‘0cm4’: Sion Sono’s exploration of colourblindness and epistemology
When it comes to directorial styles, Sion Sono is an enigmatic presence within the infinitely layered world of modern Japanese cinema. Highly divisive among film fans, Sono’s vision of cinema explores subversive areas such as erotic violence and complex philosophical trajectories.
Sono’s 2001 short 0cm4 is the perfect example of the latter, following the dilemma of Maeda (played by the incredibly talented Masatoshi Nagase), who lives with colourblindness. Although everyone around him tells him that he’s missing out on the vibrant visuals of life, he’s deeply scared of leaving his old world behind.
In order to translate his perception of the world for his friends and family, Maeda regularly heads out into the streets with multiple cameras. He experiments with filters to find a window of reality that mirrors his own, struggling to reconcile the differences between the constructed images and the dynamism of the world he inhabits.
“Tell me what’s the colour red like,” Maeda says in the film while ruminating on what colours really are. Sono delves deeper into the philosophical paradoxes associated with colourblindness and subjective realities, pointing out that the epistemology of colour is incompatible with the normative objectivity fetishised by society.
As the date for his colourblindness correction surgery draws nearer, Maeda’s frustrations and paranoia keep rising. He asks: “Is red the same red to everybody?” 0cm4 examines these societal structures, which systematically eliminate divergent viewpoints, presented through the allegory of living with colourblindness.
Of course, Sono’s more famous works, such as Love Exposure, are the ones that get the most attention from global audiences, but his short films are interesting companion pieces to his larger oeuvre. 0cm4, especially, underlines many of the philosophical curiosities that are omnipresent throughout Sono’s filmography.
In many ways, the relationship between the cinematic medium and colourblindness comes across as a commentary on cinephilia as well. For those who are addicted to the perfectly curated images on the screen, venturing into an unpredictable world is just as daunting. That’s because the systems which govern reality are fundamentally different from the magical frameworks of cinema.
Even Maeda attempts to understand the world around him through the images he captures on his cameras. However, they only reinforce the differences between his world and the one that is inhabited by his friends and family. When his family pressurises him to “rectify” something that he doesn’t see as a mistake, the validity of his existence is destabilised.
0cm4 depicts these shifting senses through which we view reality in the form of rapidly changing chromatic tones, violently oscillating between the “colours” our eyes perceive and their absence in Maeda’s vision. Sono’s experimental approach to visual epistemology is fascinating, especially because it challenges some of the core questions associated with cinema.
Sono’s approach to the dichotomy presented in 0cm4 might mean different things to different people, just like the colour red might hold a different meaning for each of us. Enforcing some arbitrary standard of objectivity to something as personal as the act of seeing comes across as an act of violence, the constant erasure of systems of meaning that do not conform to the logic of society.
Watch the film below.
