Category: Asian documentary

Haneda Sumiko’s writings /3: Paulo Rocha on Ode to Mt. Hayachine

Third part (you can read the first part here and second here)

A slightly different post today, since it’s not about Haneda Sumiko’s own writings, but more about one of Haneda’s documentary, and one of the most significant in her career, Ode to Mt. Hayachine 早池峰の賦 (a.k.a. The Poem of Hayachine Valley). The movie was released in 1982 at the Iwanami Hall, distributed by Equipe de Cinema, where it stayed from May 29th to June 25th (and later from August 7th to 13th). A booklet about Haneda and the movie was published and sold at the theater, in it there are various writings by Haneda, Tsuchimoto Noriaki, people of the village in Iwate, and Paulo Rocha, among others. The Portuguese director, with whom Haneda collaborated as a screenwriter for a segment of his A Ilha dos Amores (released at the Iwanami Hall in December 1983), wrote an interesting piece on Ode to Mt. Hayachine; you can read my translation below (NOTE: This is by no means a professional translation, but I hope the readers can get the gist of it):

Paulo Rocha on Ode to Mt. Hayachine

In an Italian film similar to this one, L’albero degli zoccoli / The Tree of Wooden Clogs, director Ermanno Olmi told us, with rare insight, about the heart and the inner world of Italian peasants. Haneda goes here even further, for her, it is not only the heart of the people who speaks in her movie, but it is as the whole of nature, trees and stones, were speaking to us. Although we are in 1982, immersed in our contemporary problems, at the same time, we live with simplicity in an uncomplicated world that has just been created right now. There is a difference between Olmi and Haneda, and it may be a difference that exists between a country with a Catholic tradition and a country with a Shinto tradition, but still there is a miracle that is common to the two. This miracle is that in their clear mind everything is sublimated and yet, a direct and spontaneous force, an inspiration and a beauty in the detachment of modern daily life is gradually invading our hearts. For Haneda, the mountain gods, the plastic products in the small shops in the village, the people who dance the kagura, and the tourists are just as passionate and fantastic. Everything is just as important to her non-sentimental gaze. That is, past and future, nature and machinery, mountains and towns. What is art for, what is fiction for, what position does the profilmic material occupy in a movie, what position does fiction occupy in art? What about the artist? What happens to the artists filmed? Rarely in the history of cinema have such essential questions been asked in such a direct, simple, generous, and intelligent way. I am a filmmaker, and until now I believed that I would be closer to the truth if I approached it through fiction, but now, after seeing Haneda’s Ode to Mt. Hayachine, I realize that the idea is an arrogant one, we must take advantage of this opportunity, we must learn to see reality correctly in order to know the truth. Ode to Mt. Hayachine gave us the best example of this. In Europe, documentary films are being re-evaluated as part of a movement for a new type of cinema. If Ode to Mt. Hayachine were to be introduced in Europe, they would no doubt be surprised and respectful to find that the path they were looking for already existed in Japan.  Centuries from now, when people in the future will want to know what we were like, they will be able to watch Ode to Mt. Hayachine, and the movie will tell them about us, the audience of the film today, and about little-known people who were lost among the mountains, in an unknown valley.

Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2021 (online) – second dispatch

The 2021 edition of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival has ended last Thursday. Like many other events in the past two years, the festival took place exclusively online, this is the second and final dispatch, you can read the first one here.

This is the list of the movies awarded:

The Robert and Frances Flaherty Prize (The Grand Prize): Inside the Red Brick Wall 

The Mayor’s Prize: Camagroga  

Awards of Excellence: City Hall , Night Shot  

Ogawa Shinsuke Prize: Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege 

Awards of Excellence: Three Songs for Benazir, Makeup Artist  

Special Mention: Broken,

Citizens’ Prizes: Writing With Fire

(Synopses are from the official homepage of the festival)

Wuhan, I Am Here (2021, Lan Bo) A film crew that had traveled to Wuhan to make a fiction film is confronted with the sudden lockdown of the city and decides to go film in the streets. They race through the city, joining forces with volunteers who are offering free resources collected through the internet to the elderly and the homeless. The director and his troupe were able to capture on camera the chaos, tensions, fears and pain experienced by the citizens of Wuhan during the first lockdown of the city, in the first months of 2020. A woman crying on a sidewalk because her husband, at home with cancer, cannot be hospitalised due the Covid situation. A group of volunteers distributing food to the various communities of elderly, but often halted and contested because of bureaucracy and the lack of passes. People denied their right to visit relatives in hospital…the documentary is about stories of struggle and grief, death is very present in the film, stories we all became accustomed to witness in the last two years. This is a documentary whose appeal and point of interest will probably increase with the passing of time, when one day, hopefully, we will look back at the pandemic days and reflect on this huge historical juncture.

Three Songs for Benazir (2021, Gulistan Mirzaei, Elizabeth Mirzaei) In a camp for displaced persons in Kabul, a young man sings for his beloved wife Benazir as if the whole world was theirs alone. We see him next four years later, facing the consequences of the path he was forced to choose in providing for his family, after his struggle to find work. In just twenty two minutes the film says more about contemporary Afghanistan than a dozen newspaper articles about the subject.

