Author: matteoB

Some thoughts on 3 Islands (Lin Hsin-I, 2015)

 

I finally had the time to rewatch 3 Islands, an experimental documentary directed in 2015 by Lin Hsin-I, a work I enjoyed on my first viewing a month or so ago, but one that, because of its complexity and all the historical references, I really wanted to watch it again before trying to write down a “proper” review.
The movie is a blending of experimental cinema and non-fiction, a “genre” that has recently become more and more the main field of my interest*, but at the same time an exploration of the historical resonances that tragically bind together three different territories, Okinawa, Taiwan, and the Jeju island in South Korea.
3 Islands is a complex and multilayered work punctuated by literary quotes (Marguerite Duras, Kenzaburō Ōe and T.S. Eliot among others**), archival footage, contemporary art, beautiful digital shots of jungle and ruins, fictional memories and a minimalist and eerie music to wrap up everything.

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The movie’s very first image is a close up of an old strip of celluloid in what appears to be a destroyed building, later on we’ll discover is probably an abandoned theater in Tainan, Taiwan. The shots of the strip and those of the hands that pull it, are superimposed with quotes from Marguerite Duras and those from a Taiwanese artist, dealing with personal and historical memory, the differences in language(s) and the impossibility to convey a truth of any sort through them. It is thus clear from the very beginning that what interests the director is also, if not mainly, an exploration of the aesthetic limits of non-fiction and those of representation more in general.
In the following scenes, written messages of a young kamikaze who died in the battle of Okinawa are intertwined with images of mural art in Taiwan and connected with footage of kamikaze attacks on American ships. Moments of battles as experienced during II World War by Zhang Zheng Guan, presumably a Taiwanese pilot who fought the Pacific War with the Japanese Imperial Army, are narrated (in Japanese) over a split screen, one side showing the places where the carnage and horrors of war took place as they are today, the other showing the act of filming and photographing the very same spots. The gimmick of the split screen has here its raison d’être because, as written above, the film gives equal importance to the facts, stories and histories narrated in it, but also to the problem of representation itself, without, and this is one of Lin Hsin-I big achievements, becoming just an empty and self-absorbing aesthetic show-off. Archival war images and scenes from the Taiwanese jungle are then linked to those of the protests in Okinawa against the American base in Futenma, and everything is connected by the memories narrated, one of the more dense and horrifying passages of this account is when it describes scenes of mutilated and headless body still moving, and other where men are walking and singing with their hands on the belly holding their own intestines and livers.

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In the central part of the movie Lin Hsin-I  moves her focus on the island of Jeiju, a very small territory located between Japan and South Korea, also a place of geopolitical importance due to its proximity to Chinese waters. Again we are presented with images from today and photos and archival footage from the colonial past of the area, and more importantly from the Jeju uprising in 1948, a revolt where people were raped, tortured and brutally murdered by the Korean government’s militia. Talking or writing about the massacre was taboo for more than 50 years and was only in 2005 that an official apology from the South Korean president was issued.
As often happen to me when I watch works that are also about Japan, the least interesting parts are those that take place, or are about, the archipelago, not because they’re less compelling or thought-provoking, but more because they usually look like a déjà-vu to me. The same happened with 3 Islands and its final part about Ichimura Misako, a woman who decided to live like a homeless at Yoyoji Park in Tokyo, to whom the director felt deeply connected.
That being said, 3 Islands remains nonetheless one of the best work of non-fiction cinema I’ve had the chance to see this year, a multitude of images and words colliding and clashing together to create a polyphonic narrative.
From the aesthetic point of view, the work feels perhaps more akin to installation art than a movie, but because of this quality it works as a unique intellectual and visual experience: fragmentation, peripherality and the centrifugal complexity of its images, give 3 Islands a very peculiar rhythm and style, allowing the film to be challenging and compelling in every single minute of its duration.

3 Islands’ documentary images try to shift from literary writings to the actual fixing of body-scene. Adopting literatures as well as the personal research and practices of artists as scripts, parallel with reversible movements of the flesh, the work recounts the unknown history and the symptomatic interpretations of the 3 islands of East Asia—Taiwan, Okinawa, and Jeju Island.

Notes

* And apparently in Taiwanese documentary as well “The 15 nominees for the Taiwanese Competition at this year’s Taiwan International Documentary Festival (TIDF) signal a reversal from the previous social issue-driven, journalistic documentaries, with many entries crossing over into the domain of contemporary art. More here)

** Not really a quote, but there’s a very brief moment towards the end of the film when the director herself pronounces the words “Ogawa Shinsuke”. An homage to one of her inspirations?

We Shall Overcome 「戦場ぬ止み」available on DVD

Just a short post to announce that our friends at Zakka Films are putting out on DVD another interesting Japanese documentary, We Shall Overcome 「戦場ぬ止み」(Ikusaba nu todomi) directed by Mikami Chie in 2014 and nominated by The Kinema Junpo poll as the second best Japanese documentary of 2015.

As the American based label’s page states:

A hundred thousand non-combatants—one in four Okinawans—died in the brutal Battle of Okinawa at the end of World War II. Postwar, the U.S. military forcibly constructed military bases throughout Okinawa. Even today, 43 years since Okinawa’s reversion to Japan and 70 years since the war, 74% of all U.S. military facilities in Japan are crowded onto the Okinawan islands.

