A couple of interesting documentaries I’ve watched recently, besides those I saw at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival.
Shot in four years, 越後奥三面 山に生かされた日々 Echigo Okumiomote: A Traditional Mountain Village (1984) follows the everyday life of Okumiomote, a mountain village in Niigata prefecture, near the border with Yamagata prefecture. The village, its inhabitants, the mountains, the forest and the rivers, form a fascinating ecosystem and microcosm of a life (1980-1984) dependent upon and regulated by natural elements and the cycle of seasons. This lifestyle and the specific traditions, customs and habits—performed, changed and improved throughout centuries by the inhabitants—would eventually disappear years after the documentary was filmed, due to the construction of the Okumiomote Dam (the area would be submerged).
The documentary has been recently digitally remastered and screened, together with other works by director and video ethnographer Himeda Tadayoshi, at a special retrospective organized at Athénée Français Culture Center in Tokyo.
While the film opens with one of the villagers talking about the anti-dam movement active since 1971, the entirety of the documentary depicts matter-of-factly the various customs and jobs done in the mountains and in the fields (hunting, gathering, harvesting). Only the last 30 minutes are more a direct reflection on the disappearance of the village, and on the act of documenting its existence and preserving its memory on film. The documentary is narrated, or better, commented, in a very friendly manner, so to speak, by Himeda himself. The presence of the director and his troupe is never hidden, once we even see a special meeting, requested by Himeda himself, when the village’s hunters are strongly opposing the presence of the camera during their upcoming bear-hunting trip. This film pairs very well, thematically but not stylistically, with Haneda Sumiko’s 早池峰の賦 Ode to Mt. Hayachine, filmed almost during the same years in the mountains of Iwate prefecture.
Echigo Okumiomote was accompanied by a publication of a huge volume about the life of the village, an ethnographic study and document of the area (I own it, I might return to the movie and the book in the future). Himeda would return to Okumiomote in 1996 to film a new work, 越後奥三面 第二部 ふるさとは消えたか Echigo Okumiomote dai ni bu furusato wa kieta ka, about the situation after the people of the village were forced to relocate. One of the discoveries of 2023 for me.
Nguyen Quoc Phi was a Vietnamese migrant worker, who on 31 August 2017 was reported for a car theft in Hsinchu County, near Taipei. On the same day, he was shot nine times by police officer Chen Chung-wen. He was left bleeding on the ground, and tragically died on his way to the hospital. A part of the public in Taiwan supported Chen’s use of firearms against the runaway immigrant who resisted arrest.
And Miles to Go Before I Sleep (Tsai Tsung-lung, 2022) is a documentary that asks the viewer uncomfortable questions, first by sketching the situation of immigrant workers in Taiwan (regular and irregular), and then by using images filmed by the body cameras of the policeman who shot Nguyen to death. These are very tough scenes to watch: after being shot, the young man lies down completely naked, slowly dying, with the officers observing and walking around him. It could be said that these scenes are exploitative, but as some viewers have commented, they also could function as a sort of “visual moral report”. I’m not sure I agree with the statement.
While as a document of a shocking and tragic event, the work has its merits, I think it meanders too much from the scene of the death, to others with the family of the deceased or where the conditions of immigrants are explained, losing in the end its focus.
While as an experimental film made of and about things, rocks, textiles, roof tiles, wood, and houses, Kyoto by Ichikawa Kon (1969) is extraordinary, also because of the experimental music by Takemitsu Tōru. As a documentary about Kyoto (or Japan more broadly ), the narration and the film itself are orientalist at best, even if it was written by a Japanese. In this respect, it should be noted that the film was commissioned by the Italian company Olivetti, so there’s the usual “I’m giving you what your image of me is” typical of some cultural products made for export in Japan. Ichikawa’s editing here starts (or perhaps it had already started before) to become almost subliminal. For more extreme examples, see his post Inugami Family’s production.
I watched the version with English and Italian narration. I would need to check out the Japanese version as well to properly assess the film.
Wang Bing’s Youth (Spring) was a fascinating viewing experience, for me also because of the long time it took to be completed: it was shot between 2014-2019 and edited/released in 2023. At the same time, I share some of the doubts expressed in this review, points that are not really about how the work is constructed or filmed, but more about the very meaning of the project itself (it’s only the first installment of a trilogy, apparently).
Sometimes the documentary felt like a Big Brother shot in a factory, that is to say, very performative in some of its parts. In the age of YouTube and tik-tok the young generations know very well how to behave when a camera is in front of them, thus, even though it goes against Wang Bing’s style, a certain dialogue with the camera (I’m sure there was, but was cut) would have made the documentary more “authentic”, so to speak. After watching the film, I had the distinct feeling that something was missing and had been cut out.
Having been filmed almost 10 years ago and for 5 years, I also would have liked to see the year of filming for each segment.
In 1979, after the Formosa Incident, Taiwanese politician Hsu Hsin-liang was forced to leave the country for his opposition to the ruling party, the Kuomintang (KMT), he would spend the following ten years in exile in the US. In 1986, after the first opposition party in Taiwan, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), was created, and while the campaign for the upcoming election was getting to the heart, Hsu tried to return to Taiwan, flying back to his country via Japan. On November 30th 1986, thousands of supporters gathered at Taoyuan Airport to welcome back the politician. Not only was Hsu not allowed to repatriate, but the central government sent a large number of police and military personnel to the airport, attacking his supporters with water cannons and tear gas. The three national and pro-government television stations used the images of the clashes to craft a narrative in which the supporters were depicted as a violent mob attacking the police. A completely different narrative emerged from a series of videos that were shot on the ground, in the midst of the clashes, by a group of DPP supporters and activists. Images that clearly showed how it was the police that provoked and attacked the people, and not vice versa. These videos were edited together to create The Taoyuan Airport Incident (1986), the first documentary made by the Green Team, a group active between 1986 and 1990 in Taiwan. The collective was originally formed by “Mazi” Wang Zhizhang, Li Sanchong and Fu Dao, and later added members such as Lin Xinyi, Zheng Wentang, and Lin Hongjun. In these four years, the collective made more than 300 works, all of them shot using video camcorders. In their works the group documented the various movements and protests that swept and destabilized the social and political fabric of the Island, in the years soon before and after the lifting of the Martial Law (July 15th 1987).
In 1998, the Green Team handed over their videos to the National Tainan University of the Arts, and 2006 saw the creation of the Taiwan Green Group Image Record Sustainability Association (literal translation). This was done in order to digitize and preserve the original video tapes (more than 3000 hours), and to set up an archive and a searchable website. Moreover, in more recent years, the works of the Green Team have been presented internationally, circulating at different film festivals around the globe. The starting point could be considered the retrospective organized at the Taiwan International Documentary Festival in 2016, where 21 works of the collective were screened on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of The Taoyuan Airport Incident. Screenings at festivals around the world soon followed, in 2017 at the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, in the Czech Republic, and two years ago in Rome during Flowers of Taiwan, an event organized to promote the cinema of the island. Furthermore, in the past years, the online platform DaFilms has made them available on streaming a couple of times in collaboration with Taiwan Docs.
