Category: Experimental cinema

Isobe Shinya Retrospective: A Beautiful Anachronism (2025)

A traveling retrospective dedicated to Isobe Shinya, one of the most interesting directors in the contemporary Japanese experimental film scene, was held in various cities in Japan in recent months (with more places and dates to come). At the end of June, the retrospective, 美しい時代錯誤 A Beautiful Anachronism, visited Nagoya Cinema Neu (formerly Nagoya Cinematheque), where I had the pleasure of meeting Isobe and attending a screening of five of his films made between 2009 and 2022. An excerpt of his new work, which is still in progress, was also screened.

A primary theme running through all of Isobe’s works is time—more specifically, the various temporalities and durations that the camera can capture and create. Isobe’s preferred film medium is 8 or 16 millimeters, but he almost always edits and works on his films digitally. The exceptions are Dance, shot and edited on film, and Humoresque, which was shot in digital.
His time-lapse and long exposure works capture extended periods of time and greatly accelerate the pace at which we usually experience it. This gives the viewers a sense of vertigo and a new perspective on things. It invites us to reconsider our position in the world, hinting at different times: seasonal, geological, astronomical.

The first film presented at the retrospective was Dance (2009), an assignment Isobe completed for the Film Research Institute as part of a class he was taking at the time. The six-minute short was shot in 8mm over the course of a week, with filming taking place for about five or six hours every night in a room where a girl was living. The room was dark, and the only source of light during the shooting came from the streetlights outside.
The altered and accelerated time of the work highlights the quasi-life of the objects in the room and offers an accumulation of personal memories—the young protagonist was Isobe’s girlfriend at the time and she would eventually become his wife (later seen in Humoresque).

Objects and ruins also play a central role in his next work, EDEN (2011), Isobe’s graduation project at Image Forum Film Institute. Filmed over the course of a year and a half, with monthly visits of three or four days, to the abandoned Matsuo mine complex (operating from 1914 to 1979) in Iwate Prefecture. The film captures the area’s decay and showcases how life moves forward when is freed from the anthropic element. The images and hypnotic music create the impression of a ghost village slowly being reclaimed by vegetation and slipping into (human) oblivion.
First, the camera focuses on the interiors of former miners’ and their families’ homes. Then, in time-lapse segments, the camera pans to the open spaces surrounding the village and the expanse of the sky. Isobe makes his work almost meta-cinematic by superimposing images of the mines within a room and including stop-motion shots reminiscent of Itō Takashi‘s work. These shots feature photographs of the area within frames of the ruins themselves. As with most of Isobe’s work, EDEN has a pivotal moment toward the end: a crescendo accompanied by a sudden burst of rock music when snow starts to slowly rise from the ground in reverse, with the crystals ascending to the sky.

As you can see in the short clip posted below, music plays an important part in his next film too, For Rest (2017). Here Isobe shifts his focus to the decomposition of a set table in a forest. Filmed over five years with progressively longer intervals in the woods at the foot of Mount Fuji in Shizuoka Prefecture, the film documents the table’s decomposition and the gradual takeover by vegetation and insects. Isobe originally intended to film it in the Aokigahara Forest in Yamanashi; thus, the theme of death permeates the whole work. As Isobe stated, the film “contrasts the human tendency to separate and distance life and death from each other with the cycle of life in nature.”

Even more distant from our everyday lives in scope is the cosmic time depicted in Isobe’s 2020 masterpiece, 13. This short film is composed of images of the sun captured at 13-second intervals from the same position over five years.
The result is a cosmic journey through time and space, but structurally confined from a fixed point of view, depicting the sun’s passage across the sky where light, time, and space beautifully converge to create an abstract calligraphy on a red and purple canvas.
I previously wrote about 13 here.

