An overdue return to my movie journal entries, with some interesting documentaries—as always the definition here is quite broad— I’ve watched in the last couple of months.
Oral History (Koizumi Meiro, 2013-2015). Comprised of interviews with people of different ages, Oral History is a fascinating exploration of memory, or the lack of it, through different generations of Japanese. The work starts by highlighting the lack of historical knowledge in young, and not so young, people, and how this disinformation is shaping their opinions about Japan—a process that felt a bit annoying and patronising, especially in the first interviews, if I have to be completely honest. What makes this experimental work interesting though, is the progression that moves it from presenting various and very shorts interviews to focusing, in its last part, solely on a deep conversation about war and personal memories, expatriation, and grief with an old lady of Korean descent. Besides the fascinating interweaving of personal history with macro-history, and the touching stories told by the woman, what I found also interesting is that here is the interviewer who shows the apparent lack of knowledge about history, the history of Koreans in Japan, Osaka to be precise, and the Repatriation Project established at the end of the 1950s by the North Korean government. Everything is made more powerful, at least in 2022, by the aesthetic choice used, filming only the mouths of the people speaking, a decision that after three years of pandemic and masks (here in Japan at least), feels freshly disorienting. (Part of the e-flux online program curated by Julian Ross)
Before the Flood (By Yifan Li, Yu Yan, 2005). The documentary depicts the final weeks of Fengjie, an old city famous because of Li Bai, one of the most renowned poet in Chinese history. Located on the Yangtze River, the city, at the time of filming, was about to be reduced to dust, and its inhabitants were forced to relocate, in order to make way to the new Three Gorges Dam that would eventually flood the entire valley. The film documents the slow death of a city, or better, the execution of a city and its people, some of them are fighting to stay until the end, by the state and for the so called progress. The lo-fi aesthetics of DV cameras so fundamental in the development of independent documentary in Asia in the 1990s and 2000s, are here used at their best. An ideal sequel, Before the Flood II – Gong Tan, a documentary about another city soon to be destroyed by the construction of a dam, was completed by Yu Yan in 2009.
Filmmaking and the Way to the Village (Fukuda Katsuhiko, 1973). A relatively short documentary, just less than an hour, directed by a member of the Ogawa collective, about the making of the group’s masterpiece, Sanrizuka: Heta Village (1973). Fukuda left the collective after completing this film, decided to stay in the area, and kept making documentaries, for instance A Grasscutter’s Tale (1985). I revisited the documentary after long time, and it was even better than I remembered, years spent watching the films of Ogawa and reading about them, gave me a different perspective on them. The movie offers a glimpse behind the curtain, so to speak, of course you need to be familiar with Ogawa Pro’s filmography and its story, but it’s nonetheless an invaluable document to understand how Heta Village came into existence. The scenes when the collective discusses how the old people of the village enjoy long takes are priceless. It was fascinating also to see how important and integral to the success and reception of the Sanrizuka Series were the screenings. In a pre mini-theaters/independent cinemas era, all the screenings throughout Japan were organized through a network of activists, unions, supporters, people as important for the movies, as the crew that made them.
Asian Docs 