Bashô is one of the most famous Haikai poets, having influenced great names in poetry such as Paulo Leminski, Ezra Pound and Mayakovsky - and is even cited in Eisenstein's theory of montage. Based on a collection of archival material started in 2016, made exclusively with images from online surveillance cameras and geolocation sites (such as Google Street View), we virtually re-enact Bashô's journey, recorded in the book "Trilhas Longínquas de Oku” (2016). In this travel diary, the poet narrates his journey on foot of more than 2,300 km through the remote corners of Japan during the 17th century. We created a mise-en-scène of dialectical encounter of times, in a hybrid experiment between documentary and fiction.

The film seeks to investigate, firstly, whether it would be possible to translate or create an experience similar to that of Bashô’s haikus, which paradoxically combine two conflicting perceptions of time: brevity and contemplation. Images that emerge in a flash, and yet are capable of expressing eternity in a state of impermanence, a central notion that underpins Zen Buddhist philosophy, of which Bashô was a follower. The proposal would be to promote a clash between different perceptions of time and of “West” and “East”, representing a “Japan” that inhabits our imagination much more than the “real world”. In a temporal clash, unite the past, the present and the imagined futures in a single concept: that of W. Benjamin’s dialectical image.

Secondly, the premise of the film is to think about our relationship with images in contemporary times, whose ubiquity on screens of the most diverse sizes and formats has become a dominant experience. Using the resources of editing, I create a film that questions its own device. Thus, by crossing elements such as phantasmagoria and realism, I investigate the premise of the indexicality of the image in contrast to the manipulation of the digital image. These questions are woven together by a poetic discourse taken from some excerpts from the diary, which allows us to follow Matsuo Bashô on his journey.

Finally, the third premise of the film was to produce some breaks in the dichotomy of the separation of the organic and the technical, where the experience with the landscape and nature could be experienced aesthetically via cameras on the internet, in a countercurrent that ontologically separates humans and machines. This new school of thought would be aligned with the studies of Donna Haraway and Viveiros de Castro—in a new metaphysics from a post-humanist perspective.