Heta village and the surrounding area, together with the people who lived there, are at the center of one of Ogawa Productions’ masterpieces—and the final work the collective shot before relocating to Yamagata—Narita: Heta Village (1973). About two decades ago, when the few remaining inhabitants were relocated, the area became a ghost of its past, a past that is threatened to be erased in the coming years with the further planned expansion of Narita Airport. This will cause the partial submersion of the zone, wiping out hundreds of years of culture, traditions, collective and personal memories, and not least, resistance.
After moving to Yamagata in the mid-1970s and after the death of Ogawa Shinsuke in 1992, the collective left behind a massive quantity of unused audiovisual material and notes—Ogawa also left a huge debt, though that is another story. The Hokusō Regional Materials and Cultural Assets Preservation Network is a volunteer organization established in 2024 to document and preserve the buildings, communities, memories and landscapes that will be lost as a result of the large-scale expansion work currently underway at Narita Airport. One of the areas greatly affected by this expansion is Shibayama Town, where Heta Village was filmed. As part of its activities, in September 2024 the network co-organized Heta Project, a workshop for filmmakers and artists to engage with the material left by Ogawa Pro and create audiovisual works that reflect on the landscape of the area and the memories connected to it.
The results of this workshop were screened at one of the satellite events held in Yamagata on October 13, Sanrizuka: Disappearing Landscapes—The Heta Project Screening. Six short films were presented, and most of the filmmakers were also at the venue to discuss their work.
What I found particularly fascinating was the heterogeneity of the participants—not only in age and nationality, but also in their levels of knowledge about Ogawa Productions, and the history of the area. Some, like Markus Nornes, have been writing and speaking about the documentaries and the resistance of its people for decades; for others, this project served as an entry point to discover the films and to become familiar with the issues affecting the region. The following films were screened:
三里塚ー辺田部落の時間 Sanrizuka—Village Time in Heta Village (Markus Nornes, 2024), 13′.
抵抗のむら The Village of Resistance (Stella Lansill, 2024), 5′.
此処に轟くThis ROAR Here…(Tanabe Yuma, 2024), 9′.
辺田部落へ To Heta Village (Watanuki Takaya, 2024), 10′.
The fact that Ogawa Production’s footage is freely available for artistic and historical purposes is an extraordinary achievement, and it could mark a turning point in the production of archival and compilation films in Japan. As I have already noted in a preliminary study on the subject, this form of cinema is strikingly absent from the Japanese audiovisual landscape—not only within the documentary sphere, but also in the experimental field.
One can only hope that this incredibly rich archive—there is, for instance, a great deal of vibrant color footage of natural elements and animal life, and the very fact that the collective chose not to use it says much about what they were striving for—will finally enter into circulation. Beyond opening new artistic possibilities for filmmakers—Satō Makoto’s Memories of Agano (2004) is a shining example that pointed in this direction already two decades ago, and if I am not mistaken some of his peers are now moving along similar lines—the archive may also function as a living repository of Sanrizuka: its memories, its struggles, its history.
Today I’m posting a translation of my piece on gentō (magic lanterns) and mine protests originally published in 2019 in Italian on Alias (Saturday supplement of Il Manifesto)
In December 1959, Mitsui, one of Japan’s largest zaibatsu, announced the imminent dismissal of 1,278 coal miners in Miike, southern Japan, as part of a restructuring of the nation’s energy policies. The response was massive. Over 1959–60, the workers first formed a new union and then launched a series of strikes and protests—among the largest the country had ever seen.
The protests and uprisings that shook Japan in the late 1960s—against the construction of the Narita Airport, in Okinawa, and in the streets merging with student movements—have been widely documented in both fiction and non-fiction films, as well as in written form. By contrast, labor and resistance movements of the previous decade remain a far less familiar chapter, both in Japan and abroad.
One important exception is perhaps Kamei Fumio’s 1955–56 trilogy on the resistance against the U.S. base at Sunagawa—protests that achieved tangible victories and, on a cinematic level, anticipated the documentary practices of Ogawa Production in later decades.
At the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2019, a satellite event held outside the usual venues on October 12 revisited this earlier period, with special screenings devoted to gentō and the grassroots movements that flourished in the 1950s. The spirit and strategies of resistance against capital and corporate power that emerged on the international stage in the 1960s cannot be fully understood without first recognizing the protests and class alliances forged in the preceding decade.
Gentō—literally “magic lantern”—was a technology that had enjoyed wide popularity in the late 19th century before being displaced by cinema, yet in Japan it experienced a surprising revival during the 1950s. Essentially an early form of the slideshow, gentō projections combined a sequence of still images with live narration and, often, music. This seemingly “obsolete” medium was repurposed by labor collectives, Okinawan anti-occupation activists, students, and citizens engaged in a variety of struggles, since it was cheaper and more accessible than cinema at a time when portable film formats were not yet widespread in the archipelago. These performances thus became a powerful means of circulating experiences of resistance, while also resonating with deep-rooted cultural traditions.
The three gentō screenings shown in Yamagata, introduced and performed by professors Washitani Hani and Toba Koji, evoked the atmosphere of Japanese silent cinema, when more often than not, a benshi live narration would shape the tone and meaning of the film. They also recalled kamishibai, the popular paper-theater storytelling format for children, long familiar across Japan.
Underground Rage, the first piece, dates to 1954—before the major strikes—but already captured the mounting tensions between management and miners. It recounts the “113 Days Without Heroes” of 1953, a protest against layoffs that involved workers and their families. “We are not Mitsui’s slaves!” “The company wants to kill us!”—these slogans framed a furious indictment of exploitation, aiming to forge a class consciousness that reached beyond Miike to farmers and other workers across the archipelago.
The second work, Bloody Battle in Miike: Never Forgive These Atrocities, is perhaps the most emblematic. It documents a massive demonstration in March 1960 outside Mitsui’s offices where not only did the police intervene, but the yakuza were called in to suppress the protest. Photographs show about 200 gangsters from two different syndicates surrounding workers with clubs and other weapons. One even brandishes an axe, believed to have been used in the killing of protester Kubo Kiyoshi, who was brutally murdered on March 29, 1960.
The third work, Unemployment and Rationalization: Never Put Out the Fire of Botayama (1959), examines the looming mine closures and, more broadly, the operating methods of the zaibatsu—the powerful capitalist conglomerates—and their impact on miners’ families, particularly women and children. It depicts homes reduced to shacks without electricity, chronic food shortages, and malnourished children forced to survive on a single meal a day. It is a bleak portrait that echoes across eras and geographies, whenever the capitalist machine consumes the vulnerable and consigns the “expendable” to sacrifice.
The Miike mines would return to the headlines in tragedy in 1963, when an explosion killed nearly 500 people and poisoned thousands, and again in 1997 with another fatal accident that led to their final closure. These gentō shows serve both as invaluable records—produced from within—of a vanished era, and as proof that an “outdated” technology, when adapted to a cause and a moment, can become powerfully expressive, effective, and even modern.
It’s that time of year again: autumn arrives, bringing with it a cascade of film festivals around the globe. Just to name a few of the major ones in Asia, we have Busan and Tokyo, along with the Image ForumFestival, the biggest event dedicated to experimental cinema in Japan. December will also see the debut of the newly established Aichi Nagoya International Animation Film Festival in Nagoya. But I digress.