Three Songs for Benazir

Soup and Ideology (2021, Yang Yonghi) Yang Yonghi is a zainichi director born and rised in Osaka. When her father passed away in 2009, of her family, only her mother and herself were left in Japan. The director who now lives in Tokyo, is worried about her aged mother living alone, so she visits her home in Osaka every month. One day, the mother suddenly tells her that she had experienced the Jeju uprising as a young woman. Her memories of the tragic event, buried deep in her heart, resurfaced and came back to life. She begins to talk specifically about how she got involved in the Jeju uprising. With her latest documentary Yang Yonghi continues her exploration of her family history and the history of the two countries she is connected with, Japan and North Korea. The movie opens in 2018, with her mother lying on a bed remembering the killings and the dead bodies piled along the roads, as she was escaping from Jeju island in 1948. Soup and Ideology is a very touching viewing experience, and on many different levels. The movie presents not only the painful memories of the Jeju massacre (April 3rd 1948) as remembered by the director’s mother, and the destruction of her family, her three brothers were sent from Japan to North Korea at a young age, but also an emotional portrait of her frail and old mother, as a Korean who grew up in Japan worshipping North Korea. As the film progresses she is diagnosed with senile dementia, and little by little she loses her memories, including those of the massacre she witnessed, only 18, in the small Korean island. The movie is also partly an act of self-reflection by Yang Yonghi herself, if in the first part she is the one filming her mother, in the second, when her mother condition worsens, she enters the frame, so to speak. We can clearly see her emotions, especially when she visits the island, with mother and husband, for the anniversary of the massacre. There Yang Yonghi understands that her mother’s affiliation/attraction for North Korea, something the director had never completely forgiven her and her father for, was also partly caused by the atrocities committed by the ROK her mother saw with her own eyes. It would have been a better movie for me, had not been for the five or so minutes of animation used to explain her mother story and the historical situation in Jeju in 1948. I found the segment unnatural and it really took me out of the movie. The soup of the title is a dish that her mother usually prepares, and that is later cooked by Yang Yonghi’s Japanese husband, we see the first meeting between her mother and him in one of the first scenes of the movie, as a way of entering or belonging to her wife’s family, the director parents had always wanted her to married exclusively a North Korean national. Soup and Ideology is important piece of documentary and was one of the highlights of the festival for me.

Soup and Ideology

Other documentaries I’ve watched: The Buddha Mummies of North Japan (2017, Watanabe Satoshi), about the practice of sokushinbutsu or self-mummification through which some mountain monks, usually related to Shugendō, are believed to have attained satori. The World’s “Top” Theater (2017, Satō Kōichi), a fascinating trip into post-war film culture in Yamagata, the film focuses on the Green Room, a cinema in Sakata City that was completely destroyed in a fire in 1976. Before the Dying of the Light (2020, Ali Essafi); Dorm (2021, So Yo-hen), partly documentary and partly performance/reenactment, female Vietnamese laborers arrive at a dormitory in Taiwan. Creative and surprising the finale.

Some final thoughts. After going to Yamagata for almost a decade, it was a very singular experience to join the festival online—the system adopted, with movies available only in Japan and at certain time, like in the in-presence edition, raised more than a doubt (I had a press pass, but I will write more on this in the following weeks). Of course I missed the people, the discussions, the city itself, experiencing the movies on a big screen, the food and the drinks, however, the festival turned out to be a satisfying experience. Of the works I watched, a couple were outstanding, but each one was interesting in its own way. Yamagata is, among other things, a nice occasion to reflect on what happened in the documentary world in the past two years, with a particular focus on Asia: new trends and new voices, but also how the cinema of the real captured, mirrored, and represented the events that took place around the globe. See you in two years Yamagata!

Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2021 (online) – first dispatch

This year edition of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival is, like many other events in the past two years, taking place exclusively online. The festival is available only for viewers in Japan and will end next Thursday (October 14th). This is a first dispatch, others, will possibly follow.

(Synopses are from the official homepage of the festival)

Pickles and Komian Club (2021, Satō Kōichi) Questions and heartbreak emerge from the closing of long-established pickled foods store, Maruhachi Yatarazuke, whose 135-year operation was brought to an abrupt end during the pandemic. The film follows the store owner, forced to make a difficult decision, and those who freely gathered at the store and supported the space.  If you have attended at least once the YIDFF, you certainly know about Komian Club, the place where all the people of the festival, directors, producers, cinema lovers, press, or just people from the prefecture, used to gather and discuss about cinema, fueled by sake, beer, or just pure passion for documentaries. Unfortunately, the place, together with the pickled store that ran it, closed down and was demolished, in part due to the pandemic. The documentary is a nice glimpse of what the Komian represented for the documentary community in Yamagata, but also a look at the dire situation of old and historical properties and buildings in peripheral areas in Japan.

Komian Club

Self-Portrait: Fairy Tale in 47KM (2021, Zhang Mengqi) The newest instalment in a series set in a small village in a mountainous region in China. In the winter marking ten years since the director began filming, she tries to get a new building constructed in the village. The girls, who had thus far been the subjects of her films, take up the camera themselves, and begin recording scenes of the village. This is a lovely addition to the series the director has been making since 2011, here the focus is on the children and their interaction with the landscape they inhabit, always breathtaking I have to say, through the mediation of video cameras.

Whiplash of the Dead (2021, Daishima Haruhiko) Weaving together the memories of a university student who lost his life in the First Haneda Struggle in 1967 through the words of his bereaved family and ex-classmates, this film turns the memories of those who protested against government power into questions for the future. The movie is comprised of two parts, for a total of 3 hours and 20 minutes. While in the first 90 minutes the director focuses on the events preceding and leading to the the death of Yamazaki, in the second segment (it could easily have been another movie), the protagonists of the students protests of the late 1960s, now in their 70s, reflect on the reasons of the implosion of the Japanese new left and its movements. The latter part is definitely the one I latched more with, listening to some of the protagonists of the season of politics in Japan, explaining how the hierarchical structure of the factions, the almost military attitude of its members, and last but not least, how the uchi-geba, the internal purges, de facto destroyed the movements, was mind-opening. Of course I’ve read about it in books and papers, and watched movies depicting this falling (and even wrote about it), but hearing it from the people who were on the frontline, was, weirdly enough, liberating.
The story of the Mito family, not affiliated with any left group, but a family that helped the young protesters in prison, and later promoted anti-nuclear activism, and whose members (father and two sons) tragically died in 1986, is so fascinating, that would deserve its own documentary. 

