A film by Jordan Baseman
Narrated by Setsuko Enya
Translation Aethan Wills, Nozomi Uematsu, Ms Ichimura

Thanks to:
Carolyn Thompson, Robin Klassnik, Judith Carlton, Animate Projects, Royal College of Art, Hiroshima Peace Museum, Kahori Wada, Reina Senga, Ms Ichimura, Tokyo Wonder Site, Kenzo Tange Associates, Mikki and Hiko, Dirty Frank

An Animate Projects commission supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England

Little Boy takes its name from the atomic bomb that was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. The film investigates the idea of international collective memory though the personal recollection of Ms Setsuko Enya, a survivor of the atomic blast, to consider the momentous impact that the first use of nuclear weapons has had on humanity since.

My recent work is a synthesis of reportage, portraiture, documentary, creative non-fiction and narrative practices. I am interested in the spontaneity and unpredictability of the interview situation, exploring speculation, opinion, belief and anecdotes as central components of this process. Voices are edited to operate as if a participant is speaking directly to an audience. The timbre, pace, pauses and vocabulary of the participant’s narratives are reconstructed to emphasize and convey personal accounts of individual or intimate experience. The recorded interviews are edited, transcribed into text, and then re-edited textually to form a script. The final audio edit, follows the transcribed text-based script, creating narrative through a reversal of the conventional script-writing process.

The moving images within the films are never illustrations; they are often a counterpoint to the story being told and work in concert with the voices. In recent years I have been experimenting with 16mm film and in-camera motion picture techniques. Visual abstraction, within a moving image context, is something that I have been increasingly interested in trying to manufacture, encouraging visual breakdown, fragmentation and distortion. This reflects my interest in relinquishing the boundaries of control within an image-making process: a celebration of the overlap between representation and abstraction. This overlap is further established by the marriage of these experimental film techniques with creative, non-fiction narrative soundtracks.