Effacement

A film showing Taniguchi Akiko, a Japanese Noh mask maker,at work in her Tokyo studio. She carves the mask, paints and moves it in the page of an actor's movements on the traditional Noh stage. The film emphasizes the relationship between the mask-maker and her mask. It experiments with the visual and dramatic potential in Noh and in the mask, moving toward abstraction as the mask appears and re-appears in the reflection of a tree, its original substance. The soundtrack is filled with wood sounds - those of resistance of wood to tools and percussion of wooden clappers.