This is the translation of an article I originally wrote in Italian about two years ago for Sonatine.it, a contemporary Japanese cinema portal I often collaborate with.
Voices from the Waves is the second part of a trilogy of documentaries directed by Sakai Kō and Hamaguchi Ryūsuke about the disaster that struck northeastern Japan in March 2011. This second part consists of two documentaries, Voices of the Waves Kesennuma and Voices of the Waves Shinchi-machi. The only difference between the two works is that they were filmed in two different locations and are about the people who lived and experienced the disaster in two different but geographically very close areas. Both documentaries consist mainly of conversations between two people, often family members or colleagues, who survived the earthquake and tsunami.
Both films begin with images of the silent landscape of the areas, the sea and the waves, houses under construction and the remains of buildings that no longer exist. The idea around which the conversations take place is very simple: each person begins by telling where they were and what they were doing on the day of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami, and from there memories and reflections unfold.
In the first conversation of the Shinchi-machi film, a father and his grown-up daughter sit across from each other. As they recall the arrival of the tsunami and the size of the waves, their conversation is briefly interrupted by the father’s tears as he remembers friends and acquaintances who have disappeared, swept away by the tsunami. From the very first scenes, one of the trilogy’s strengths becomes clear: the moving stories of people who remember become something much more empathetic for the viewer than the flood of images of the disaster. In today’s mediascape, and the Japanese triple disaster of 2011 has become a striking case in point, spectacular images often fade from view in the few moments they are seen, leaving no trace. It is then that words, tone and intonation – in this case the man’s pronounced northeastern accent – manage to convey something much deeper and more affecting than the visual element alone.
Among the various couples we hear and see, whether friends, spouses or colleagues, some recall the difficulty of communicating with their loved ones in the moments immediately after the earthquake and the fact that they turned to images broadcast on television or circulated on the Internet. One of the most interesting parts of the first documentary is when we listen to two fishermen, both of whom were no longer fishermen at the time of the interview, but were doing other things to survive. This conversation, which is more edgy and direct and touches on the issue of radiation in the sea, reflects the character and occupation of the two and provides an interesting but painful variation on the people and personalities affected by the tragedy. The same problems that gripped the area in the aftermath of the disaster are perceived differently depending on people’s social class and economic background. It should be noted that some of these conversations are between a resident of the area and one of the two filmmakers, who then stands in for the second interviewee, but we will return to this important point later.
The second documentary, as the title suggests, was shot in Kesennuma, one of the towns hardest hit by the tsunami. It begins with a night-time view of the town’s harbour and then moves to the first conversation, probably recorded in the evening, between two colleagues working in a bar-restaurant. They share the memory and the feeling of despair and fear when they heard the sound of cars and houses colliding and destroying each other on that tragic day. A middle-aged couple does not want to remember the day of the tsunami because it is still so fresh, even though a year has passed since the tragedy. What emerges here is the willingness of the local people to forget, not to not remember, but to move on and not to base their future lives on the disaster. This is a sentiment that has emerged more and more in recent years, especially in Fukushima, and is often found in many communities affected by natural or man-made disasters, such as mercury poisoning and the resulting Minamata Syndrome, which Tsuchimoto Noriaki has explored in his documentaries. Tsuchimoto, one of Japan’s greatest documentary filmmakers, who has devoted much of his career to following the lives of the victims of Minamata Syndrome, has often commented on how, after decades of documentaries on the subject, many of the victims’ relatives began to treat him coldly. It is therefore important to emphasise one more time that the conversations in Hamaguchi e Ko’s documentaries were filmed just over a year after the triple disaster, when the pain and memories were still fresh, but also when the perspective of those affected by the earthquake and tsunami was slowly but surely changing.
The talking pairs are often in an airy space, especially in the first documentary, where the conversations take place inside buildings, but with large windows looking out. The chosen setting therefore gives a sense of spaciousness and grandeur that an enclosed space would not allow. Between one conversation and the next, there are short ‘pillow shots’, scenes showing the area being rebuilt, the sea, the waves, the excavators and cranes that are still constantly at work. Although these images often capture the landscape filmed by a horizontally moving camera, the entire trilogy differs from most documentaries made about the earthquake and tsunami in that it is composed of mostly static shots. Many of the works that have attempted to document the plight of the local population and the triple disaster over the years have in fact done so through shots taken from a moving vehicle, partly because the vastness of the area affected by the tsunami requires it, but this choice of filming also ended up becoming almost a documentary style in itself and a cliché of how to film the disaster.
It is also significant that the two documentaries are not constructed with interviews, a practice used and abused in the aftermath of the triple disaster, which establishes a relationship of power and impartiality between interviewee and interviewer. Conversations between two people, even though they take place in a staged and constructed space, with at least two cameras and two directors in the room, achieve something different. No one intervenes from outside, of course there is editing, but a kind of horizontal and equal dialogue is created, because these are people who have experienced the tragedy first hand. In this sense, the fact that the two directors intervene in some of the conversations is interesting, almost revealing the “artificiality” of the work, but in the long run it reduces the impact of the two films. The same could be said of the different angles and techniques used to film the two interlocutors (this insightful essay by Markus Nornes is illuminating); while in some cases this works almost perfectly, in others it exacerbates a sense of artificiality that detracts from what is being said. There is, however, one part where all these techniques are used to the full, and that is the final conversation of Voices From the Waves Kesennuma, when a young couple, a man and a woman aged 26 and 23, amid silences, awkwardness, nervous smiles, ringing mobile phones and yawns, bring out the cinematic power of the unspoken, of gestures and pauses, making this scene perhaps the most touching and at the same time amusing of all those seen in both works.
This is the translation of an article I origianally wrote in Italian about three years ago, on the occasion of the special online edition of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival.
Anticipating many of the aesthetic trends that now abound in the visual and social media landscape, The New God is constructed as a video diary that explores and reveals what lies behind the attraction of some young Japanese for the far-right movements at the end of the last century. Video activist and filmmaker Tsuchiya Yutaka films his interactions with ultra-nationalist singer Karin Amamiya and other members of the far-right group to which she belongs. Although his political orientation is completely different, Tsuchiya is so fascinated by what the girl has to say that he decides to give her a video camera to record her daily reflections.
The documentary begins with Amamiya in front of the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, where soldiers and high-ranking generals who committed Class A war crimes during the Second World War are enshrined. A place that continues to cause controversy and tension between Japan and the international community, especially South Korea and China, due to the annual visits to the place by important Japanese political figures. As director Tsuchiya, a left-wing activist and fierce opponent of the imperial system, begins to film Amamiya and her band, he discovers that behind the hard veneer of right-wing extremism lies a sense of almost existential confusion not unlike that experienced by other young people in Japan at the time. The New God thus proves to be a fascinating portrait of a group of very confused young people who have made far-right ideology and the celebration of the emperor the centre of their lives.