One of the oldest and most prestigious festivals in Japan is without doubt the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, an event I’ve been attending for more than a decade now (and about which I’ve written various reports and reflections on this very website).
I plan to attend this year’s edition (October 9–16) as well, though life is unpredictable and you never know what might happen in the “real” world. Below are some of the screenings and programs that have caught my eye and that I’m especially looking forward to.
Being a biennial festival, YIDFF is not the place to see world premieres, but rather a chance to catch up with significant films already screened elsewhere or to discover under-the-radar documentaries, often from the Asian continent. This year’s International Competition will showcase Park by So Yo-Hen, which won the Grand Prize at the Taiwan International Documentary Festival last year, and With Hasan in Gaza by Kamal Aljafari, presented at Locarno a couple of months ago. Aljafari will also present his more experimental A Fidai Filmin the program Palestine – Memory of the Land, a work I am eager to revisit on the big screen, this time with more information and conext to help decipher it.
Returning to the competition lineup, Letters to My Dead Parents by Ignacio Agüero weaves together personal stories with the history of the labor movement in Chile, while I Was, I Am, and I Will Be! by Itakura Yoshiyuki promises an exploration of Kamagasaki, a town of day laborers, at a moment when the city was preparing for Expo 2025.
New Asian Currents has usually been the section where I’ve made the most discoveries over my years of attending Yamagata. While many of these came from last-minute decisions or suggestions by friends and fellow critics on site, this time there are a couple of titles I’m especially eager to check out. Collective Dreams Stitched into December by Bappadittya Sarkar—a patchwork of interconnected stories set in the Indian city of Jaipur—promises to satiate my appetite for more documentaries from this vast country. Meanwhile, The Tales of the Tale by Song Cheng-ying and Hu Chin-ya captures the stories and dreams of an old mining town of Houtong in Taiwan.
In Perspective Japan,The Yoshida-ryo Dormitory by Fujikawa Keizō documents the ongoing battle to keep the country’s oldest student dormitory open—a struggle deeply intertwined with the social fabric of the city and the political activism of Japan at large (you can read more here). In the same section, Spring, On the Shores of Aga by Komori Haruka carries a special resonance for me, as it is connected to Satō Makoto, his cinematic legacy and the Agano area.
Every edition of the festival offers audiences a major retrospective, and this year it is Unscripted: The Art of Direct Cinema—32 works spanning five decades of a documentary mode that revolutionized the way non-fiction films are conceived, produced, and filmed. Although I have already seen most of these documentaries – but not all!- this is a perfect opportunity to revisit some “classics” and to gain deeper insights through the accompanying discussions.
Among the peripheral screenings and events, one that stands out is Feb 11, 1990 Rough Cut Screening: The Other Version—four and a half hours of material documenting the very first YIDFF in 1989, footage not included in Iizuka Toshio’s A Movie Capital (1991). For those, like me, fascinated by Sanrizuka, the resistance against the construction of Narita Airport, and the legacy of Ogawa Pro, the special presentation Sanrizuka: Disappearing Landscapes – The Heta Project Screening is not to be missed. Another highlight is the invitation of Voices of the Silenced, this year’s closing film—a reflection on counter-archives and the suppression of minorities in Japan (particularly the Korean minority) by Park Soo-nam and Park Maeui. The documentary screened in Berlin two years ago, but YIDFF lists it as 2025, so I wonder whether the film has been reworked.
All of these films, however, feel like just planets orbiting around the central sun: Palestinian cinema, and Palestine itself—the true core of this year’s festival, even if the number of works is not overwhelming. At least, that is how I perceive it. Palestine, its culture, and the struggle of its people have always held a special place at YIDFF. This year, while the dedicated program Palestine—Memory of the Land features only eight films, additional Palestinian works will appear across other sections, and I expect that conversations at nearly every venue will inevitably turn toward the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.
As it is the case for the Direct Cinema section, I’ve already seen most of the films in the Palestinian program, but here more than ever I’m eager for the post-screening discussions, and for the chance to share on the big screen—together with other viewers—some true masterpieces of political cinema.
The documentary I’d like to highlight in these closing lines is Fertile Memory (1980) by Michel Khleifi. When I first encountered it, the film was a revelation. It reflects a culture and a society oppressed and dispossessed by the Israeli state from the outside, while at the same time telling the story of two women struggling to navigate the shifts and tensions within Palestinian society itself.
What is equally striking is how the film unfolds as a meditation on landscapes: the geographical terrain, where human history and geological time are layered, and the human landscape of faces—faces that reveal emotions, hopes, regrets, and anger. In this sense, the breathtaking images of the Palestinian land, with its warm colors and sinuous contours, both contrast with and converse with the more intimate shots of the two women moving and working inside their homes. Particularly moving are the images of food and its preparation, as well as those moments when one of the protagonists is framed between a door left ajar and the jamb. We should keep the door open and continue to talk and discuss about Palestine, its people and memories.
Death Education (Yuxuan Ethan Wu, 2025) is a well-shot and edited short film about how a group of young people in China think about death. The reflection is, of course, universal and is based on a program created by a high school teacher in which a class of students buries unidentified ashes in a public cemetery on Tomb Sweeping Day. As explained at the end of the short: “Every March, Teacher Qian Jianbo holds a death education class for his students, opening up the conversation about death for the first time”. Though the film is overly stylized in places – the slow motion of the petals scattered on a tomb was unnecessary – it succeeds in creating a somber and meditative mood that envelops the viewer. This is especially evident when images of human ashes, cremation facilities, and graves are combined with soothing music and the voices of the students reading their diary entries.
Keiko Kishi: Eternally Rebellious (Pascal-Alex Vincent, 2023) is an intriguing portrait of a Japanese cinema icon. Through interviews with the actress and film scholars, as well as home movies and clips from her most famous films directed by Ozu, Ichikawa, and Kobayashi, this French production paints a fascinating, albeit partial and incomplete, portrait of Kishi. While the film is not particularly notable for its formal elements, I found it nonetheless interesting for several reasons. For instance, it recounts Kishi’s decision to move to France and marry director Yves Ciampi in 1957 after he filmed her as a protagonist in Typhoon Over Nagasaki. I was also surprised to learn about her involvement with the Ninjin Club, an actors’ agency founded by Kishi, Kuga Yoshiko, and Arima Ineko in 1954, that later became a production company. For two decades, the Ninjin Club produced some of the best and most boundary-pushing films of the time, including the Masaki Kobayashi Human Condition trilogy (1959–1961), Shinoda Masahiro’s Pale Flower (1964), Kinuyo Tanaka’s Love Under the Crucifix (1962), and Kobayashi’s Kwaidan (1964). Kwaidan is now considered a masterpiece, but it was a box-office bomb at the time, causing the company to file for bankruptcy. To pay off the debt, Kishi appeared on many TV programs in both France and Japan in the 1970s. Later in life, she shifted her career completely and started working as a photojournalist, often visiting war zones around the world.