The final piece in the retrospective, Humoresque (2022), was also filmed over about five years. It is Isobe’s first work shot entirely digitally, marking a departure from his previous works. It is different also in that the subject is in this case his family: his wife and young son. What impressed me most about Humoresque was the subtle play and experimentation with sound. All of the sounds were added in post-production (I think); this is the first time Isobe has worked with sound distortion rather than time distortion. The result is a playful, powerful, and subtly experimental home movie of sorts.

Isobe is currently shooting his next film. The provisional title is April, so it was introduced, although he said it might change. An excerpt was screened at the retrospective, and from the few minutes shown, it appears to be composed of images of rivers, water, and other natural elements overlapping. It looks really promising.

Docs: Images and Records – Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2025 – report 2: Nihon University Film Study Club Special

This is the second dispatch from this year Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions. Your can reda the first one here.

Founded in 2009, this year’s edition of the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions is dedicated to exploring the possibilities and problems posed by the changing nature of moving images in our time. Titled Docs: Images and Records, the event, currently taking place at the Tokyo Photography Art Museum, features a variety of works (films, installations, photography, performances and talks) that reflect on the meaning of representation through the visual medium and, in particular, question the meaning of the word ‘documentary’, a term that has become increasingly ossified (both on the big and small screen) and synonymous with the word ‘factual’. Or, as stated on the web page of the festival:

A document is a record of fact-based information, traditionally in the form of words but more recently also as images such as photographs and moving images. The word “documentary,” meanwhile, has come to be used not only as an adjective meaning “factual” or “consisting of documents,” but also as a noun referring to a film expressing facts.

The Lumière brothers’ Exiting the Factory (1895), which is a record of people leaving a factory, is widely recognized as the starting point of the history of motion pictures. People at the time were astonished to see scenes from their everyday lives being recorded and replayed before their eyes as if the events were actually happening right there. Today, 130 years after the invention of moving images, it is entirely unexceptional for people to record and share their daily lives through photographs and videos. Meanwhile, the definition of a photograph has been expanded to include digital images and that of moving images now encompasses digital video; in digital form, these media can be manipulated more freely than before, resulting in a more complex and ambiguous relationship between facts and the images that represent them. Held on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2025 will focus on the transformation of these media. By examining a wide range of works through the lens of images and words, the festival will pursue a reconsideration of documents and documentary.

I was able to attend a couple of screenings last week, a special dedicated to discovering Japanese television documentaries and independent works that inhabit documentary and experimental cinema called Japanese Post-Documentary, and two of the four Commission Projects created specifically for this year’s event.

Japanese Post-Documentary Special 3: Nihon University Film Study Club Special brings together four short films made by a collective of students at the famous university; according to what was explained in the presentation, the versions screened at the event are digital restorations of the films based on footage from the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum Collection.

Conversation between Nail and Sock (釘と靴下の対話,1958), by Hirano Katsumi and Hiroh Koh, was perhaps the best of the bunch, a surrealist dream set at the university, heavily influenced by Bunuel and with stylistic choices reminiscent of Bresson, while Record N (Nの記録, Kanbara Hiroshi and Motoharu Jōnouchi, 1959) is a short film documenting the immediate aftermath of the Isewan Typhoon (Typhoon Vera), a disaster that struck the central part of the archipelago in September 1959, killing more than 5,000 people and displacing thousands more. Similar in its immediacy to the documentaries produced in the immediate aftermath of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami of March 2011, it differs profoundly from them in that many of its images show bodies swept away by floodwaters or trapped in collapsed houses, and in that it is accompanied by light and pop music, choices that make it, in parts, exploitative and perhaps unethical. However, as scholar and researcher Hirasawa Gō pointed out in the talk following the screening, images of such disasters were not easily accessible at the time – this was the late 1950s, an era when television was not yet popular in every household – and so the very raw footage, and the fact that it was screened at the university, was both an act of documentation and witnessing, and a protest that went against the grain of social norms.