Green Team’s videos mark a pivotal moment in the history of documentary and in the evolution of alternative media in Taiwan. During the forty years of Martial Law, documentaries were still produced in the country and enjoyed some success—the Fragrant Formosa TV series, for instance—however, practically none of them, even those produced independently, depicted and commented overtly on the social, let alone the political, situation in the country.
By documenting protests and fights related to environmental issues, indigenous self determination, and women rights, Green Team’s output opened a path that many Taiwanese documentaries would follow in the next decades. Another important novelty brought in the field by the group was the use of portable and low-cost video cameras, a technology that had become affordable and mass-produced in the mid 1980s.
The intersection of this technological shift and a mutated socio-political situation, made possible a novel documentary practice and an alternative media approach that was unthinkable only a few years before. At the same time, Green Team’s activity represented also an evolution of what had been happening since the beginning of the decade, when the media control exerted by the state started to show its cracks as a consequence of the Formosa Incident in 1979. In the aftermath of the event, political magazines critical of the government began to flourish, and in the second half of the 1980s, thanks to the aforementioned technological shift, this radical dissent took the shape of independent videos. To be in the trenches criticizing the government you needed now to bring your videocamera.
One of the VHS camcorders used by the Green Team (source)
On a purely aesthetic level, this approach resulted in works of low image quality and an almost amateurish look. After all, Green Team’s videos were never meant to be shown on huge screens and in cinemas, and by the members own admission, they never tried to make cinematic works in the first place. The group was more interested in using their videos ‘to break the barrier of media control and fulfil the concept of social practice” (Chuan 2014). This “video revolution” was made possible and successful also because of the adoption of underground distribution and exhibition practices, a clear break with what was done in the past and what was going on, at the time, in the mainstream media. I will return to this point at the end of this piece.
Labor battles and environmental protests
I have watched only a small fraction of the videos made by the collective, but two of them stood out for me, both for the topics covered, labor disputes and environmental issues, and for their construction as visual expressions. While I have touched on other videos as well, I have spent more ink, so to speak, on those two.
In 1987 alone, Taiwan saw as many as 1835 protests erupting in different parts of the island. Demonstrations and acts of civil resistance sprung up in all areas of social life: from environmental to labor issues, from student movements to indigenous rights, and from feminist fights to peasants protests. Farmers resistance is at the core of The 20th May Incident (1988), a work that documents the demonstrations of thousands of peasants in the city of Taipei, protesting against the government’s indifference to their rights and requests. It was the first farmers’ demonstration after the abolition of the Martial Law. The protest turned into an urban battle when the police stopped some farmers from using the bathrooms. Led by the Yunlin Farmers’ Rights Association and supported by a group of university students, the protesters fought back and some of them were arrested. At night, peasants and students marched to the police station, demanding the release of the people imprisoned. The police instead reacted by attacking them and arresting in total more than a hundred people.
Similar to the strategy employed during the events at The Taoyuan Airport two years prior, the national TV stations kept spreading lies through their channels, labelling the protesters as members of a conspiracy group. When the Green Team released the documentary with the images of what really happened, the government, fearing to be exposed, tried to seize the VHS cassettes of the video circulating around the country.
In 1985, the KMT government greenlighted the construction of a titanium dioxide plant, by American company DuPont, near Lukang, Changhua County. In the following months, the local residents organized a series of demonstrations that eventually caused the project to be cancelled. Lukang Residents’ Anti-DuPont Movement (1987) documents this historical victory through images of street protests, peaceful (and less peaceful) demonstrations, and discussions about broader environmental and civic issues. The work opens with a brief explanation of the situation, and interviews with the opinions of the people of Lukang. The work then moves on to show the march of the citizens in front of the presidential office to give the authorities a petition to stop the construction of the plant. Next, we see professors, poets and experts speaking at a special seminar organized in the city. This is the most insightful part of the video in my opinion, the points touched are very nuanced, complex, and more relevant than ever, even today more than 35 years later. Environment should be considered as a public asset and a collective right, says one of the speakers, and if the government is not able to protect it, it should be prosecuted. Environmental rights do not just belong to the people who are now alive, the current generation, the speaker continues, but to the citizens of the future as well. A professor of law adds that environmental rights are part of the right to life, basic human rights, and constitutional rights. In the same seminar another speaker touches on the division of labor on the global scale, that is, the exploitative nature of multinationals, in this case DuPont coming to Taiwan to use the resources of the land, without giving back anything but pollution and empty promises of “progress”.
These words provide a perfect philosophical background and set the table for what is coming on screen in the second part of the video, when we see the protests and clashes between the police and the citizens, as the distrust of the people towards the institutions has increased. It is particularly impactful to see how these demonstrations are somehow reminiscent of local folklore festivals (plus the rage). A big drum is rhythmically struck and accompanies the protest on the streets, it is often heard and seen at the center of the action, and even used as a battering ram, as it were, to break the security cordon made by riot police. Ending the video with images of a religious festival, held to express the gratitude for the success of the protests to the goddess Mazu, is thus a natural continuation of what we saw before, and a conclusion that emphasizes a reinforced sense of identity and belonging for the people of the area.
In the work, we see an organization of university students being involved in supporting the protests and in helping to do environmental research in the area. One of the major traits emerging from the works made by the Green Team, at least the ones I was able to watch, is the almost constant presence and involvement of students from various universities, but especially from the capital, in most of the demonstrations and acts of resistance that shook Taiwan at the time. This is the case with Labour’s Battle Song (Laid-off Shinkong Textile Workers’ Protest) as well, a work shot by the collective in 1988.
The film opens with a brief overview of the events that happened in Shilin district, Taipei, in 1988, when the closure of the Shinkong Textile factory left hundreds of workers unemployed and without a place to live. Some workers decided to self-organize in groups and to occupy factory spaces to express their anger towards both the company and the government. From the very first sequence it is clear how this protest is not only aimed against the closure of the plant, but also against the exploitative nature of the job. Women seem to be the ones who were more affected by the demanding labor conditions in the factory: they had to work for long hours to provide an income for their families, but at the cost of neglecting their personal lives. The documentary also sheds light on the inherent dangers of the job done in the plant and on the conditions inside the factory. This is exemplified by a very young lady without a hand, shown and interviewed during a demonstration, and who painfully recalls the incident that left her disabled.
One of the major driving forces behind the movement is a group of aboriginal students from Taitung and Hualien. As the female narrator beautifully put it, their traditional war dances and songs—performed joyfully on the street, together with factory workers and as a form of protest—bring not only a sense of needed solidarity to the workers, but have the power to “challenge the discreteness of the middle class”. Singing and dancing become fundamental elements of the workers’ identity, class identity, both during the demonstrations and in their recreational time in the occupied spaces. A particularly creative move involves turning the repetitive movements of the assembly line in the factory into a choreographed dance to perform on the streets.
On November 12, 1988, the plant workers took part in a historical event, a demonstration joined by others labor groups from across Taiwan to protest the government’s proposed amendments to the Labor Standards Act and Labor Union Act. This event marked a pivotal moment in Taiwan’s independent labor movement, with Shinkong’s workers playing a crucial role in the fight. The class divide is a common thread permeating the whole work and that powerfully emerges when we see the workers camping on the cold streets in front of the company’s head office. It is winter and they are preparing food to share with their comrades, while life in the rest of the city goes on as usual, indifferent to their struggle.