Landscape Hunter (2021) is an experimental documentary commissioned by Chiayi Art Museum, Taiwan, and directed by Liao Hsiu-hui and the Your Bros. Filmmaking Group, a collective responsible for another fascinating experiment in nonfiction, Dorm (2021). The film centers on Fang Ching-mian (also known as Uncle Hsin-kao), an indigenous man of the Bunun people who was a passionate amateur mountain photographer. Seventy years ago, he climbed and took photos of Mount Jade (Yu Shan), the highest mountain in Taiwan, more than a thousand times. Landscape Hunter is structured like a mosaic composed of several overlapping facets: a nonlinear, oblique, and opaque work that interweaves Uncle Hsin-kao’s shots of Yu Shan’s locations; interviews with mountaineers discussing the significance of his endeavors for the discipline; Black-and-white alpine scenery; Bunun words; and reflections on representing and capturing reality, as well as an interrogation of the absence of indigenous peoples in the history of photography.
This absence reminded me of a presentation at the last Niigata International Animation Film Festival in March. A group from the Taichung International Animation Festival concluded their showcase of animated works produced in Taiwan with a question: What is missing from Taiwan’s animation landscape? The answer is the voices of indigenous peoples. While this is also true in the documentary field, the technological revolution brought about by video cameras and DV camcorders gave rise to a wave of indigenous-made works in the last decade of the 20th century. This was the focus of a fascinating program titled Indigenous with a Capital ‘I’ which was presented at the Taiwan International Documentary Festival in 2020. An interrogation of the relation between Photography and indigenous peoples in Taiwan is also at the center of the impressive MATA-The island’s Gaze by Cheng Li-Ming.
The self-reflexive and somewhat obscure qualities of Landscape Hunter can be traced back to the collective’s working methods and the professional backgrounds of its members. Some are video artists, some are architects, some are art history researchers, and some are theater critics. Field research, creative workshops, unforeseen circumstances, and flexible scripts are fundamental to their works and they describe their approach as “filmmaking as a method for reinterpreting reality, endowing it with an aesthetic form, and transforming it into a medium of thinking.”
This is an essay that grew out of two articles I wrote for this site last year. I submitted it for publication, but it was rejected. It is perhaps too vague and unfocused. Hopefully I will return to the subject in the future with more to say. The essay is available in pdf here.
Found Footage Films, Compilation Documentary and Recycled Cinema in Japan: a preliminary study
The practice of making found footage films and compilation documentaries from archival material has been widespread in Europe and the USA for some time, but research into these cinematic practices in Japan often leads to a deafening silence and a dead end. This essay constitutes a preliminary exploration into the development, or absence thereof, of this captivating field in Japan, whilst concurrently highlighting two works produced in the archipelago that can be categorised as archival film practices. The term ‘archival film practices’ is employed here as an umbrella term denoting a constellation formed by found footage documentaries, compilation documentaries, recycle cinema and collage films. The present essay is also intended to stimulate new studies and research on the subject.
In 1947, the French filmmaker Nicole Védrès created Paris 1900, a compilation film comprising footage shot between 1900 and 1914. In 1965, the Italian artists Gianfranco Baruchello and Alberto Grifi experimented with found footage of Hollywood films that were earmarked for destruction in Uncertain Verification; and in 1987, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi reworked the colonialist gaze of footage shot in 1925 into something entirely different in From the Pole to the Equator. These are just some of the most significant examples of compilation or found footage cinema from the last century. The practice of recycling cinema, another term that has emerged within this constellation, has seen a surge in production and quality in recent decades. Technological advances and the availability of archival material have played a significant role in this development, but so too has a willingness to explore the meaning of reassembling images from the past and their impact in the present. A diverse group of filmmakers, including Bill Morrison, Haroun Farocki, Jonas Mekas and Sergej Loznitsa, have extensively explored the possibilities and challenged the limits of archival film practices, resulting in insightful and boundary-pushing works.
The question that arises is: what is the history of these film practices in Japan? A review of the relevant literature suggests that there has been a scarcity of such films, particularly within the documentary and experimental realms, despite these modes of filmmaking being frequently associated with these practices in other regions. Given Japan’s extensive, diverse and heterogeneous history of documentary and experimental cinema, this apparent absence is surprising and warrants further investigation.
There are, of course, exceptions to this, which will be discussed in the second part of this essay, and there are several documentaries made in Japan that do indeed make use of archival footage, especially those dealing with and depicting the Pacific War or the social uprisings of the late 1960s. Daishima Haruhiko’s tetralogy of documentaries (2014-2024) on the Sanrizuka struggle and student movements[1], or Boy Soldiers: The Secret War in Okinawa (2018) by Mikami Chie and Ōya Hanayo are notable examples of this approach, combining interviews, reenactments, newly filmed scenes and narration to create a compelling narrative.
However, these films cannot be included in the cinematic practices discussed here in that they utilise archival material to illustrate a point rather than to provoke a sensation or a reflection on the status of the images.
Alberto Brodesco and Maurizio Cau posit 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, Introduction), and according to Eric Thouvenel, “Found footage films are far more than the “documentation” of an era; there is always a critical statement behind the images. Because these films are a special form of archeology (to use a cur-rent and fashionable term), their significance is not located at the level of the represented event, but with the events occurring within the representation itself.” (2008, 98) Moreover, Bill Nichols, writing about Jay Leyda and his seminal volume on the subject, points out that “the core idea of the compilation film revolves 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, not as they are known'” (2014, 149). Furthermore, the quantity and duration of the material employed is also a pertinent factor: the more archival images or found footage are utilised, the closer the films approach a concept of recycle cinema that engenders novel meanings for the assembled images, “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, 65)
The scarcity of such practices in the archipelago can be attributed, in no small part, to the considerable difficulty and expense of obtaining and using footage, or even stills, from films produced by major Japanese companies. While Japanese Copyright Law does allow for a certain degree of reproduction, the absence of a robust discourse on fair use in the country further exacerbates the issue. However, this cannot be the sole reason, as there are alternatives, such as the use of found footage from home movies and amateur cinema, or other non-commercial sources.
In search for words
To illuminate this subject further, a brief reflection on words and the use, or absence thereof, of specific terminologies in Japanese film studies is necessary. It should be noted that the purpose of this discussion is not to advocate for the superiority of any particular language, whether it be English, French, Italian, or any other, over Japanese. Rather, the objective is to provide an overview of a dynamic and constantly evolving field, one that is open to external influences and is, by its very nature, subject to change and development. It should also be noted that I am not advocating for the absolute correspondence and translatability between languages. Instead, I advocate for the expression of specificities inherent to geographical regions (not necessarily countries) and human groups. The existence of different languages, dialects, political conditions, and cultures gives rise to diverse cinematic expressions and approaches to visual communication.
In Japan, this linguistic peculiarity can be traced back to the early days of cinema and persists to this day. The spectrum of non-fiction films in Japanese has been characterised by a range of terms, including kiroku eiga (record film), senden eiga (propaganda film), bunka eiga (cultural film), and finally, dokyumentarii eiga (Nornes 2003, 2). Bunka eiga continues to be utilised by the prestigious film magazine Kinema Junpo to categorise and award non-fiction films. It is interesting for the discussion to note how the term bunka eiga tends to denote a certain type of non-fiction cinema that deals with historical and, above all, social issues without experimenting too much with cinematic language.
