Cinema and the Poiesis of Solidarity of Resilience

Suffering is often a deeply unique experience for those who undergo it—subjective, yet undeniable as an empirical reality. Thus, it sometimes appears private and isolated from its external context. But paradoxically, solidarity often arises from the feeling that a group of people share the same, or at least similar, suffering. This is also true in the historical context of nations across the world. Though shaped by local circumstances, the suffering of a nation often carries certain universal patterns that can be recognized across the borders of nation-states.

Cinema and film festivals provide spaces where individual sufferings can resonate as a global phenomenon. They become part of a broader map of inter-nation upheavals that are constantly shifting. In the cinema space, audiences encounter sisters and brothers, then form solidarities born of shared experiences. Thus, the poiesis of cinematic solidarity is born from the act of watching and witnessing through films.

Poiesis comes from the Greek word poiein (ποιεῖν), meaning an act of creation that unveils truth, and word poiesis (ποίησις), meaning the process of making or creating.[1] In scientific, linguistic, and creative discourse, poiesis refers to a creation process that involves a transition and transformation from non-being into being. In film, poiesis sometimes occurs when everyday objects acquire new meaning through the gradual and repeated insertion of significance. Imagine a poem with a particular rhyme and rhythm that generates new meanings from words or language. That repetition of rhyme and rhythm brings forth a certain aesthetic qualities in terms of its sounds, feelings, language, and meaning.

Poiesis in Niguruma no Uta (Ballad of the Cart) by Satsuo Yamamoto (1959) offers a new meaning in regards to suffering and resilience. The cart pulled across Japan’s roads by the film’s protagonist, Seki, reflects not only the life journey of a woman cart-puller from a farmer family, but also a chronicle of Japan’s path to modernization. Seki’s world moves with her cart through Japan’s turbulent transformations in the era of economic collapse after wars, the shadow of Hiroshima bombing, radioactive poisoning, the transition from feudal era, as well as the unstoppable push of industrialization and modernization that would soon replace the cart with automobiles and steam trains. Instead of putting these dangerous times within the film’s narrative, Yamamoto allows them to loom as a subliminal yet constant pressure faced by Seki and the Japanese society. The cinematic everyday reality of peasant life becomes a depiction of struggle, with systemic threats lingering beyond the frame. Women’s domestic labor fills the film’s daily life; care work intertwines with the unending effort of pulling the cart, as Seki strives to keep pace with rapid modernization.

Yamamoto does not put Seki’s struggle and suffering as a mere spectacle, but also as a revelation of the tenacity of the peasant woman class in fighting for life and dignity. Yamamoto’s camera does not turn away from Seki’s repetitive tasks on cooking, farming, raising children, caring for an abusive mother-in-law and a thankless husband, while still hauling goods across long distances with her cart. With persistence, his lens captures these domestic sequences as a ceaseless labor to defend dignity and, indirectly, as the backbone of Japan’s entry into its modern era. When automobiles and steam trains replace the carts, and supervising factory machines shift farming, the poiesis of Seki’s journey ends with a celebration of strength and perseverance through changing times.

As a cinematic work that portrays minor realities, Niguruma no Uta’s strength also lies in its collective process. About 3.2 million women farmers organized in the Japan’s National Association of Women Farmers funded the film production. Officially, the National Rural Film association produced the film. Its story was also based on a novel written by women’s activist Tomoe Yamashiro, later adapted into a screenplay by veteran writer Yoda Yoshitaka—who also frequently collaborated with Kenji Mizoguchi in scripting stories of Japanese women in the feudal and post-feudal eras.

What Yamamoto’s camera highlights and his film narrates has shown a reflection of his involvement with Prokino (The Proletarian Film League of Japan), active between 1929–1934. Though forcibly dissolved and its members arrested, Prokino left behind a tradition of recording demonstrations and workers’ lives, screening them collectively in factories and mines with mobile projectors.[2] Niguruma no Uta carries that spirit, later shown in Jakarta at the 1964 Afro-Asian Film Festival, where it won the Bandung Prize alongside Xie Jin’s Hóngsè Niángzi Jūn (The Red Detachment of Women, 1961).[3]

At this point, cinema itself undergoes poiesis. It reveals truth not by extracting life’s suffering into spectacle but by turning its lens to illuminate the dignity of women peasants’ tenacious struggle. Suffering is transformed into seeds that foster connection and solidarity across nations through the collective work of filmmaking and watching films together.

Re-screening Niguruma no Uta is thus an effort to revive the memory of how resilience within cultural work and cinema spreads, shaping solidarity and affirming collective imagination in the spaces of film-screening. It transforms the isolation of individual suffering, restoring it as part of larger global socio-economic-political phenomena—ever interconnected and in constant motion.

Note:

This article is an introduction to the curatorial program of Satsuo Yamamoto's film Niguruma no Uta (Ballads of the Cart) presented at the ARKIPEL 2025—Years of Living Dangeroulsy documentary & experimental film festival on September 10, 2025. See the following page for the full curatorial program of this film at ARKIPEL: https://arkipel.org/cp-2025-niguruma-no-uta/ .

References:

[1] This term was coined and elaborated by Martin Heidegger in his essay The Question Concerning Technology (1954), referring to one of Plato's sentences in Symposium section 250b: "Every occasion for whatever passes over and goes forward into presencing from that which is not presencing is poiesis, is bringing-forth [Her-vor-bringen]." Heidegger elaborated on poiesis as the creation of something into being or the revelation of truth.

[2] “Kino-Pravda: A Tribute to Prokino” I.M. Heung-soon, Eiji Oguma, James T. Hong & Yin-Ju Chen, Mitsuo Sato & Kyoichi Yamaoka, Prokino (The Proletarian Film League of Japan). May 13 – May 28, 2017. Curated by Asakusa with support by Sanya Production and Screening Committee, Rokka Shuppan. Accessed from https://www.asakusa-o.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Pressrelease_KinoPravda_EN.pdf on August 17, 2025.

[3] Bunga P. Siagian and Lilawati Kurnia, “The 3rd Asia Africa Film Festival: Women's Knowledge and Imagination of Cinematic Sovereignty,” in Capture: Jurnal Seni Media Rekap, Vol. 14, No. 3 (December 2023), p. 296.