Whiplash of the Dead

Inside the Red Brick Wall (2020, Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers) Hong Kong, shaken by the “one country, two systems” policy. November 2019, protestors calling for democratic reform are besieged in a university by heavily armed officers. In scrupulous detail, these anonymous filmmakers capture the worn out and anxious youth who are being beat into submission by the violent and cunning forces of power. This was for me the highlight of the festival, so far. Not only a raw punch in the stomach and a visceral viewing experience, but also and incredibly fascinating film on so many other different levels. First of all, there’s the emotional and political side of the resistance, seeing the events of the siege after almost two years, and from a different point of view was, once more, enraging. The second part of the film, when many of the young students broke down, cried and walked out, defeated, from the campus, often criticized by their comrades, was — although something I’ve seen over and over again in the documentaries about the Japanese protests of the 1960s and 1970s—heartbreaking. What was also extremely fascinating, was that all the young people wearing gas-masks and gear, for protection and for anonymity, formed, shall we say, a multitude, a resistance, expressed not through the act of individuals, although there are some speakers who stand out, but more through a sense community and togetherness. It is true that it’s a community that in the second part of the documentary, as I said above, partly dissipates. However, for the period of the siege, twelve long days, it shone as a fight of the multitude.
Very interesting was also how the documentary, by filming the violence between riot police, students, aid people, and members of the press (mainly independent press that live-streamed the battles on the internet) was able to capture and create a very powerful sense of space and proximity. A visual cartography of violence, but also of resistance.

Inside the Brick Wall

Other documentaries I’ve watched: Entropy (2021, Chang Yu-sung), a short and abstract experimentation with images shot in a mine; It’s Just Another Dragon (2020, Taymour Boulos); Broken (2021, Nan Khin San Win) a short but touching portrait of abuse and violence in Myanmar. Her Name Was Europa (2020, Anja Dornieden, Juan David González Monroy) a playfully and fascinating trip into the obsession of recreating/simulating/reviving things from the past/present with a deranged and derailed finale. Afternoon Landscape (2020, Sohn Koo-yong), more an installation than a movie, better to be experienced on the big screen probably; Nuclear Family (2021, Erin Wilkerson, Travis Wilkerson) a descent into the heart of darkness of the US; and The Still Side (2021, Miko Revereza, Carolina Fusilier) the latest from the talented duo Revereza/Fusilier, but one I could not really connect with.

Movie journal (June-August 2021): Minamata Mandala, Sayonara TV, The Witches of the Orient, Challenge, Alchemy

Before being overwhelmed by the wave of film festivals approaching —like last year Yubari, Pordenone, OpenCity and for the first time Yamagata are offering an online edition—I wanted to gather some thoughts on a couple of documentaries (and experimental works) I recently watched.

Sayonara TV (Hijikata Kōji, 2020) It’s a pity that the documentaries produced by Tokai Terebi are not released, by their own choice, on DVD and more widely known, and as far as I know they are not even streaming. I had the chance to see some of them in theater here in Japan in the past ten years or so, and while they are not formally challenging, some of the documentaries are really good and worth watching, this one included. I would also suggest Aozora Dorobō (2011) and Shikei bengonin (2012).

Sayonara TV starts as an investigation into the routine of the news channel Tokai TV in Nagoya, at first a camera films the daily work in the office, but after most of the employees express a sense of uneasy at being followed around and filmed, Hijikata moves his focus on three specific employees. However in the course of the documentary the director starts to doubts the factuality of his own endeavour. Reminded me of some work by Mori Testuya and Imamura Shouhei.

The Witches of the Orient (Julien Faraut, 2021). A pop-documentary about the Japanese volleyball players called the “Oriental Witches”, now in their 70s, a team that took the world of sport by storm during the 1960s. The film follows the formation of the team of the Dai Nippon Spinning’s factory in Kaizuka, Osaka, until their victory at the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. Not the kind of documentary I’m usually attracted to, but well, this was highly entertaining. The cinematography is by the great Yamazaki Yutaka (Still Walking, Nobody Knows), and splashy is the use of animation from Attack No. 1, a manga and series inspired by the team itself. The great animation at the beginning is Dan Dan’emon bakemono taiji (1935) by Kataoka Yoshitaro, and the images of the team’s training are from the short documentary Challenge by Shibuya Nobuko.

Shibuya Nobuko in the 1960s

As written above, Challenge, also known as The Prize of Victory (Shibuya Nobuko, 1963) is a short documentary about the so called Oriental Witches, the legendary Japanese women’s volleyball team active in the late 1950s and 1960s. The short was awarded a prize at Cannes in 1964, and Shibuya ended up contributing to Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad, she filmed the section about volleyball of course. Shibuya was a script supervisor, filmmaker, and video reporter born in Dalian, occupied China, in 1932, and she moved to Japan only after the war. As a script supervisor she worked also for Dokuritsu Pro with Imai Tadashi, Shindō Kaneto, and Yamamoto Satsuo. After this documentary, in the next decades she would work mainly for TV, and, as far as I know, worked as an editor for some non-fiction films directed by others (Iizuka Toshio, for instance). She passed away in 2016. Shibuya is a fascinating figure, another forgotten Japanese female filmmaker and documentarian I would like to explore more in the future. On YouTube there’s a channel dedicated to her films, I believe it’s a semi-official one:

Minamata Mandala (Hara Kazuo, 2020). Synopsis from Letterboxd: After years of dumping industrial wastes from the factory to the ocean, Chisso Chemical Corporation contaminated the area of a small Japanese fishing village with excessive amounts of methylmercury. This highly toxic chemical bioaccumulated in fishes of the local water, which when consumed by the local populace resulted in mercury poisoning. In 1977, Minamata disease certification criteria was set by a strange method that tried not to recognize the rights of environmental disease patients. However, an Osaka court won the case for some patients because of a newly developed theory by medical doctors’ recent experiments and proofs. For decades, these patients struggled within the Japanese judicial system for their rights to receive compensation as victims of environmental disease. Those different aspects of these patients’ lives have been filmed by director Hara for the last 15 year inspired by the late director Tsuchimoto Noriaki documentaries.