We Shall Overcome reports on what is actually going on right now in Okinawa. Today there are plans to construct a brand new military base that requires reclaiming a portion of a beautiful ocean where rare coral and the vanishing dugong make their home. Most Okinawans are opposed to this base, and have launched protests, on sea and on land, to somehow stop construction. Okinawa’s rage has boiled over. In November 2014, Takeshi Onaga was elected Governor of Okinawa in a landslide victory on a platform opposing new base construction. But the national government refuses to budge. It uses subsidies to buy off some Okinawans and uses the Okinawan Prefectural riot police against others, pitting Okinawans against Okinawans. Tensions build daily at the scene of the protests, with injuries and arrests.

Violent confrontations are not the only subject of this documentary. It also reveals the rich culture and way of life of people who have had to live alongside the U.S. military bases, the music and humor they have carefully nurtured in spite of Okinawa’s harrowing history. The film conveys to the world Okinawa’s wish that an end be made to seventy years of conflict.

Mikami is a journalist and filmmaker who in 2013 authored another movie set in and about Okinawa and the struggle of their people, The Targeted Village, the theatrical version of which was screened at the 2013 edition of Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. I very clearly remember that after a packed morning screening, many young viewers (especially women) came out of the theater in tears and moved by the experience.
We Shall Overcome is narrated by Cocco, singer and actress herself from Okinawa, cinema lovers will certainly remember her as the disturbed protagonist of Tsukamoto Shin’ya’s Kotoko and as the subject of a music documentary by Kore’eda Hirokazu, Daijōbu de aru yo ni Cocco owaranai tabi「大丈夫であるように-Cocco 終らない旅」.

You can purchase We Shall Overcome directly from Zakka Films website using Amazon payments.

youtu.be/FEc_D_meOBY

East and Southeast Asian documentaries, a list/database of the most significant works

 

updated September 14th 2016
In the past few days I was online looking for list(s) about East and Southeast Asian documentaries, lists that could give me an idea of what to watch if I wanted to explore the history non-fiction cinema in East and Southeast Asia, well….I couldn’t really find anything. So I told myself “why not making this list? a list that would also function as a sort of database for people interested in non-fiction” and then I realized that although I’m a kind of an expert in the history of Japanese documentary, I don’t really know that much about non-fiction cinema in the rest of Asia, besides of course Wang Bing, Rithy Panh and few others.


In most of these Asian countries cinema as a form of art is something pretty new and still in development, and often documentary is basically nothing more than state propaganda, fortunately things have slowly started to change few decades ago, when the new digital technologies allowed virtually everyone to become a documentary filmmaker and the social unrest set in motion the arts.
An interesting and useful resource on the topic, although it focuses more on the contemporary situation, is Asian Documentary Today, a book published by the Busan International Film Festival in 2012 and compiled and edited by AND (Asian Network of Documentary).

If anybody out there in the vastity of the internet is interested in helping me with this tiny project, a list/database of the most significant and important documentaries made in East and Southeast Asia, please feel free to get in touch with me: matteojpjp [at] gmail.com
Just a few “rules”:

– new works are accepted but don’t forget that the list is about “important and significant documentaries in the history of cinema”

– accepted are documentaries from these countries:  China, Hong Kong, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Mongolia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, East Timor, Brunei, Christmas Island, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar (Burma), Thailand and Vietnam.

– if you’re kind enough to send me some suggestions or titles, it would be nice to have also few sentences contextualizing the documentary and briefly explaining what the movie is about.

– the deadline is the end of September, once done and organised properly, I’ll publish it here on the blog and I’ll try to have it spread in the internet.

Thank you

Memories of Agano (阿賀の記憶 Satō Makoto, 2004)

This is an unfinished draft for an essay on Satō Makoto’s Memories of Agano 「阿賀の記憶」, a work in progress, at this stage no more than a series of random thoughts about one of my favorite movies.

 

last update: 26 September 2017

 

“…the habit of imposing a meaning to every single sign”

Trinh Minh-Ha


Satō Makoto’s documentaries seem to be (again) part of the filmic discourse in Japan, or at least on the rise in some cinematic circles, and deservedly so. Nine years have passed since his death, this year (2016) a book titled「日常と不在を見つめて ドキュメンタリー映画作家 佐藤真の哲学」(roughly rendered “Gazing at everyday and absence, the philosophy of documentarist Satō Makoto”) was published and a screening of all his documentaries, followed by discussions and talks, was held in Tokyo in March and later at the Kobe Planet Film Archive. I haven’t read the book yet, but the title summarizes and conveys perfectly the themes embodied in Satō’s last works: the dicothomy absence/presence and the presence of absence, that is to say the phantasmatic presence of cinema.

Sato’s final works, Self And Others, Memories of Agano and Out of Place: Memories of Edward Said witness and embody a shift in Satō’s approach, movies through which he was attacking and partly deconstructing the documentary form, to be fair with his works though, it’s a touch that was partly present in his films since the beginning, but in these three documentaries it becomes a very prominent characteristic. This publication seems to be timely and enlightening because is tackling Sato’s oeuvre not necessarily from a purely cinematic point of view, the book’s curator is by her own admission not a cinema expert, but it’s expanding the connections of Satō’s movies and writings towards the philosophical.

I hope the book will kindle and revive a new interest on his works, Satō is in my opinion one of the most important Japanese directors of the last 30 years, and sadly one of the most unknown in the West, I don’t really think there’s much out there in the internet or on paper about Satō, nor in English nor in other non-Japanese languages, and it’s a pity and a missed occasion because his movies, again, are more than “just” documentaries, or even better, are documentaries that have the power to question their own form and stretch in many differents areas. If you’re not familiar with his works, you can get a glimpse of Satō and his touch reading this beautiful and long interview, or you can buy them on DVD thanks to Siglo, it’s a rarity in Japan, but they come with English subtitles.