Pu Pu (1960) is definitely the most surrealist of the four films showcased at the festival, and was made within the club in response to and in support of the protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty that took place and shook the country in 1960. Following these uprisings, it was decided to reorganise the Nihon University Film Study Club into the New Film Study Club, and as a result the VAN Lab for Film Science was founded. Bowl (椀, 1961), perhaps the best known of the four shorts, was one of the first results of this shift, a work I couldn’t really relate to – I found the first part almost unbearable, while the second was more aesthetically accomplished – but which undoubtedly has a raw energy and anger about it, and which also marks the directorial debut of Adachi Masao.

Sculpting space with light: Underground (Oda Kaori, 2024)

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. 

Report: Yamazaki Hiroshi’s special screening at the National Film Archive of Japan (October 2023)

Today, October 21st, the National Film Archive of Japan organized a special screening of four films by Yamazaki Hiroshi, and 山崎博の海 The Seas of Yamazaki Hiroshi (2018), a short movie about the filmmaker and photographer, made by his friend and colleague Hagiwara Sakumi.
The screening was part of the series of exhibitions and events connected to the T3 PHOTO FESTIVAL TOKYO 2023.

In addition to the screening, a series of panels, reproductions of Yamazaki’s photos discovered only after his death in 2017, were displayed in the Film Archive’s entrance hall.

I had already seen all of the films of the program years back, when the Image Forum Festival organized a bigger retrospective on the filmmaker. I also had the chance to write about Yamazaki’s masterpiece, Heliography (1979), and about his other experimental films he made during his career for this site. Moreover, a longer piece, where I draw connections between Heliography, Ogawa Pro’s Magino Village, and Matsumoto Toshio’s Ātman (1975), was recently published on Chute Film-Coop.

All of this to say that I went to Tokyo to revisit and rewatch Yamazaki’s films on a bigger screen, and possibly to experience them in a better quality. I had read, before attending the event, that the works would be screened digitally (ProRes), but I was a bit disappointed and sad to learn about the story of their condition and preservation.
Of the four, a print exists only of Heliography, prints or negatives of the other three, Vision Take 1, Observation, and Motion are regrettably lost. To my surprise, the digital copies screened at the event were made from VHS tapes (!) Yamazaki used to show in the university where he worked.

the event

The after talk between Ishida Tetsurō, curator for the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, and organizer of Yamazaki’s last exhibition, and the aforementioned Hagiwara was casual, but interesting. Some anecdotes about Yamazaki’s life were shared, but most importantly for me, the two revealed some technical and conceptual aspects about Yamazaki’s filmmaking process.

Vision Take 1 (1973, 8mm, 4′) presents the viewer with the images of the sea, a constant in Yamazaki’s career, and a beach were a television stands. As soon as the landscape gets darker the TV set starts to light up with images of the same sea. This is probably the weakest of the bunch.


観測概念 Observation (1975, 16mm, 10′) is a film that starts with a fixed and very dark image of the filmmaker’s neighborhood. Slowly and gradually the scene, a couple of roofs, antennae and the sky, with students and a small truck passing on the street at the bottom of the frame, turns whiter and whiter. The screen turns dark again, and from the upper left side of the screen, accompanied by a pulsating sound, one after another, many small bright “suns” appear drawing an arc of sorts in the dark sky above a house. However, as emerged from the discussion, probably this is not the arc drawn by the Sun in the sky captured in time-lapse, like in Isobe Shinya’s 13 for instance, but something different that Yamazaki created to make it look like the real thing. “It’s fiction” as said by one of the two people on stage.

Yamazaki himself was interested in photography and filmmaking in that “the world created through media is different from what humans see with their eyes”. For instance, the two half of Heliography, first the Sun filmed in time-lapse setting over the sea, and then, after a couple of seconds of darkness, the star resurfacing from a city seen upside down, were shot from two very different locations. If we think about it from a technical point of view, it is quite obvious. However, in the film it feels like the point of view is conceptually the same.