This would need a longer and in-depth piece, but for now suffice it to say that Minamata Mandala is, in my view, one of Hara’s best works, and the masterpiece of the second part of his career. Not a minute of the documentary (373 minutes!) is superfluous. 

Alchemy (Nakai Tsuneo, 1971). Official synopsis: The camera slowly zooms, in over a long period of time, on the light of the sun reflected in the mirror of a bicycle parked at the construction site. To this is added a slowly evolving flicker effect derived from negative-positive reversals, progressively dismantling the distance from the subject. Nakai created a masking film with a calculated pattern of black and white frames into which he inserted positive and negative images and made a print out of two separate rolls of film. The original projection speed was 16 frames per second, but the sound is separate from the open-roll tape rather than burned in, so it can also be screened at 24fps. Also, the original sound consisted of the friction noise of rubbing steel, but in 2019 a new version of the sound was created featuring the friction noise of glass. Two versions of the film exist: 24:15 mins at 24 fps and 40 mins at 16 fps.  This was one of the best discoveries of the year for me, thanks to the Collaborative Cataloging Japan (CCJ), a structuralist work made in 1971 by Nakai, clearly inspired by Michael Snow’s Wavelength, but at the same time highly original, and somehow anticipating Matsumoto’s Atman.

Movie journal (March 2021): Dead Birds, The First Emperor, and Noda Shinkichi

Wrapping up March and the first 3 months of 2021 with some of the most interesting non-fiction works I’ve watched this year so far.

Dead Birds (Robert Gardner, 1963)

I discovered the existence of the movie through Expedition Content, thus I watched it and experienced it knowing what was behind it, colonial gaze and everything else that comes when a movie is constructed to fit a certain, problematic to say the least, view of the world. 
That being said, some of the images used are so powerfulーI’m here referring especially to the long shots of the battles between the two tribes, or the children washing the intestine of a pig in a river ーthat they escape the film own narration and the conceptual framing of the work. The movie is available here.

The First Emperor (Hara Masato, 197?)

From IFFR:

In 1971, Hara Masato and a group or actors started shooting his 16mm film, The First Emperor, based on an old Japanese book about history and myths that is known as the Kojiki (‘Record of Ancient Matters’). He did not finish the film. A year later, he started filming again with a small Super8 camera, all on his own, now intending to make some shots of the locations he had not previously been able to film. On the way, he reconsidered his ideas and realised that the myths could not be found anywhere outside and were not filmable in a material sense, but that they were located in cinema itself or in the making of cinema. He decided that recording his hunt for locations was the best way to finish The First Emperor, in which the Japanese myths could also serve as material. The smallest universe known as cinema corresponds with the universe of telling myths about Creation. This is a travelogue by the film maker himself and a film about film, while it is also a myth about film.

There are many iterations of this “movie”, the work completed by Hara in 1973 was 7 hour long, and there are later versions of 4 and 2 hours. A decade or so ago, I saw a 7 hour version (not sure if it was the first version), with live accompaniment by Hara himself, few years ago the 4 hour long, and last month the restored 2 hour edit (two-screen version). 
The latter is for me the best, a lysergic trip into the fabric of filmmaking and memories, and film as memory. 
Hara and his works is something that should be explored more—not only in connection with the so called Japanese new wave, he co-wrote Ōshima’s The Man Who Left His Will on Film, and the concept of fûkeiron (landscape theory) in film, to which this movie certainly belongs —but also as a unique filmmaker who works “outside” of cinema as traditionally conceived, in a liminal space formed between personal cinema and amateur filmmaking.

Japanese science and PR films are a well of discoveries, particularly those produced in the late 1950s and 1960s, when many directors who later would have become big names, started their career working in this genre. In the last past months I’ve had the chance to watch a couple of shorts directed by Noda Shinkichi, a director, poet, theorist and producer who was affiliated and collaborated with, among others, Matsumoto Toshio, and who was a central figure in the development of documentary in Japan.

Country Life Under Snow この雪の下に (1956) is a fascinating depiction of the harsh life in a rural area in Yamagata prefecture, while Transporting the Olympics オリンピックを運ぶ (1964) is a documentary about the logistics and the behind the scene of the 1964 Olympics. How things (boats, yachts, traffic cones, film reels, etc.) and animals (horses, pigeons) were transported from and to Tokyo. Directed by Matsumoto and Noda, the film was part of the official coverage of the event, but the two crafted an interested filmic object nonetheless (the classic music used, for instance, reminded me of the Japanese new wave). The work tells us that without the people working behind the scene, such a big scale events would not be possible.

Yamazaki Hiroshi, Concepts and Incidents 山崎博 計画と偶然

A different sort of post today.

Since the cinematic works of Yamazaki Hiroshi are, to say the least, not really available ー I was lucky enough to attend a retrospective dedicated to his experiments in 16mm, organized by the Image Forum Festival a couple of years ago (you can read more here) ー I thought it would be interesting to post here some of his photographs. After all he was first and foremost a photographer, a conceptual photographer to be more precise, whose works as a filmmaker were a continuation of the path created and explored with his still images.

On s side note, it blew my mind to discover that he was the cameraman who shot the overworldy time-lapse images of the Sun in Ogawa Pro’s The Sundial Carved with a Thousand Years of Notches — The Magino Village Story (1986), a solar connection to be further explored, and another proof, if we needed any, of how the masterpiece shot in Yamagata was also the result of a collective effort, and an interwaving of influences and contributions from different artistic fields.