This year (2017) Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival will also hold a retrospective for the 10th anniversary of Satō’s death, commemorating and celebrating his works, his influence and his reception abroad.

One of Satō’s documentaries that resonates with me more than others, even after many viewings, is Memories of Agano (阿賀の記憶, 2004). As the YIDFF describes it:

Ten years after the acclaimed film Living on the River Agano, the film crew returns to Niigata. Personal memories reflect upon remnants of those who passed away as the camera observes abandoned rice fields and hearths that have lost their masters.

It is a relatively short but complex movie running only 55 minutes, an experiment in the form of a non-fiction film, splendidly shot on 16mm by cameraman Kobayashi Shigeru, the same cameraman who worked and lived together with Satō in Niigata for more than three years during the shooting of Living on the River Agano. The film is a poem on the passing of time and consequently on the objects that will outlive us, the persistence of things in time, including cinema itself. The original idea was in fact to make a film about the remnants of Meiji, that is “the glass photographic plates of the Niigata landscape from the late Meiji to early Taisho era (1910s) left behind by photographer Ishizuka Saburo. Using those old black and white photographs as a motif, we started out making the film with the same concept as Gocho Shigeo in Self and Others”. This quasi-obsession with objects is the thread that waves through the film’s fabric: boiling tea pots, old wooden houses, tools…

One of the most stunning scene of the movie and one that defines Memories of Agano is placed at the very beginning, when Satō and Kobayashi after returning to the area where the first movie was shot hang a big canvas tarp in the middle of a wood projecting on it the documentary they made 10 years before. The effect is profoundly disturbing and touching at the same time, images and thus memories are suddenly like tangible spectres.

On another level, Memories of Agano with its intertwining of past, present and landscapes ー the external ones with mountains, fields, rivers, and the interior landscapes of old and almost empty houses ー could also be read as an attempt to approach and partly re-elaborate the fūkeiron-cinema, the theory-of-landscape-oriented-cinema, 「footnote: “launched” almost five decades ago with A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969),  The Man Who Left His Will on Film (1970), Red Army/PLFP: Declaration of World War (1971) and The First Emperor (1973)」

As for its aesthetics, one of the quality that strikes me every time I rewatch it, is the slow pace and the use of long takes that give the movie a dreamlike quality of lethargic torpor. The scene that embodies at most this aesthetic idea is an almost static shot of a teapot boiling on an old stove lasting about 10 minutes, on the background, sort of white noise, the words of an old lady spoken with a thick Niigata accent. She talks sparsly with Satō himself also about the fact she doesn’t wanna be filmed, half jokingly half seriously, a breaking of the fourth wall so to speak, a dialogue between camera and object filmed that was prominently present in Living on River Agano as well (“Are you filming me?” “Don’t shoot me!” are sentences that punctuate the course of this movie and the one made in 1992).

Memories of Agano also present itself as a documentary of opacity rather than one of transparency, the choice of not using the subtitles when people speak with their thick Niigata accent, a Japanese citizen from another area of the archipelago would probably understand 50% or 60% of what is said, a technical option that was used in Living on the River Agano – signals a major change in Satō’s approach to documentary and cinema in general. Feeding the viewer with limpid and clear messages and making a “comprehensible” movie is not what interests Satō here, but rather placing obstacles, visual riddles so to speak – the aforementioned tarp for instance, but also visually striking moments of pure experimentation – and thus presenting the opacity of the cinematic language seems to be the goals he had in mind when he conceived Memories of Agano. The images are thus escaping the organizing discourse tipical of so many Japanese documentaries, in contrast they open to new (cinematic) discoveries and keep resonating with the viewers and engage us on many different levels.

100 best Japanese labor films

Last June the NPO organization “Hataraku Bunka Net” made and released a list of the 100 best Japanese labor films, a vast and varied list that besides documentaries includes also many classic movies and big names, TV series, indies and so on, from the beginning of cinema, with the actualities filmed by the Lumière company at the end of 19th century, to the present day. Below you can find the list in Japanese followed by my translation (feel free to correct me if you find any mistakes):