While the absence of a terminology does not necessarily correspond to the absence of a certain way of making cinema, it is interesting to note how the scarcity of certain documentary and experimental practices in the archipelago is reflected in the absence of a terminology, and how these two phenomena are related. As I have previously explained, following the English literature on the subject, I have decided to use the terms archival film practices, found footage documentary and compilation documentary to describe the galaxy of films discussed here. This constellation of terms, in conjunction with recycled cinema and collage film, provides a more comprehensive description of the field under analysis: a set of cinematic practices that utilise found footage and archive images to create works that traverse both the non-fiction and experimental realms.
However, the boundaries between what these practices are and what they are not are often nebulous, and the English terms employed in this field are similarly ambiguous, constituting a less than stable foundation for analysis. Nevertheless, these terms can serve as a point of departure. My research into Japanese terminology reveals a paucity of specific terms, or at least a lack of utilisation. For instance, the English term ‘compilation documentary’ appears to be without an equivalent in Japanese. Instead, the term is more likely to be expressed in phrases such as 映像素材を映画に編集した (edited the footage into a film), or or 映像素材をコラージュした作品 (a work made from a collage of footage), and so on. ‘Recycled cinema’ and ‘collage film’ are definitely two terms that point to a practice more akin to experimental filmmaking. While the former seems to have no equivalent in Japanese, the latter, コラージュ映画 (collage film) or 映像コラージュ (video collage), is a term that has been used in the archipelago for decades[2]. This is probably because the term ‘collage’ came to film studies from and through the visual arts and avant-garde movements of the early 20th century, for instance, Braque and Picasso. The term ‘found-footage documentary’ is even more confusing, since in Japan found-footage horror is a very popular subgenre that often overlaps with mockumentary, and a brief search for ファウンドフッテージドキュメンタリー (found footage documentary) on the Internet resulted in a substantial number of horror films and related works. The only occasion on which the term ファウンドフッテージ was used in a non-fiction context was when the articles were translations of discussions in English. However, a different case can be made for アーカイヴァルドキュメンタリー or アーカイヴァル映画 (archival documentary or archival film). This term appears to have gained currency in recent years in connection with the so-called “archival turn”. This is particularly evident in the films of Sergei Loznitsa, a filmmaker whose works have been screened multiple times in Japanese cinemas and are even available on streaming platforms. It is therefore reasonable to hypothesise that the adoption of this term in Japan may have originated with the diffusion of the Ukrainian auteur’s films. To date, I have found no examples of アーカイブヴァルドキュメンタリー being used to describe a film made in Japan. This is, however, only a preliminary investigation and further research is needed to provide a more comprehensive overview of its usage.
Still from Tokyo Trial
Two compilation documentaries made in Japan
Although there are some examples of collage films and recycled cinema projects in Japanese experimental cinema, often short works derived from installations and primarily produced in the 1960s and early 1970s[3], the focus of this segment is on two longer films that can be categorised as compilation documentaries: A “Toy Film” History of Shōwa: The Second Sino-Japanese War, 1931-1945 (Ōta Yoneo, 2021) and Tokyo Trial (Kobayashi Masaki, 1983). These works are notable for their examination of the Japanese wartime period, encompassing the nation’s military expansion and imperialist endeavours. Each of them offers a distinctive perspective, utilising archival footage to illuminate diverse historical events.
A “Toy Film” History of Shōwa: The Second Sino-Japanese War, 1931-1945 stems from Professor Ōta’s extensive involvement with omocha eiga (toy films), their restoration and preservation[4]. The film begins with intertitles providing the viewer with a definition of toy films: fragments of 35mm theatrical prints created for sale and domestic use, typically projected by hand-cranked toy projectors, and ranging in length from 30 seconds to 3 minutes. These include excerpts from documentaries, propaganda films, newsreels, home movies, and digest versions of theatrical feature films. Ōta, who also served as the film’s writer and editor, assembles these fragments, which were sourced from the collection of the Toy Film Museum, to offer a distinctive viewpoint on a calamitous era in Japanese history, 1931 to 1945, interweaving images from animated propaganda films, “the funeral of Emperor Taishō (Yoshihito, reigned 1912-1926), the enthronement of Emperor Shōwa (Hirohito, reigned 1926-1989), military training drills and field exercises, battlefield scenes in China, and home movie footage of the daily life of Manchukuo’s Japanese colonists.” (Bernardi 2023)
The structure of the film is didactic and content-oriented, with maps, historical dates and explanatory intertitles contextualising the moving images which are essentially militaristic if not propagandistic in nature. By chronologically linking and combining these images, the project is thus, as stated through the intertitles in the opening minutes, an attempt to bring to light a different historical truth and a deeper understanding of a crucial period in the history of the Far East. The music that accompanies the film varies from screening to screening, but the two versions I was able to see[5] were both accompanied by live piano music. This choice lends the entire project a certain sense of “silent film rediscovered”, instilling it with a classical tone and drawing attention to the film’s museum origins and the profession of its creator.
It is also noteworthy that the fragments were selected, restored and digitised by Ōta and his collaborators using the material available at the Toy Film Museum. Consequently, the film is composed entirely of images produced from a Japanese perspective, thus offering a single and one-sided point of view, an observation that was raised during the post-screening Q&A at the Lenfest Center in New York in 2023 (Ipek 2023). While acknowledging that images captured by the colonised would have provided a compelling counterpoint, it is important to recognise that one of the objectives of the project is to showcase the Japanese military propaganda apparatus in operation during the era, in all its might and ramifications, and that a counterbalance to the images is already provided by the addition of explanatory intertitles and maps, inclusions that reveal the real goals of the imperialist state.
Moreover, and more importantly, there is always an excess of meaning inherent in the images that goes beyond the original intent, and there is always the possibility of new meanings emerging from interweaving such diverse visual material within one single work. “The dilemma of images, their resistance to reuse, or, on the contrary, their openness to take on new meanings, remains something unfathomable.” (Bertozzi 2012, Chapter 5) A “Toy Film” History of Shōwa: The Second Sino-Japanese War, 1931-1945 does not represent an overt endeavour to reflect on the status of images and to question the mode of appearance of the ‘real’, but rather a reflection on history through images. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition and combination of images of such divergent styles and textures can also work on the viewer on a more purely aesthetic and perceptual level, raising new questions and pointing to new possible configurations of the past. This is especially true in the animated fragments of propaganda and home movies, where the complexity and richness of the act of representing the ‘real’ is fully revealed.
Tokyo Trial is a 1983 documentary compilation film directed by Kobayashi Masaki, one of the giants of the so-called golden era of classical Japanese cinema[6]. The film runs for a duration of over four and a half hours and was edited over a period of five years from nearly 100 hours of footage acquired from the US Department of Defense, material released 25 years after the conclusion of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (29 April 1946 – 12 December 1948).
The documentary is narrated by the renowned actor Satō Kei and begins with scenes from the Potsdam Conference, followed by archival footage of the Pacific War. It then transitions to Emperor Shōwa’s Imperial Rescript of Surrender on 15 August 1945 and to footage of the rise and fall of Nazi Germany under Hitler. It is not until approximately the 40-minute mark that the film moves to the Tokyo courtroom and the ‘parade’ of war criminals, including Ōkawa Shūmei, a Class A war criminal and nationalist, in one of the most memorable scenes in the entire film, a behaviour which made headlines around the world at the time of the trial. This scene is shown twice: once from a distance at normal speed, and once again in slow motion from a frontal and close angle, showing Ōkawa hitting Tōjō Hideki, the former Prime Minister of Japan, on the head.
