Ascent by Fiona Tan

Ascent (2016, Color and Black and White, 80mins, O.V. English/Japanese)

Fiona Tan has created Ascent through a montage of over 4000 found still images of Mount Fuji from all eras. As the artist herself says: “I wanted to create cinema with its antithesis — to make a movie out of entirely still images.”
Ascent unfolds as a contemplative visual essay, a filmic experiment between documentary and fiction. The narration addresses notions of visibility and invisibility, distance and proximity; expanding the boundaries that divide stillness from movement. Together with the two protagonists—a woman and a man—the viewer climbs Mount Fuji across geographical, temporal and cultural divides.
Evoking both the intuitions of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil and the emotional charge of Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, Fiona Tan’s film explores the intersections between Japanese and Western art and popular culture, from Van Gogh’s to Hokusai’s famous painting The Wave.

Director: Fiona Tan
Cast: Hiroki Hasegawa, Fiona Tan
Producer: Fiona Tan, Marty de Jong
Music: Leo Anemaet
Screenplay: Fiona Tan
Sound: Hugo Dijkstal
Editing: Nathalie Alonso Casale
Production: Antithesis Films

Fiona Tan (Pekan Baru, 1966; lives and works in Amsterdam) works primarily in film and photography. Tan exhibited at the Yokohama Triennale (2001); Documenta 11 (2002) and represented The Netherlands in the 2009 Venice Biennale. Her work can be found in numerous international art collections including Tate Modern, London; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Schaulager, Basel; New Museum, New York and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Her first film feature, History’s Future premiered at the 2015 International Film Festival Rotterdam.