The after talk revealed also how Motion (1980, 16mm, 10′) was made, or better, how the two speakers think it was made, because Yamazaki was quite secretive about his methodology. According to Hagiwara, the film was made by shooting in a shower with a strobe lens. Motion is a fascinating film, without sound, composed of a series of tiny specks of liquid reflecting light, superimposed with layers and layers of more lights, sometimes edited slowly, sometimes faster. Besides Heliography, this was the film that impressed me the most. For the way it is constructed, but also for its trance-inducing quality, it felt like an experiment by Makino Takashi.

The event was interesting, but I wish there were more films screened, because to understand what Yamazaki was trying to do with images and light, one needs to be immersed longer and deeper in his world, photographic or filmic (also, I’d really like to see Sakura, his film about “dark” cherry blossoms again).

On Yamazaki Hiroshi, Heliography, Magino Village, and Ātman

I’ve been fascinated and captivated by Yamazaki Hiroshi’s works, both still and moving images, since the first time I discovered them in 2018, at the Image Forum Festival.

Reading about his approach to photography in the catalogue of one of his exhibitions, and finding ‘Ugoku shashin! tomaru eiga!‘(Moving photos! Still movies!), the book where he recounts part of his life and career, made me appreciate his artistic output even more.

Moreover, it a was a revelation to discover (how did I miss it!?) that Yamazaki was behind the time-lapse sequences shot for Magino Village – A Tale / The Sundial Carved with a Thousand Years of Notches (1986) by Ogawa Production, and that he worked as a cameraman in Matsumoto Toshio’s Ātman (1975).

Chute, an experimental film cooperative based in Istanbul and The Hague, offered me the chance to gather my thoughts on Yamazaki, Heliography (1979), and what I’ve called “the solar connection”.

The piece is available here.

In the article I’ve only scratched the surface of what could, and frankly should, be written about Yamazaki. His engagement with moving images, the relation between his films and his work in photography, his method, and his position in the history of experimental cinema in Japan.

Soon after the article was posted, more thoughts started to coagulate in my head, and I was also told that Matsumoto wrote a piece on some pre-Heliography experimental films by Yamazaki. The journey has just started.

Kobe Discovery Film Festival 2022 – dispatch 3: Koike Teruo’s screen memorial

Third and final dispatch from this year’s Kobe Discovery Film Festival (first and second here and here)

My last day at the festival coincided with the screening of four programs: the state of film preservation today, actor Hayakawa Sessue, the 100th anniversary of Pathé Baby, and a selection of works by Koike Teruo, experimental filmmaker who passed away last March.

Film, the Living Record of Our Memory (2021) is a documentary directed by Inés Toharia, where film archivists, curators, technicians and filmmakers reflect on the current state of film preservation, why it is a vital part of our culture, and how film archives in different countries are facing a set of very different problems. The second screening of the day was Where Lights Are Low, a silent drama directed by Colin Campbell in 1921, with protagonist the Japanese Hollywood star Hayakawa Sessue. I had already watched the movie before, on the streaming edition of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival during the pandemic I believe, but to experience it on the big screen with a live accompaniment was a delight. 2022 marks the 100th birthday of Pathé Baby, to celebrate it, a group of people, lead by Anna Briggs, Michele Manzolini, and Mirco Santi, in conjunction with the association INEDITS Amateur Films / Memory of Europe, assembled a montage of amateur films shot in 9.5mm from around the globe, 9 1⁄2 the title. The work is a visual symphony of everyday life, as it is called in the introduction, that, for its moments of unexpected poetry, reminded me of Liu Na’ou’s The Man Who Has a Camera.

