The specter of nuclear cataclysm suffuses Tomonari Nishikawa’s Sound of a Million Insects, Light of a Thousand Stars (2014). Nishikawa buried his film in Tamura City near the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. In 2011, three of the plant’s six reactors melted down after the site was hit by a tsunami that had been precipitated by an enormous earthquake. Dozens were injured, radiation leaked, and widespread water contamination followed. Thousands died from the earthquake and tsunami, hundreds died in the resulting evacuations, and hundreds more may contract cancers related to radiation exposure. The residents of Tamura City have been told that it is safe to return to their homes but many have stayed away, and the Japanese government recently admitted that the site cleanup make take two hundred years.

Nishikawa drove around Fukushima Prefecture with a Geiger counter to help him choose a spot to stash the film, even as its presence remains immediately unseen or unfelt. Nishikawa’s film, exposed for six hours in possibly irradiated earth, burns blue. The celluloid was beautifully transformed by its interaction – its fusion – with a “natural” world corrupted by humanity. The film is undoubtedly beautiful, dominated by a thrumming ultramarine with scattered flecks of green darting throughout the film, the latter being the result of Nishikawa scratching the film when he unearthed it because it was too difficult to do so while wearing gloves. Placing himself at the scene of nuclear and ecological disaster, in a region subject to rigid state oversight, Nishikawa was very possibly risking his health and well-being. Thus the material, biological, and governmental conditions surrounding, and directly involved in, the film’s making afford a thematic reading of it that extends its meaning beyond its surface beauty and into the issues of severe weather related to global warming, the fallibility of the built environment, and how the interests of industry trump those of public health.

Even though the film’s imagery may be abstract, it nevertheless acts as a uniquely indexical rendering of the space in which it was made. Unlike a photographic document of the space, however, Nishikawa’s film is not a pictorial representation – it is a physical impression that produces an image, something closer in relation to a sculptural casting than a photograph. Its visibility is the result of its having been hidden, its burial leading to its literal and metaphoric exposure. And yet, in its two-minute run time, Sound of a Million Insects Light of a Thousand Stars can offer only a glimpse of the deeper times hinted at in the film’s blue glow – the tens of thousands of years it takes for spilled plutonium to degrade along with the light from those already-dead stars in the sky, some of which are over a million years old. In his artist’s statement about the film, Nishikawa says that “the night was beautiful with a starry sky, and numerous summer insects were singing loud” when he buried the film. Though we cannot see those stars or hear those insects, they exist both within and outside of the film – and they persist in their light and song.