  1. 『明治の日本』(１８９７～１８９９, Lumière company )
  2. Kawasaki Mitsubishi Strike 「川崎・三菱造船所労働争議」(1921)
  3. What Made Her Do It? 「何が彼女をそうさせたか」(Suzuki Shigeyoshi, 1930)
  4.  Twelfth Annual Tokyo May Day 「第 12 回東京メーデー」(Prokino, 1931)
  5. Sumida River 「隅田川」(Yabushita Taiji, 1931)
  6. I Was Born, But… 「生れてはみたけれど」(Ozu Yasujirō, 1932)
  7. Mr. Thank You 「有りがたうさん」(Shimizu Hiroshi, 1936)
  8. Fighting Soldiers 「戦ふ兵隊」(Kamei Fumio, 1939)
  9.  Renga jokō 「煉瓦女工」(Chiba Yasuki, 1940)
  10. Kikansha C57 「機関車C57」 (Imaizumi Zenju, 1940)
  11. Record of a Kindergarten Teacher 「或る保姆の記録」(Mizuki Soya, 1942)
  12. We’re Working So So Hard 「私たちはこんなに働いている」(Mizuki Soya, 1945)
  13. Rushing Forward 「驀進」(Iwasa Ujitoshi, 1946)
  14. Coal Mine 「炭坑」(Itō Sueo, Yanagisawa Hisao, 1947)
  15. We Are Electric Industry Workers 「われら電気労働者」(1947)
  16. Living on the Sea 「海に生きる」 (Yanagisawa Hisao, Kabashima Seichi, 1949)
  17. Shirayuki-sensei to kodomo-tachi「白雪先生と子供たち」(Yoshimura Ren, 1950)
  18. Still We Live 「どっこい生きてる」(Imai Tadashi, 1951)
  19. Ikiru 「生きる」(Kurosawa Akira, 1952)
  20. Mother 「おかあさん」(Naruse Mikio, 1952)
  21. May Day 1952 [1952年メーデー」(Yoshimi Yutaka, 1952)
  22. Woman Walking Alone on the Earth「女ひとり大地を行く」(Kamei Fumio, 1953)
  23. The Crab Cannery Ship 「蟹工船」 (Yamamura Sō, 1953)
  24. The Wokers of Keihin 「京浜労働者」(Noda Shinkichi, 1953)
  25. The Street Without Sun 「太陽のない街」(Yamamoto Satsuo, 1954)
  26. Tachiagaru onnanoko rōdōsha (Zensen domei, 1954)
  27. Koko ni izumi ari 「ここに泉あり」(Imai Tadashi, 1955)
  28. Street of Shame 「赤線地帯」(Mizoguchi Kenji, 1956)
  29. The Lighthouse aka Times of Joy and Sorrow 「喜びも悲しみも幾歳月」(Kinoshita Keisuke, 1957)
  30. Bota san no enikki 「ボタ山の絵日記」(Tokunaga Mizuo, 1957)
  31. Yuki to tatakau kikansha 「雪と闘う機関車」(Tani Kyōsuke, 1958)
  32. My Second Brother「にあんちゃん」(Imamura Shōhei, 1959)
  33. Umi ni kizuku seitetsujo「海に築く製鉄所」(Ise Chōnosuke, 1959)
  34. 刈干切り唄(1959, Ueno Kōzō)
  35. The Secret of Tree Rings (TV series) 「年輪の秘密」(Hani Susumu, Noriaki Tsuchimoto, Nagano Shigeichi 1959-60)
  36. Ōinaru tabiji「大いなる旅路」(Sekigawa Hideo, 1960)
  37. The Naked Island 「裸の島」(Shindō Kaneto, 1960)
  38. 1960 nen  6 gatsu anpo e no ikari「1960年6月 安保への怒り」(Noda Shinkichi Noda, Tomizawa Yukio, 1960)
  39. The Weavers of Nishijin 「西陣」(Matsumoto Toshio, 1961)
  40. Foundry Town 「キューポラのある街」(Urayama Kirio, 1962)
  41. Woman of Design「その場所に女ありて」(Suzuki Hideo, 1962)
  42. An Engineer’s Assistant「ある機関助士」 (Tsuchimoto Noriaki, 1963)
  43. On the Road—A Document 「ドキュメント 路上」(Tsuchimoto Noriaki, 1964)
  44. 68 no sharin 「68の車輪」(Morita Minoru, 1965)
  45. Kokoro no sanmyaku「こころの山脈」(Yoshimura Kōzaburō, 1966)
  46. The Siblings 「若者たち」(Tokihisa Tokihisa Morikawa, 1966)
  47. Nōyaku ka「農薬禍」(Shūkichi Koizumi, 1967)
  48. Waga Town, Waga District in Summer 1967 「特集 和賀郡和賀町 1967年 夏」(Kudo Toshiki, 1967)
  49. The Sands of Kurobe 「黒部の太陽」(Kumai Kei, 1968)
  50. The Great Adventure of Horus, Prince of the Sun「太陽の王子 ホルスの大冒険」(Takahata Isao, 1968)
  51. It’s Tough Being a Man 「男はつらいよ」(Yamada Yōji, 1969)
  52. Shipyard no seishun 「シップヤードの青春」(Kamiuma Isao, 1969)
  53. Where Spring Comes Late 「家族」(Yamada Yōji, 1970)
  54. Men and War trilogy 「戦争と人間 三部作」(Yamamoto Satsuo, 1970-73)
  55. Yūko gishiki Hokkaido Yubari shi mayachi tankō kaede ana「友子儀式 北海道夕張市真谷地炭鉱 楓坑」(NHK archives, 1973)
  56. Nihon no inasaku sono kokoro to dentō「日本の稲作 そのこころと伝統」(Aoyama Michiharu, 1974)
  57. A Poet’s Life 「詩人の生涯」(Kawamoto Kihachirō, 1974)
  58. Torakku Yarō: goiken muyō 「トラック野郎 御意見無用」(Suzuki Norifumi, 1975)
  59. A Song of the Bottom「どっこい!人間節 寿・自由労働者 の街」(Ogawa Production, 1975)
  60. Impressions of a Sunset「日没の印象」(Suzuki Shiroyasu, 1975)
  61. Otokotachi no tabiji 「男たちの旅路」(NHK drama, 1976-1982)
  62. Nihon no sengo dai 5 「NHK特集 日本の戦後 第5集 一 歩退却 二歩前進 二・一ゼネスト前 夜」(NHK, 1977)
  63. Oh! The Nomugi Pass 「あゝ野麦峠」(Yamamoto Satsuo, 1979)
  64. The Sakana man 「ザ・サカナマン」(Kuroda Teruhiko, 1979)
  65. Enrai 「遠雷」(Negishi Kichitarō, 1981)
  66. Kaikyō 「海峡」(Minami Kōsetsu, 1982)
  67. Genpatsu wa ima 「原発はいま」(Ōmi Michihiro, 1982)
  68. The Catch 「魚影の群れ」 (Sōmai Shinji, 1983)
  69. Gung Ho (Ron Howard, 1986)
  70. A Taxing Woman 「マルサの女」(Itami Jūzō, 1987)
  71. Haha ga shinda – seikatsu hogo no shūhen  『母さんが死んだ―生活保護の周辺』(Mizushima Hiroaki, 1987)
  72. Kiki’s Delivery Service「魔女の宅急便」(Miyazaki Hayao, 1989)
  73. Earth 「あーす」(Kim Soo-Kil, 1991)
  74. All Under the Moon 「月はどっちに出ている」(Sai Yōichi, 1993)
  75. Bayside Shakedown 「踊る大捜査線」(Motohiro Katsuyuki, 1997)
  76. Whalers and the Sea 「鯨捕りの海」(Umekawa Toshiaki, 1998)
  77. Poppoya 「鉄道員/ ぽっぽや」(Furuhata Yasuo, 1999)
  78. Be More Human – Kokuro’s 15-year Struggle 「人らしく生きよう 国労冬物語」(Matsubara Akira, Sasaki Yumi
  79. Konbanwa「こんばんは」(Mori Yasuyuki, 2003)
  80. Genchō no hoshi「県庁の星」(Nishitani Hiroshi, 2003)
  81. Hula Girls 「フラガール」 (Lee Sang-il, 2006)
  82. Echoes From The Miike Mine「三池 終わらない炭鉱(やま)の物語」(Kumagai Hiroko, 2006)
  83. Hagetaka – TV drama 「土曜ドラマ ハゲタカ」 (Ōtomo Keishi, Inoue Go, Horikirizono Kentarō, 2006)
  84. Haken no Hinkaku – TV drama 「ハケンの品格」(Nagumo Seiichi, Satō Toya, 2007)
  85. Departures 「おくりびと」(Takita Yōjirō, 2008)
  86. A Normal Life, Please 「フツーの仕事がしたい」(Tsuchiya Tokachi, 2009)
  87. Genkai in a Black Company 「ブラック会社に勤めてるんだが、 もう俺は限界かもしれない」(Satō Yūichi, 2009)
  88. Ninkyō Helper 「任侠ヘルパー」(TV drama, 2009)
  89. A Lone Scalpel 「孤高のメス」(Narushima Izuru, 2010)
  90. Showa Housekeeping 「昭和の家事」(Koizumi Kazuko, 2010)
  91. Saudade 「サウダーヂ」(Tomita Katsuya, 2011)
  92. The Great Passage 「舟を編む」(Ishii Yuya, 2013)
  93. Tale of a Butcher Shop 「ある精肉店のはなし」(Hana usa Aya, 2013)
  94. Dandarin Rules 「ダンダリン 労働基準監督官」(Sato Tayō, Nakajima Satoru, 2013)
  95. Wood Job! 「ウッジョブ~神 去なあなあ日常」(Yaguchi Shinobu, 2014)
  96. Pale Moon 「紙の月」(Yoshida Daihachi, 2014)
  97. A Little Girl’s Dream 「夢は牛のお医者さん」(Tokita Yoshiyaki, 2014)
  98. Hirumeshi tabi: Anata no gohan misetekudasai! 「昼めし旅 ~あなたのご飯見せてく ださい」(TV drama, 2014)
  99. A Sower of Seeds 「種まく旅人 くにうみの郷」(Shinohara Tetsuo, 2015)
  100. Shitamachi Rocket 「下町ロケット」(TV drama, 2015)