Experimental filmmaker and visual artist Koike Teruo passed away on March 18th, KDFF 2022 dedicated to the director a special program comprised of four of his works, three of which are part of his life-long series Ecosystem, which Koike himself described as something that “has grown as a sort of giant tree for me”: 生態系 -5- 微動石 (1988), 生態系 -20- ストーン (2013), and 生態系 -27- 密度１(2018). One of the four, 衝 (1995), is a short piece, a sort of documentary, shot in Kobe in the aftermath of the earthquake that hit the area on January 17th 1995. Besides the works themselves, a wave of materiality that inundates the viewer with their rhythm and editing speed, especially when experienced on a big screen, what turned out to be particularly interesting for me, was the talk after the screening. Researcher Tanaka Shimpei talked about the importance of Koike in establishing the experimental scene in the Kansai area through events and independent screenings (自主上映会). As Tanaka writes in the catalogue ECOSYSTEM Teruo Koike Visual Works 1974 – 2020:

The career of a prominent visual artist Teruo Koike must be reconsidered through not only his film making which includes collaborations with various modern dances and his improvisational music performances, but also his aggressive independent screening activities which have been maintained since as far back as around 1980’s. And not only should we look back on his rich filmography centering on the “Ecosystem” series, but also by reviewing Koike’s screening activities engaged around Kobe.

Born in Ichinomiya city, he graduated in Kobe, and after his experience in Iran at the end of the 1970s, where he worked in a petroleum complex, and where he experienced first hand the Iranian Revolution, Koike returned to Japan, started again to make films, and began to organize screening events. In 1980, together with Okuda Osamu founded Cosmic Caravan (1980-1982), a group engaged in showing and making experimental movies. After this experience, Koike and others, among whom Zeze Takahisa, formed Voyant Cinémathéque (1983-1996), a group active for more than a decade in Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe, that promoted experimental cinema, and helped new artists by providing them venues for showing their work. Koike continued to be very active in showing and organizing events (installations, visual performances) in the new millennium as well, he learned to play the Japanese flute in the mid-1990s, and often accompanied the screenings of his works, not only with his live improvised performances, but also with professional dancers.

Image Forum Festival 2022: Silver Cave, Humoresque, A Short Story, and The Cleaning Lady After 100 Years: Spectre.

Yesterday I had the chance to attend one of the programs of this year Image Forum Festival, in Nagoya. Every year the event is held first in Tokyo, and later in the year, in a scale-down format, in other cities in Japan: Yokohama, Kyoto, and Nagoya.

In the past decade I went to the festival in Tokyo a couple of times, once in Kyoto if I remember correctly, and recently just in Nagoya, since it’s for me, a closer location. The event is dedicated mainly to experimental cinema and video, produced all over the world, with a particular attention of what is going on in Japan and Asia. The festival has been for me a source of wonderful discoveries, here I wrote about the 2018’s edition, here about Stop-Motion Slow-Motion, and here about Heliography by Yamazaki Hiroshi. Unfortunately this year I could just see a tiny fraction of what I planned and wanted to, just four works of the East Asian Experimental Film Competition.

Silver Cave

Silver Cave (2022) by Cai Caibei is an interesting piece that plays with surfaces, and the flat metallic substance that animates and “moves” for most of the work. For its focus on abstractions, rhythm, and its quasi meta-filmic quality, it reminded me of the works of some pioneer animators of the beginning of last century, such as Walter Ruttmann. Silver Cave won the Award for Excellence at the festival.

A Short Story

Filmmaker and artist Bi Gan’s latest work, A Short Story (2022) tells about a black cat that embarks on a bizarre journey to meet three curious characters. Presented in the short competition at Cannes last spring, the work is populated with dream-like images, visual inventiveness, and poetry, but I could not really connect with it.

ユーモレスクHumoresque

I was really looking forward to checking　ユーモレスク Humoresque (2022) by Isobe Shinya, who in 2020 made 13, one of my favourite films of that year. I had already read that this work was something very different from what he had done before, Humoresque is 46 minutes long and was shot digitally, so I was somehow prepared. As the description in the official catalog reports the work is

an abrupt turn from “13”, this film employs the technique of home movies to tell the story of the lives of a mother and child across four seasons. Day after day, water drawn from a lake is filtered and bartered for food. One day, a man visits with a portable gramophone. The song it plays is Dvorak’s “Humoresque.” What does he think about this music?

and according to Isobe

I created a fictional world by converting and extending home movie shooting as a filmmaking technique. Many of the scenes in the film were inspired by their real-life counterparts. The small story in front of us, the big story far away, and the story that is no longer here. This film is an attempt to assimilate them in fiction and reality.

