Created fifteen years after A Man and His Dog Out for Air, Fuji is the precise counterpoint of the former’s graphic transformations. Mount Fuij plays a crucial role, its graphic profile at the heart of the image, stably so, more of less, throughout the film’s progression. Breer exchanges the power of metamorphosis and the play of metaphors for the subtle declensions of a graphic field and a standard figure.

Filming from the window of the Tokaido Express—the fastest on Japan’s most celebrated railway—without striving for a “refined point of view” and “without thinking of the next steps,” he used a rotoscope to alter the footage, inserting some shots of filmed footage (wide shots on the face of a woman looking out the window) from the very first scenes.

We can also detect a possibility of quotations from works Breer often referenced, including Hans Richter’s Rhythmus 21 and Fernand Léger’s Ballet méchanique.

The generally regular alternation between standard shots, blurred perspectives, the very pronounced dialectic between surface and depth, variations in rhythm and incursions of foreign bodies, all constitute motifs of “anti-continuity.”

Mount Fuji, following these plastic declensions and myriad disturbances, is then defined as a “troubled figure”: the spectacle to be discovered through the window of a train became, for Breer, a motivation to create a work, transforming cinematographic notation with only his Super 8 camera into a graphic and chromatic score.

Patrick Barrès
Professor at the University Toulouse Jean-Jaurès