Filmed in a secondary school in suburban Japan, Goshoagaoko at first seems to be about the exercise routines and drills of a girls’ basketball team. The film consists of six ten minute takes, shot with a fixed camera at court level, in which the various cadences of chanting voices and bodily movements disgress into distinct studies. Taken together they form a subtle and multilayered social portrait, in which documentary values soon become inseparable from aesthetic ones. And as there are no games, scrimmages, or barking coaches here, just the girls and their routines, the image is not so much one of contest and gamesmanship but one of individualization within a scene of group cooperation. Shy girls, a shy camera and a strange kind of social belonging.