As time passed, challenges started to surface. The company cut off water and electricity in the plant and dormitory, leading workers to question their strategy and methods of dissent. By December 23, after more than two months, many workers reluctantly started to give up the struggle as SWAT teams were deployed at the protest site. The video cut to scenes of empty factories and rooms where workers used to live, the sense of defeat brings with it also a feeling of personal loss, a period of 75 days of resistance and labor fights is ending, but with it are also fading the memories of lives lived together for years. As a counterpoint to this mood, the film concludes on a positive note, with a montage of black-and-white photos, primarily featuring female workers, set to a labor song. While this specific fight has ended, the broader message remains clear: “Oppose exploitation. Fight for equality. Keep Fighting. Tomorrow will be better!”
Underground distribution and exhibition practices
The Green Team was not the only group of video-activists operating in Taiwan at the end of the 1980s and at the beginning of the 1990s, but was the one that lasted longer, and whose works had a lasting impact on future generations of Taiwanese documentarians. The importance of the group and its activities is deeply intertwined with the manner their works were produced and distributed. The group released their works through video dealers—more than sixty at the height of their activities—selling their VHS cassettes at video rental shops and at night markets, but also through branches of the DPP, and by organizing screening tours in the countryside. Free copies were also made and dispatched for political movement purposes, for The Taoyuan Airport Incident, for instance, about 2000 cassettes were produced and distributed around the country. When the videos were about the peasants’ protests, such as The 20th May Incident, the collective formed a group in charge of screening them in rural villages to spread the knowledge, spark discussions, and as a vehicle for social and political participation. The production method behind these works is also very important, at first the funding came from donations (but not from political parties), and later mainly from the sales of their videocassettes. After shooting the footage, the members of the group edited all the material and made the cassettes, when possible on the same day, and on the following day the videos were already dispatched, by car, to the selling points. This was the case for the first years of their activities at least, and since they could not stay up to speed with the official media, later on, the collective tried to set its own underground TV station, an event documented in Green TV’s Inaugural Film (1989).
The reasons for the end of Green Team’s activities are multiple. On the one hand, the technological advance that made their success possible in the first place, brought about also a cheaper reproducibility. Piracy, that is to say, copying video cassettes illegally, became a problem, and selling videos through the channels described above became, thus, unsustainable. This happened also because other groups of video activists operating at the time in Taiwan were selling their videos at a cheaper price. On the other hand, the end of the Martial Law contributed to creating a freedom of speech that allowed the traditional media, TV and newspapers, to cover social and political issues considered taboo before, making the Green Team’s videos less exceptional. In truth, the issues affecting people living at the margins of society remained still very much ignored by mainstream media, and became a topic to explore for filmmakers and groups in the next two decades.
In this new cultural landscape and mediascape, the Green Team, their videos, and their distribution and exhibition practices partly lost their raison d’être. In the second half of the 1990s, cinemas and TV became the main release platforms for documentaries, and while maintaining their independence, documentaries started to be financed by the “system”, television channels or public institutions. The average documentary filmmaker changed as well, more directors came now from film studies and were naturally more interested in making documentaries as cinematic art—the 1980s saw also the ascent of the so-called Taiwan New Wave, capped by Hou Hsiao-Hsien winning the Golden Lion for City of Sadness at the Venice Film Festival in September 1989. Not to mention the advent of the digital revolution—smaller, cheaper and more portable cameras—an event that would radically change, in the following decades, the field of documentary, allowing filmmakers to shift their focus towards more personal and individual themes.
Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2023 wrapped up two weeks or so ago. It was a nice and enriching experience to attend the festival in presence again (the 2021 edition was held online only), and to catch up with old and new friends.
Most of my viewing time was cannibalized (and I mean it in a good way) by Noda Shinkichi‘s huge retrospective, a deep dive into the works of a pivotal figure in the development of documentary filmmaking in post-war Japan. I’m planning to write about this fascinating and almost overwhelming viewing experience in the following weeks, but today I’m going to focus on some of the other films I saw in Yamagata.
Three documentaries about the current socio-political situation in Myanmar, films shot in the country, were screened in the always interesting New Asian Currents program.
Losing Ground (anonymous, 2023) is a short film (23’ in the version presented in Yamagata) about the filmmaker’s own personal experiences in the protests that erupted in Myanmar, after the coup d’état brought chaos to the country, in February 2021. A somber, and beautifully shot, personal reflection on how the event altered his life and those of the people who joined the resistance. After actively participating in the demonstrations on the streets, the anonymous director was imprisoned for eight months, and once released, he was unable to return to his “normal” life. The film is a recollection of what happened in 2021 and a depiction of his current situation, trapped in his house, his dreams and those of his generation have been destroyed by the military regime. This sense of entrapment is expressed by images enveloped in darkness mainly shot in and from his home, also a way not to show the filmmaker’s face and thus guarantee his safety. After the time spent in prison, the director’s house and the city where he lives, Yangon, have also become a prison, a metaphorical but inescapable one. As the filmmaker states in the film, the sense of dread experienced during his imprisonment now pervades every fiber of his body. Just seeing a police or army vehicle from his window makes him feel nauseous and shake with fear. The sense of defeat and existential paralysis emanating from the minimalistic images is extremely powerful, and the whole movie feels like a desperate scream for help. It is thus very important that Losing Ground was awarded with the Ogawa Shinsuke Prize, and I couldn’t agree more with the comment of the jury’s members: “We want to send a strong message to this as well as other filmmakers who are similarly trapped or imprisoned, physically or metaphorically, that we see you. We care, and we are in solidarity with each and everyone of you.”
Conceptually and stylistically very different, but equally interesting, is Journey of a Bird (anonymous, 2021). Filmed in the days and months following the coup d’état, the short work documents the daily life of a group of young people, all in their early twenties, facing the lack of freedom brought after the military seized power. Shot with smartphones and a small digital camera, the film chronicles the daily life of a group of friends: organizing and protesting in the streets, changing apartments to avoid being followed, drinking and singing together, and dealing with their parents and the world of adults. While on the opposite spectrum of Losing Ground—it is a less reflective work and it feels like the director and his friends were thrown into making a film almost by chance—the situation depicted on screen reveals, in all its complexity, the struggle to keep living in a country under a dictatorial regime.
Also filmed in Myanmar, but not dealing directly with the consequences of the coup d’état, is Above and Below the Ground (Emile Hong, 2023). The work depicts events that happened before February 2021, and it is set in a peripheral area of the country, the Kachin region in the north of Myanmar, near the border with China. The life of a small community, the ethnic Christian minority that inhabits the area, is about to be disrupted by a soon-to-be-built dam, whose construction has been entrusted to a Chinese company. The resistance to the project and their fight for self-determination is described from the point of view of two of the women at the forefront of the protests, probably the better part of the documentary. To this storyline the film interweaves that of a local rock band invested in the demonstrations, a section too meandering and that lessens the impact of what the documentary is trying to say.