The following photos are taken from Yamazaki Hiroshi, Concepts and Incidents 山崎博 計画と偶然, an English/Japanese catalogue published on the occasion of an exhibition organized at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum in 2017. The volume covers Yamazaki’s career from his debut, at the end of the 1960s, until his late works, and it’s divided in chapters following the different phases, approaches and interests in photography and film throughout his life, he passed away in June 2017, less than a month after the end of the exhibition.

Stills from Heliography (1979), in my opinion Yamasaki’s masterpiece
Stills from a video experiment, Flower in the Space (1989)

Movie journal (November 2020): 2 documentaries by Yoshida Kijū, and Okinawa 2018

Wrapping up November with some of the most interesting non-fiction works (made in , or about, the Far East) I’ve watched in the past months.

私たち生まれた島 Okinawa 2018 (Todori Shin’ya, 2020) is an informative documentary about how the new generations of Okinawans deal and cope with the American military bases in the islands. Filmed in the last few years, the film covers the protests againsst the relocation of one of the biggest American bases in Henoko, the election of a female representative (for the communist party) in a small town, and the election of governor Denny Tamaki in 2018. A mix of video journalism and grassroots activism caught on video, the documentary offers an interesting insight of a complex and layered situation.

Sooner or later I will have to write something longer about the documentaries directed by Yoshida Kijū, one of the towering figures in post war Japanese cinema. For today let me just share a few random thoughts about two of his best non-fiction films I’ve recently rewatched.

With The Cinema of Ozu according to Kijū Yoshida 吉田喜重が語る小津安二郎の映画世界 (1994) the Japanese director adds images to his reflections on Ozu written in his beautiful Ozu’s Anti-Cinema. If you have already read the volume, it’s nothing particularly new, but it is a delight nonetheless. I watched the short version, but apparently there also a longer version out there.

While both were made in the same period and share a certain style and approach ーYoshida providing the narration, and the preoccupation with cinema and the act of representing through images as a theoretical structureー Dreams of Tokyo, Dreams of Cinema 夢のシネマ 東京の夢 (1995) is by far my favourite of the two. By telling the story of the early travels of Gabriel Veyre, the Lumière Brothers’ cameraman, in Mexico, Japan and Morocco, Yoshida reflects on the advent of this new technology and the changes and cultural shifts that were caused by the cinematograph and everything that came with it. This relatively short documentary (50’) is a fascinating example of how effective and poetic essay cinema can be when used at its best. Yoshida, using Veyre’s gaze, exposes the power and dangers that the birth of cinema brought with it since its very beginning, forseeing also the prominence that visual representation would reach in the world to come.

One of the most significative passage is, in this sense, one where we see a group of indigenous people in Mexico filmed by Veyre, a group that is definitely not glad to pose for the camera. At a certain point a white person violently grabs the head of a woman and forces her to see and face the camera to get a “better” shot. At this point the footage ends. According to Yoshida probably Veyre sensed that something was not right and decided to interrupt the shooting. Quoting Yoshida “Most people enthusiastically perceived the moving images of the cinematograph as reality itself and so the representation ended up taking precedence over the reality of the world, but Veyre for some unknown reason adopting an opposing standpoint, saw the future of the cinema from a different angle.”

Here the scene:

https://youtu.be/rNpzCJsSEz4


Movie journal (Sept 2020): Toro Axe Part 3: All Things Change, The Tide Pool, Ainu My Voice, The Dawn of Kaiju Eiga

The Covid-19 and the consequent pandemic has also been affecting the film festival circuit around the globe, with many festivals forced to cancel their events, postpone them or moving the screenings online. As bad as the situation is (first world problems of course), this shift in the showing practice, we all hope it’s a temporary solution, gave me the chance of “attending” the virtual edition of a couple of film festivals that under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have been able to be at. The Udine Far East Festival and the Cinema Ritrovato in Italy, and more recently the EXiS Film Festival in South Korea, and the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival here in Japan. Below are some thoughts about a couple of documentaries I had the opportunity to watch at these events.

Toro Axe Part 3: All Things Change (2012, 35′) is Matsumoto Toshio last work, a collaborative video project produced by Sano Gallery initially in 2009, in which six co-writers would participate and create an omnibus film. At first, Matsumoto was not supposed to be involved too much in it, but in 2011 the Great East Japan Earthquake and the consequent nuclear disaster had such a strong impact on him, that Matsumoto decided to change the shape of the project. This new work became a trilogy titled Tōrō no ono, the third installment, All Things Change, was screened at this year EXiS Film Festival (online).

蟷螂の斧: 万象無常 Toro Axe Part 3: All Things Change

The origin of this project was the experience of the horrific disaster (earthquake and nuclear accident) that took place in 2011. This event was so powerful that it changed the way humans see and value things. If we don’t look directly at at the fundamental way death and life are entangled, we will not be able to move forward. For this reason, this visual work became even more disorganized and destructive than “Pilgrimage into Memory” the second installment, containing all different sort of noises and creating a dissonant vortex of chaos. (Matsumoto Toshio)

The film consists of videos shot and produced by 5 artists, Tanotaiga, Inaki Kanako, Oki Hiroyuki, Kunito Okuno, and Tanaka Tanako, blended together by Matsumoto, an attempt, according to the director himself, to get rid of the individuality of the artist, and to create or to move towards an anonymous subjectivity. His last involvement in a visual work as a manipulator of images is the perfect sum of his career, everything he made and worked on during his life resonates throughout this collaborative film, from his early preoccupations about the filmmaker/image maker’s subjectivity, to his interest in the process of the creation of moving images.

