Category: Japanese cinema

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 One Day (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.

Tanaka Min is one of the contemporary Japanese artists I admire the most, both for his past as a butoh performer—a definition he has openly and vehemently refused to used in recent years—and for his connection with Gilles Deleuze and especially Felix Guattari, an encounter that resulted, in 1985, in the volume 光速と禅炎 Agencement ’85. Last but not least, I’ve always been fascinated by the turn that Tanaka’s career took around two decades ago, a change that made him a movie actor appreciated for his powerful and magnetic presence on screen. Not only a performing body in service of documentaries with an experimental touch, such as the beautiful ほかいびと 伊那の井月 Hokaibito: Ina no Seigetsu (Kitamura Minao, 2012), and the delirious piece of performance that is 始まりも終わりもない No Beginning, No End, directed in 2013 by Itō Shunya of 女囚701号/さそりFemale Prisoner #701: Scorpion fame. But also for his presence in more mainstream movies, and his work in voice acting for feature animations.

名付けようのない踊りThe Unnameable Dance (2022) is a documentary that retells, using Tanaka’s own narration and words, and in an episodic and at times syncopated way, some of the events and encounters that guided his life as a performer. Tanaka recalls, for instance, his meeting with Hijikata Tatsumi and the discovery of his revolutionary performances in the early 1970s. Or dancing in Paris in 1978, a trip that de facto launched his career, not only internationally but also in Japan. During one of his trips to France, Tanaka had also the chance to meet Roger Caillois, a writer and philosopher he strongly admired, and for whom he insisted to dance. The title of the movie, The Unnameable Dance, is, as a matter of fact, taken from a sentence Caillois used to describe Tanaka’s performance.

The documentary, directed by Inudō Isshin, covers also Tanaka’s debut as an actor in Yamada Yōji’s Twilight Samurai, an event that kicked off, at age 57, his career on the big, and small, screen. A part of the documentary is also dedicated to Tanaka’s work as a farmer, an activity very important for his philosophy, because, as he famously stated, “In agriculture one can find the anti-modern coming from the past. There you find the concreteness of the present.”

The recalling of all these experiences is interspersed with some of his more recent performances, always awe-inspiring, even when mediated through the camera. These performances were recorded in Japan and abroad, Paris and Portugal play a big role in the work, the latter is not only the place where the documentary begins and ends, but its music (Fado?) accompanies the whole documentary.
Another fascinating quality of the film is that the performances and scenes with Tanaka on screen are interspersed with Yamamura Kōji ‘s beautiful and effective animation, used mainly to depict Tanaka’s memories and dreams as a child.
Particularly significant is also how the documentary includes purposely the audience, their faces and their reactions, when filming Tanaka’s performances in public spaces. There’s not attempt to hide or cut out the people watching and taking videos and photos with their smartphones, since for the Japanese performer “dance cannot be owned; dance is born in the space between; the viewers become dancers too”.

Presented in its 4K restored version last summer at the Locarno Festival, 書かれた顔 The Written Face (1995) offers a fascinating and at times experimental portrait of Bandō Tamasaburō, kabuki actor known in Japan especially for being one of the most talented onnagata ever, a man who plays the role of a woman in traditional Japanese theatre. Bandō has also directed a couple of movies, and appeared as an actor in a number of films, among which I would like to highlight at least 夜叉ヶ池 Demon Pond (1979), an excellent movie by Shinoda Masahiro, with an outstanding performance by Bandō in the double role of a girl and a mythical princess.
The Written Face is a Japanese-Swiss coproduction directed by Swiss filmmaker Daniel Schmid, who assembled together Bandō’s on-stage performances, which make up the bulk of the film, with interviews of artists he was inspired by, such as actress Sugimura Haruko, the face of many works by Ozu and Naruse, dancer Takehara Han, the elderly geisha Tsutakiyokomatsu Asaji, and Ohno Kazuo, the great butoh dancer, subject of another movie directed by Schmid and also released in the same year, Kazuo Ohno (1995). The movie is also punctuated by short interviews with Bandō himself, and wrapped up with a film within a film, Twilight Geisha Story, a short movie without spoken words starring the actor himself in the role of a geisha at the end of her career.

The Written Face opens with Bandō on stage, his performance, however, is filmed from the side and not frontally as seen by the audience. These scenes are alternated with brief passages in which the actor strolls through the streets, or explores the stage and the areas surrounding it, as if he were watching the performance he himself is acting in. Once the show is over, after the roaring applause of the off-camera audience, the film shows Bandō removing his make-up, the white patina covering the face, the wig, the heavy dress, and profusely thanking the musicians. At this point we cut to the actor in plain clothes chatting with a child, probably his young son, who is playing with a portable video game. While the scene itself is very brief and not too significant in itself, when considered in the context of the movie, so far made mainly of acting on stage, ritual gestures and traditional music, it represents a counterpoint that zooms us out of the stage performances, and anchors the film to the time it was filmed, the 1990s. While most of the movie, as written above, is made by the beautifully choreographed performances of Bandō, everything else that surrounds them— interviews, words, and “pillow shots”— functions as an indirect explanation of his artistic approach, and partly as a deconstruction of what is happening on stage. One of the crucial points of the movie is when we first hear Bandō’s voice reflecting on his art and approach. He is sitting in a hotel facing what is probably Osaka Castle at sunset, and explaining to the interviewer what he is trying to express when he takes the stage as onnagata: “I do not represent a woman, but I suggest the essence of women. That is the nature of the onnagata, isn’t?”.

In order to do so, Bandō has often seeked inspiration, throughout his career, from the art of the four aforementioned figures, each of them representing a different and unique type of femininity. A clip from Naruse Mikio’s 晩菊 Late Chrysanthemums (1954) suggests the particular type of femininity, strong and direct, Sugimura often represented in her long and glorious film career. At the other end of the spectrum, the dancing body of Ohno, 88 years old at the time, immersed in the blue of dawn, and surrounded by water, captures and expresses something more ethereal and dreamlike. Ingrained in the nihon-buyō‘s tradition are the dance movements that Takehara performs for the film, delicate, elegant, and almost imperceptible, while the voice of Tsutakiyokomatsu, trembling but still full of life, is a sign of a fierce vitality, she was 101 years old at the time of the shooting.

After the short Twilight Geisha Story, a segment about twenty minutes long, which perhaps represents the weakest part of the work, in the last ten minutes, the movie returns to a kabuki play with Bandō protagonist. The performance is Sagi Musume (1762), also the opening performance of the documentary, one of the most famous and celebrated kabuki play in Japan. It is the story of a girl, abandoned by her lover, who is transformed into a heron and dies on a snowy night. Bandō’s performance is here breathtaking in its beauty.