recognise Piano’s Kansai International Airport.

The work flits between the machine-ness and human-ness of the city, both of which seemingly occupy the same physical space concurrently, sometimes overlapping. Morris describes her films as an “open system of coordinates”, with her film acting as a kind of poetic index of place and its occupation at a single moment in time, as the blossom falls.

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