This is a first in a series of short articles dedicated to archival film practices in Japan, an umbrella term that points towards a constellation made of found footage documentaries, compilation documentary, recycle cinema, and collage films.

An evolution of the two short articles can be read here.

While the practice of making found footage and compilation documentaries out of archival material is and has been widespread in Europe and in the U.S. for quite some time—I’m guilty of knowing too little about the history of these films in other parts of the world—researching these cinematic practices in Japan resulted, for me, in a deafening silence and in a dead end.
This and the following articles are an attempt to make sense and examine this scarcity, and an opportunity to focus on the few works made in Japan that can be included into these “categories”.

In 1947, French filmmaker Nicole Védrès made Paris 1900, a compilation film assembled from footage shot between 1900 and 1914, while in 1965 Gianfranco Baruchello and Alberto Grifi experimented with found footage images from Hollywood movies destined to be trashed in Uncertain Verification, and in 1987 in From the Pole to the Equator, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi reworked the colonialist gaze of material shot in 1925 into something very different. These are just some of the most significant examples of compilation film or found footage cinema from the last century. Moreover, in the past few decades the practice of recycle cinema, another term to add to the constellation, has seen a surge in production and quality, brought about by the technological advance and the availability of archival material, but also by a will to inquire the meaning of reassembling images from the past and its impact in the present. Filmmakers as diverse as Bill Morrison, Haroun Farocki, Jonas Mekas, and Sergej Loznitsa have all extensively explored the possibilities and challenged the limits of archival film practices, assembling insightful and boundary-pushing works.

What about the history of these film practices in Japan?
To my knowledge and according to my brief research, in the archipelago this is a story of an absence, as it were, both in the documentary and in the experimental field. Considering that Japan has a long, rich, and heterogeneous history of documentary filmmaking and of experimental cinema, this came to me as a surprise, but also as a topic worth of further investigation.
There are, naturally, exceptions—I will touch on them in the the following articles dedicated to the subject—and there are several documentaries made in Japan that use indeed archival images, especially those dealing with and depicting the Pacific War or the social revolts of the late 1960s. However, these type of works—The tetralogy of documentaries (2014-2024) directed by Daishima Haruhiko about the Sanrizuka struggle and the students movements, or Boy Soldiers: The Secret War in Okinawa (2018) by Mikami Chie and Ōya Hanayo come to mind—are usually made by combining interviews, reenactments, newly shot scenes, and narration, thus I’m not sure they can completely count as the type of practices discussed here. In addition, the archival material in these films is usually used more to demonstrate a point than to provoke a sensation or a reflection on the status of the images.

I’m aware that this is a very debatable definition and stance, someone might argue that those are indeed archival documentaries, but I tend to side with the definitions provided on the matter by some scholars, who identify archival film practices as acts of creating something novel and aesthetically complex and layered. Alberto Brodesco and Maurizio Cau, for instance, state that ‘In general terms, the expression [archival cinema] describes the operation of reuse, recycling and reappropriation of material shot in the past, which is recomposed to produce new film texts’ (2023), and according to Eric Thouvenel ‘found footage films are far more than the “documentation” of an era; their significance is not located at the level of the represented event, but with the events occurring within the representation itself.’ (2008)
Moreover, when writing about Jay Leyda and his landmark volume on the subject, Bill Nichols points out that ‘the core idea of the compilation film revolves around not only montage and photomontage but also ostranenie, the basic tenet of Russian formalism as put forward by Victor Shklovsky: “the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.”’ (2014)
Furthermore, I believe it is also a matter of the length and the quantity of the material used: the more archival images or found footage are utilised, the more the films approach an idea of recycle cinema that opens new meanings for the images assembled, ‘in such a way as to produce new knowledge about history that evokes a deeper, more sensual, and experiential understanding of the past.’ (Russell 2018)

As for the reasons of the scarcity of these practices in the archipelago, the first that comes to mind is the incredible difficulty in obtaining and using images from films from Japanese production companies. Anyone who has ever tried to organize events, or just use still images from movies for publications is, sadly, well aware of this madness, and even when the permission is granted, more often than not, big studios are asking very high prices.
However, this cannot be the only reason, since there are alternatives, such as using found footage from home-movies or other non-commercial or amateur sources. In the the next articles, I will write about a couple of exceptions, works that can be described as belonging to the categories here discussed, and that make use of some of the aforementioned archival alternatives.

References:

Alberto Brodesco and Maurizio Cau, ed. Found footage. Il cinema, i media, l’archivio. Cinema e Storia. Rivista di studi interdisciplinari n. 2023, Rubettino, 2023.

Jay Leyda, Films Beget Films: A Study of the Compilation Film, Hill and Wang, 1971.

Bill Nichols, Remaking History: Jay Leyda and the Compilation Film, Film History
Vol. 26, No. 4, Indiana University Press, 2014.

Catherine Russel, Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices, Duke University Press, 2018.

Eric Thouvenel, How “Found Footage” Films Made Me Think Twice about Film History, in Cinéma & Cie, Milano University Press, 2008.