Heavy churning, gears clanking, metal scraping, pickaxes swinging in the dark, Kaori Oda’s debut film Aragane (2015) is a bricolage of overpowering machinery and figures drifting in and out of the dark. Following a single work day of Bosnian miners, this experimental documentary charts an intense world of labor, dirt, and darkness that cannot be grasped by the image and wholly antagonistic to the camera’s violent visuality, denying any depth into these laborers worlds, leaving only the material traces that claw at our senses.  Machines, miners, and Oda inhabit the space of this messy assemblage known as the mine, an odd dialogue forming an ever-expanding space for the sake of extracting what’s beneath surface, whether it’s the ore or the human condition.  Yet, Oda captures nothing in its fullness, instead, working with echoes, parts, and shafts of light, she forces the viewer into contact with an avisual world they can never dig into and perhaps has no interest in them whatsoever.  

Matt Turner describes “Aragane is an example of a film that is something like an environment: a container for various competing subjectivities...”[i] Johnathan Rosenbaum parallels the film Leviathan (2012), describing it’s aesthetic quality as “a[n] exquisite formal and even abstract beauty that is complemented, complicated, and sometimes even contradicted throughout by a continuous human presence.”1[ii] Oda herself stated that she “just wanted to see what was underground; the act of physically descending underground with a camera was no doubt connected with something buried in my subconscious. I was creating a world based on physical sensations.”[iii] These underground spaces, which she has revisited in her two “sequels” to Aragane—Cenote (2019) and Underground (2025) — are about the stratas of collective memory for her, and the ethical implications of digging into it. Of the filmmaking style and process, Oda states,  

[I]t wasn’t necessarily an intentional thing, rather, it was my relationships to the coal miners and the coal mine that dictated the style. When I say relationship, I mean things like whether we share the same language or how dangerous the work might be or how close I can get to something. Those things change how I communicate. Regarding the miners, I was only filming them inside the mines and it wasn’t like I followed them back home to also film their private life. I was filming their work and it was also my work to film them.[iv] 

In the first of what is called the Underground trilogy, labor captures Oda's imagination: the labor of filming, the labor of mining, and finally, the labor of viewing the conflicting and complicated formations of these stratas. The underground is a theater of competing subjective viewpoints always in noisy communication and are only abstracted traces of the people and machines that create and expand it. Like Matt Turner argues with Cenote, everything becomes an impurity, a scratch on the frame, a splinter in the screen, marking these spaces as theaters of the indiscernible, and challenges the viewer to communicate with the image, not simply mine it.  

Oda’s decision to direct the camera away from the light, flood the image with darkness or, rather, allow the light to come to the camera, veils the cameras perceptual advantage to construct a total, archaeologically complete, image of the world its been thrown into world; the camera denies the viewer an interpretative leg to stand on. We are left in the dark, literally at times. Even when the camera finds itself in the middle of miners discussing the ethics of their exploitation and their response to dangerous conditions, the camera leaves these psychological depths for long takes of pure noise, slow moving drills, rushing sludge of discarded rock, that punish the viewer for attempting an “empathic” relation to the camera. An attempt to sympathize with the conditions of the subjects being recorded, as if the camera could take their place—swinging and sweating in this extreme environment—ruthlessly slipping the rug from under us as we tilt and shift around in our seats, searching the screen in a desperate attempt to find stabilized forms we can read.

Utilizing these shifting and sliding forms that streak and paint the image in ever changing lines of sight or occlusions of depth, we might assume that Oda’s concern is to find a pure material substance that can take the place of the immaterial data of the digital. If silver is what gave film stock, and films themselves, an immaterial aura of cinematic magic, as Pansy Duncan argues, Oda’s course to the production of Aragane running through a desire to learn more about coal for a short film project gives the alluring interpretation that metadata can materially become like industrially mined coal.[v] The camera lens never takes on the cliché moment in which camera and its world touch, when the dirt and grime physically come in contact with the lens, nor is there an explicit reference to the mine being a coal mine, pushing the industrial aims out of the frame altogether; however, the insistence to gather and proliferate sites of indescernibility brings the world to the surface, potentially emphasizing its reliance on the material extraction that the mine itself proffers. Absorbing and melding with the the thing the mine itself was built to excavate.

Whatever aura coal might offer as a new material substrate for the digital, though, Oda utilizes it as a way to etch the labor and processes of coal’s extraction into the image. Coal as antithesis to the material digital is underscored by the smudges of light when coal miner’s turn towards the camera, their headlamps smearing the black veil with a tungsten tinted flare. Jacques Aumont argues that although the flare’s cinematic history is fraught with an attempt to link the indexical and automatitism of the camera’s mechanics, primarily the invasion of film stock with the “real” world, a literal “finger print,” he emphasizes that the contingent nature of this manifested veil can break the ‘seamlessness’ of the filming/recording process.[vi] The irregular and unmotivated moments when light directly hits the lens, blinding both the sensor and the viewer, can only be a moment of disruption that acknowledges the “highly paradoxical material” at play.