The first five minutes are almost like a work by Makino Takashi, colours and particles in motion that leaves room, in the rest of the movie, to a more traditional video documentary about the triple disaster of 3.11. The interest of Matsumoto and his collaborators towards the pullulating life (worms, flies, but also a new born baby) among the landscape of death of the ruins and wreckage left by the tsunami, is as disturbing as it is fascinating. The endless pulse of life, life here considered in its broader meaning encompassing also death and destruction, is not only conveyed through the scenes of swarming insects and the arrival of a new life to this world, but also, in pure Matsumoto style, is embedded in the plasticity and throb of images.

The title is fascinating in itself too, 蟷螂の斧 (tōrō no ono) is a maxim signifying a futile endeavor like a “mantis brandishing a hatchet”, while mujō of the title of the installment, 万象無常 (banshō mujō) All Things Change, is the Buddhist anitya meaning impermanence, and banshō signifies all the creation, the universe.

Ainu My Voice アイヌ, 私の声 (Tomida Daichi, 2020) was presented at the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival (online) section dedicated to women’s empowerment, a collection of shorts dealing with the lives of female subjects, a wide and diverse range of subjects, in contemporary societies.
Shot and composed like a TV commercial, after all it was produced by the fashion magazine MINE, the movie is nonetheless an interesting dive, albeit short ça va sans dire, on a young Ainu woman who is trying to make sense of her life and her belonging to a minority group in contemporary Japan and beyond, in the course of the film she also visits a tribe of native Indians in America. You can watch, legally, Ainu My Voice here.

The Tide Pool: Where the Ocean Begins (Lim Hyung Mook, 2019) is a movie about the tide pools in Jeju island, South Korea, and their complex ecosystem. As the official description says “A tide pool is an isolated pocket of seawater found in the ocean’s intertidal zone (…) areas where the ocean meets the land: from steep, rocky ledges to long, sloping sandy beaches and vast mudflats.”

An above-average documentary about marine life that is elevated by a stunning photography and a smart use of music. A very “traditional” science documentary, make no mistake about it, with narration, explanations, and an educational purpose at its core, but the images are so beautiful and the colours so popping that it is easy to understand why it was included in a festival about the fantastic.

I’m cheating a bit here, The Dawn of Kaiju Eiga (Jonathan Bellés, 2019) is not properly speaking a documentary produced or made in Asia, but nonetheless it is about a very Japanese phenomenon, the Kaiju eiga. Bellés explores the connections between the advent of Kaiju movies, especially Godzilla, and the horrific history of Japan and atomic bombs. Nothing special and nothing new for an average but well-informed Godzilla fan, but if you’re new to the subject, it might work as a portal. As already noted by many reviewers, while there are some interesting interviews with people who worked for the Godzilla franchise throughout the decades, the lack of images from the movies ruins the enjoyment of it (the movie is made almost completely of interviews). It is by no means the director’s fault, Tōhō and more in general Japanese movie companies are famous for their closure of mind in regards to the usage of images from their works (unless you pay of course, pay a lot).

Movie journal (Dec. 2019): Man Who Has a Camera, Many Undulating Things, Nuclear Power Plants Now

Three short takes on some of the most interesting documentaries I’ve seen recently.

The Man Who Has a Camera (Liu Na’ou, 1935)

One the the discoveries of the year for me. Clearly inspired by Dziga Vertov, filmmaker, poet and writer Liu Na’ou shot this movie in four cities across national boundaries: Tainan, Canton, Shenyang, and Tokyo. A beautiful film that is in equal part amateur cinema, a city symphony film, and an experiment in poetic filmmaking, less a work about landscapes of certain areas, and more an actuality film depicting faces and people’ feelings across and beyond borders. Incredibly charming, fresh and well constructed, a feverish dream of transculturality that is much deeper and complex than its simplicity on the surface level might suggest. I’m planning to write a longer piece about the fascinating figure that was Lui Na’ou and this film in the near future.

Many Undulating Things (Wang Bo, Lu Pan, 2019)

The film begins and ends in a shopping centre in Hong Kong. We carefully observe the smooth movement of the escalators, the constant flow of people that never stops, the musical fountain that presides over the centre of the internal courtyard, as if this gigantic complex could concentrate the circulation of the entire city, or even, the entire country. From there, it will be more a tale about concrete, enormous port warehouses, glazed galleries built for the 2010 universal exhibition, overpopulated tower blocks, the fragments of still recent colonialism… Through the history of urban changes, we witness the profound social transformation of this territory that is constantly swinging between the East and the West. Hong Kong thus emerges, like an archetypal space of many other cities of globalised capitalism. MANY UNDULATING THINGS offers a complex reflection on the relationships between landscape, nature, urbanisation and society. Thanks to its exhaustive approach, the film questions the function of cities in the development of the capitalist system. A political poem.

I almost despised the first part, the visuals are fascinating, but the narration and the philosophical frame used didn’t really work for me. From the second chapter onward, the work elevates itself and gets definitely more interestingly nuanced and complex, exploring the historical layers that constitute contemporary Hong Kong, analyzed through cinema, photography and paintings. When it moves to the third chapter, the documentary also explores how colonization in the past centuries worked and was deeply linked to the alteration of the botanical realm, “the reorganization of ecosystems under imperial order (…) was actualised through the glass boxes” an important invention and crucial part of the conquering process pushed by imperialism. The glass box would later mutate and evolve into greenhouses, exhibitions, arcades, spectacles and finally into shopping malls. This section, and especially the second chapter of the movie, is an expansion of Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings, a short made in 2018 by Wang Bo, and definitely forms the strongest part of Many Undulating Things, in my opinion. When the movie moves from the historical perspective back to contemporary Hong Kong, moving also from a visual and hybrid approach that uses old movies and photos to convey its meaning, it loses its power, trying to be too many things at once and meandering in too many directions.
That being said and even though Many Undulating Things feels at times too randomly constructed, and a sort of patchwork of three or four short documentaries, it’s still a fascinating piece of work worth revisiting.

