Category: Asian documentary

Kobe Discovery Film Festival 2022 – dispatch 2: home movies and Where But Into The Sea

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.

You can read more on the official page of the project.

Personal documentary, diary films, first-person cinema and “Self documentary” in Japan

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.

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).