Wansei Painter – Tetsuomi Tateishi

 

After Le Moulin, and partly Asia is One, my personal exploration of the period when Taiwan was under Japanese rule (1895 – 1945) continues today with Wansei Painter – Tetsuomi Tateishi (2015), a documentary directed by Kuo Liang-yin and Fujita Shuhei, and presented at the last Taiwan International Documentary Festival, where it received the Audience Award.
Here the synopsis:

Tateshi Tetsuomi was born in Taiwan in 1905. He returned to his birthplace to find painting subjects and then he had been attracted by the landscape and local cultures of Taiwan. During his stay in Taiwan, he made oil paints, illustrations and wood engravings for the magazine Minzoku Taiwan (Taiwanese Folklore). He was regarded as a promising painter, but his achievements were to be forgotten when he was repatriated to Japan at the end of WWII and lost most of his paintings. He earned a living as an illustrator for children’s books, but finally achieved unique expressions in his last years. This film reveals his ambition and struggle, and reflects the dramatic political, cultural and social change in Taiwan.”

The word Wansei refers to the Japanese individuals born in Taiwan during the colonial occupation of the island, people who were forced to leave Taiwan, and de facto deported, in the years following the end of the Pacific War (1945). The movie, exploring the life of one of these people and a very special one, is indeed a biopic, but at the same time and on a more subtle level, it’s a depiction of what it means to belong and to live in two different cultures in times of shifting historical changes.

