Single channel video ProRes422 (Shot by 8 mm film), 720×480, 29.97 fps, Stereo sound, 13’08”0, 2010-2012
Their bird is based on Hayama’s childhood memories of the forests of central Japan, where she often visited during vacations. As an adult, Hayama returned to these forests again with her sister, and together they made this film. One pretending to be a bird and the other became a photographer with 8mm camera for the first time. Hayama unfolds the enigmatic story of a human visiting the forest and striving to become a bird. By the end of the film, however, the two will have to leave the mountain. In the final scene as they descend the mountain, an area inhabited by humans can be seen below.
In Hayama’s early works with film, the film often appears to crawl around the screen as if the film medium itself has a single consciousness, as if searching for where the life of the story lies. This is a transfer of the film itself, the medium of the image, onto film using the photogram technique, which Man Ray and others also used extensively.