Structured as a kind of low-fi video confessional and visual dialogue, shot alternately by Amamiya and Tsuchiya, the documentary is an exploration of the response to life malaise by a group of young people in search of something to fill their existential void. In this sense, one of the most striking elements of the work is the sincerity with which the young singer reveals her feelings to the camera. In her own words and by her own admission, the political stance is often just a mask, a personal reaction to a sense of not belonging in contemporary Japanese society. Amamiya often talks about the lack of meaning that reality has for her, especially when compared to the life-and-death decisions made by soldiers during the Second World War. Of course, this is her rather superficial, confused and mythical vision of Japan’s wartime and supposedly heroic past.
In her confessions and conversations with Tsuchiya and Itō, the band’s guitarist, the girl is looking for something to hold on to, something solid and stable that can give meaning to her everyday reality. Very often this meaning and centre of gravity is provided by the pride of belonging to the “Japanese ethnic group”, which she believes to be a real concept. One of the most fascinating parts of The New God is Amamiya and Itō’s trip to North Korea. There they meet some members of the Yodogō group of the Red Army Faction (Sekigun-ha), who hijacked a JAL flight to Tokyo on 31 March 1970 and eventually took refuge in North Korea, where they were still living when the film was shot. Amamiya, who is very distant from the group in ideology and politics, feels a certain envy both for these 60-year-old ex-terrorists and for the sense of ethnic unity she sees in the Asian country. In one of her videos, she confesses that children aren’t bullied here as they are in Japan, and that she was bullied by her classmates several times as a child and young girl.
As the film progresses, Amamiya’s weaknesses and feelings are slowly revealed, and she is not afraid to confess her fears and indecision directly to the camera. Through the videos that Tsuchiya and Amamiya exchange, the mutual attraction that the two are beginning to feel for each other comes to the surface at a certain point; the two will eventually marry after the filming is finished. It is this sense of progressive revelation and self-discovery accomplished with the help of the camera that makes this documentary such an interesting experiment. The New God thus sits at the crossroads of video activism – Tsuchiya’s own What Do You Think About the War Responsibility of Emperor Hirohito? (1997) is, in a sense, the starting point for The New God – and the tradition of Japanese personal cinema (self-documentary)1.
Seen today, more than 25 years after it was released, The New God is an interesting example of the problematic process of liberation and democratisation of the filming subject made possible by the technological revolution and brought about by the affordability of small video cameras. At the same time, the video message style with which the work is constructed anticipates today’s ubiquitous visual social media aesthetics. There is a great deal of exhibitionism behind Amamiya’s video letters and video confessions, more in the way she relates to the eye of the camera than in what she actually says to it. It is no coincidence that the film ends with her saying, before turning off the video: “I can’t live my life without a camera!”.
That is, the personal, diaristic, often amateur documentary, whose pioneers include Hara Kazuo’s Extreme Private Eros: Love Song, 1974 (1974) and Suzuki Shirōyasu’s Impressions of a Sunset (1975). ↩︎
As usual, the list below reflects my tastes, interests and viewing habits during the year. Some works are from 2023, but only became available here in Japan in 2024. Synopses, in italics, are from Letterboxd. Films are listed in no particular order:
Dahomey(Mati Diop) Thousands of royal artifacts of Dahomey, a West African kingdom, were taken by French colonists in the 19th century for collection and display in Paris. Centuries later, a fraction returned to their home in modern-day Benin. This dramatized documentary follows the journey of 26 of the treasures as told by cultural art historians, embattled university students, and one of the repatriated statues himself. Dahomey is a mesmerising experiment, both visually and thematically: it poses so many questions about decolonisation, essentialism, the traces in the present left by the actions in the past, language, art, religious practices, politics, and the life of objects (Object Oriented Onthology?), while hinting at possible lines of flight…Diop has an incredible talent in capturing the beauty of people and things, and blend them together… “I am the face of the metamorphosis”
Knit’s Island (Ekiem Barbier, Guilhem Causse, Quentin L’helgoualc’h) Somewhere on the internet is a land where communities pretend to live out a survivalist fiction. The avatars of the directors of Knit’s Island spent 963 hours there, creating a fascinating film resulting from their encounter with these communities. The “players” reveal their fears and fantasies, in an at times unsettling blurring of the real and the virtual. I am not a gamer, and not particularly interested in online videogames, but when I first saw it at the Niigata International Animation Film Festival, it blew my mind. The reality of the virtual, complex, subtle, and much much more.
No Other Land (Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal) Made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective, this documentary shows the destruction of the West Bank’s Masafer Yatta by Israeli authorities and the unlikely friendship that blossoms between Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham.
The Voices Of The Silenced (Park Maeui, Pak Su-nam) Director Park Soo-nam, a second-generation Korean resident in Japan who is losing his eyesight, decides to digitally restore 16mm film she shot a long time ago, relying on her daughter Park Ma-eui’s eyesight. The blood, tears, and numerous corpses of Koreans living in Japan are clearly engraved in the film filmed over 50 years.
Hiroshima – Nagasaki (Ikezoe Shun) Voices from Tsuyoshi Yamaguchi, who was twice exposed to the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and later became a storyteller, as well as those who continue the storyteller activities with his daughters, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and other people who were twice exposed to the atomic bombs. How will a storyteller who was not involved in the story pass on the memories in the future?
Clouds of War (Mikami Chie) This is the latest documentary by journalist and filmmaker Mikami Chie, a director whose previous works (The Targeted Village, Boy Soldiers: the Secret War in Okinawa, We Shall Overcome) have focused on the current situation in the Ryūkyū archipelago (Okinawa), its complex geopolitical history and the resistance of its people against the various American bases operating on the islands. Filmed over the course of eight years, beginning in 2015, Clouds of War documents the construction of military harbours and ammunition depots by the Japanese Self-Defence Forces, and more broadly, the general militarisation of the main island of Okinawa, Yonaguni, Miyako and Ishigaki. These frightening changes affecting the land and its citizens, such as the construction of underground shelters in Yoneguni or a plan to evacuate the inhabitants to Kyūshū, are being done in preparation for the next war on the horizon, the one between China and Taiwan.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’État (Johan Grimonprez) In 1960, United Nations: the Global South ignites a political earthquake, musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash the Security Council, Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe denouncing America’s color bar, while the U.S. dispatches jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to the Congo to deflect attention from its first African post-colonial coup.
The Oasis I Deserve (Inès Sieulle) Replika is a public platform that allows anyone to create a relationship with a chatbot trained by artificial intelligence. This chatbot has been designed to replace us with our loved ones after our death. Thus, its goal is to learn as much as possible about us in order to reproduce us identically. Through a walk that takes place only from the subjective point of view of Replikas, we see them evolve and discover the images & sounds of the world around them through a system of videos generated by artificial intelligence. Phone conversations that Replikas have with users fill the narration. The Oasis I Deserve is not a film that questions the system of machine/human domination under the axis of a future war against the machine. It is a film that is mainly human. It speaks about our relationship to the unknown and how we share violence. (source). I was really impressed by the subject tackled and by the way the images, Francis Bacon like, are able to convey the themes and the feelings explored .
