Picture of the floating world is a film that explores the idea of the passing moment, a filmic ‘ukiyo-e’  (pictures of the floating world). In 'Picture of the floating world‚ a city park is seen through a sequence of still shots, empty seats, unopened flowers, motionless birds before a woman is seen waiting at the edge of a boathouse. She looks down motionless at the pond water where the currents are forming bubbles and ripples on the surface of the water. A close up shot shows the bubbles and ripples coalescing to form a tiny solar system spinning in the water. She lifts her head and looks up, her expression changing from still and pensive to open and expectant. Simultaneously a burst of petals floats down from a cherry blossom tree. Petals rain heavily around the boathouse. A large goldfish swims out from hiding. Ducks break into sudden activity on the pond. In Picture of the floating world‚ the scene changes from stillness to motion, from a fixed single shot to a sequence of activity.  A nonsensical spatial jump occurs, the sense of distance shifts, from an interior world to an outer reality.  A rupture occurs from the seeming reality of a cinematic suspense to digital fantasy.

“Living only for the moment, turning our full attention to the pleasures of the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms, and the maples, singing songs, drinking wine, and diverting ourselves just in floating, floating….

These lines from the 17^th century Japanese writer Asai Ryoi have survived for 350 years. In them, he describes life in the ‘floating world’ of Edo, the old capital of Japan, in which pleasure and entertainment were combined with a heightened sensibility attuned to the beauty and transience of the seasons. The concept of the ‘floating world’ had its roots in Buddhist teaching where ‘Things are valuable to us precisely because they are so fragile, temporary, impermanent’ and our perception of life’s brief duration makes us realise that ‘A thousand years is a single night's dream.’

This sensibility is alluded to in Grace Weir’s Picture of the Floating World (2007), in which a woman simply observes the beauty of nature: goldfish lazing in a pond, a rain of cherry blossoms falling on grass, bubbles swirling and eddying on the water’s surface, the reds and yellows of a duck’s beak. We are vaguely aware that the scene takes place at the heart of an industrious city, yet the film focuses our attention on the rhythm of the seasons. At a certain point the bubbles on the water’s surface begin to rotate around each other, reminding us of planets orbiting the sun. We cannot be sure what we are seeing is real…

Bubbles, of course, have a long history in art as symbols of transience and in science today there are theories that an entire universe might blossom from a bubble of energy, that there may even be a stream of bubbles creating multiverses. Weir’s glimpse of the macrocosm in foam on the surface of a pond, though, has the effect of grounding contemporary physics and astronomy in the everyday experience of the world around us. The concept of time, as imagined today by scientists, often appears strange and challenging. Weir’s subtle series of images silently places their theories within a chain of allusions that at once gives us access to these ideas through the familiar experience of nature while also making strange the world we think we know well.”

Exerpt taken from Cherry Blossom Time by Francis McKee

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