Women’s voices are also featured in two documentaries filmed in India about the Citizenship Amendment Act (2019), and more broadly on the political and social situation since Narendra Modi’s far-right government was elected in 2014. A Night of Knowing Nothing is an experimental documentary, screened and awarded at Cannes in 2021, directed by Payal Kapadia. The film has been critically praised internationally, a trend that continued in Yamagata, where it won the competition’s Grand Prize, The Robert and Frances Flaherty Prize. It was a very impactful viewing experience for me, the grainy black-and-white images perfectly convey the sense of horror and terror in which young generations of Indian students live in New Delhi, amid caste discrimination and police repression. However, it is a movie that I would like to watch again to better assess and appreciate the nuances and aesthetic choices made. I find the statement from the jury illuminating:
“A Night of Knowing Nothing adopts a fictional conceit in order to historicize the reality of a tumultuous present, crafting a portrait of a nation in crisis that is equally a story of love, friendship, memory, and youth. Marshaling a vast array of cinematographic techniques and technologies with skill and creativity, Payal Kapadia reflects on how and why images are made and what they can do. This enchanting and risk-taking film abandons all didacticism while retaining a political acuity that resonates intellectually and emotionally”.
Formally very different, Land of My Dreams (2023) addresses the same period and social tensions from a more feminist, more direct, and perhaps more articulate and critical point of view. Director Nausheen Khan, a university student, crafts a piece of resistance cinema that depicts, through interviews and images shot in the midst of the action, the story of the women who formed the non-violent movement against India’s Citizenship Amendment Act. Between 2019 and 2020, for over 100 days, the women of Shaheen Bagh in New Delhi, students, mothers and older women, protested the systematic repression against the Muslim minority, one of the pillars of nationalist propaganda set in motion by the government. Month after month these peaceful sit-ins spread to the rest of the capital, and eventually of the country, creating a broader movement that criticized the right-wing policies of Modi. In addition to providing a complex and dynamic picture of the socio-political situation in New Delhi, the film is also a painful reflection by the filmmaker herself on her identity. As a Muslim and as a woman, she finds herself at the center of personal tensions between the religious beliefs she grew up with, and her social experiences. The film (unsurprisingly, it’s Yamagata!), was awarded the Citizen’s Prize.
A special mention goes to Night Walk (Sohn Koo-yong, 2023), a work without sound, and with static images of night landscape accompanied with written poems on screen. An extreme visual experiment I could not completely connect with, but that still fascinates me. Predictably, many people walked out of the theater, but it was refreshing to hear, in the after talk, that many viewers were mesmerized by and could engaged with it. Again, the words of the jury come to rescue: “Night Walk might be called an anti-cinematic, anti-poetic, and anti-landscape-theory documentary.”
Today, October 21st, the National Film Archive of Japan organized a special screening of four films by Yamazaki Hiroshi, and 山崎博の海 The Seas of Yamazaki Hiroshi (2018), a short movie about the filmmaker and photographer, made by his friend and colleague Hagiwara Sakumi. The screening was part of the series of exhibitions and events connected to the T3 PHOTO FESTIVAL TOKYO 2023.
In addition to the screening, a series of panels, reproductions of Yamazaki’s photos discovered only after his death in 2017, were displayed in the Film Archive’s entrance hall.
I had already seen all of the films of the program years back, when the Image Forum Festival organized a bigger retrospective on the filmmaker. I also had the chance to write about Yamazaki’s masterpiece, Heliography (1979), and about his other experimental films he made during his career for this site. Moreover, a longer piece, where I draw connections between Heliography, Ogawa Pro’s Magino Village, and Matsumoto Toshio’s Ātman (1975), was recently published on Chute Film-Coop.
All of this to say that I went to Tokyo to revisit and rewatch Yamazaki’s films on a bigger screen, and possibly to experience them in a better quality. I had read, before attending the event, that the works would be screened digitally (ProRes), but I was a bit disappointed and sad to learn about the story of their condition and preservation. Of the four, a print exists only of Heliography, prints or negatives of the other three, Vision Take 1, Observation, and Motion are regrettably lost. To my surprise, the digital copies screened at the event were made from VHS tapes (!) Yamazaki used to show in the university where he worked.
the event
The after talk between Ishida Tetsurō, curator for the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, and organizer of Yamazaki’s last exhibition, and the aforementioned Hagiwara was casual, but interesting. Some anecdotes about Yamazaki’s life were shared, but most importantly for me, the two revealed some technical and conceptual aspects about Yamazaki’s filmmaking process.
Vision Take 1 (1973, 8mm, 4′) presents the viewer with the images of the sea, a constant in Yamazaki’s career, and a beach were a television stands. As soon as the landscape gets darker the TV set starts to light up with images of the same sea. This is probably the weakest of the bunch.
観測概念Observation (1975, 16mm, 10′) is a film that starts with a fixed and very dark image of the filmmaker’s neighborhood. Slowly and gradually the scene, a couple of roofs, antennae and the sky, with students and a small truck passing on the street at the bottom of the frame, turns whiter and whiter. The screen turns dark again, and from the upper left side of the screen, accompanied by a pulsating sound, one after another, many small bright “suns” appear drawing an arc of sorts in the dark sky above a house. However, as emerged from the discussion, probably this is not the arc drawn by the Sun in the sky captured in time-lapse, like in Isobe Shinya’s 13 for instance, but something different that Yamazaki created to make it look like the real thing. “It’s fiction” as said by one of the two people on stage.
Yamazaki himself was interested in photography and filmmaking in that “the world created through media is different from what humans see with their eyes”. For instance, the two half of Heliography, first the Sun filmed in time-lapse setting over the sea, and then, after a couple of seconds of darkness, the star resurfacing from a city seen upside down, were shot from two very different locations. If we think about it from a technical point of view, it is quite obvious. However, in the film it feels like the point of view is conceptually the same.
The after talk revealed also how Motion (1980, 16mm, 10′) was made, or better, how the two speakers think it was made, because Yamazaki was quite secretive about his methodology. According to Hagiwara, the film was made by shooting in a shower with a strobe lens. Motion is a fascinating film, without sound, composed of a series of tiny specks of liquid reflecting light, superimposed with layers and layers of more lights, sometimes edited slowly, sometimes faster. Besides Heliography, this was the film that impressed me the most. For the way it is constructed, but also for its trance-inducing quality, it felt like an experiment by Makino Takashi.
The event was interesting, but I wish there were more films screened, because to understand what Yamazaki was trying to do with images and light, one needs to be immersed longer and deeper in his world, photographic or filmic (also, I’d really like to see Sakura, his film about “dark” cherry blossoms again).
After the special online edition of 2021 (the in-person event was canceled due to the pandemic), starting from today the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival is back in its regular format. For a week, October 5-12, the city in Northern Japan will be the capital of non-fiction cinema, with screenings, events, workshops, and meetings on and around the varied landscape of international documentary, with a special focus on Asia. If you want to have a look at the program, check the official page of the festival.
This will be my 5th edition (6th counting the online one), and the main focus for me will be following, as much as possible—but as usual everything changes during the festival—the huge retrospective on the works of Noda Shinkichi (1913-1993). A poet, filmmaker, film theorist, and an important figure to understand the different evolutions and developments of documentary filmmaking in the archipelago during the 20th century. Some of his works (industrial, science, and folklore films) are available on the NPO Science Film Museum‘s official homepage for free; or for rental, on the platform Ethnos Cinema.