Black Box Diaries (Itō Shiori) Journalist Shiori Itō embarks on a courageous investigation of her own sexual assault in an improbable attempt to prosecute her high-profile offender. Her quest becomes a landmark case in Japan, exposing the country’s outdated judicial and societal systems. A powerful example of how women can reclaim their agency through the visual medium.
Underground (Oda Kaori) The latest work by the Japanese artist, I have written about it, here: Sculpting space with light.
Discoveries:
Mother of Many Children (Alanis Obomsawin, 1977) This film is an album of Native womanhood, portraying a proud matriarchal society that for centuries has been pressured to adopt different standards and customs. All of the women featured share a belief in the importance of tradition as a source of strength in the face of change. Obomasawin’s first feature-length documentary is also one of her best (along with Kanehsatake and Restigouche, in my opinion): insightful, touching, multi-layered and beautifully constructed.
Echigo Okumiomote: A Traditional Mountain Village (Himeda Tadayoshi, 1984) I wrote an article about the film: here.
A Grasscutter’s Tale (Fukuda Katsuhiko, 1985) Part of the Sanrizuka notes that Fukuda took after he left Ogawa Pro in the late 1970s and the group moved to Yamagata, A Grasscutter’s Tale is a crucial film in the history and development of documentary practices in Japan. It occupies two spaces at once: a militant cinema and a cinema that explores the waves of history through the personal; in other words, it’s an oral film that uses images to explore the physical and historical space of a place. Fukuda experiments with style and form, for example: one segment about a dream is completely dark except for a bright light in the top left corner of the screen, and in another, the narration explains, again on a black screen, how the re-enactment of an episode from the old lady’s life was scrapped at the request of her son, who was in it. The episodic structure of the film, which is made up of 19 chapters (some comic, some tragic) that explore episodes in the life of the protagonist, does not capture a totality, but provides an image that leaves room for the creation of meanings. This is also reflected in the visual style used, where images and words are parallel and do not touch each other, so to speak. I was lucky enough to attend a screening of the documentary in 16mm, the greens of the crops and grass are almost tactile, and the time-lapse scene of the setting sun, here a fiery red, is similar to that used in Magino Village: A Tale.
addendum (January 5, 2024): I forgot Tokyo Trial (Kobayashi Masaki, 1983), one of the fews examples of found footage/compilation documentary in the history of Japanese cinema.
Underground spaces accumulate traces and memories of past presences, both non-human ones created over thousands of years by geological processes, and those left by human activity and histories. Over the past three years, Japanese artist and filmmaker Oda Kaori has explored and focused her attention on some of these underground places in Japan, seeking to capture and evoke past existences through images and sounds. The result of this research, which has also led to other productions in various media, is アンダーグラウンド Underground (2024), a sonic and visual experiment that was presented at the 37th edition of the Tokyo International Film Festival in the Nippon Cinema Now section last November.
At least three years in the making, Underground is her most experimental work to date, and a project that concludes a phase of Oda’s career dedicated to exploring subterranean spaces with Aragane (2015) and continued with the underwater world with Cenote (2019), but one that may also herald a new path, more experimental, for the artist. If you want to know more about Oda and her previous work, I’ve written a long essay about her first three works, or there’s also an interview I did with her – although it was almost ten years ago, at the beginning of her career.
The interest in the Japanese underground and in the past lives it evokes is thus a continuation of the path that the artist took with Aragane and Cenote, but here with a focus on the subterranean spaces of the archipelago. An early result of this exploration of Japan’s underground spaces was released last year, Gama (2023), a medium-length film that brings to light, almost literally, the stories of forced mass suicides of Okinawan people in gamas (natural caves), during the latter stages of the Pacific War. Much of the footage shot for Gama was reused in Underground and combined with images from another project, a nearly ten-minute installation created for the city of Sapporo in 2022. To complete Underground, Oda combined all this material with others shot in Yubari, Shimane, Saga, and Hyogo, although the locations are never specified in the film.
The biggest departure and difference from her previous works is Oda’s decision to use Yoshigai Nao as “shadow” in the film, an almost phantasmatic presence that moves freely throughout the work, connecting different places and different times, and the meaning of which is never explained. This addition brings a performative element to Underground that is almost absent from her other films. Yoshigai is a coreographer, dancer, and director herself, and has made some interesting works such as Grand Bouquet (2019) and Shari (2021); まさゆめ Masayume (2024), her latest – which I have unfortunately not seen – was produced as Cenote by the Aichi Arts Center and screened in Nagoya last November. Yoshigai also has a prominent role in Gama, as most of the images from the hybrid documentary released in 2023 are reused in Underground. This is probably the main problem I have with Oda’s latest film, the central part is a repetition of what was done and shown in Gama, and although I know that it is the other way round – Gama came out of the Underground project and not vice versa – I feel that the images of Okinawa could have been left out.
While Underground is perhaps less effective when it combines material that is too visually disparate – at least for me the film does not work when it weaves together Yoshigai’s performance with the more abstract images shot underground – it excels in the more visually and sonically experimental moments. In the director’s own words “the underground world is pitch black, and nothing can be seen unless light is shone on it. It is not reflected. The act of shining light on the darkness felt like an act of sculpting the space with light”. This play of light and darkness, the overlapping of the artificial and the natural – the use of film superimposition is first class – and the materiality of the images, which I understand were shot on film, find a magnificent parallel in the sound, a sonic tapestry that, in the most inspired moments, manages to elevate the whole film.
If I’m not mistaken, at the moment Oda is working on smaller projects, she will be screening one of her shorter works, shot digitally, about her mother, at the next Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions between next February and March.
warning: this article includes suicide-related content
Throughout our lives, we have been constantly reminded that we would transform into butterflies as we become adults. We were led to believe that adolescence was merely a pupal stage, where all our dreams and hopes would take flight upon metamorphosis. However, my friends and I didn’t quite experience that butterfly-like transformation. Instead, we found ourselves undergoing a different kind of growth, akin to a dragonfly that, unlike the complete metamorphosis of a butterfly, only changes in size as it matures. Hong Daye
I’m usually not a fan of personal documentaries, although I’ve often written about this “mode” of non-fiction, especially in regard to the Japanese documentary landscape (e.g. here). That being said, occasionally there are exceptions that grab my attention, Saving a Dragonfly by South Korean director Hong Daye is one of these. I missed it last year when it was screened at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, but thanks to the Taiwan IDF: 2024 on Tour, I had the chance to catch up with it.