Nuclear Power Plants Now いま原子力発電は (Sumiko Haneda, 1976)

This is an obscure and short documentary made for TV by Haneda Sumiko in 1976, shortly before establishing her own company and releasing The Cherry Tree with Gray Blossoms, if I’m not mistaken. Haneda and her troupe visit the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant to explore the state of atomic energy in Japan, and its lights and shadows. The short is mainly composed of interviews, but the most fascinating part is when doubts about safety concerns start to emerge in the talks. While some people from the Tokyo Electric Power Company, the company that owns the plant, compare the possibility of an incident at the power plant to that of a meteor hitting the earth, there’s a professor from Waseda, if I remember correctly, who says that there have not been enough cases to delineate or guess the consequences, or even to calculate the possibility, of a nuclear incident. The style is that of a TV documentary, and there’s a lot of explanation about how nuclear energy is produced, however, the doubts that the film raises, especially knowing what would happen 35 years later, are chillingly prescient and make it an interesting viewing. Even essential if you consider Haneda, like I do, one of the most important female directors in the history of Japanese cinema.

Report from the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2019

The 30th edition of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival has ended more than a week ago. I was fortunate enough to be there, it was my fourth time, and for almost the entirety of the festival. What follows is a short report about things I’ve seen and my general impressions of the event. Please bear in mind that every film festival is experienced differently by each people attending it, depending on age, expectations, interests and the path each of us carve in the forest of movies screened.

As usual I didn’t see many of the films in competition, most of them are by big names, and, hopefully, will be screened in theaters o streamed on platforms in the near future. That being said, I really wanted to see Wang Bing’s Dead Souls, but its length deterred me, not the actual length in itself, but the fact that it would have eaten up a whole day of movies. Anyway I ended up not seeing it and I’m not sure I made the right decision, Dead Souls won the main prize, the Robert and Frances Flaherty Prize, and surprisingly to me, the citizen price as well. The other major award, the Special Jury Prize, was given to Indiana, Monrovia by Frederick Wiseman, a solid work, but not the best documentary by the American director, in my opinion, the main problem I had with the movie was the “fast” editing of certain scenes, the landscape scenes to be precise.

AM/NESIA: Forgotten “Archipelagos” of Oceania is the program I was most excited about, and it turned out I was right. The first work I saw at the festival was Lifeline of the Sea, a propaganda documentary made in 1933 with the support of the Navy Ministry of Imperial Japan, a film depicting the colonization and militarization of several islands in Oceania. It’s an extremely important document, almost ethnographic in its first part, when it depicts the various traditions and beliefs of the people inhabiting the islands, and overtly propagandist in the second part. It does that in such a bluntly way, it does not sweeten the pill so to speak, that it doesn’t hide the the fact that colonization is first and foremost about using other territories resources and exploiting people. A chillingly matter-of-fact documentary that found its perfect counterpart in the work screened soon after, Senso Daughter. Directed by Sakiguchi Yuko in 1990, the movie focuses on the legacy of the Japanese occupation of Papua New Guinea during the Second World War. A sad legacy that arises from rape, starvation and terror. It is an unflinching gaze at the horrors perpetuated by Japanese military towards women, the so called “comfort women”, in Papua New Guinea, told through interviews with ex-soldiers. While admitting the violence of war, almost all these veterans deny any violence or forced prostitution of women, on the other hand the director researches and presents us a very different reality when she interviews women who survived that period and painfully recollect those times. It is interesting to note that the documentary was released just a couple of years after Hara Kazuo’s The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, a movie that covers a different but related topic in the same area. Imamura Shohei also explored the topic of comfort women, sent from Japan in his film, in Karayuki-san, the Making of a Prostitute, a made-for-TV documentary aired in 1975.
A big surprise for me was to find out that Sakiguchi Yuko is the same person who directed from 2012 to 2108 Everyday is Alzheimer, a series of three personal documentaries about her mother’s dementia. A trilogy of films that had a relative success in the indie scene and in the mini-theater circuit.
AM/NESIA was a real discovery for me, unfortunately I saw only one more film, Kumu Hima (Dean Hamer, Joe Wilson, 2014) about a transgender person in contemporary Hawaii and how colonialism has affected and continues to affect people’s bodies as well, not only lands and territories. I bought the catalog, a beautiful book with which, hopefully, I will try to continue the exploration of the films produced in the continent. A forgotten cinema.

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The other program that I followed somehow closely was The Creative Treatment of Grierson in Wartime Japan. While some of the movies screened are “classics” of documentary cinema, Night Mail, Coal Face, or Housing Problems, the screenings were often packed, typhoon notwithstanding. When Night Mail was shown for instance, during the scenes when it is shown how the postal mail is delivered around the country without the train stopping, the audience was cheering and clapping enthusiastically like at a Marvel movie. I was really impressed, and this made me ponder about who these kind of festivals and screenings events are made for. They’re definitely not only for “experts” and professionals, and I was glad to notice that many people in the audience were young, well younger than me at least.
In the same section I saw Kobayashi Issa (1941), a film commissioned by the Nagano Prefectural Department of Tourism and directed by Kamei Fumio. I had high expectations for this, if you read this blog you know my love for Kamei, and this short movie completely blew me away. Told in a poetic and subtle way, using the haiku of poet Kobayashi Issa, the documentary goes against all the idyllic depiction of countryside and mountain life that one would expect from a work commissioned by such an institution. Instead Kamei sets his gaze on the poverty and on the conditions of the people living in the area, presenting also a witty deconstruction of a frame of thought that wants to consider countryside like an “other” or furusato, a ”home” where to go back, an origin. One scene in particular stayed with me because it summarizes the tone of the movie perfectly. An old man’s face in close-up (remember Fighting Soldiers?) is accompanied by a narration that solemnly says something like, I’m paraphrasing of course, “what is this man gazing at?”. When the camera zooms out and cut to the bigger picture though, we see him urinating against the mountain landscape. Definitely one of the best discoveries of the festival, still very fresh and relevant today, both for its thematic approach and its style.