Another powerful scene portrays the controversial speech delivered by lawyer Benjamin Bruce Blakeney as a defence, asserting: “If the killing of Admiral Kidd by the bombing of Pearl Harbor is murder, we know the name of the very man who[se] hands loosed the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, we know the chief of staff who planned the act, we know the chief of the responsible state. Is murder on their consciences? We may well doubt it. We may well doubt it, and not because the event of armed conflict has declared their cause just and their enemies unjust, but because the act is not murder. Show us the charge, produce the proof of the killing contrary to the laws and customs of war, name the man whose hand dealt the blow, produce the responsible superior who planned, ordered, permitted or acquiesced in this act, and you have brought a criminal to the bar of justice.” The act of presenting the scene on screen, more than three decades after the event and in a new and evolving geopolitical context, approaches what scholar Marco Bertozzi defines as “the degree zero of archive reuse, an epistemic purity that leaves its mark: sometimes presenting a film (or a series of rediscovered sequences) as it is can be an artistically disruptive gesture that goes far beyond the arrangement of re-edited fragments.” (2012, Chapter 2)
However, Kobayashi also employs the power of editing on multiple occasions, such as when he presents images of the Nanjing Massacre, described as “a revelation of the inhumanity that had put down deep roots and being nurtured within the organization of the Japanese military, (…) a cross that the Japanese people must bear forever”, followed by images of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is a choice that can be criticised as expressing Japanese collective victimhood in the context of the Second World War, but which is more likely, in Kobayashi’s mind, an editing decision that underscores his humanist perspective and the collective tragedy experienced by ordinary people affected by war, irrespective of their nationality.
The documentary ends with the death sentences of seven of the war criminals, who were executed on 23 December 1948, a month after the verdicts were announced. The film then presents a parade celebrating President Truman’s re-election, while concurrently adding subtitles that detail various wars and conflicts that took place globally following the Second World War, including the Korean War in 1950. The film concludes with the poignant image of Phan Thi Kim Phuc (the so-called “Napalm Girl”) fleeing an air raid during the Vietnam War.
Conclusion
In this article, I have attempted to trace a concise cartography of archival film practices, or the absence thereof, in the Japanese archipelago. A study that aspires to stimulate further interest in a field that has yet to be explored. I have briefly focused on the terminology associated with the field, and attempted to suggest reasons for the alleged scarcity of recycled cinema, compilation documentaries and found footage film production in Japan.
In the second part of the article, I have examined two significant ‘exceptions’; that is, two works that embody, albeit differently, the idea of archival film practices in Japanese cinema: A ‘Toy Film’ History of Shōwa: The Second Sino-Japanese War, 1931-1945 and Tokyo Trial. These are compilation documentaries that explore and reconsider Japan’s wartime and imperial past through the use and combination of diverse and varied archival footage. While not overtly experimental, both works illustrate the potential of archival film practices to resonate with contemporary times, thereby generating novel and evolving constellations between the past (the rediscovered images) and the present (the time when the compilation work is assembled and viewed).
References:
Bernardi, Joanne Notes on A ‘Toy Film’ History of Shōwa: The Second Sino-Japanese War, 1931-1945, unpublished, 2023.
Brodesco, Alberto and Cau Maurizio, ed. Found footage. Il cinema, i media, l’archivio. Cinema e Storia. Rivista di studi interdisciplinari n. 2023, Rubbettino, 2023.
Leyda, Jay Films Beget Films: A Study of the Compilation Film, Hill and Wang, 1971.
Nichols, Bill Remaking History: Jay Leyda and the Compilation Film, Film History
Vol. 26, No. 4, Indiana University Press, 2014.
Russel, Catherine Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices, Duke University Press, 2018.
Thouvenel, Eric How “Found Footage” Films Made Me Think Twice about Film History, in Cinéma & Cie, Milano University Press, 2008.
Nornes, Markus Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era Through Hiroshima, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
[1] They are: The Wages of Resistance: Narita Stories (2014) co-directed with Ōtsu Kōshirō, The Fall of Icarus: Narita Stories (2017), Whiplash of the Dead (2021), and Gewalto no mori – kare wa Waseda de shinda (2024).
[2] The 1998 edition of the Image Forum Festival presented a programme called FAKE THE TIME, which was dedicated to collage films – コラージュ映画 in the original title – shot on video or 16mm by artists such as Johan Grimonprez, Jay Rosenblatt or Martin Arnold. Kitakōji Takashi, Korāju eiga ― sono kanōsei no tansaku Imēji Fōramu Fesutibaru 1998 “tokushū FAKE THE TIME” https://artscape.jp/museum/nmp/nmp_j/review/0701/movie0701.html (retrieved 23 February 2025)
[3] For instance, On Eye Rape (Iimura Takahiko, Nakanishi Natsuyuki, 1962), Gewaltopia Trailer (Jōnouchi Motoharu, 1968), and Jointed Film (Imai Norio, 1972). I am indebted to Julian Ross for his invaluable input on this matter.
[4] Ōta Yoneo is a Professor of Art, Archivist, Curator, and director of the Toy Film Museum in Kyoto: https://toyfilm-museum.jp/ (retrieved 23 February 2025)
[5] I saw the pilot, about thirty minutes long, during the online edition of the Kyoto Historica International Film Festival in 2022. The screener of what can be considered the final version (97′) was shared with me by Ōta and Joanne Bernardi, Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Rochester, who also provided the English translation of the film’s intertitles. The screener is a recording of a live screening presented at the Columbia’s Lenfest Center for the Arts, New York, on September 17, 2023. I am deeply indebted to both Professor Ōta and Professor Bernardi for their invaluable help and their kindness.
[6]Tokyo Trial is a film that stands in dialogue with the late careers of some of Kobayashi’s contemporaries, such as Kurosawa Akira and Kinoshita Keisuke, who also reflected on Japan’s past and its involvement in the Pacific War through their films released in the 1980s and 1990s. Significantly, in 1983 Kinoshita released Children of Nagasaki, a film that focused on the tragedy that befell the city and its inhabitants on 9 August 1945.
Fukushima with Béla Tarr documents a two-week workshop held by the Hungarian filmmaker in February 2024 in the Japanese area hit by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. The documentary is directed by Oda Kaori, who studied with Tarr at film.factory, his film school in Sarajevo, more than a decade ago, a period that led to Oda’s debut film Aragane (2015).
I found Fukushima with Béla Tarr fascinating on so many levels, not least the director’s abrasive personality, which – as some reviewers have pointed out – at first seems almost like a caricature of the artistic persona he has developed over the years. What also struck me was his varied interactions with each filmmaker; there is a sense, at least from what we can gather from the documentary, that he likes some of the participants’ approach to filming more than others. Tarr’s comments, suggestions and conversations with the filmmakers also reveal how he sees cinema and the filmmaking process, at least in the limited conditions of the workshop: only two weeks, no familiarity with the area and the language for many of the participants. Perhaps it’s because of the limited time available that Tarr pushes everyone, sometimes almost aggressively, to visualise the ideas they have in mind in images, rather than just talking about them or explaining the context of what’s happening. Some of the most interesting technical tips he gives the workshop participants are also prime examples of his idea of cinema, such as holding a shot longer than one would normally do, it’s always possible to shorten it later, or how paying attention to the interplay of light and darkness enhances the visual impact and the meanings conveyed by the work.