The film is a visual diary of sorts, filmed by director Hong over six years, from her last years in high school, to her time in college, depicting her struggles, and those of her friends, in trying to navigate life in a society, South Korea, where entrance tests, and the college admission system, are treated as a matter of life and death. As far as I know, South Korea and Japan are the only two countries where the obsession for tests and entrance exams, originally a device used to solve the problem of huge classes in the postwar period, at least in the archipelago, is an integral part of what society demands from young people. This obsession ends up shaping the lives of the young generations and their families, from the time spent studying at night at cram schools almost daily, to the financial burden these schools often represent for the students’ families, resulting in debts, extra jobs, and occupation changes.
The documentary shows very clearly how this pressure, and the consequent fear of failure and judgment, is internalized by the young girls, pushing them, in the most extreme cases, towards attempts to commit suicide. The matter-of-fact tone in which some of the high school girls talk about the feeling of being worthless and abandoned after failing the CSAT (College Scholastic Ability Test), is spine-chilling. As the director comments in the film, in the final years at high school, the lives of the girls feel like a chrysalis to be crushed and consumed in order to become a dragonfly, the life after high school. However, oftentimes from this chrysalis no dragonfly is born, and young lives are sadly lost, hence the title.
Death and the shadow of suicide, of friends and of the director herself, permeate the whole film, and I don’t think it’s only a consequence of the Korean school system, while the pressure is undoubtedly there. At one point in the film, Hong confesses that she tried to cut her wrists a couple of times—towards the end we even see the cuts on her arm—feeling insecure, almost an act to “confirm her own worth”, this happened even once she finally entered university after retaking the exam.
While the first part of the documentary is composed of shots taken in 2014, during the last year of high school and just before the CSAT, the second half depicts the life of the director and her friends in university from 2016 to 2020. In this section there are more and longer descriptions of her own attempts to take her life, never overly dramatized, one of the qualities of the documentary. The gloomy feeling of not belonging is thus still there, even when the world outside moves on, for instance, we see briefly on screen protests on the streets, probably those of the so-called Candlelight Demonstrations (2016-2017), alternated with images of Hong and her friends curled up on a sofa. A hint of communality and purpose, on the one hand, solitude and aimlessness, on the other. In this part, the documentary is more an exploration of the existential crises the director went through at that stage of her life: the difficulties in connecting with her friends, and more broadly finding a way in life. Yet, at the core of it, at least this is my reading, there’s still that sense of failure and not living up to expectations instigated by the school system.
One of the most heartwrenching scenes in the film is when Hong and her parents recollect her suicide attempt on a bridge, the three of them are in a car and at one point her mother bursts into tears—we cannot see her face, the camera is on the back seat with the director. For a brief moment we have a glimpse of her relationship with her parents and of their feelings towards their daughter. The use of a moving car to elicit confessions or straightforward talk between people seems to be a tendency in the world of non-fiction, I’ve seen at least a couple of documentaries recently that employ this narrative device.
Saving a Dragonfly ends with some of her friends, now in their mid twenties, being interviewed by Hong, remembering and reflecting about their young years and the filming process they were part of, including sorrowful remembrance of a friend who took her life. This for me was probably the weaker segment of the film, I much preferred the spontaneity and directness of the images and sounds that came before, to the reflection a posteriori of what happened and was filmed five years prior. In this regard, the aesthetics of the film reflect this difference: while the images of the parts filmed in high school, compared to the more polished ones shot at the time of college and after, might be, and indeed are, more “amateurish” and shaky, they are nonetheless more powerful and affective in their rawness. What particularly works here are the several moments of poetic truth scattered throughout the film, never overblown, and always expressed as a matter-of-fact, also through a lean editing. One that, for me, summarizes the documentary particularly well is this exchange between the director and a friend, on images of the blue sky over the city:
The second part of this ongoing series (first is here) is about words and the use, or the lack thereof, of certain terminology in Japanese cinema (studies). This is also the article I am less confident about, since it is, strictly speaking, about language, a field I am not an expert in. The following paragraphs are, thus, more a tentative search for words that might not even exist, than a proper analysis or definitive statement.
A necessary disclaimer: I am by no means advocating for a certain superiority of the English language (or French, Italian, etc.) over the Japanese, nor for a codification of a way to construct a documentary or a film that Japanese cinema should follow and adopt. My effort aspires more to be a survey of a situation that is open to external influences and thus in flux and evolving. I am also not advocating for a perfect correspondence and total translatability between languages, on the contrary, I am all for letting the specificities of geographical areas (not necessarily countries) and groups of people express themselves: different languages, dialects, political conditions and cultures give birth to different types of cinemas, and more broadly, to a diverse approach towards visual expression.
After all, in Japan this linguistic specificity goes back to the dawn of cinema and is still alive today: the galaxy of non-fiction films in Japanese has been rendered, throughout the years, with a variety of words such as ‘kiroku eiga (record film), the senden eiga (propaganda film), (…) the bunka eiga (culture film), and, finally, the dokyumentarii eiga‘ (Nornes 2003), and bunka eiga is still used today to categorize and award non-fiction films by the prestigious film magazine Kinema Junpo. It is interesting for the discussion to note how the term bunka eiga has a tendency to denote a certain type of non-fiction cinema that tackle historical and especially social themes, but without experimenting too much with the cinematic language.
While the absence of a terminology does not necessarily correspond to a lack of a certain mode of doing non-fiction cinema, what interests and fascinates me, is how the scarcity (yet to be proved) of certain documentary and experimental practices in the archipelago, is reflected in the lack of a terminology (again, yet to be proved), and how these two phenomena are related.
In search for words
As discussed in the previous entry, following the English literature on the subject, I have decided to use the terms archival film practices, found footage documentary and compilation documentary in the title. A constellation of expressions that, together with recycled cinema and collage film, better describes the field I’m here analyzing: a series of cinematic practices that employ found footage and archival images to create works of non-fiction, and visual essays.
That being said, the boundaries between what these practices are and what they are not, are often nebulous. As nebulous are the English terms used, a very shaky ground to build upon, but at least these expressions can function as a starting point. In Japanese, as far as I could gather from my inquiries, there is, again, a scarcity in the specific terminology, or at least, in the use of it .
The English term compilation documentary, for instance, appears not to have a corresponding Japanese translation. That is to say, it is rather rendered with sentences such as 映像素材を映画に編集した (edited the footage into a film), or 映像素材をコラージュした作品 (a work made of a collage of footage), and so on.
Recycled cinema and collage film are definitely two terms that point towards a practice more in tune with experimental filmmaking than documentary. While the former appears not to have a correspondent word in Japanese, the latter, コラージュ映画 collage film, or 映像コラージュ video collage, is a term that has been used in the archipelago for decades. It is probably so because the term collage came to film studies from and through the pictorial arts and the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century (Braque, Picasso). For instance, I found an essay written in 1998 for the Image Forum Festival by scholar Kitakōji Takashi about a program titled FAKE THE TIME dedicated to collage films—コラージュ映画 in the original title—shot on video or on 16mm by artist such as Johan Grimonprez, Jay Rosenblatt, or Martin Arnold.