I couldn’t see many of the documentaries screened in the New Asian Currents program, usually one of the most interesting of the festival, but I was able to catch a couple, among these, worth mentioning are Cenote (2019) by Oda Kaori and Temporary (2017) by Hsu Hui-ju. I had already seen Cenote in Nagoya a few month ago, but this was too good of a chance to re-watch it with better sound and on a bigger screen. The movie confirms Oda as one of the most original and interesting voices working in documentary today, if Aragane was a revelation (I wrote about it here, and interviewed her 4 or so years ago about the movie), her next project, Toward a Common Tenderness (2017), was conceptually different, but kept the aesthetic touch present in Aragane, adding to it a poetic and essayistic element. With this work Oda continues on the same path started with those two movies, the long take aesthetic is here translated underwater and intertwined with stories and legends told by the people of the area, Cenote(s) are natural sinkholes in Mexico, sources of water that in ancient Mayan civilization were said to connect the real world and the afterlife. If Aragane was a movie that revolved formally around darkness, slow movement and repetition, Cenote is a work about water and light. Images and soundscape are, as usual in Oda’s films, impressive and deeply interconnected, particularly in the scenes shot underwater inside the the sinkholes. Swimming in these Cenotes, the camera is enveloped in a reality that is perceived and created through water and light, going deep back the to womb of the earth, to the origin of life, as it were. When I saw the movie in Yamagata, I felt it worked less than the first time, maybe it was festival fatigue on my part, but I think the movie in its final part loses some of its power. Perhaps the words and faces of the Mexican people, shot in a beautiful and grainy 8mm, could have been used differently. That being said, the intensity I got from some of the scenes was almost overwhelming, Oda is aiming here higher than in her previous works, she’s trying to convey deeper and even religious meanings, and although not always successfully, there are moments when I felt that the underwater images (filmed with an iPhone!) combined with the sound/noise, reached almost a sort of spiritual materiality. I definitely need to re-watch it.
Temporary is an interesting documentary, albeit not completely successful, that experiments with reenactment “in the ruins of an abandoned factory, three temporary workers—a young man, an older man and an older woman—behave like a choreographed family, as they clean up, construct a table, and eat together.” It felt more like a draft for a future feature film than a proper work, and indeed director Hsu Hui-ju after the screening said that she’s now filming and making a new work about one of the men who appeared in the short movie. More interesting for me was to see another documentary by the same director (she had 3 movies in Yamagata!), Out of Place (2012), shown in the Cinema with Us program, this year dedicated to the depiction of disasters in Japanese and Taiwanese documentary. Out of Place It’s a personal documentary in which Hsu films the town of Xiaoling, after Typhoon Morakot completely swept it away in 2009. The grieving process of the people is intertwined with a quest for an identity by the director herself, her family and the people who lived in the village, most of them said to belong to the Pingpu ethnic minority. Besides the value of the documentary itself as a visual piece, there’s nothing really exceptional about it, the work excels at conveying a complex multi-layered picture of a group of people whose origins are very shifting and hazy. Instead of giving us simple solutions in easy and stereotypical sentences like “going back to our ancestral roots” or “find who we really are” and so on, Hsu expresses in images all her doubts about the importance of belonging to a certain group, and, this is my personal reading of it, in the end, the uselessness of finding a solid origin or a fixed identity. It was a very moving screening experience for me because, by pure chance, I sat next to the director and her young daughter, whose birth was filmed and shown on screen, and it was very sweet seeing them exchanging glances and smiles.
Not to insist too much on the subject, but this, after all, small movie, consolidated my opinion that contemporary documentary in Taiwan, or at least a certain portion of it, is in a really good and healthy stage, not only from a purely artistic point of view (read more here), but also as an example of an effervescent culture not afraid of exploring, and even moving away from, its multi-layered and complex origins.

In competition, besides the above-mentioned Monrovia, Indiana, I saw Memento Stella (2018) by Makino Takashi, an experimental movie in line with Makino’s previous works, a visual feast and experience like no others, and a film that I haven’t completely digested or absorbed yet. Interesting was also taking a glance at two other special programs, Rustle of Spring, Whiff of Gunpowder: Documentaries from Northeast India and Reality and Realism: Iran 60s–80s, where I had the chance to see for the first time A Simple Event (1973) by Sohrab Shahid Saless, passionately introduced by Amir Naderi, a beautiful discovery.

Among the festival’s satellite events that were organized in the city, I was lucky and brave enough, on the day the big typhoon hit Japan, to venture to the Yamagata University and attend a very special event. The use of Gentou (magic lanterns) in the social and grass-roots movements of the 1950s, with a special focus on the revolts and strikes in the Miike mine. The topic is so deep and rich of implications to understand the development of documentary in Japan, that I should write a separate article. The 1950s is a period often forgotten or neglected when discussing representation of social protests in postwar Japan, the priority is usually given, and in certain cases deservedly so, to the more cool or stylish production of the 1960s. For now, if you want to know more about Gentou, there are these two excellent pieces: On the Relationship between Documentary Films and Magic Lanterns in 1950s Japan by Toba Koji, and The Revival of “Gentou” (magic lantern, filmstrips, slides) in Showa Period Japan: Focusing on Its Developments in the Media of Post-war Social Movements by Washitani Hana

The festival was, as usual, an extremely exhausting but exciting experience, I would say it is a unique event, but I don’t really go to many other festival around the world. What I can certainly say is that it is a celebration of film culture, where everybody meets everybody else, directors, film professionals, cinema lovers, students or professors alike. As someone has rightly pointed out on-line, the YIDFF is more akin to a rock festival than a film festival. I couldn’t agree more.