この雪の下に Country Life Under Snow (1956), for instance, is a fascinating depiction of the harsh life in a rural area in Yamagata prefecture, while オリンピックを運ぶ Transporting the Olympics (1964), co-directed with Matsumoto Toshio, focuses on the logistics and the behind the scene of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. How things (boats, yachts, traffic cones, film reels, etc.) and animals (horses, pigeons) were transported from and to the capital.
One of the most relatively known works by Noda is マリン・スノー－石油の起源－Marine Snow – The Origin of Oil, co-directed by Ōnuma Tetsurō, a celebrated science film produced by Tokyo Cinema, sponsored by Maruzen Oil Co., and filmed using Eastmancolor. The short film describes the vertiginous span of time (millennia) in which sea plankton, through decomposition, turns into natural gas and oil. Commissioned by an oil company, and thus partly celebrating the petroleum industry— directly only in its last 5 minutes though—Marine Snow remains a visually astounding piece of science film, flawed by its own design and origin, but astounding nonetheless. You can watch here the version with an English narration (I prefer the Japanese one, for what it’s worth).
These films are just a fraction of what will be shown in Yamagata, in total the Noda’s retrospective includes 38 works, produced between 1941 and 1991. A Japanese/English flyer with summaries for each film is available here.
I really look forward to learn more about this towering figure in Japanese documentary, also because his contribution to the art of cinema does not stop with filmmaking, but it encompasses also books on the subject. One I’m particularly interested in is 日本ドキュメンタリー映画全史 Nihon dokyumentarii eigashi (1984), a history compiled by listing and analyzing the individuals involved in making documentary films in Japan, from the beginning of cinema to the mid-1980s. Having leafed through the volume, I could see names I had never heard before. I’m excited to discover more.
If I’m not mistaken, this retrospective in Yamagata originates from a special program organized in 2020 at the National Museum of Art in Osaka, an event that was unfortunately canceled because of the pandemic. One of the positive outcomes of this phantom retrospective was the publication online of a series of essays (in Japanese) exploring Noda’s filmmaking and his role in Japanese non-fiction cinema.
Naturally, many more works will be screened in Yamagata, the international competition, for instance, will present Self-Portrait: 47 KM 2020 (2023) by Zhang Mengqi, a friend of the festival who is bringing the newest entry of her ongoing film series shot in her hometown, and What About China? (2022) by theorist and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha. One of my most anticipated works of the festival, the film was assembled using Hi8 video footage shot by the artist about 30 years ago.
New Asian Currents is usually a section that does not disappoint, and in past editions, it was a chance for me to make some big discoveries. This year, one of the threads of the program seems to be a special attention towards Myanmar and the ongoing resistance to the current political situation in the country. Losing Ground (anonymous, 2023), Journey of a Bird (anonymous, 2021), and Above and Below the Ground (Emily Hong, 2023) are some of the titles dealing with the subject. Also in New Asian Currents, Gama by Oda Kaori (I’ve written about it here), and the always interesting Miko Revereza with Nowhere Near (2023).
Other programs of this year festival are Yamagata and Film, Cinema with Us 2023, Film Letter to the Future, Perspectives Japan, Double Shadows 3, and View People View Cities—The World of UNESCO Creative Cities.
Usually the most impactful viewings I had at the festival in the past—at any festival, to be honest—are those that came at me unexpected and that I discovered by chance or by word of mouth. Hopefully it will be the same this year.
Sōda Kazuhiro has become, in the last decades, one of the most distinct voices working in the contemporary documentary scene. Based in New York, a city where he moved for studying and eventually work for the Japanese public broadcasting NHK in the second half of the 1990s, Sōda has been directing, shooting, and editing (with his wife Kashiwagi Kiyoko as a producer) his independent documentaries for almost two decades. Sōda has also been writing, in Japanese, about filming, and social and political issues for quite some time, on his blog, but also in articles and in books. なぜ僕はドキュメンタリーを撮るのか Naze boku wa dokyumentarii wo toru no ka is a volume published in 2011 dealing with the process, issues, theory, and discoveries of making non-fiction movies, and was recently translated into English as Sōda Kazuhiro – Why I Make Documentaries (208 pages, Viaindustriae, Milan 2023, edited by Silvio Grasselli, translated by Matt Schley).
This publication is a reflexive diary on his own work in pursuit of answers to many crucial questions which have arisen along his extensive research path. It is the first curated English version of Kazuhiro’s most enlightening and complete writings, enriched with a new iconographic apparatus derived from his films and an updated introduction by the author himself. Discover why seeking answers to such basic things as ‘What is a documentary?’ and ‘Why do I make documentaries?’ turns out to be essential practice for one of the most prominent Japanese filmmakers today.
As written above, the volume originally was published in Japan in 2011, after the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, a tragedy that almost pushed Sōda to halt and cancel the project, and it is structured around Peace (2010), the third documentary directed independently by the Japanese. In the book Sōda recalls how the film came into existence, through the invitation to make a short movie by the DMZ International Documentary Film Festival in South Korea, but also the unexpected encounters while filming, and the difficulties in shaping a work centered around a community of people and cats in Okayama city, Japan. Describing the process of making Peace is for Sōda a chance to reflect on his working method, his belief in what documentary cinema can do, and other important issues related to the ethics and philosophy of filming. Famously, Sōda describes his method and style as observational filmmaking, and when making independent documentaries always tries to follow a series of rules he has himself established:
1 No research.
2 No scripts.
3 No meetings with subjects.
4 Roll the camera yourself.
5 Shoot for as long as possible.
6 Cover small areas deeply.
7 Do not set up a theme or goal before editing.
8 No narration, superimposed titles, or music.
9 Use long takes.
10 Pay for the production yourself.
The volume covers a lot of fascinating themes and topics significant for those who are interested in nonfiction filmmaking. First of all, citing also the writings of Satō Makoto, the power and responsibility that holding and pointing a camera at someone entails. “A documentary camera (especially in the hands of a skilled filmmaker) mercilessly gouges out and lays bare its subject’s subconscious; their inner soul, or what I call people’s ‘soft spots’” writes Sōda. “Depending on how things go, it can leave a subject deeply hurt. In that sense, there’s a possibility for a documentarist to become an assailant, and a very real risk for the camera to become a tool of violence.”
Some beautiful pages are also dedicated to the filmmakers Sōda considers his main influences, the American direct cinema of the 1960s, and especially Frederick Wiseman, who remains for the Japanese author to this day a guiding star in the world of documentary. As the technical innovations helped to shape nonfiction cinema at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s, so did the digital revolution that occurred at the beginning of this century. “The biggest impact this technology had was in freeing documentaries from the production and exhibition format of film” writes Sōda, “Up until then, if you wanted to exhibit your work on a big screen with any semblance of quality, you had no choice but to shoot, edit and project on either 16 or 35mm film. But using this new camera and the DV format allowed you to shoot on digital, edit on a computer, and even show your film using a digital projector. It opened up a whole new path.”