As for the term found footage documentary, the situation is more muddled, since in Japan found footage horror is a subgenre, often overlapping with mockumentary, that enjoys great popularity (Noroi: the Curse, and in general the movies by Shiraishi Kōji). Searching ファウンドフッテージドキュメンタリー (found footage documentary) on the internet resulted in a plethora of horror movies and related papers, the only time I found ファウンドフッテージ used in a non-fiction context, was when the articles were translations of discussions in English.
Different is the case of アーカイヴァルドキュメンタリー or アーカイヴァル映画 (archival documentary or archival film), a term that seems to have gained currency in recent years, in concomitance with the so called “archival turn”. Especially when the writings are discussing the films of Sergei Loznitsa, an author whose works have been screened in Japanese cinemas on several occasions, and some of which are even available on streaming platforms. It is not far-fetched to say that probably the usage of the term started in Japan with the films of the Ukrainian author. So far, I have not found examples whereアーカイブヴァルドキュメンタリー is used to describe a film made in Japan, again my (re)search has not been deep, but I believe it to be indicative nonetheless.
In the next installment I will tackle some works made in Japan that fit the categories here discussed.
References:
Markus Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era Through Hiroshima, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
I’ve decided to publish here my essay on three films by Oda Kaori that was originally meant to be published in an international film magazine (things have stalled, unfortunately). I took the decision because in the meantime Oda’s career (the piece was written almost five years ago) has evolved significantly, with more exhibitions, art installations, political and social stances, and films (Gama, and the Underground project). It goes without saying that now I would write the piece quite differently, mainly in style but also regarding the content. Posting here this short essay does not preclude that in the future I might return to write on the subject; on the contrary, it gives me the chance and the peace of mind to turn the page and freshly reassess the filmography of one of the most fascinating artists working in Japan today.
Reassessing the human: three experimental documentaries by Oda Kaori
“The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness.”[1]
A worker sits down and takes a break. In the deep belly of a mine and enveloped in a pitch black surrounding, he bites a red apple. His helmet lamp provides the only few blades of light in a scene of almost Vermeer-like beauty. In the preceding scenes the noise from the machinery at work in the mine is so unbearable that the words are oftentimes superfluous or just a waste of energy. The life in the mine is only silence or cacophony: there is no middle ground. It is an alien landscape, both visual and sonic, where the human is just one element among several. The beauty of the moment derives from the interplay between darkness and light, from the silence after the wall of noise that precedes it, and from the empathy towards the man conveyed by the camera.
The scene is one of most significant and impressive passages in Aragane, a feature documentary shot, edited, sound-designed and directed by Oda Kaori in 2015. Oda made her debut in 2010 with the short Thus a Noise Speaks, a personal documentary that unflinchingly explored her coming out as gay and the subsequent reactions from her family, especially her mother. The experience of Thus a Noise Speaks, one where the camera is also used, in Oda’s own words, “as a weapon for revenge against my mother,” was a fundamental experience for the young Japanese director, who was 23 years old at the time: Not only because it was a way of expressing her true self, but also because it was a chance to grasp the incredible power that filmmaking can have, and to realize how harmful a camera pointed at someone can be.
Born in Japan, but partly educated in the U.S.[2] and with three formative years spent in Bosnia, Oda’s artistic arc began from a position of hybridity from the very beginning and afterward wandered around the globe in search of places and stories to explore. The sense of displacement experienced and expressed in her debut short, and her background as a so-called “halfie,”[3] opened the gates for a cinema conceived as a nomadic wandering, and an artistic path that in crossing borders, cultures, genres, and styles, explores what it means to be a subject in flux and always open, as the best ethnographers always are, to what the world has to offer[4]. Moving from one geographical area to the next, from Japan to Bosnia, back to Japan and then to Mexico—but a Mexico filtered through Mayan mythology—Oda’s filmography expresses the idea of a nomadic cinema not interested in broad and essentialist discourses about cultures, but more focused on specific places and the collective experiences and memories linked to such places.
Towards an alien phenomenology
The first (and to this day, most artistically accomplished) example of this approach arrived for Oda in 2015, when Aragane was presented at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. A work, as previously mentioned, that she directed, photographed, edited, and sound-designed, but also a “product” of Bela Tarr’s film.factory, the short-lived film school based in Sarajevo and established by the Hungarian director in 2013, a place where Japanese director Oda studied for three years.
Aragane, meaning ore or small pieces of stone in Japanese, was shot in a Bosnian coal mine as a project for film.factory. An immersive and hypnotic sensorial experience, the movie starts, and thus sets the tone for the rest of the work, with a pounding noise and a close-up of a machine. The scene is followed by a short depiction of life on the surface, with workers preparing and completing various tasks before commencing the deep dive into the mine. Once in, we’re in a different kind of world, one where the only lights rippling and dancing in the total darkness are those of the headlights of the workers and of Oda herself, and one where the noise is so deafening and monotonous it turns into a sort of alien music.
Aragane is not a direct inquiry into the harsh conditions of the people working in the mine (although that is something that eventually and necessarily emerges) but more an attempt to convey on screen the time and space of the coal mine as experienced by the people working in it. Creating a sensory experience of the place, an experience constructed through the interplay of machines, darkness, head lamps and the miners, Oda hints at a different field of perception and at a different type of time. For most of the duration of the film, we don’t really know what’s going on and who is doing what: what is missing is a central orientation, a focal point around which the movie can organize itself in the usual sense.
“The darkness, no sunlight, no moonlight”
“timber dust floating”
“pump, electric saws”
“grey fog”
“steam evaporating from T-shirts”
“a flickering head lamp sways”
“A small universe within a universe”.
“I see because there is light”
“In this underground world people and machine carry the same weight”[5]
Once we get accustomed to the things, events and musicality of the noise presented on screen, though, everything slowly begins to make sense. What starts to surface from the images, sounds, tracking shots and slow and hypnotic camera movements, is the time and the materiality of the mine itself. When a long and dark scene towards the end of the movie, with the carts ascending to the surface of the earth, is brutally interrupted by a static image of the outside of the mine covered in snow, it is almost like a revelation. After an hour of darkness inside the bowels of the earth experiencing a different perception of time and space, the whiteness of the snow, the colors of the clothes and those of the equipment hanging are so sharp and bright that gazing upon them almost induces vertigo.
With the sensory and cacophonic descent into the alien landscape that is the life in the mine, Aragane is also an exploration of the relation between the people working inside and the place itself. This is a crucial point in understanding Oda’s works: her films are, for the most part, and especially on first viewing, an overwhelming visual and sensory experience that seem to focus more on the non-human elements of what is filmed. However, when fully absorbed, they reveal the true potential of what her cinema can do at its best: establish a cartography of non-human landscapes and, at the same time, reflect on the role and position of the human element in this “new world.” It is not by chance that the central part of the movie, the core and one of the most significant scenes in the entire documentary, is the beautiful scene that we have described at the very beginning of this essay.
