Peacock (Nue)is a documentary-style film shot with a handheld camera, capturing the haunting beauty of the classical Japanese Noh play Nue. In early 2016, João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva (JMG+PP), while in artistic residency in Kyoto, Japan, collaborated with a Noh theater company to film this enigmatic performance directly on stage.
Noh theater itself exists in a liminal space, a threshold between the world of the living and the realm of the dead. More than a stage for dramatic storytelling, it serves as a portal to the supernatural, where actors channel the collective memory of ghostly tales.
As if in a trance, they embody spirits and specters, allowing for a ritualistic bridging of worlds. Filming within this sacred space, however, disrupts the traditional boundary between performance and audience, challenging the fourth-wall convention that is essential to preserving Noh’s supernatural power. By placing the camera within the performance itself, the film situates its imagery in an eerie perspective—one that does not merely document but instead inhabits the spectral dimension that Noh conjures.
The play recounts the story of Nue, the chimerical monster that once haunted the emperor’s palace before being slain by the warrior Minamoto no Yoshiie. As with all Noh dramas, the narrative unfolds through ghostly recollection: a spirit returns from the afterlife to relive its trauma. In the filmed performance, the ghost of Nue first emerges, appearing to a traveling monk to recount its death by Minamoto’s arrow. Later, a second, more enigmatic manifestation occurs—the spirit of the ghost of Nue. This spectral doubling creates a disorienting shift, as if death itself were being replayed and transformed. With an increasingly bewildering costume and intensified performance, the spirit of the ghost reenacts its own demise, dying once more on stage only to awaken into yet another spectral state.
This recursive structure—a ghost within a ghost, a death within death—draws the viewer into an underworld within an underworld, a space where reality dissolves the unreality of death. JMG+PP’s cinematic appropriation of this undead tale does more than document; it engages with the proto-theatrical essence of Noh itself. Here, transcendence is inscribed not only in the narrative but also in the very texture of the film, creating an uncanny doubling—an image that, much like Noh’s phantoms, hovers spectrally on the threashold of the living dead.