These new tools allowed Sōda to embark in a career of independent filmmaking, a path that was also kindled and forged in contrast to what he had experienced in the world of documentaries made for TV during the 1990s. There are strong echoes here with what Kore’eda Hirokazu has to say about working for TV, although with some major differences, Kore’eda was lucky to work in a different period, with more freedom, and with some enlightened colleagues and producers, Sasaki Shōichirō in primis. Everything on TV, according to Sōda, is often scripted, and once the director or the producers set a theme or a goal for the program, the reality captured is distorted, biased, and without anything left to chance, the latter being one of the most powerful elements in a documentary. As an example of this modus operandi, Sōda brings his personal experience of working with NHK after the terrorist attacks on 9/11 2001. In the aftermath of the tragedy, the Japanese broadcaster was looking for images of tears and cooperation, while Sōda often witnessed in New York scenes of normal daily life and quarrels. Being open to chance and randomness is a key point for Sōda’s approach to documentary, and it is fascinating to read that he was influenced and inspired in this by the art and the creative method used by Jackson Pollock, and by the way dance was conceptualised by Merce Cunningham, a performer Sōda was able to know and meet through his wife, a professional trained dancer.
Some of the most inspiring pages are the ones dedicated to the art of editing, and a paragraph titled “Changing Yourself Through Observation”, where Soda associated the act of observing through documentary with vipassana meditation, a subject he ended up writing a book about in 2021. “Many people may think of ‘observation’ as something done in a cool and distant way. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. The act of observation is almost always accompanied by a change in the observer’s way of seeing the world. One loses one’s sense of tranquility, and, before long, is compelled to observe one’s own self as well.”
In conclusion, it is fair to say that beyond the pleasure of reading the reflections of one of the most prominent documentarians working today, this volume is also important in that it is an essential addition to expanding literature, available in English, on film theory produced in Asia.
I’m reposting a slightly edited version of a piece I wrote 8 years ago, an article about Night and Fog in Zona, directed by South Korean film critic, Jung Sung-il.
It’s always fascinating when cinema reflects on cinema, and even more so when a documentary’s subject is director Wang Bing filming one of his movies. Night and Fog in Zona is a documentary, or better yet a cine-essay as it is called by its author: South Korean critic turned director Jeong Sung-il, who follows the renowned Chinese filmmaker throughout a whole winter while working on two of his projects, ‘Til Madness Do Us Part and a sequel to his Three Sisters.
The “coming” of Wang Bing has been, and still is, one of the most important events that occurred in the world of cinema in the last 15 years: not only did he contribute asserting the aesthetic value of digital filmmaking, but with his documentaries he also brought an auroral and liberating gaze upon the world.
Jung Sung-il had the same kind of dawning experience watching West of the Tracks in 2001.
“When I was at the Rotterdam Film Festival I bought a ticket for a movie 9 hours and 10 minutes long, I was surprised by its length but went anyway. It begins with a train in movement and it reminded me of the first movie ever made by the Lumière brothers in 1895. Watching Wang Bing’s work I had the feeling of witnessing the cinema of 21st Century just like the audience in 1895 witnessed its birth.”
There’s no narration in Night and Fog in Zona, everything is explained with intertitles: geographical coordinates, places where Wang Bing is headed to, his plans. Sometimes these intertitles also work as a poetic comment to the following scene.
The only time when Wang speaks directly to the camera is in an interview-like fashion at the very beginning of the film, a sequence that works as a brief introduction to his world and his filmmaking style. A few minutes where, among other things, he talks about his filmmaking process, truth in cinema, the impossibility of conveying the totality, his projects, Chinese history and peasants, and the similar cultural background his generation shares with Andrei Tarkovsky.
In 235 minutes Night and Fog in Zona illuminates a great deal about Wang Bing’s approach to filmmaking. Among other things, we learn about his habit of taking photos of the people he films, his relationship with them, and, most fascinating of all, about his “interview technique”: it’s compelling to see how he is able to seamlessly switch from “chatting with” to “shooting at” his subjects, as if there was no real break between the two actions.
It’s also interesting to witness how “Wang searches for the ‘strategic point’, the single position from which all of the actions in the scene can be recorded”. This is a fundamental feature of his filmmaking, as the relationship between the camera and the people and things around it determines both the movie’s sense of space and how space itself is conveyed in his works. And space, together with time/duration, is one of the most crucial elements of his cinema.
Another revelation of Night and Fog in Zona is to discover how Wang Bing is a director whose involvement with the subjects of his movies is deeper than we might think from just watching his works: when the camera is off, he’s often seen giving practical help and advices to his “protagonists”.
Particularly fascinating, from a movie making point of view, is a scene where the director and his two collaborators have an evening meeting to watch the footage shot during the day at the Asylum — footage that would eventually become ‘Til Madness Do Us Part. A few but meaningful minutes where he explains the reasons behind his use of long takes, why avoiding telephoto lens, and other rules to follow while shooting, so that the final work can gain a certain consistency, a certain style.
However, the best quality of Night and Fog in Zona is that it’s not only a documentary about Wang Bing shooting his movies, but it’s also shot and conceived — with all the due differences – just like one of Wang’s documentaries. In terms of style, it mirrors Wang Bing’s filmmaking: long takes, no narration, abstract landscapes and experimental music, everything put together to explore his filmmaking and, in a broader sense, contemporary China, a country gazed upon, as in most of Wang Bing’s works themselves, from a peripheral and rural point of view.
One of the best examples of this mirroring process is to be found towards the beginning of the film, when the Chinese director and his collaborators move to the Yunnan province.
A very long sequence shot from the car everyone is on, that shows us streets, mountains, plains, lights and tunnels almost melting together. A scene almost 10 minute long, matched with a hypnotic and minimalistic music interacting with the abstract landscape captured by the camera.
We encounter these sort of sequences a couple of times during the movie: another powerful one, shown in slow motion, is inside the asylum. Bing is sleeping and ten or so patients are sitting and moving around him. What gives Night and Fog in Zona a further experimental and even meta-filmic touch are two scenes, placed at the beginning and at the end of the movie, that show a Korean girl dressed in red sitting in a theater and making a phone call.
The only flaws to be found in this documentary, an otherwise almost perfect work, are some editing choices, in some cases too abrupt, and the pace of the intertitles, definitely too fast. But that’s just splitting hairs, Night and Fog in Zona is definitely one of the best non-fiction movies seen this year, not only for its fascinating subject, but also for its ability to resonate with Wang Bing’s own style at a deep and aesthetic level.
This is the 4th part of an ongoing series of translations dedicated to the writings of Haneda Sumiko (third part here, first and second here and here)
Distributed by Equipe de Cinema, 早池峰の賦 Ode to Mt. Hayachine (a.k.a. The Poem of Hayachine Valley) is the second work conceived and directed independently by Heneda Sumiko. The movie was released in 1982 at Iwanami Hall, where it stayed from May 29th to June 25th (and later, due to its success, again from August 7th to 13th). A booklet about Haneda and the movie was published and sold at the theater, and more importantly in 1984 Haneda published 早池峰の賦 (Hayachine no fu), a fascinating volume about the origin, production and shooting of the film, how the various versions of the documentary came about, and about her relationship with the people of Take and Ōtsugunai, the two villages where kagura is performed. As for the versions of the documentary, the first one, backed by Iwanami Eiga, is titled 早池峰神楽の里 Hayachine kagura no sato, a 52-minute long film that, among other things, is interesting in that it has a male voice narration, while the following versions have a female one. 早池峰の神楽 Hayachine no kagura is a second version, assembled by Haneda after the previous was completed, using more footage shot during the years, while the third one, 早池峰の賦 Ode to Mt. Hayachine, the version usually screened, is 185 minutes long , and very similar to the second one (195′), that was cut down of 10 minutes in order to be screened at Iwanami Hall. The book was, like the film, an unexpected and moderate success, and the first experience for Haneda writing a volume about one of her films.