Tateishi was born and lived part of his life in Taiwan, a place and a culture that played a great part in his development as an artist and human being, when he returned there from Japan during the 1930s, the colors and landscape absorbed in his daily experiences would remain forever with him and would be very recognisable in his future paintings. As he writes in his memoir “I have always peferred strong colors and bold lines. Taiwan’s landscapes suited my personality perfectly”.
Things started to dramatically change in the sociopolitical environment at the beginning of the 40s, when the “divide began to emerge between Japanese and Taiwanese in areas such as painting, literature, and theater. The government was promoting Japanesation, Taiwanese culture was considered vulgar and barbaric”. In such a period, when the imperialistic and fascistic oppression promoted by Japan was at its peak and the propaganda machine was in full swing, Teteishi extensively wrote for Folklore Taiwan, a magazine (in Japanese) exploring and reviving the traditional arts and custom of the island. This (re)discovery of Taiwanese cultural heritage was so important that is still praised nowadays among Taiwanese scholars.
At the age of 39 in 1944 Tateishi was drafted and sent to the war front, and after the conflict ended his family stayed in Taiwan, part of those people called “overseas Japanese” in a land now under Chinese administration. In 1949 they were forced to leave the country and go back to Japan, where he continued to paint and eventually became a well-known illustrator for encyclopedias and scientific publications, many of his illustrations can be found in Japanese children’s books and covers of the 1960s and 70s. As for his painting, after the war his style changed considerably, becoming more surrealistic and abstract “military and post-war experiences in Taiwan cast a shadow over my heart, I searched for new styles of painting, yet I could not make up my mind on a particular style.”

From a purely cinematic point of view, the documentary is mainly composed by still photos, paintings, archival images and interviews with Tateishi’s relatives, his wife and his two sons, and Taiwanese arts scholars. The narration is heterogeneous, the main voice, the one from his granddaughter, is intertwined with short pieces read from his memoir and the voices of his wife and children. There are also few scenes of modern Taiwan and Japan, a school where he used to teach or places where he used to go, and everything is held together by a minimal and unobtrusive music, a sound design that gives the movie its almost contemplative mood.

When the story moves to Japan after the war, the documentary loses, for me, its appeal, it’s still a well crafted work, but the risk of becoming an hagiography is very strong. Fortunately balancing up this tendency are the artist’s beautiful and diverse paintings filling up the screen with their colors, shapes and mystery. Another problem I have with the movie is that the period of colonization, to my eyes at least, is depicted with some indulgence, of course the aim of the work wasn’t to deeply explore the violence of the occupation, but still, watching the documentary it seems like the period was after all a positive phase in Taiwan history, especially when opposed to the post-war Chinese administration. I am maybe reading too much into it, and again I’m not an expert on the subject, so I could be wrong and it may well be that amid all the violence and oppression, important cultural and artistic achievement were obtained, but at what price?  
If raising doubts about a subject is one of the best achievements a movie can obtain, willingly or not, Wansei Painter – Tatsuomi Tateishi for what I’ve written above is certainly a compelling work and a must-watch for anyone interested in how the life of an individual interweaves and is shaped by the events of a very intricate historical period.

The next installment in my personal series about Japan/Taiwan will be, time permitting, 3 Islands by Lin Hsin-i, you can now read my review here.

Ogawa Production’s Sanrizuka Series – DVD Box set is out today

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Known outside Japan as the Narita series, the works made by Ogawa Shinsuke and his collective from 1968 to 1973 (with a return to the area in 1977) filming the battle and resistance of farmers, students, activists against the building of Narita airport, are usually called in Japan the Sanrizuka series, from the name of the area where the main struggle and land expropriation took place (an ongiing battle that is not over, by the way). As written briefly in a previous post, the Japanese label DIG is putting out on DVD all the documentaries of Ogawa Production, the first 3 films were released in June, and today (July 2nd) DIG is also releasing a DVD box set of the Sanrizuka/Narita series. Here’s the list of the works included in the box set:

  1.  Summer in Narita『日本解放戦線 三里塚の夏』(1968)
  2. Winter in Narita 『日本解放戦線 三里塚』(1970)
  3.  Three Day War in Narita『三里塚 第三次強制測量阻止斗争』(1970)
  4.  Narita: Peasants of the Second Fortress『三里塚 第二砦の人々』(1971)
  5. Narita: The Building of Iwayama Tower  『三里塚 岩山に鉄塔が出来た』(1972)
  6. Narita: Heta Village 『三里塚 辺田部落』(1973)
  7. Narita: The Sky of May  『三里塚 五月の空 里のかよい路』(1977)
  8. as an extra work, available only in the box set: Fimmaking and the Way to the Village (1973, Fukuda Katsuhiko)『映画作りとむらへの道』(1973)

The box set comes with a booklet where each movie is introduced and a final note by renown documentarist Hara Kazuo. I haven’t had the chance to watch them yet, so I can’t say anything about the transfer*.
All the DVDs don’t have English subtitles, but that fact that finally these important documentaries are available on home-video basically for the first time, the only Summer in Narita was released with a book a couple of years ago, is something to rejoice. My hope is that some label outside Japan (maybe Zakka Films or even Icarus Films, why not?) will one day in the near future put together an international edition.

* July 4th addendum: I’ve watched some minutes of Heta Village, The Building of Iwayama Tower and Narita: Peasants of the Second Fortress just to get an idea of the transfer’s quality. As I expected the DVDs mirror the quality of the original prints – I’ve seen them all on the big screen, but many times on quite battered DVD samples, so my memory might trick me here. Be that as it may, the movies are not in a good state, lots of scratches, flecks and dirt, in a perfect world they would have had a restoration first and they would have been transferred on DVD only later. But we don’t live in a perfect world and the huge debt left by the group is still hindering any “normal” process of preserving and presenting the works in a pristine state. That being said,  this release is an important step anyway, because it will help to introduce Owaga Pro and its documentaries to a wider and younger audience, and just for this reason it’s a project that should be praised.