Some images are really mesmerising, the way sound is used is remarkable, and while very different from the time-lapse experiments Isobe is known for, Humoresque is still a movie about time, the thickness of it, and the passage of it. That being said, I definitely need to watch it again to give it a proper assessment. Humoresque was awarded the Grand Prize at the festival.

The Cleaning Lady After 100 Years: Spectre

The Cleaning Lady After 100 Years: Spectre (Shichiri Kei, 2022) is a reimagining of the filmmaker’s own multimedia stage drama The Cleaning Lady, where the ghost of her mother appears to an old woman. This was probably the most powerful work among the four I saw, in a completely digitised world the human presence is not even a memory, even the words uttered are just part of the cacophonous soundscape presented in the film. No straightforward meanings emerge from the work, but images and sounds slowly and aggressively point towards and put the viewer through a sensorial and exhilarating experience. The film loses part of this power towards the end when the spoken words try to enunciate philosophical ideas.

Leafing through the catalogue made me realised how many interesting and possibly wonderful works I missed: a retrospective on contemporary Chinese independent cinema, Qingnian Express: New Voices and Visions of Chinese Independent Cinema Today (curated by Tong Shan and Ma Ran), TUNOHAZU, the latest by Tezka Macoto, a retrospective on artist and graphic designer Tanaami Keiichi, and much more.

13 by Isobe Shinya

In a peripheral corner of Japanese cinema, one where experimental film, photography, and documentary film encounter, overlap, and merge, there seem to be a thread connecting some films made by different artists in different eras. Alchemy (Nakai Tsuneo, 1971) and Heliography (Yamazaki Hiroshi, 1979), but also parts of Magino Village: A Tale (Ogawa Shinsuke, 1986) and Gootariputra (Yamazaki Mikio, 1999), just to name a few, all share a common fascination for, and a total cinematic dedication to the Sun, its path, and its astral movements in the sky.

The photographer and filmmaker Yamazaki Hiroshi (1946-2017) is particularly important in this context, in the past I wrote about Heliography, here, and on his photographic works, here. After having dedicated a large part of his career to the creation of long-exposure photographs of the sun, Yamazaki in 1979 crowned this artistic path with the short film Heliography, one of the most important experimental films in the history of the genre in Japan. In the work, as the title indicates, the sun is placed at the center of the filmed universe, while everything else moves around it, horizon, sky and city. A visual and artistic vertigo that in the following years evolved and took a similar path when Yamazaki collaborated with Ogawa Production. Yamazaki went to Yamagata prefecture and for the collective filmed the time-lapse sequences of the Sun for the masterpiece Magino Village: A Tale (1986). 

This “solar community” has now a new practitioner, Isobe Shinya. In 13 the young Japanese filmmaker left his camera in exactly the same spot for five years to shoot a picture of the sunset every thirteen seconds. In a series of merged time-lapses, we see the sun(s) moving repeatedly from the left part of the screen to the right. Superimposing these images collected over half a decade, Isobe created a work where the sky, while going through a series of permutation in colours, from black to purple, from red to blue, is also being slowly populated by fluorescent dots, the sun(s), gradually clustering the screen.