In the short passages here translated from the volume 早池峰の賦, Haneda narrates the first steps that led to the conception and production of the documentary. She discovered yamabushi kagura when she attended a performance held in Tokyo in 1964, the following year, together with cameraman Segawa Jun’ichi, she visited the two villages of Take and Ōtsugunai, at the time part of Ōhasama town, where they witnessed the various kagura dances performed, also in a magariya, an old style farmhouse typical of the area. Haneda was so impressed by the area and its atmosphere, the people and the performances, that she decided to make a documentary. She even wrote a provisional script, but was not satisfied with it and so the project was shelved. The chance came again in 1977, after she independently made 薄墨の桜 The Cherry Tree with Grey Blossoms and gained more confidence in her career as a filmmaker.
NOTE: This is by no means a professional translation, but I hope the readers can get the gist of it:
To make a film I really wanted to shoot, that is, by myself [without the help of a production company, t/n] was for me something like a dream, almost impossible to realize. Thus, when I made The Cherry Tree with Grey Blossoms as an independent work, it was like a new road was opening in front of my eyes. When I made that movie its subject was one tree, it does not go away and it didn’t require so much time and money to be made, however, this time it was different, the subject was people, and many, since there are about 20 performers in the kagura group. If I wanted to film the kagura, I needed the proper filming equipment and a considerable amount of money, above all, what I needed to make the movie, was the cooperation and the understanding of the kagura performers and the people of the area.
In the early summer of 1977 I visited, after 12 years, the town of Ōhasama. I told Ōhasama’s major, Murata-san, that I wanted to make a film that would not be a documentary about kagura, but would portray the culture, life and spirit of the land that has supported kagura, and that it would be a record of the town that I would make and give to the town. Often people came to the town to film kagura, leaving nothing behind for the people of the area. [in the conversation with the major recollected in the book, there are complaints about NHK troupes coming to the area and leaving soon after the main festival is over, without leaving behind anything, t/n]
The decision to form a group to make a movie was decided only a year and a half after this first meeting with major Murata, in the meantime we had the chance to visit and talk with him many times. (…) At the time I was still a Iwanami Eiga employee, and I was very happy to know Iwanami Eiga provided full support for this personal project. More fortunately, the fundraising campaign was able to secure a certain amount of funding, and Tohoku Electric Power agreed to purchase the film necessary. About a year and a half after meeting the mayor for the first time, on 13 February 1979, the 早池峰神楽の里を作る会 ‘Group for making the film Hayachine kagura no sato’ was established. The mayor himself named the film “Hayachine kagura no sato”, which I thought was not a bad title. The group started its activities with the goal of producing a film with a fund of 30 million yen, and a running time of 50 minutes. I thought that fifty minutes was too short, but the production costs would have been much higher otherwise.
However, it was not so easy to raise money, money could never keep up with the speed of film production, nduring filming and during the finishing touches, we still had to find the money. I still cringe when I think back on all the headaches over money we had during this period. In the end, we managed to reach the target amount in autumn of the following year, a year and a half after we had completed and delivered “Hayachine kagura no sato” to the town. During this period, all the footage shot for the film was fully utilized to produce the three-hour and five-minute Ode to Mt. Hayachine, which was shown at Iwanami Hall in Tokyo, gaining a good reputation and being seen by many people.
The film was screened twice a day at the City Hall. On that day, nearly 1,300 people gathered to watch it enthusiastically. We were thrilled that so many people came to see our film, even though the town had a population of less than 8,000.
The 52-minute film was appreciated by the local people, but the 3 hours and 15 minutes film was appreciated even more. Unexpectedly, a woman from Take told us that it was the first time she could properly see the festival and the kagura performances. Come to think of it, when they are busy with the preparation for the festivals and kagura, the women are so busy in the kitchen, that they don’t have time to watch them. Some of them were impressed that the dancers looked so divine when they danced in the film, even though they are usually normal people very close to them in everyday life. What was most gratifying for us was that many people said they felt proud of their hometown.
We were hesitant to let people see the three-hour 15-minute film we donated to the town, because it was so long, and we weren’t sure if it would work as a film to be released in a theater or not. Even though, I showed it to a few people.
A few months later, I was told that the film would be screened at Iwanami Hall as a film distributed by Equipe de Cinema, and I honestly couldn’t believe it. It was unthinkable that such a documentary film would be shown to the public. We reduced the length of the film to three hours and five minutes in order to be able to screen it at the theater, and named the film Ode to Mt. Hayachine. The title of the film best expresses our feelings about the twists and turns that led to the creation of the documentary.
Second report from the Kobe Discovery Film Festival 2022 (you can read this first one here).
On October 15th, the festival held a couple of screenings of home movies from the Kobe area, on the occasion of Home Movie day 2022. It was a very pleasant and eye-opening experience for me, the audience had the chance to see a couple of short films (from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, if I’m not wrong), projected on screen with the person who filmed it, or a family member, in attendance. It was like opening a treasure chest, a personal one, in front of a bunch of strangers, a way to share personal memories, often forgotten, with other people. The home movie day, held since 2002 all over the world, it’s a fascinating event situated at the intersection between personal history, History with a capital “H”, and film studies. It is an exploration of the possibility of building an alternative video history from the bottom up, almost a micro history as it were, excavating personal memories to document social changes, and also an occasion to celebrate a dying format (8mm, super 8, etc.). Besides the specific places and experiences captured on the films projected—a trip to the zoo, scenes of a countryside house, a family vacation, a day at the Osaka Expo 1970—it was interesting to learn how home movies from the 60s generally retain even today a better visual quality and colours (especially the reds), compared to those shot in the following decades. As the film and film equipment got more affordable, the quality of the celluloid also dropped, causing the films to deteriorate easily with the passing of time. Insightful was also to learn, from a live commentary done by a scholar of the subject, that, because of the cost of the film, home movies made in the 50s or 60s were usually edited faster, with shorter cuts that is, while later on the cuts tended to be longer.
In September 1939, after the Nazi invasion of Poland, Maria Kamm and her brother Marcel Weyland were forced to leave their hometown and to start an endless journey around the globe to survive. After fifteen months in a refugee camp in Lithuania, they arrived in Tsuruga, a port city in Fukui prefecture, and from there they moved to Kobe, later to Shanghai, where the family was separated, and finally they reached, at different times, their final destination, Melbourne in Australia.
海でなくてどこに Where But Into The Sea (2021) is a film documenting their odyssey around the world, constructed by interweaving interviews, poetry, letters, and a historical investigation by scholar Kanno Kenji. The film is directed by Ōsawa Mirai, but the idea of the project came about when Kanno met Maria in Melbourne in 2016, and later decided to shape his research also into a visual work. The documentary is a delicate portrait of two people, their family, their past, and how their personal experiences intersected the large historical events of the last century. It is also about a less known and studied fact, how the asylum process for Jewish people worked in wartime Japan and in the Japanese occupied territories.
