Allie Tsubota

Bathers Interior (2023)
4K video, color, sound; 5min 0sec

Bathers Interior is a short film exploring the racial and sexual valences of Asian/American desire and assimilation. The film reproduces a minor scene in the 1964 psychological drama, Woman in the Dunes, directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara during the Japanese New Wave. Teshigahara's original scene features the eponymous “woman in the dunes” intimately hand-bathing her captive companion. Shot at close range, the scene is one of several sexually-charged moments between the two protagonists, but it is the only one that introduces the visual language of “bathing.” 

Bathers Interior, as a filmic permutation of Teshigahara's original scene, proposes "bathing" as a meditation on desire and disappearance. The film casts racialized skin–as contaminant, as bodily topography, as an object of longing–as a contested site on and in which power and pleasure take hold. The washing of skin appears as a symbol for cleansing and racial hygiene, as well as a ritual of intimacy and care. Through an embodied act, the film probes Asian/American assimilation as a profoundly complex and desirous negotiation of identity, longing, and survival. 

Performers: Edric Young and Anna Takayo Walden 
Sound: Michael McGuire and Allie Tsubota