The best quality of the documentary, in my opinion, is the time it spends and stays with the group of people involved in the workshop, allowing the camera to capture the distinctive personality of each filmmaker and how each of their projects progresses, or in some cases crumbles, towards the deadline. It is this familiarity with the subjects that makes the work more organic and meaningful as it unfolds, and leads the viewer to care about, or at least become more familiar with, all the people involved, not just the filmmakers and Tarr, but also the interpreters, drivers and ordinary people filmed here. All this takes place against the backdrop of the lives of the people of Fukushima affected by the triple disaster, the subject of the works produced in the workshop, of which we, the viewers, get only a glimpse. Among the most fascinating of these stories is that of a kamishibai performed by two women in an abandoned cow shed, now in ruins, and told from the animals’ point of view (Tale of Cows directed by Fukunaga Takeshi).
On a technical level, Oda’s decision to use mostly static shots with very little camera movement is very effective in creating a restrained cinematic space centred around the people portrayed and their interactions. But perhaps the Japanese filmmaker’s greatest effort, as is often the case with this type of documentary, was in the editing room, deciding what to include, how to include it, how to structure it, and what to leave on the cutting room floor.
The short films made by the 7 filmmakers have been compiled into an omnibus film, Letters From Fukushima. Below is the description of each short film (from the Tokyo International Film Festival’s webpage):
“Nappo” After 13 years of silence, the instruments are played again. Nappo gathers Fukushima children at Odaka Church. Singing and dancing, they breathe new life into the land. Director: Lin Po-Yu 2024/Color/9min/Japanese
“Wall” A man from Namie Town had to relocate his landscaping business after the disaster. One day, he begins working on a garden in the office, which has been untouched. Director: Ooura Miran 2024/Color/28min/Japanese
“Long Long Hair” In a Fukushima hair salon, daily interactions unveil personal stories, resilience, and the beauty of life after the Great East Japan Earthquake and the nuclear accident. Director: Iizuka Minami 2024/Color/23min/Japanese
“From F” Fukushima, Family, Female, and Future. A story about various Fs, starring 17-year-old-girl who wants to be a dancer while attending an evening school in Fukushima. Director: Shimizu Shumpei 2024/Color/10min/Japanese
“Letters from Fukushima” “Woman, Life, Freedom” is a social movement seeking gender equality. Through three scenes of Fukushima, the film honors the women who gave their lives for dignity. Director: Roya Eshraghi 2024/Color/27min/Japanese, Persian
“The Guests” After a nuclear radiation leak at the Fukushima power plant in 2011, a group of Southeast Asian auto mechanics is dispatched to work in this land… Director: Xu Zhien 2024/Color/28min/Filipino, Japanese
“Tale of Cows” Two women who survived the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake, perform a Kamishibai picturebook about the abandoned cows during the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident. Director: Fukunaga Takeshi 2024/Color/29min/Japanese
This is the fourth and final dispatch from this year’s Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions. You can read the first three here, here, and here.
Founded in 2009, this year’s edition of the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions is dedicated to exploring the possibilities and problems posed by the changing nature of moving images in our time. Titled Docs: Images and Records, the event, currently taking place at the Tokyo Photography Art Museum, features a variety of works (films, installations, photography, performances and talks) that reflect on the meaning of representation through the visual medium and, in particular, question the meaning of the word ‘documentary’, a term that has become increasingly ossified (both on the big and small screen) and synonymous with the word ‘factual’. Or, as stated on the web page of the festival:
A document is a record of fact-based information, traditionally in the form of words but more recently also as images such as photographs and moving images. The word “documentary,” meanwhile, has come to be used not only as an adjective meaning “factual” or “consisting of documents,” but also as a noun referring to a film expressing facts.
The Lumière brothers’ Exiting the Factory (1895), which is a record of people leaving a factory, is widely recognized as the starting point of the history of motion pictures. People at the time were astonished to see scenes from their everyday lives being recorded and replayed before their eyes as if the events were actually happening right there. Today, 130 years after the invention of moving images, it is entirely unexceptional for people to record and share their daily lives through photographs and videos. Meanwhile, the definition of a photograph has been expanded to include digital images and that of moving images now encompasses digital video; in digital form, these media can be manipulated more freely than before, resulting in a more complex and ambiguous relationship between facts and the images that represent them. Held on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2025 will focus on the transformation of these media. By examining a wide range of works through the lens of images and words, the festival will pursue a reconsideration of documents and documentary.
One of the four works commissioned by the festival this year is Spring, On the Shores of Aga (春、阿賀の岸辺にて, 2025) by Komori Haruka, a filmmaker I was familiar with through two of her previous works, Under the Wave, On the Ground (波のした、土のうえ, 2014) and Double Layered Town / Making a Song to Replace Our Positions 二重のまち／交代地のうたを編む (2019), both co-written with Seo Natsumi. While I couldn’t really connect with the latter, the former is a fascinating look at a specific and distinctive time and place in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami of 11 March 2011, a glimpse into people’s lives during the period of slow reconstruction when mainstream media attention is fading. What is captured on screen is the slow rebuilding of an area flattened by the ocean, but also the rebuilding of the lives of the survivors and their coping with the sense of guilt towards the dead, expressed here through a landscape cinema approach and the voices and memories of the people.
Another tragedy, and the people affected by it, is the subject of Spring, On the Shores of Aga, a tragedy of a very different kind that has almost silently struck the area along the Agano River in Niigata Prefecture over the decades. Niigata Minamata Disease occurred around 1964, during a period of rapid economic growth in the archipelago, when the Showa Electrical Company’s chemical plant in Kanose released large quantities of methylmercury into the Agano River, poisoning the food chain and contaminating the fish eaten by the people living in the villages in the region.
The lives of those affected by the disease were famously captured and depicted in Satō Makoto’s debut, Living on the River Agano (阿賀に生きる, 1992) and in part in the subsequent Memories of Agano (阿賀の記憶, 2005). I have written extensively about Satō and his documentaries, so this new film by Komori is particularly fascinating to me, not only because it focuses on Hatano Hideto, the head of the Niigata Minamata Disease Support Group in Yasuda, and his struggles and commitment to helping the victims for almost five decades, but also because it is partly a reflection on how Living on the River Agano has now become part of the fabric and memories of the area.
In fact, Hatano was one of the driving forces behind Satō’s debut, and over the years has been very vocal about keeping the focus on the victims of the disease and their struggles alive, even after they have passed away. Hatano still screens Living on the River Agano every year on 4 May, when he holds a memorial service called “On the Shores of Aga” to commemorate the victims of the disease and those who have worked to alleviate their plight over the years. This event is part of the activities that, as we learn from the film, he has been leading for decades, a kind of cultural movement called Meido no miyage (a final wish, something someone wants to do before dying).