13 begins with a black screen and without sound, but soon the sun(s) and other drapes of light begin to appear from the upper left corner. As the progression and arcs of the sun(s) get faster, the images are paired first with a what could be described as a sort of background noise, and as the film moves along, with a soundscape composed of accelerating instrumental music. This musical progression peaks with the arrival on screen of a C-shaped cluster of sun(s), a sensorial explosion in a screen now transformed almost into a pink canvas perforated by a multitude of blinding lights.  13 offers a vision of the cosmos and of life conceived as the alternation of solar cycles, and this passage of time – the years, the sun(s), the skies – is condensed and visualised in its 10 minutes with an intense and almost haptic quality. The travel in time that 13 represents, the creation of a different time, could be also read as a travel in space: from the deep darkness of the first images, the journey passes through different phases and different colours of the universe – the sky – to land, in the last minute or so, again on planet earth. The sun(s) turn here into a singular Sun, and the purple, red and pink skies make way to a blue one. We are now back on earth, we can finally see the horizon, the clouds passing, and the shape of a house with its antenna. The singular Sun is setting, concluding its astral path.  The film definitely belongs to the same realm of visions created by Yamazaki, and with his solar works, both cinematic and photographic, almost establishes an artistic and long-distance dialogue.

13 has won several awards around the world, and in 2021 has been shown in many festivals, online and in-presence, in the United States and Europe. If you read this in 2021, the film is made available by Isobe himself on Vimeo until December 28th: 

https://vimeo.com/653602392/4f481a87b7

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 (April, May 2021): 13, Youth, Ecosystem 5

Some thoughts on three interesting films I’ve seen in the last couple of months.

13 (Isobe Shinya, 2020) For me easily one of the best works of 2021 so far. Here the synopsis from IDFA:

Filmmaker Shinya Isobe left his camera in exactly the same spot for five years to shoot a picture of the sunset every thirteen seconds. In a series of merged time-lapses, we see the sun moving serenely from left to right. Over and over again. First in a neat line, in total silence. Later patterns appear, supported by a minimalist soundtrack. Isobe overlaid analogue shots from different seasons to produce clusters of shining spots.

The film reminded me of Yamazaki Hiroshi‘s Heliography, his photographs and his collaboration with Ogawa Pro for Magino Village: a Tale (the time-lapse scenes of the Sun). 13 is an incredible viewing experience that connects our human time, the 5 years of the shooting, to the cosmic time of the star(s). The apex of this sensation for me is when a bunch of luminous suns appear on screen towards the middle of the work. The overlapping images shot on film (16mm) reach here an almost haptic quality, and the bright spots are, as it were, holes in the sky that let an otherwise unbearable light filter through. The instrumental music used enhances this overwhelming sense of joy and cosmic gratitude, yet, 13 works without music as well, and like in the best examples of pure experimental cinema (Brakhage), the succession of images by itself creates a visual, and almost musical, rhythm.

Ecosystem 5: A Tremulous Stone (Koike Teruo, 1988)

The Ecosystem movies are a series of films that work with abstract patterns of extraordinary density and complexity; the series is inspired by the complex chaos systems present in nature.

A storm of materiality in flux, a very tactile visual experience, a cacophonous but smooth, almost Merzbow-like (and not because of the sound), experience. I would love to see it on a big screen.

Youth: The 50th National High School Baseball Tournament (Ichikawa Kon, 1968) Unpopular opinion maybe, but I prefer this to Tokyo Olympiad, and I don’t even particularly like baseball.
The first part is among the best examples of cinema I’ve seen this year: beautiful photography, really stunning, by Uematsu Eikichi (a cinematographer who worked for Kamei Fumio’s Record of Blood: Sunagawa, among other works), fast-paced editing like in an action movie, incredible popping colours, a moody music, inventive camera angles, a clever sound design, and an exploration of different landscapes and lives of young students practicing baseball in Japan. The most fascinating moment for me was when the movie touches on how the history of the tournament and that of the country are indelibly intermingled. There’s a cut in the first 30 minutes or so, from the smiling faces, in colours, of contemporary (at the time) fans, to the bombings of the Pacific War, that is pure cinema, and it’s worth alone the viewing. The second part, where the 50th tournament itself is the main subject on screen, loses for me, a non baseball person, some of the appeal, but it is still very well crafted and a showcase of Ichikawa’s cinematic touch, and has a very poetic ending. One of the discoveries of the year for me.