NDU and Asia is One （アジアはひとつ）

NDU (Nihon Documentary Union) was a Japanese collective established in 1968 by a group of Waseda University students, who would eventually drop out, one of the most prestigious universities in Japan. From 1968 to 1973, the year the group dismantled, this group of activists, they considered themselves first of all as a collective of activists,  made four documentaries, moving from the street of Tokyo – the first work was Onikko – A Record of the Struggle of Youth Laborers – to the far away islands in Micronesia passing through Okinawa, the archipelago where they shot two of the their most significant documentaries. Motoshinkakarannu (1971) was made and is about Okinawa before the reversion to Japan, the group went to the island in 1971 and captured on film a society in flux and in the middle of a shifting passage. The film show and focuses on the margins of society with illegal prostitution and life in the red districts, at the same time highlighting the historical and social fractures that were traversing the area: anti-establishment and anti-American riots, the Black Panthers visiting Okinawa, pollution of water and much more. I listed Motoshinkakarannu as one of my favorite Japanese documentaries in the poll I’ve organised a year ago, but today I want to shift my attention on the second movie made by the collective in Okinawa (and beyond): Asia is One (アジアはひとつ),  a work that I hadn’t seen at the time of the poll, and that would have certainly figured in my list paired with Motoshinkakarannu.

Asia is One was screened on June 26th at Kyoto Kambaikan, as part of the AAS in Asia, and it was screen with English subtitles for the first time, the movie was shelved for many many years, forgotten, and was (re)discovered only in 2005 when was screened at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. The screening in Kyoto was followed by a fascinating Q&A with the only surviving member of NDU, Inoue Osamu, Nunokawa Tetsurō, who after the dismantling of the collective made other interesting solo documentaries in Palestine and US, passed away in 2012. As described by Roland Domenig (1), with Asia is One

NDU further explored the margins of Okinawan society and continued to break through borders by focusing on the Taiwanese minority. The film portrays Taiwanese migrant workers on the main island of Okinawa who substitute the Okinawa laborers who in turn are employed as migrant workers on Japan’s main islands. It traces the history of Taiwanese coal miners on Iriomote Island, follows legal and illegal workers to the westernmost island of Yonaguni and finally lands in Taiwan in a village of he Atayal tribe of Taiwanese aborigines, where still the Japanese naval anthem is played every noon.

Formally the documentary is composed of  landscapes and interviews, all of them out of sync, possibly due to the equipment used or maybe the lack of it. The uncanny space created by this displacement, but also by the use of music from radio broadcasts and kids voices, thrown here and there during the movie, gives the work  a peculiar aesthetic tone, a type of non-fiction cinema that I like to call “chaos cinema”. (2)
To explain and understand the “chaotic” trait of Asia is One, and Motoshinkakarannu, we have to delve deeper in the philosophy that laid behind NDU. What the collective has tried to convey through their cinema is extremely fascinating, in their writings (3), mainly published in the magazine Eiga Hihyo, the group was explicitly pushing towards a cinema/activism of anonymity, trying to reach an “impersonal space” and rejecting even the term “work” (sakuhin) because it was seen as the product of a single person in command and as a result of a dominating power structure. In this regard famous was their criticism of Ogawa Production, a collective that bore the name of a single person and that was basically structured hierarchically (4). To this kind of collectivism NDU tried to oppose a more fluid idea of group activism, where the structure was a flat and horizontal one,  and in doing so promoting a cinema made by amateurs (5) and not by professionals. “Everybody can push the button and shoot with a 16mm camera” said Inoue, and this is even more true today since the advent of the digital revolution. Whether this approach was successful or not, and more importantly, whether this horizontal structure and “amateur cinema” is possible at all, are questions without answers that are haunting scholars to this day.
Going back to Asia is One, the part of the movie the resonates more with me is the last one, when the film moves to the Atayal village in Taiwan. There’s a quality in the close-ups of the tribe people, beautiful and ancient faces, that is very fascinating, also because it is in these scenes that the political discourse on identity, or the negation of it, reach its peak. From the 17th Century onward The Atayal people, like the rest of the tribes inhabiting the island,  had to face the colonization of the Dutch, the Spanish, the Chinese and later of the Japanese (1895 – 1945). Calling them “barbarians” the Japanese Empire tried to assimilate and annihilate their culture (6), the words from the tribe people in the movie add layers of complexity to the situation  : “Japan conquered us and abolished many of our ancient traditions and customs”, but at the same time “we were drafted and went to war with pride and ready to die” and “luckily the Japanese abolished some of our ancestral traditions like beheading”.
Asia is One ends with the militaristic song If I Go to Sea against an everyday scene with the aboriginal Taiwanese people isolated in the mountains singing “We want to go to war again.” Of course there is oppression and violence, physical and cultural, in every colonization, but things here are very layered. It seems to me that in this process of cultural and historical coring that the movie conveys, from Okinawa to Taiwan, two very significant points emerge. The first is the crisis of the identity concept, often a forced cultural and national superstructure imposed by the stronger part on a “highly fluid space of human life” (6), as Inoue explained “identity was one of the most hated words inside the NDU, identity is a choking concept”. The second point that struck me is the recurrence of a power and social structure that exploits the margins and the outsiders, in mainland Okinawa the illegal prostitutes and worst jobs are done from people from Miyako island, and in Miyako and other small islands the lower part of society is occupied by Koreans, Taiwanese and aboriginal people.
A final note on the title, the movie as a product of a collective that was thriving towards anonymity, has not film credits, nor it had originally a title, Asia is One was attached to it only later, and it’s a kind of a joke because as Inoue himself said “we all know that Asia is not one!”

notes:

1 Faraway, yet so close by Roland Domenig, in The Legendary Filmmaking Collective NDU and Nunokawa Tetsurō ed. Yasui Yoshio, Tanaka Noriko, Kobe Documentary Film Festival Committee, 2012.