“Tell me how I can touch a butterfly without breaking her wings”[6]
The preoccupation towards people is one of the central themes of Towards a Common Tenderness. Released in 2017, the movie is many things: a visual poem structured like a diary about the experience Oda had while filming her first and second works, but at the same time a reflection on the act of filming, and, as in Thus a Noise Speaks, the power the camera has when pointed at someone.
The movie starts with a beautiful murmur of voices and sounds, with Oda herself pronouncing lines from her memories and reading from Notes on Cinematography by Robert Bresson and Rosemary Menzies’ Poems for Bosnia. It then moves to a shot of her first movie (a shot of a shot) of her mother crying when Oda comes out. The movie is, in fact, structured as a long letter sent to Oda’s mother, in which the director speaks directly to her mother about her experiences with the camera and everything that happened to her after she decided to become a filmmaker. Toward a Common Tenderness uses a mixed visual style, with abstract and poetic images intertwined with shots recorded by Oda in Bosnia and Herzegovina during her period at Bela Tarr’s school, outtakes not used in Aragane, and other images from unfinished projects.
The central part of the documentary is when Oda was a guest at a family of Romani descent for a week. When talking about this experience, she recalls how she couldn’t finish filming the project because she could not stare at the old husband and go deeper inside him, depicting the loss and grief his family went through when one of their members passed away. Rosemary Menzies’s poem shown at the end of the movie through extreme close-ups of the printed page is exemplary of the conundrum that haunts and informs the whole movie. “Tell me how can I touch a butterfly without breaking her wings.” How can we gracefully depict the beauty of things without destroying it? How can we film reality without annihilating it or destroying the things and the people in it?
“…reveals the base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself”[7]
If Aragane is a movie revolving formally around darkness, slow movement, and repetition, and Towards a Common Tenderness a reflection on the riddle that is the act of filming, Cenote is a movie that combines the two approaches.
It is about water, light and their connection to the cosmos, but also about people and their collective memories. Cenotes, or ts’onot in a form of Mayan, are natural sinkholes found in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, the only source of water for people living far away from rivers or lakes, and considered sacred places in ancient Mayan civilization.
Abstract images of the underwater world inside the cenotes intercut with people reciting, almost whispering, old Mayan poems, and other voices, in Spanish, recalling memories about life near these natural pits. Swimming in the water, the camera is enfolded in a reality that is perceived and created by the play of water and light. The first ten minutes, the more experimental part of the work, are in this sense an absolute bliss, an exhilarating and liberating artistic experience that brings us back to the womb of the earth, to the origin of life, or, as one of the quoted Mayan poems states, to the place where the sun sinks, disappears and reappears every day. Blotches and blades of colors flash on screen, drops of water dance like subatomic particles on the surface of water, and fish swim as peacefully as ancient deities. While this formal experimentation is noticeable in the path blazed by Aragane, a cinema of sensation that shifts the representation of humanity towards the periphery of reality, the non-human elements presented in Cenote expand further, reaching the spiritual and the mythical.
Another novelty that Cenote brings when compared to Aragane or even Towards a Common Tenderness is the presence, throughout the film, of a dialogic tension, both aesthetically and thematically, between words and noise, light and water, grainy images and digital sharpness, mythical time and geological time, and people and natural elements. Using 8mm film (Super8) and images shot underwater with an iPhone, Oda creates a difference and an aesthetic space, a poetic “ma” (間) that reflects and has a parallel in the space between the two worlds explored: the sensory experience taking place underwater, on the one hand, and the close-ups of faces and the voices of people on the other. Faces of people, but also animals, chicken, butterflies, dogs, cats, and local festivals are filmed in 8mm, while the world inside the cenotes is filmed with an iPhone. The dialog between these two types of images, the intercut between these two worlds, becomes the structural backbone around which the movie develops.
The sound and words spoken in the movie, folklore, mythical stories, memories of people who live near a cenote, and legends of children who drowned in them are all weaved together, recited and spoken in Yucatec Maya and Spanish. The stories told are important, of course, but the musicality of the words is an element that, paired with the underwater sounds and the distorted noise captured or created by the camera’s microphone, form a sonic tapestry of rare beauty. The soundscape used in Cenote, more than the one adopted in Aragane, where the human voices were relegated to very few words, hints at an idea of the cosmos in which humans are part of a larger dimension, both in time and space. The images confirm this larger scope on a geological scale: the sinkholes are a product of a celestial encounter between a shower of meteorites and the earth’s crust, but at the same time, a mythical place for ancient Mayan civilization, a portal and a threshold where, according to the Popol Vuh, this world and the afterlife touch each other. The connection between these two realms is an important part of Cenote, and, as a matter of fact, the movie also works as an exploration of collective memories and ancient mythologies, both still very present in the area and the villages around these sinkholes. The dead (via the poems), the women sacrificed in the pits, and all the legends and stories retold by the villagers, form a layer where the past, real or mythical, and the present coexist. This present-permeated-by-the-past has a phantasmic quality channeled into the movie by the images in 8mm, which always feel distant from the here and now, and by the voices in Spanish and Yucatec Maya, always out of sync and hovering above the images, as it were. The connection between the dead and the living is made more explicit in a brief and beautiful passage when the movie gazes, bathed in a frail and milky light, at funeral rituals in the area, when human bones and skulls are brushed, polished and collected with extreme care as remnants of past lives.
Conclusion
Like some of the works made at the Sensory Ethnography Lab[8], and to the cinema of Bela Tarr and Wang Bing, Oda’s filmmaking has, in the past years, built a unique trajectory in the film world: a brand of experimental documentary born at the intersection between visual anthropology and a cinema that prioritizes a pre-reflective engagement with the world. The result is an oeuvre that traces and establishes new connections between people, things, memories and the landscape they inhabit and from which they emerge. The human element is thus repositioned and reframed according to a different vision of reality, compared to one that often dominates the field of documentary, especially in contemporary Japan. This artistic approach is also traceable in her works as a painter: for instance, in a series of CD covers of Aragane’s soundtrack she painted by hand. Each cover is a thick impasto depiction of a scene from the movie, or a memory from her filming inside the mine. Another example is a series of portraits of women Oda made inspired by the story of the women who were thrown into the cenotes as ritual sacrifices. In these paintings, the faces of these women seem to resurface from the water like deities, made by the recollection of what Oda experienced while filming and swimming in these sinkholes.
Visual and sonic experimentation which engages with the world and creates a cinema that, while reassessing the human element and abandoning a human-centered perspective on reality, continues at the same time to show a deep care, affection and interest toward people. This is the biggest accomplishment of Oda’s artistic trajectory so far.