Komori became interested in the Agano River and Hatano’s activities after seeing Living on the River Agano more than a decade ago, and in 2022 she decided to move to the area to film the man. While the central subject of the documentary is undoubtedly Hatano and his efforts and struggles to commemorate and memorialise the events that have shaped the Agano basin over the past sixty years, I felt that the core of the film was the sense of community forged between the very few victims still alive, their relatives and descendants, the people who have fought for their recognition, and those victims – the majority, including those depicted in Satō’s films – who are no longer of this world. This is what struck me most: how the relationship between people directly or indirectly affected by the disease does not end when someone dies, but continues to be part of an ecosystem of mourning and remembrance, made possible also by the role played by Satō’s documentaries.
The film was screened in the museum’s theatre on the day I visited, but it is currently being shown as an installation until 23 March.
As usual, the list below reflects my tastes, interests and viewing habits during the year. Some works are from 2023, but only became available here in Japan in 2024. Synopses, in italics, are from Letterboxd. Films are listed in no particular order:
Dahomey(Mati Diop) Thousands of royal artifacts of Dahomey, a West African kingdom, were taken by French colonists in the 19th century for collection and display in Paris. Centuries later, a fraction returned to their home in modern-day Benin. This dramatized documentary follows the journey of 26 of the treasures as told by cultural art historians, embattled university students, and one of the repatriated statues himself. Dahomey is a mesmerising experiment, both visually and thematically: it poses so many questions about decolonisation, essentialism, the traces in the present left by the actions in the past, language, art, religious practices, politics, and the life of objects (Object Oriented Onthology?), while hinting at possible lines of flight…Diop has an incredible talent in capturing the beauty of people and things, and blend them together… “I am the face of the metamorphosis”
Knit’s Island (Ekiem Barbier, Guilhem Causse, Quentin L’helgoualc’h) Somewhere on the internet is a land where communities pretend to live out a survivalist fiction. The avatars of the directors of Knit’s Island spent 963 hours there, creating a fascinating film resulting from their encounter with these communities. The “players” reveal their fears and fantasies, in an at times unsettling blurring of the real and the virtual. I am not a gamer, and not particularly interested in online videogames, but when I first saw it at the Niigata International Animation Film Festival, it blew my mind. The reality of the virtual, complex, subtle, and much much more.
No Other Land (Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal) Made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective, this documentary shows the destruction of the West Bank’s Masafer Yatta by Israeli authorities and the unlikely friendship that blossoms between Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham.
The Voices Of The Silenced (Park Maeui, Pak Su-nam) Director Park Soo-nam, a second-generation Korean resident in Japan who is losing his eyesight, decides to digitally restore 16mm film she shot a long time ago, relying on her daughter Park Ma-eui’s eyesight. The blood, tears, and numerous corpses of Koreans living in Japan are clearly engraved in the film filmed over 50 years.
Hiroshima – Nagasaki (Ikezoe Shun) Voices from Tsuyoshi Yamaguchi, who was twice exposed to the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and later became a storyteller, as well as those who continue the storyteller activities with his daughters, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and other people who were twice exposed to the atomic bombs. How will a storyteller who was not involved in the story pass on the memories in the future?
Clouds of War (Mikami Chie) This is the latest documentary by journalist and filmmaker Mikami Chie, a director whose previous works (The Targeted Village, Boy Soldiers: the Secret War in Okinawa, We Shall Overcome) have focused on the current situation in the Ryūkyū archipelago (Okinawa), its complex geopolitical history and the resistance of its people against the various American bases operating on the islands. Filmed over the course of eight years, beginning in 2015, Clouds of War documents the construction of military harbours and ammunition depots by the Japanese Self-Defence Forces, and more broadly, the general militarisation of the main island of Okinawa, Yonaguni, Miyako and Ishigaki. These frightening changes affecting the land and its citizens, such as the construction of underground shelters in Yoneguni or a plan to evacuate the inhabitants to Kyūshū, are being done in preparation for the next war on the horizon, the one between China and Taiwan.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’État (Johan Grimonprez) In 1960, United Nations: the Global South ignites a political earthquake, musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash the Security Council, Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe denouncing America’s color bar, while the U.S. dispatches jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to the Congo to deflect attention from its first African post-colonial coup.
The Oasis I Deserve (Inès Sieulle) Replika is a public platform that allows anyone to create a relationship with a chatbot trained by artificial intelligence. This chatbot has been designed to replace us with our loved ones after our death. Thus, its goal is to learn as much as possible about us in order to reproduce us identically. Through a walk that takes place only from the subjective point of view of Replikas, we see them evolve and discover the images & sounds of the world around them through a system of videos generated by artificial intelligence. Phone conversations that Replikas have with users fill the narration. The Oasis I Deserve is not a film that questions the system of machine/human domination under the axis of a future war against the machine. It is a film that is mainly human. It speaks about our relationship to the unknown and how we share violence. (source). I was really impressed by the subject tackled and by the way the images, Francis Bacon like, are able to convey the themes and the feelings explored .
Black Box Diaries (Itō Shiori) Journalist Shiori Itō embarks on a courageous investigation of her own sexual assault in an improbable attempt to prosecute her high-profile offender. Her quest becomes a landmark case in Japan, exposing the country’s outdated judicial and societal systems. A powerful example of how women can reclaim their agency through the visual medium.
Underground (Oda Kaori) The latest work by the Japanese artist, I have written about it, here: Sculpting space with light.
Discoveries:
Mother of Many Children (Alanis Obomsawin, 1977) This film is an album of Native womanhood, portraying a proud matriarchal society that for centuries has been pressured to adopt different standards and customs. All of the women featured share a belief in the importance of tradition as a source of strength in the face of change. Obomasawin’s first feature-length documentary is also one of her best (along with Kanehsatake and Restigouche, in my opinion): insightful, touching, multi-layered and beautifully constructed.
Echigo Okumiomote: A Traditional Mountain Village (Himeda Tadayoshi, 1984) I wrote an article about the film: here.
A Grasscutter’s Tale (Fukuda Katsuhiko, 1985) Part of the Sanrizuka notes that Fukuda took after he left Ogawa Pro in the late 1970s and the group moved to Yamagata, A Grasscutter’s Tale is a crucial film in the history and development of documentary practices in Japan. It occupies two spaces at once: a militant cinema and a cinema that explores the waves of history through the personal; in other words, it’s an oral film that uses images to explore the physical and historical space of a place. Fukuda experiments with style and form, for example: one segment about a dream is completely dark except for a bright light in the top left corner of the screen, and in another, the narration explains, again on a black screen, how the re-enactment of an episode from the old lady’s life was scrapped at the request of her son, who was in it. The episodic structure of the film, which is made up of 19 chapters (some comic, some tragic) that explore episodes in the life of the protagonist, does not capture a totality, but provides an image that leaves room for the creation of meanings. This is also reflected in the visual style used, where images and words are parallel and do not touch each other, so to speak. I was lucky enough to attend a screening of the documentary in 16mm, the greens of the crops and grass are almost tactile, and the time-lapse scene of the setting sun, here a fiery red, is similar to that used in Magino Village: A Tale.
addendum (January 5, 2024): I forgot Tokyo Trial (Kobayashi Masaki, 1983), one of the fews examples of found footage/compilation documentary in the history of Japanese cinema.
warning: this article includes suicide-related content
Throughout our lives, we have been constantly reminded that we would transform into butterflies as we become adults. We were led to believe that adolescence was merely a pupal stage, where all our dreams and hopes would take flight upon metamorphosis. However, my friends and I didn’t quite experience that butterfly-like transformation. Instead, we found ourselves undergoing a different kind of growth, akin to a dragonfly that, unlike the complete metamorphosis of a butterfly, only changes in size as it matures. Hong Daye
I’m usually not a fan of personal documentaries, although I’ve often written about this “mode” of non-fiction, especially in regard to the Japanese documentary landscape (e.g. here). That being said, occasionally there are exceptions that grab my attention, Saving a Dragonfly by South Korean director Hong Daye is one of these. I missed it last year when it was screened at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, but thanks to the Taiwan IDF: 2024 on Tour, I had the chance to catch up with it.