2 This might not be the best way to describe the movie, but aesthetically it reminded me, maybe because of the out of sync, of Imamura Shōhei’s documentaries shot in South East Asia during the 70s.

3 Some of the writings are translated in The Legendary Filmmaking Collective NDU and Nunokawa Tetsurō, op. cit.

4 You can find more in  Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary, Abé Markus Nornes, Visible Evidence 2007.

5 Some interesting insights on amateurism in cinema can be found in The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan, Eric Cazdyn, Duke University Press 2002.

6 In 1930 the village was the site of an anti-Japanese uprising, the so called Musha Incident, an event portrayed in Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale (Wei Te-Sheng, 2011)

7 Nunokawa Tetsurō in YIDFF 2005 Special Program, Borders Within – What it means to live in Japan.

Documentary film festivals in East Asia

Surfing through the internet in search of information and publications about documentary in East Asia, I’ve stumbled upon what seems to be an interesting and original dissertation.”Extending the local: documentary film festivals in East Asia as sites of connection and communication” is a thesis written in 2012 by Cheung Tit Leung at Lingnan University and, as the title suggests, it’s a study about the importance of East Asian documentary film festivals for the development, nurture and distribution of Asian non-fiction cinema, and Asia in general, across the globe. The author focuses his attention on four film festivals in the region, arguably the most important ones, the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (Japan), the Documentary Film Festival China (China), the Taiwan International Documentary Festival (Taiwan) and the Hong Kong’s Chinese Documentary Festival (Hong Kong). 
I’ve read a dozen of pages so far and I have to say that the topic is really fascinating, more than I expected; whether or not you’re into Asian cinema, this thesis is an important piece to the relatively new field of Film Festival studies, but also one that explores the connections between cinema and a region, East Asia, seldom analysed on specialist periodicals or inside academic circles. 

Your can legally download and read the thesis here.

Land of the Dawn 「夜明けの国」(Tokieda Toshie, 1967)

The Chinese Cultural Revolution began 50 years ago, and newspapers, websites, magazines, blogs and books have recently taken the opportunity of this anniversary to write about, discuss and analyse the huge and still controversial historical event that shaped the Asian country and whose ripples were felt all over the world.
In 1966, a group of filmmakers from Japan were allowed to enter the country, or rather, they were lucky enough, almost by chance, to be in China just after the revolution was proclaimed (in August 1966) to film and record, almost without knowing what was happening, the changes brought about by the event. This was something of a “miracle”, as there were no formal diplomatic relations between the two countries at the time. The documentary is by no means a critical view of the revolution, as it was still in its infancy, and also because there were areas the group was not allowed to film, but it works as a visual and unique document of the early period of the revolution. The group spent seven months filming landscapes, factories, cities, farms and people across China, and the resulting documentary was compiled the following year under the title Land of the Dawn 夜明けの国.

The film was directed by Tokieda Toshie, a filmmaker who worked for and was associated with Iwanami Production for over 30 years. Among her extensive filmography, at least worth mentioning is Town Politics-Mothers Who Study 町の政治 – 勉強するおかあさん」 (1957), a depiction of a group of mothers-turned-activists in the town of Kunitachi, Tokyo (the short documentary is part of the films featured in this edition box set).

There’s an interesting interview with Tokieda on the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival website, in which she recalls her experiences of filming in China. The film is also discussed in a chapter of Nakajima Takahirō’s The Chinese Turn in Philosophy (2007):

「The film」opens with a scene showing young Red Guards arriving from throughout China and gathering in Tian’an men Square. In the following scene a train appears with a plate indicating “Wansui Maozhuxi [long live Chairman Mao];” it is an express train traveling from Beijing to Shanhai Guan. The narrator of the film tells us that the young people clustering around Shanhai Guan station are tourists going to see the Great Wall. However, Tsuchiya Masaaki suggests that
these young people teeming around the station are not tourists, but are going to Tian’an men Square to see Mao Zedong.
It must be easy to reach such an understanding if we could comprehend the meaning of August 1966, or at least if we could grasp the meaning of the opening scene of the young Red Guards gathering in Tian’an men Square. However, the film presents the opening scene like a picnic or a school excursion, when they take souvenir photos and write their names in Mao notebooks and exchange them. It is “daily life” in the New China, which is regarded as being similar to daily life in Japan where people enjoy having fun. Following this line, the second scene at Shanghai Guan station is to be understood as showing tourists going to the Great Wall. Likewise, if we go to the third scene, it shows people bathing in the Songhua River in Ha’erbin City. In short, “Country of the Dawn” is edited to make the unusual event of the Cultural Revolution become normal and understandable to a Japanese audience.

This is just an excerpt from a chapter in which the author analyses the documentary in relation to Soseki Natsume’s Travels in Manchuria and Korea (here if you want to read more).
A final note on the availability of the film. In 2008 the movie was released on DVD, together with a book about the Cultural Revolution, it’s in Japanese without English subtitles, but if you’re interested you can buy it here.