[1] Paul Cézanne, quoted in Cezanne’s Doubt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1945. Later in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. by Hubert and Patricia Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern, 1964).
[2] She studied film at Hollins University in Virginia.
[3] “People whose national or cultural identity is mixed by virtue of migration, overseas education, or parentage” Lila Abu-Lughod, Writing Against Culture, in Fox, Richard G. Hg, Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe, S. 137–162.
[4] More than fifty years before, a similar approach to documentary was proposed by Matsumoto Toshio: “Matsumoto’s avant-garde documentary theory focused instead on the revelation of the existential force of an object or the actual people filmed through the process of subjective film-making” Hata Ayumi, ‘Filling our empty hands’: Ogawa Productions and the politics of subjectivity in H. Fujiki, A. Phillips ed. The Japanese Cinema Book, Bloomsbury 2020.
Both for their importance in the history of Japanese documentary, and for their intrinsic artistic value, the two films below would deserve a longer and deeper analysis, but time is always scarce here… perhaps in the future…
For some reason, in my exploration of the documentaries made during his long career by Tsuchimoto Noriaki about the Minamata disease and its victims, The Minamata Mural (1981) completely escaped me, at least until now. The film asks the delicate question of how it is possible to represent and depict the suffering and the struggles of Minamata’s victims, and more broadly, how artists can express, through their medium of choice, the sorrow caused by other tragedies as well, such as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the suffering inflicted to minority groups in Japan. Tsuchimoto and his crew follow Maruki Iri and Akamatsu Toshiko, a couple of artists working on a series of panels dedicated to the people of Minamata, showing us the couple at work on the mural, and during their visits in Kyūshū, when they meet some of the people affected by the disease. By showing how these encounters, especially with two young girls, influenced and changed the perspective of the two artists, Tsuchimoto is also, subtly but obviously, reflecting on his own (at the time) decade-long endeavour in capturing and siding with the people in Minamata. The segment around the middle of the film, when activist and writer Ishimure Michiko reads her poems over the close-ups of the huge mural, is a spine-chilling and heart-wrenching masterpiece of a sequence. For me, one of the most impressive qualities of the scene, besides the poetic words by Ishimure, is how powerfully the camera is able to convey the intensity of the paintings. Another striking aspect of the documentary is how Tsuchimoto and his cameramen are able to capture and convey on film the beauty of the young people affected by the disease. Shiranui Sea (1975), probably the peak of Tsuchimoto’s career, has a balance and a grace in depicting the people of Minamata, particularly the young ones, that can be found here as well.
One of the two cameramen in The Minamata Mural is Segawa Jun’ichi, a director of photography who, among other films, worked in the seminal Snow Trail—directed by Taniguchi Senkichi in 1947, from a script by Kurosawa Akira, and starring Mifune Toshirō in its first role—and with Haneda Sumiko in Ode to Mt. Hayachine— he was mainly in charge of filming the mountains—a documentary filmed around the same period as the one here discussed. It would be interesting to know if Segawa shot the paintings, was involved in filming the people and scenery in Minamata, or was involved in both (I’m inclined to think it’s the former).
The Minamata Mural
“This linking of memories, this setting remembrances in motion, is not a nostalgia but an immanence,”
Crisca Bierwert
A Grasscutter’s Tale (1986) is one of the Japanese “documentary treasures” I have been meaning to watch for quite a long time. The occasion finally came last April, when it was screened at Athénée Français Cultural Center in Tokyo, part of a very interesting retrospective about resistance and political struggle on film, organised to launch the new documentary by Daishima Haruhiko, Gewalto no mori – kare wa Waseda de shinda (ゲバルトの杜 彼は早稲田で死んだ, 2024).
The film focuses on grandma Someya, born in 1899, one of the farmers who lived and worked on the land to-be-expropriated for the construction of Narita Airport. She fiercely opposed the second phase of the airport, a stance that severed her relationship with her family, and resulted in her living alone on her land. The film consists of nineteen stories narrated by grandma Someya’s own words, and mainly of images of the old lady cleaning her field.
Part of the Sanrizuka notes Fukuda Katsuhiko (1943-1998) took after he left Ogawa Production at the end of the 1970s, after the collective left for Yamagata, the film is a crucial work to better understand the history and development of documentary practices in Japan, in that it heralds a shift in the way documentary was conceived, theorised and practiced in the archipelago. The film occupies at least two spaces: militant cinema with a focus on the resistance of one person (Someya-san) against the construction of Narita Airport on the one side, and a mode of cinema that explores the different (hi)stories traversing a physical space, Sanrizuka, and how these intersect with the personal history of one individual. Moreover, seen from a different perspective, A Grasscutter’s Tale can also be considered as an example of “oral cinema”, that is, a cinema that connects and activates the untapped potential of storytelling and the spoken word in relation with the moving image. By combining images and tales that are parallel and do not touch each other, so to speak—as previously noted, the images show mainly Someya-san working on her field—the film constructs a segmented and open portrait of a life, a poetic bricolage made of stories and images that invites the viewers to wander inside of this personal/historical “landscape”.
The film has an episodic structure and is composed of chapters, some funny and some tragic, such as the story of her sons who died, her husband who worked as barber, a strange dream remembered, the time she first came to Sanrizuka, or how she once ate only matches as a child to avoid starvation. Sometimes A Grasscutter’s Tale edges towards the experimental. In the segment about the dream, the screen is completely dark except a bright light on the upper left corner, in another, the voice of the director explain (if I’m not wrong) again on a black screen, how the reenactment of an episode from the old lady’s life was scrapped from the final work at the request of her son, who was in it. The screening I attended was in 16mm, a rare chance to better appreciate the colours and the texture of the work. The greens of the crops and of the grass are almost tactile, and the time-lapse scene of the setting Sun, here a fiery red, is akin to that in Magino Village, a very different film, but a work that nonetheless shares many common traits with A Grasscutter’s Tale.
Held in Osaka from March 15th to September 13th, the 1970 World Exposition was, along with the Tokyo Olympics of 1964, one of the events that most reflected the changes happening in Japanese society, and especially in the world of art, between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. According to scholar Yoshimoto Midori, Expo ‘70, as it is commonly known, has become in this century “one of the most frequently discussed topics in the Japanese art world”, and the subject and the setting of many comic books, movies, and books. It is worth mentioning here at least Urasawa Naoki’s manga 20th Century Boys (1999-2006), and Crayon Shin-chan: Storm-invoking Passion! The Adult Empire Strikes Back (2001) directed by Hara Keiichi.
Many of the people invited to participate in the event were part of a wave of artists that was affected by and shaped the 1960s, when art was conceived and practiced as a form of political activism and social resistance, a period kicked off in 1960 with the ANPO protests. The act of participating in Expo ‘70 was considered in itself, by many, a betrayal of what was theorized in the previous decade: a “selling out” to power and a symbolic gesture that (re)institutionalized art, after the urban and rural revolts of the sixties had sought a path outside of the official circles. However, for some of the criticized artists, the event “provided unprecedented opportunities to realize ambitious and big-budget projects that would otherwise never have been conceived” (Yoshimoto), and pushed artistic boundaries, helping to explore unkown creative landscapes.
