Category: found footage

Archival film practices, found footage documentary, and compilation documentary in Japan. /2 An evolving terminology?

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.

An evolution of the two articles can be read here. 

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.

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Archival film practices, found footage documentary, and compilation documentary in Japan. /1 The story of an absence? 

This is a first in a series of short articles dedicated to archival film practices in Japan, an umbrella term that points towards a constellation made of found footage documentaries, compilation documentary, recycle cinema, and collage films.

An evolution of the two short articles can be read here.

While the practice of making found footage and compilation documentaries out of archival material is and has been widespread in Europe and in the U.S. for quite some time—I’m guilty of knowing too little about the history of these films in other parts of the world—researching these cinematic practices in Japan resulted, for me, in a deafening silence and in a dead end.
This and the following articles are an attempt to make sense and examine this scarcity, and an opportunity to focus on the few works made in Japan that can be included into these “categories”.

In 1947, French filmmaker Nicole Védrès made Paris 1900, a compilation film assembled from footage shot between 1900 and 1914, while in 1965 Gianfranco Baruchello and Alberto Grifi experimented with found footage images from Hollywood movies destined to be trashed in Uncertain Verification, and in 1987 in From the Pole to the Equator, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi reworked the colonialist gaze of material shot in 1925 into something very different. These are just some of the most significant examples of compilation film or found footage cinema from the last century. Moreover, in the past few decades the practice of recycle cinema, another term to add to the constellation, has seen a surge in production and quality, brought about by the technological advance and the availability of archival material, but also by a will to inquire the meaning of reassembling images from the past and its impact in the present. Filmmakers as diverse as Bill Morrison, Haroun Farocki, Jonas Mekas, and Sergej Loznitsa have all extensively explored the possibilities and challenged the limits of archival film practices, assembling insightful and boundary-pushing works.

What about the history of these film practices in Japan?
To my knowledge and according to my brief research, in the archipelago this is a story of an absence, as it were, both in the documentary and in the experimental field. Considering that Japan has a long, rich, and heterogeneous history of documentary filmmaking and of experimental cinema, this came to me as a surprise, but also as a topic worth of further investigation.
There are, naturally, exceptions—I will touch on them in the the following articles dedicated to the subject—and there are several documentaries made in Japan that use indeed archival images, especially those dealing with and depicting the Pacific War or the social revolts of the late 1960s. However, these type of works—The tetralogy of documentaries (2014-2024) directed by Daishima Haruhiko about the Sanrizuka struggle and the students movements, or Boy Soldiers: The Secret War in Okinawa (2018) by Mikami Chie and Ōya Hanayo come to mind—are usually made by combining interviews, reenactments, newly shot scenes, and narration, thus I’m not sure they can completely count as the type of practices discussed here. In addition, the archival material in these films is usually used more to demonstrate a point than to provoke a sensation or a reflection on the status of the images.

I’m aware that this is a very debatable definition and stance, someone might argue that those are indeed archival documentaries, but I tend to side with the definitions provided on the matter by some scholars, who identify archival film practices as acts of creating something novel and aesthetically complex and layered. Alberto Brodesco and Maurizio Cau, for instance, state that ‘In general terms, the expression [archival cinema] describes the operation of reuse, recycling and reappropriation of material shot in the past, which is recomposed to produce new film texts’ (2023), and according to Eric Thouvenel ‘found footage films are far more than the “documentation” of an era; their significance is not located at the level of the represented event, but with the events occurring within the representation itself.’ (2008)
Moreover, when writing about Jay Leyda and his landmark volume on the subject, Bill Nichols points out that ‘the core idea of the compilation film revolves around not only montage and photomontage but also ostranenie, the basic tenet of Russian formalism as put forward by Victor Shklovsky: “the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.”’ (2014)
Furthermore, I believe it is also a matter of the length and the quantity of the material used: the more archival images or found footage are utilised, the more the films approach an idea of recycle cinema that opens new meanings for the images assembled, ‘in such a way as to produce new knowledge about history that evokes a deeper, more sensual, and experiential understanding of the past.’ (Russell 2018)

As for the reasons of the scarcity of these practices in the archipelago, the first that comes to mind is the incredible difficulty in obtaining and using images from films from Japanese production companies. Anyone who has ever tried to organize events, or just use still images from movies for publications is, sadly, well aware of this madness, and even when the permission is granted, more often than not, big studios are asking very high prices.
However, this cannot be the only reason, since there are alternatives, such as using found footage from home-movies or other non-commercial or amateur sources. In the the next articles, I will write about a couple of exceptions, works that can be described as belonging to the categories here discussed, and that make use of some of the aforementioned archival alternatives.

References:

Alberto Brodesco and Maurizio Cau, ed. Found footage. Il cinema, i media, l’archivio. Cinema e Storia. Rivista di studi interdisciplinari n. 2023, Rubettino, 2023.

Jay Leyda, Films Beget Films: A Study of the Compilation Film, Hill and Wang, 1971.

Bill Nichols, Remaking History: Jay Leyda and the Compilation Film, Film History
Vol. 26, No. 4, Indiana University Press, 2014.

Catherine Russel, Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices, Duke University Press, 2018.

Eric Thouvenel, How “Found Footage” Films Made Me Think Twice about Film History, in Cinéma & Cie, Milano University Press, 2008.