The film is a visual diary of sorts, filmed by director Hong over six years, from her last years in high school, to her time in college, depicting her struggles, and those of her friends, in trying to navigate life in a society, South Korea, where entrance tests, and the college admission system, are treated as a matter of life and death. As far as I know, South Korea and Japan are the only two countries where the obsession for tests and entrance exams, originally a device used to solve the problem of huge classes in the postwar period, at least in the archipelago, is an integral part of what society demands from young people. This obsession ends up shaping the lives of the young generations and their families, from the time spent studying at night at cram schools almost daily, to the financial burden these schools often represent for the students’ families, resulting in debts, extra jobs, and occupation changes.
The documentary shows very clearly how this pressure, and the consequent fear of failure and judgment, is internalized by the young girls, pushing them, in the most extreme cases, towards attempts to commit suicide. The matter-of-fact tone in which some of the high school girls talk about the feeling of being worthless and abandoned after failing the CSAT (College Scholastic Ability Test), is spine-chilling. As the director comments in the film, in the final years at high school, the lives of the girls feel like a chrysalis to be crushed and consumed in order to become a dragonfly, the life after high school. However, oftentimes from this chrysalis no dragonfly is born, and young lives are sadly lost, hence the title.
Death and the shadow of suicide, of friends and of the director herself, permeate the whole film, and I don’t think it’s only a consequence of the Korean school system, while the pressure is undoubtedly there. At one point in the film, Hong confesses that she tried to cut her wrists a couple of times—towards the end we even see the cuts on her arm—feeling insecure, almost an act to “confirm her own worth”, this happened even once she finally entered university after retaking the exam.
While the first part of the documentary is composed of shots taken in 2014, during the last year of high school and just before the CSAT, the second half depicts the life of the director and her friends in university from 2016 to 2020. In this section there are more and longer descriptions of her own attempts to take her life, never overly dramatized, one of the qualities of the documentary. The gloomy feeling of not belonging is thus still there, even when the world outside moves on, for instance, we see briefly on screen protests on the streets, probably those of the so-called Candlelight Demonstrations (2016-2017), alternated with images of Hong and her friends curled up on a sofa. A hint of communality and purpose, on the one hand, solitude and aimlessness, on the other. In this part, the documentary is more an exploration of the existential crises the director went through at that stage of her life: the difficulties in connecting with her friends, and more broadly finding a way in life. Yet, at the core of it, at least this is my reading, there’s still that sense of failure and not living up to expectations instigated by the school system.
One of the most heartwrenching scenes in the film is when Hong and her parents recollect her suicide attempt on a bridge, the three of them are in a car and at one point her mother bursts into tears—we cannot see her face, the camera is on the back seat with the director. For a brief moment we have a glimpse of her relationship with her parents and of their feelings towards their daughter. The use of a moving car to elicit confessions or straightforward talk between people seems to be a tendency in the world of non-fiction, I’ve seen at least a couple of documentaries recently that employ this narrative device.
Saving a Dragonfly ends with some of her friends, now in their mid twenties, being interviewed by Hong, remembering and reflecting about their young years and the filming process they were part of, including sorrowful remembrance of a friend who took her life. This for me was probably the weaker segment of the film, I much preferred the spontaneity and directness of the images and sounds that came before, to the reflection a posteriori of what happened and was filmed five years prior. In this regard, the aesthetics of the film reflect this difference: while the images of the parts filmed in high school, compared to the more polished ones shot at the time of college and after, might be, and indeed are, more “amateurish” and shaky, they are nonetheless more powerful and affective in their rawness. What particularly works here are the several moments of poetic truth scattered throughout the film, never overblown, and always expressed as a matter-of-fact, also through a lean editing. One that, for me, summarizes the documentary particularly well is this exchange between the director and a friend, on images of the blue sky over the city:
A recent rewatch of 三里塚 辺田部落 Sanrizuka – Heta Village prompted me to reflect on, and reconsider two of the most significant scenes in the documentary. I’m referring to the short one with the snake crawling through the grass and Ogawa reflecting on the changing situation in the village, and the one, much longer, when the two young men from Heta are taken by plain-clothes police officers. It goes without saying that everything I’m writing here is built upon, and would not be possible without, the writings of Markus Nornes; his volume on Ogawa Production was the starting point of this site, and what kindled my interest in the collective.
I’ve uploaded both scenes on YouTube, hopefully they will not be taken down.
The snake here is seen as a symbol of transformation and rebirth, Ogawa himself is commenting that, I’m paraphrasing, the resistance and battles in Sanrizuka caused the reappearance and the strengthening of old folklore practices and rites, but also the creation of new collective practices, such as the Women Alliance, and the Youth Alliance. He repeatedly mentions the concept of kō (講); following Joan Mellen “at the base of their movement is the revitalization of the concept of the kō, or group meeting, a theme that lies at the heart of Heta Village. The kō began as a Buddhist prayer meeting and later developed many forms, including that of the town meeting. (…) The kō is a historical means among Japanese peasants of uniting people horizontally, rather than vertically by rank. Ogawa shows how this ancient communal tradition provides the backbone to the Sanrizuka movement, sustaining it by drawing on established, familiar, and revered patterns of social organization” (Mellen, 1976)
I’ve always found this section, part of a longer take, beautiful and revealing: two young men from the village are taken away by the police. The camera stops, a group of farmers keep following the cars, sometimes kicking them. The wind blows through the rice fields. The camera now gently pans 180 degrees towards two ladies talking, one of them is the mother of one of the boys taken away, and grandpa Tonojita, one of the central figures in Heta and the protagonist of the awe-inspiring long opening scene, praises her son. As the long take continues, the camera slowly pans back to the cars moving, we see them going out of the frame in distance, while the drum cans signal their passage. The almost-tribal beating sound and the accompanying voice shouting, through a megaphone, what the police is doing to the village, are also perceived far away and fading.
I read this long passage as a cartography of sorts of what was happening in Heta village at the time: the hamlet, shaken by recent events (the death of young Sannomiya, and the police spreading division and discord among the farmers), was looking within itself to find a new balance and unity to overcome the crisis. I also read this part of the long take as an embodiment of two of the more significant lines of flight traversing the film: a sense of distance from the action and the battles, but at the same time an extreme proximity to the core of the struggle and its motivations, achieved by turning the gaze towards the lives and histories of the villagers.
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