Advancements in digital sensors have given immense control over extremely dark environments, allowing cameras to capture more detail than ever before at higher quality resolutions. In post-production, the colorist can further tune these images with denoise algorithms. Oda’s rejection of these advancements plunges the viewer into the world of darkness and digital noise, the real material artifacts of the sensor’s intersubjective relation with the world. A veil of digital noise in the blackness of pure negative space and the unmotivated disruptive smears of light that occasionally reveals possible words within the frame questions the ineffibility of the digital’s claim to either a material or immaterial aura. Instead, as Aumont states, “by its acceptance of veils of diverse origins, the image consents to identify itself with what occults the real, thereby renouncing its right to say anything about it, for the benefit of the construction of a different world.”[vii] A world of mud and darkness, where the camera itself competes to simply be, clinging onto the labor and physical exertion of the miners in order to perceive any trace of an image, any trace of a material world. Labor itself becomes that which structures the camera’s ability to see, obfuscating any claims to truth of it, forcing the viewer to perceive this world as constructed by labor.

As Aumont reminds us, via Merleau-Ponty, a film is meant to be perceived, not thought. These images smeared by laborers stumbling, grumbling, and working in autopilot in the dark reverberates and compounds onto the unrelenting noise of the machinery that accompanies them, and the camera, in every moment. Noisiness is instantly noticeable from the opening sequence of the film, however, its best punctuated in a scene that obscures and deflects movement into slow emergent lines of sight. In a powerful, hypnotic scene near the end, the viewer is forced to watch a heavy industrial drill slowly push into the dirt for seven minutes straight. The camera is positioned outside of the “action,”sitting low and behind. The viewer can see the drill turning in the background, but the lens is focused shallow, right in front of the camera. Headlamps occasionally illuminate the massive, burrowing tool; the humid environment creates a glowing effect that both veils and emphasizes its action; a portal is torn into a deep subterranean world beyond perception. As the drill pushes into the earth,  the side of the machine drifts past the frame. Its bits and bobs, toggles and buttons, direct our attention away as points of interest. A water bottle left sitting on the frame reflects a spotlight from offscreen, becoming a low light hotspot until a large panel emerges, blinding us as a green, infected abcess. The excruciating moment lasts for some time until the panel is replaced by a headlamp spotlighting the rust and dirt accrued on the surface of the metal frame, disturbing its once clean yellow paint with muddy browns. Finally the scene ends as the drill’s main body fully enters the frame, leaving us the parting gift of a blinding white hot spotlight glinting off the lens, veiling the image in a pure flare of radiating fog and dust.

The drill scene is the longest of the film, but what is striking about it is the utilization of the unrelenting background noise Oda has deployed to trace the viewer into the slowly shifting form of the machine via our labor. Marek McGann, and other cognitive scientists, have researched and argued that “noise” does not constitute as a negative in our experience of the world. Instead, he makes sense of noise as a constraining, metastable background that opens up a new fullness of the world, creating the conditions for new contexts and “differently oriented actions.”[viii] The excess of background noise is a texture of phenomenological experience, always already “integrated with our understanding of embodied action” and invites us to explore, and adapt to, “the messiness of everyday life.”[ix] Hyper constraining the viewer to a single point of view for an extended period of time and subjecting them to minimal movement—highlighted by excruciating moments that obscure the image, and the viewers eyesight—within the frame is a deployed experimental bracketing. The noise becomes the background, forcing the viewer to search out the image, urging the drill along through psychic force of will or finding solace in a highly charged relationship with light.

A simplified, cliched response is to say that we’ve embodied the constricting, harsh physicality the miner’s endure and perform every day. More accurately we can say that we’ve become abstracted by the image, our embodied exploratory responses inadvertently becoming an abstraction for the film’s meditation on perception and labor. We are traced into the unstable forms of the image in its dialectical play with light and sound. The film’s antagonism is not a simple desire to restrain the viewer’s ability to see the world of the miner, nor feel it. Rather, Oda seems intent on rejecting that liminal desire she first experienced when searching out the coal mine: the abstraction, and extraction, of labor and material for the purpose of cinematic aura. Her own labor is intertwined with the cinematic process and out of this experience emerges the desire to confront the viewer’s own desire to see labor. In its discordant and disruptive formation, Aragane forces the viewer to communicate not as an equal, but as a participant; we can only reflectively and reflexively re-evaluate how we perceive and communicate with the image—and those proletariat deep beneath the surface, out of eyesight.