The movie has a beautiful and poetic ending, made in collaboration with artist Miyamoto Keiko, it was a discovery for me to learn that this scene was inspired, as the director himself confirmed in the talk after the screening, by the films of Satō Makoto—specifically Memories of Agano (2005) and the movie in the movie screened on a tarp, but also Out of Place: Memories of Edward Said (2006). Ōsawa was Satō’s student when he was teaching at The Film School of Tokyo (Eiga bigakko), and he is also the director of 廻り神楽 Mawari Kagura (2018), a documentary that has been on my radar for some time.
Originally published in 2018, edited with some minor changes on September 2022, in remembrance of Suzuki Shiroyasu (1935-2022)
Cinephiles and film buffs on the internet, and specifically those active on social media, are often times obsessed by lists. Although I’m not a big fan of them when used to rank movies, it is nonetheless unquestionable that lists are one of the best tools, when properly used that is, to discover new movies and explore novel cinematic landscapes.
In the past month I’ve asked on Twitter to list some of the most significant or favourite personal documentaries/diary films made in Japan. Some friends were kind enough to reply and share some titles, some of which I wasn’t aware of.
With this feedback in mind, I started to collect my thoughts and compile a list of what I consider the most important personal documentaries made in Japan since the advent of cinema. I’ve also included some titles I have not seen yet, don’t kill me for this, but I’ve trusted what has been written and discussed by people I trust and respect.
Before starting to explore what the list has to offer, let me clarify what we mean when we talk about “personal documentary”. Keeping in mind that the definition is always vague, in flux and susceptible to change, and so is the term documentary, I think we can approach a sort of truthfulness by stating that personal documentaries are works often made, but not always, in the first person and about the life of the director/cameraman. For these reasons often they are also called, or more precisely they overlap with, diary films and first-person cinema.
In Japan the term often used to define this kind of works is “Self Documentary” セルフ ドキュメンタリー. Illuminating in this respect is this piece written by Nada Hisashi for the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in 2005. Also available on the YIDFF site, an interview with Matsumoto Toshio conducted by Aaron Gerow, in it the theoretician and director criticized some trends in the Japanese self documentary scene of the 1990s, a take that, for what is worth, I agree with:
there are problems with an “I” which doesn’t doubt its “self” and the so-called “I-films” (watakushi eiga) share those: they never put their “I” in question. Since they don’t attempt to relativize themselves through a relationship with the external world, they gradually become self-complete–a pre-established harmony.
With this in mind, let’s start:
Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (Hara Kazuo, 1974)
My favourite film by Hara Kazuo, at the moment, maybe together with Minamata Mandala, one of the cinematic highlights of the second part of his career. The movie is one of the first and finest examples of diary cinema and personal documentary in Japan, and contrary to what many films made in the following decades did, Extreme Private Eros is a sublime embodiment of the famous artistic motto of the 1960s and 1970s “the personal is political”.
Impressions of a Sunset (Suzuki Shiroyasu, 1975)
If Extreme Private Eros is where the Japanese personal documentary started, Impression of a Sunset is where the diary film à la Mekas emerged in the Japanese archipelago. Mostly unknown outside Japan, it’s in every way a diary composed by images where Suzuki, after buying a CineKodak 16 (a pre-war 16mm camera) at a second hand camera shop, starts filming his wife, his newborn baby and his workplace. With Impressions of a Sunset and other works such as 15 Days (1980), Suzuki is more a poet with a camera than a documentarian in the sense we give the term today.
Embracing (1992) and Katatsumori (1994)
Probably the most known personal documentarian from Japan, Kawase started her career with short home movies about the search for her father, who abandoned her as a child, in Embracing, and about the strong bond with her grandmother, who became de facto her adopted mother, in Katatsumori.
Memories of Agano (Satō Makoto, 2004)
I’ve written extensively about the movie and its hybrid and experimental qualities, clearly it’s much more than a personal documentary, but director Satō and his cameraman returning to the locations and the people filmed more than 10 years before in Niigata, make it a movie perfect for this list.
Dear Pyongyang (2006) and Sona, the Other Myself (2009) by Yang Yong-hi
A documentary by zainichi Korean director Yang Yong-hi about her own family. It was shot in Osaka (Yang’s hometown) and Pyongyang, North Korea. In the 1970s, Yang’s father, an ardent communist and leader of the pro-North movement in Japan, sent his three sons from Japan to North Korea under a repatriation campaign sponsored by ethnic activist organisation and de facto North Korean embassy Chongryon; as the only daughter, Yang herself remained in Japan. However, as the economic situation in the North deteriorated, the brothers became increasingly dependent for survival on the care packages sent by their parents. The film shows Yang’s visits to her brothers in Pyongyang, as well as conversations with her father about his ideological faith and his regrets over breaking up his family. In Sona, the Other Myself the director continues the exploration of her family, Sona is the daughter of her brother who moved to North Korea from Japan in the early 1970s. Narrating her story, the film shows the struggles of a generation that migrated from Japan to North Korea, and the life of their offspring, who were born and raised in North Korea. (from Letterboxd).
Ending Note: Death of a Japanese Salesman (Sunada Mami, 2011)
Recently retired from a company after some 40 years of service, Sunada Tomoaki, father of filmmaker Sunada Mami, is diagnosed with terminal cancer and only has a few months left to live. True to his pragmatic core, Sunada sets out to accomplish a list of tasks before his final departure: playing with his grandchildren, planning his own funeral, saying “I love you” to his wife, among others. (from Letterboxd)
Everyday is Alzheimer’s (2012), Everyday Is Alzheimer’s 2 – The Filmmaker Goes to Britain (2014) Everyday Is Alzheimer’s the Final: Death Becomes Us (2018) by Sekiguchi Yūka
Director Sekiguchi Yūka documents and depicts the daily life of her dementia-diagnosed mother and how this changed her family’s life.
Yongwanggung : Memories from Across the Water ( Kim Im-man, 2016)
Statement from the director: “Yongwangung was a Gutdang (shaman’s shrine) where first generation Korean women who crossed the seas from Jeju to Japan use to go before the Second World War. In 2009, I heard that the shrine was about to be demolished by the Osaka city government. My childhood memory of my mother praying in the kitchen came back when I was filming elderly women in Jeju. I felt the urge to have a shamanistic ritual for my mother who had been hospitalized.”
Home Sweet Home (Ise Shinichi, 2017)
This was one of the movies I was more eager to see last year, but unfortunately I couldn’t catch it. The film covers 35 years in the life of filmmaker Ise Shinichi’s family, documenting his disabled niece Nao since 1983.
Special mentions
Toward a Common Tenderness (Oda Kaori, 2017)
It’s one of my favourite viewings of the year, but it has just come out and I need to rewatch it, that’s why it’s not included in the list. The balance between the personal and the poetic is what makes it special.
Magino Village – A Tale (Ogawa Shinsuke, 1986)
As the mysterious object of Japanese documentary per excellence, Magino Village goes of course far beyond the realm of personal films, but somehow this sprawling movie is, among other things, the result and the partial documentation of more than a decade spent in Yamagata by the Ogawa collective.
Asian Docs 
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