Instant cult

PLANET A is a short film Momoko Seto made at the prestigious French academy Le Fresnoy. It is the first of the planet-themed films, culminating in the feature film Dandelion’s Odyssey which won the FIPRESCI Award in the Critic’s Week section at Cannes 2025. PLANET A opens on the frozen surface of a world hostile to (organic) life. The ice is not merely a stage or background for the events but an event itself. This is how Seto invokes several notions from the revolutionary fin-de-siècle, such as Bergson’s vitalism, Einstein’s spacetime, and Monet’s impressionism. As Monet paints water lilies, he discovers the water in which they float. Similarly, in place of the vacuum in which planets hover, Einstein discovers the rippled fabric of space-time that curves with different masses and forms various gravitational and temporal fields, laying the groundwork for his theory of relativity. Today, it is unimaginable that only a century ago people still deemed the universe static. Then Hubble’s observations proved that it is ever-expanding, with distant galaxies moving further away and turning red on the principle of the Doppler shift. So, the idea of the world as an eternal and immovable space inhabited by eternal forms undergoes transition, which, after all, also announces the onset of new art – cinema.

When Deleuze references Bergson in his introduction to The Movement-Image, he attempts to articulate the revolution movement has brought into the image. He claims that movement is not merely a sequence of static and finalised poses or figures in succession that move. The status of each individual pose changes dramatically. The Horse in Motion (1878) is the first example of chronophotography, a way to photographically capture and study movement. This technique no longer encompasses a series of finalised and ‘eternal’ poses (which Deleuze claims are formally impossible). Instead, they become points of the movement into which they are integrated. Each point thus remains its own ‘finalised image,’ but it already has an inscribed transition in which the elements of the whole will reorganise (for example, the horse’s legs will be positioned differently). With this, we approach the concepts of difference and not-Whole, which may be understood precisely in the context of movement: we achieve movement when all is not given (and finalised), implying that there must be a current. The essential element of Momoko Seto’s Planet series is that it depicts movement in areas where our mundane view easily overlooks it.

Although Momoko Seto portrays forsaken, frozen landscapes, these are not inert. Life is constantly active underneath, giving us the impression of a humming machine or blaze that will burst out on the surface. Sooner or later, this life force erupts, either as a jet of water in PLANET Z (2011) or as a volcanic eruption melting the eternal ice that held back the animals in PLANET ∑ (2015). In line with the core idea of the movement, Seto’s films are full of vitalism, as exemplified by the tsunami survivors in the short documentary Arekara—La Vie Après (2013) as well as by Ojiichan (2021), a portrait of the director’s grandfather. As Jane Bennet writes in Vibrant Matter, Bergson understood vitalism contrary to the mechanistic view. For him it represented a vital force that cannot be fully calculated and, while manifested in matter, is not necessarily material itself. What other way is there to understand the ending of Ojiichan? Grandfather, who wished to be an opera singer, takes up art education because of financial limitations. Yet the film bears no resentment, since grandfather’s flat is a living art studio, in which he occasionally sings La Traviata. Even after his death the end does not come: Verdi’s classic spills across the images of the Atlantic and the Portugal coast, just as if grandfather were omnipresent, a force that lives its own life in everything we see.

Robert Kuret