One of the artists who joined Expo ‘70 was filmmaker and theorist Matsumoto Toshio. In the second half of the 1960s, with some of his short films, Matsumoto had reflected on the protests against ANPO, and more broadly on the artistic and political fervor of the time. For Expo ‘70, Matsumoto created Space Projection Ako, a work projected on ten screens inside a pavilion dedicated to textiles production. On the occasion of the previous World Exposition, held in Montreal in 1967, many artists had already begun to experiment with multi-projections films, for instance Canada ’67 by Walt Disney Production, a work in which the audience was surrounded on 360 degrees by nine large screens, where images of Canada were displayed. On the one hand, art funded by large companies, Space Projection Ako by a textile company, Canada ’67 by a telephone company. On the other, an experimentation that explored the limits, possibilities, and role of visual media, and intermedia, in contemporary society, thus casting a fascinating glance into the evolution of the relationship between technology and humanity.
It is in this socio-historical context that Teshigahara Hiroshi and Abe Kōbō collaborated once again—together they had already made at least three masterpieces: Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another, and The Man Without a Map— to make what would become their last join effort, 240 Hours in OneDay (1日240時間). A short visual experiment directed by Teshigahara and based on an idea by Abe, 240 Hours in One Day was sponsored and screened at the Automobile Pavilion during Expo ‘70. Rediscovered and restored only in recent years, the short film was shown on a couple of occasions in the past decade, and last March at the Osaka Asian Film Festival, a screening event I was lucky to attend.
…but they say that the passage of time that the dream fish experiences is quite different from when it is awake. The speed is remarkably slower, and one has the feeling that a few terrestrial seconds are drawn out to several days or several weeks. The Box Man, Abe Kōbō
The short film was originally projected at the World Exposition on four screens, three arranged horizontally, the fourth, trapezoidal in shape, placed almost on the ceiling. At the Osaka Film Festival, the work was projected on one flat screen with the 4 original screens forming an upside down T, so to speak (the still that opens this article gives hopefully an idea of it).
240 Hours in One Day is set in a city of the near future, where Dr. X and his female assistant have successfully developed a miraculous drug. When inhaled, this medicine, an accelerator known as Acceletin, allows the user to function ten times faster than normal, perhaps a reference and homage to the protagonist of Alfred Bester’s novel The Stars My Destination (1956), or Ishinomori Shōtarō’s Cyborg 009. At first, people celebrate the newfound freedoms offered to them by this miraculous drug that extends a single day to 240 hours, but gradually things start to change. Teshigahara experiments with a dizzying combination of genres, and the tone is always playful and joyous, a bit all over the place to be honest, and probably by design, because the work does not take itself too seriously. In this regard, it reminded me of the best and most delirious PR movies (industrial films) of the 1960s, such as Noda Shinkichi’s Nitiray A La Carte (ニチレ・ア・ラ・カルト) (1963) or Kuroki Kazuo’s 恋の羊が海いっぱい (1961).
Science fiction, comedy, musical, animation, documentary, and metafiction are weaved together in an aesthetic divertissement that is also a light critic of the obsession of our society with speed and production. The film also offers an obvious reference to the changes produced by the invention of means of transportation; after all, the film was screened in the Automobile Pavilion. What particularly stood out to me is the inventiveness of the different cinematic styles used, and how the four screens are used to create a cinematic viewing experience that is spatially different from the usual one: the characters move freely from one screen to the other, and sometimes each screen represents a distinctive point of view on the same scene.
As pointed out by Tomoda Yoshiyuki, professor and scholar that did a short but fascinating talk after the screening, in the last scenes of the film, when the doctor runs away and spins so rapidly that he becomes a wheel of light and colours, Teshigahara and Abe are hinting at something different that goes beyond the pure negative sides of an accelerated society. The two artists are pointing towards the post-human changes and becomings that new technologies inevitably bring with them, a becoming-thing that was one of the themes often touched by Abe in his books.
Reference: – Expo ’70 and Japanese Art: Dissonant Voices An Introduction and Commentary, Yoshimoto Midori, Review of Japanese Culture and Society, Vol. 23, 2011. – The Box Man, Abe Kōbō, Vintage, 2001.
As a sort of work in progress, draft for a possible future research, or more probably simply as a trace of a significant and very rare viewing experience, in the past weeks I published the unedited notes and reflections I took while attending the Noda Shinkichi‘s retrospective (Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, October 2023). A total of 38 films were screened in 5 days (you can read the synopsis of each film here). My thoughts on days 1-2, 3 and 4.
Final thoughts
Unfortunately, I could not attend the last day of screenings, day five, at the festival. Mental and physical exhaustion kicked in, as usually does at these kind of events, but I also opted to see some of the films presented in the main program, after all I had to write a general piece on the event for the Italian publication I freelance for. As a sort of justification and excuse, I recall people saying that the films presented on the last day were the “less interesting” ones of all the Noda’s program. .. That being said, I can definitely say that the retrospective was a very impactful viewing experience; as a film writer interested in Japanese documentary, I found the program to be revelatory. It was a very well curated showcase, and I really appreciated the fact that the films were not presented chronologically, but divided into thematic blocks. There are some incredibly powerful and fascinating works in Noda’s filmography —personally Forgotten Land, The Matsukawa Incident, Nitiray A La Carte, The Feast of the Gods, and Good Road for the Livingand the Dead are some films that, for different reasons, still resonate with me to this day. However, the stongest point of the event was, in my opinion, that it presented a significant section of Noda’s filmography, and in doing so it highlighted the developments of Noda’s style and interests in the course of almost five decades, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the developments and transformations of post-war Japanese documentary. All the films screened hint, in their totality, at connections, coincidances (cit. Joyce), and constellations with other works and names in the field of Japanese non-fiction cinema: Matsumoto Toshio, Ogawa Pro, Haneda Sumiko, Kitamura Minao, and others. Each day of the program, there was at least a talk or a discussion with experts and documentarians, the one, by far, most deep and fascinating saw the great Kitamura Minao, a filmmaker and visual anthropologist (or visual folklorist as he, probably, would like to be called), talking about his personal experience with Noda, with whom, in 1978, he co-founded the Japan Visual Folklore Society. I believe Kitamura, his films and his writings, should be (re)discovered, sooner rather than later.
Some of the films that were shown in Yamagata are available on streaming, legally and for free (see below), or for rental. After the festival I was able to revisit some of them, especially The Feast of the Gods, and Good Road for the Living and the Dead deserve probably a longer treatment and a specific focus, an article or a longer essay (?).
Asian Docs 
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