The Digital Unconscious and Post-Disaster Recovery in the Cinema of Haruka Komori

How does digital technology mediate decision-making and shape our understanding of disaster recovery? I address this question by examining both the administrative and cinematic uses of digital images in the reconstruction process following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Post-disaster digital mediation is characterized by the administrative use of what has been termed “operational images,” designed not for interpretation but for action, particularly in disaster response and prevention. I connect the social and ethical dimensions of post-disaster recovery with the ontological dimensions of the technological characteristics of digital photography. By comparing Japanese independent filmmaker Haruka Komori’s digital filmmaking practice with the operational images utilized by administrative and research bodies, I aim to demonstrate how her particular digital aesthetics elicit the latent capacity of the “digital unconscious” and offer new modes of perceiving post-disaster recovery, in contrast to both other forms of post-disaster digital mediation and to analog photography. Through close analyses, I argue that her work articulates an alternative vision of recovery—one rooted not in spatial management or predictive planning, but in physical attachment to place, trust in the future, and imaginative engagement with survivors and the dead.