...her memories, her pets and her homes, her dreams and her fears, her experiences and her desires. But this diarist not to be trusted. The details don't add up and the persona is incomplete, inconsistent and often incoherent, as if the diary were compiled from the fragments of lives lived in a highly mediated world of experience. It is a world of aphorisms and cliches, bad jokes and tourist brochures within which a poetic voice struggles for survival.

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Shot primarily on a "VcamNow" digital camera marketed for children, Onodera's images are low definition, and feature close-ups of things and spaces such as landscapes, low and high angles of streets and interiors, and a wide range of digital abstractions. The imagery is usually framed within the frame of the screen by black or coloured borders, and the image is frequently split, multiplied and layered into even smaller pieces of movement and colour. She uses all kinds of special effects to make the imagery dynamic, and with the sheer volume of 365 little movies, the diversity is impressive. Each video has an electronic soundtrack, often using altered ambient sound, and each one has titles: an opening title followed by intermittent fragments of text superimposed on the images themselves. Insofar as the component parts work together to create dialogic effects, the 365 instalments are perhaps better understood as multimedia collages rather than "movies" or "films" or even "videos" (even if I will continue to refer to them as such). As David James has argued, "every film is an allegory of a cinema," insofar as every film "internalizes the conditions of its production." (1) In the case of Onodera's "movie-a-day" project, the social relations at issue are those of digital cinema and the mode of production is the miniaturized delivery system of the iPod.

Onodera's project is at once excessive in its sheer quantity and banal in its focus on the mundane and everyday. There are, in fact, more than 365 videos, as the package I received had ten "bonus" videos of more of the same. And yet they are not the same at all. Each little, numbered, video is like a surprise package or candy to unwrap, taste and dissolve in your mouth--or your hand as the case may be. One can screen them from a DVD onto a TV or computer screen, or one can find them online at www.midionodera.com, but I found they worked best on the iPod where they mimic the toy-like miniaturization of cinema that the new technology makes possible. As experimental films, they continue the project of exploring the aesthetic and cultural possibilities of the technologies of audio-visual representation, in keeping with the history of the avant-garde mapped out by David James. In this on-going reinvention of cinema, they constitute a reconfiguration of the everyday.

Many of the 365 videos are addressed to "you," an interlocutor who might be a lover or might be a number of lovers, or who might be the viewer, or might be simply the fiction of someone who cares. For example, The Ride Down features the light glimpsed through the cage of a warehouse elevator going down. The ride is interspersed with intertitles saying: "I thought you'd be home/ I wanted to see you/ I had something important to say/ just to you/ but you weren't there." The ride ends with a bump on the ground and the camera moves toward the door. The little camera is an appendage of the filmmaker's body, a woman who is herself barely glimpsed and who never films the faces of her friends. Only the faces of occasional anonymous passers-by are shot and even then, only at a distance. These are strangely unpopulated films. The only characters are animals: pets who are named, farm animals who are crudely anthropomorphised (in videos called Anthropomorphism 00.1 and 02.7 etc.), and dogs on leashes at one of Onodera's favourite floor-level camera angles.

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Other videos feature montage compositions of urban grid-like buildings in the urban landscape; many feature trains and streetcars, many are about driving, parking and riding a scooter. The filmmaker's gaze frequently emulates the panoramic views and phantom rides of early cinema when it is appended to technologies of transportation, so that even in the countryside it is a very urbanized view of the world. The mobile gaze is one of many ways in which the...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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