Fifth part of an ongoing series of translations dedicated to the writings of Haneda Sumiko (4th here, 3rd here, first and second here and here)
The short passages translated below—from 早池峰の賦 published in 1984—are very important and central to properly understand Ode to Mt. Hayachine, and more broadly, Haneda’s approach to documentary filmmaking. Just to provide a bit of background: Haneda discovered yamabushi kagura in 1964 in Tokyo, and the following year, the beauty of the performances and their connection with Tōhōku, when she visited Ōtsugunai, where she attended a kagura performed in an old magariya, an L-shaped farmhouse typical of the area. When she went back to the town in 1977, she noticed how the magariya and the culture associated with them were slowly disappearing from the scenery. She really wanted to start her documentary from a performance held in one of these old houses, an image that had stayed in her mind for decades, but instead she decided to go the opposite direction and started the movie by filming the demolition of one of these old farmhouses. It is interesting to note that, the first and shorter version of the documentary, 早池峰神楽の里 Hayachine kagura no sato, opens with kagura performed in the entrance of an old house, not a magariya, if I’m not wrong, and that the demolition scene is absent.
NOTE: This is by no means a professional translation, but I hope the readers can get the gist of it:
I first became aware of the Tōhoku region when I was in primary school, and read about a famine in the area in a children’s book. I think this was probably about the great famine of 1934. I had completely forgotten what it was about, but the tragic impression stayed with me for a long time. So when I think of the Tōhoku region, the first thing that comes to mind is a dark and impoverished image.
When I thought about making a movie about Hayachine kagura, I thought that Kagura is like a flower that blossoms and has its roots in the soil, that is, the harsh living conditions of the Tōhoku region. The true value of the flower cannot be understood unless it is depicted together with its soil. But how should this soil be expressed? In 1979, this was quite difficult.
When I first visited Ōtsugunai in 1965, the old farmhouses were still there, and the atmosphere of the old times was still strong. However, the rural landscape has now completely changed. Wide paved roads. Large concrete buildings. Houses just like in the city. Colourful tin roofs reflect the sunlight, and there is no longer any sense of history, poverty or darkness. I was at loss in front of this rural landscape.
The image of kagura I had in my mind was the one I saw during my first trip to Ōtsugunai [in 1965 when Haneda attended a kagura performed at the entrance of an old magariya, t/n]. I tried to find a place that somehow came close to that image, and in my mind I was constantly trying to recreate a scene like that. However, I soon began to feel that there was something wrong with obsessing over only old things. I realised that in order to depict the life of kagura, which has continued to live until today, even when the houses are new and the roofs are red, first of all it was important to accurately capture the present life of the farmers, and I also realised it would be a mistake to go too far in pursuing the perfect form, and thus to lose the vitality of the present. I was forced to change my methodology.
I thought that starting the shooting with the destruction of the magariya was quite symbolic. I filmed the demolition of the magariya as a symbol of the transfiguration of the rural areas in the Tōhoku region, but it also became the “demolition” of my own way of thinking. It doesn’t matter if the magariya are no more. It doesn’t matter if the roofs are blue or red. I wanted to make this work as an expression of the spirit of the farmers in Tōhoku, beyond what is visible to the eye, and as an expression of the ever-changing flow of history.
This is the 4th part of an ongoing series of translations dedicated to the writings of Haneda Sumiko (third part here, first and second here and here)
Distributed by Equipe de Cinema, 早池峰の賦 Ode to Mt. Hayachine (a.k.a. The Poem of Hayachine Valley) is the second work conceived and directed independently by Heneda Sumiko. The movie was released in 1982 at Iwanami Hall, where it stayed from May 29th to June 25th (and later, due to its success, again from August 7th to 13th). A booklet about Haneda and the movie was published and sold at the theater, and more importantly in 1984 Haneda published 早池峰の賦 (Hayachine no fu), a fascinating volume about the origin, production and shooting of the film, how the various versions of the documentary came about, and about her relationship with the people of Take and Ōtsugunai, the two villages where kagura is performed. As for the versions of the documentary, the first one, backed by Iwanami Eiga, is titled 早池峰神楽の里 Hayachine kagura no sato, a 52-minute long film that, among other things, is interesting in that it has a male voice narration, while the following versions have a female one. 早池峰の神楽 Hayachine no kagura is a second version, assembled by Haneda after the previous was completed, using more footage shot during the years, while the third one, 早池峰の賦 Ode to Mt. Hayachine, the version usually screened, is 185 minutes long , and very similar to the second one (195′), that was cut down of 10 minutes in order to be screened at Iwanami Hall. The book was, like the film, an unexpected and moderate success, and the first experience for Haneda writing a volume about one of her films.
In the short passages here translated from the volume 早池峰の賦, Haneda narrates the first steps that led to the conception and production of the documentary. She discovered yamabushi kagura when she attended a performance held in Tokyo in 1964, the following year, together with cameraman Segawa Jun’ichi, she visited the two villages of Take and Ōtsugunai, at the time part of Ōhasama town, where they witnessed the various kagura dances performed, also in a magariya, an old style farmhouse typical of the area. Haneda was so impressed by the area and its atmosphere, the people and the performances, that she decided to make a documentary. She even wrote a provisional script, but was not satisfied with it and so the project was shelved. The chance came again in 1977, after she independently made 薄墨の桜 The Cherry Tree with Grey Blossoms and gained more confidence in her career as a filmmaker.
NOTE: This is by no means a professional translation, but I hope the readers can get the gist of it:
To make a film I really wanted to shoot, that is, by myself [without the help of a production company, t/n] was for me something like a dream, almost impossible to realize. Thus, when I made The Cherry Tree with Grey Blossoms as an independent work, it was like a new road was opening in front of my eyes. When I made that movie its subject was one tree, it does not go away and it didn’t require so much time and money to be made, however, this time it was different, the subject was people, and many, since there are about 20 performers in the kagura group. If I wanted to film the kagura, I needed the proper filming equipment and a considerable amount of money, above all, what I needed to make the movie, was the cooperation and the understanding of the kagura performers and the people of the area.
In the early summer of 1977 I visited, after 12 years, the town of Ōhasama. I told Ōhasama’s major, Murata-san, that I wanted to make a film that would not be a documentary about kagura, but would portray the culture, life and spirit of the land that has supported kagura, and that it would be a record of the town that I would make and give to the town. Often people came to the town to film kagura, leaving nothing behind for the people of the area. [in the conversation with the major recollected in the book, there are complaints about NHK troupes coming to the area and leaving soon after the main festival is over, without leaving behind anything, t/n]
The decision to form a group to make a movie was decided only a year and a half after this first meeting with major Murata, in the meantime we had the chance to visit and talk with him many times. (…) At the time I was still a Iwanami Eiga employee, and I was very happy to know Iwanami Eiga provided full support for this personal project. More fortunately, the fundraising campaign was able to secure a certain amount of funding, and Tohoku Electric Power agreed to purchase the film necessary. About a year and a half after meeting the mayor for the first time, on 13 February 1979, the 早池峰神楽の里を作る会 ‘Group for making the film Hayachine kagura no sato’ was established. The mayor himself named the film “Hayachine kagura no sato”, which I thought was not a bad title. The group started its activities with the goal of producing a film with a fund of 30 million yen, and a running time of 50 minutes. I thought that fifty minutes was too short, but the production costs would have been much higher otherwise.
However, it was not so easy to raise money, money could never keep up with the speed of film production, nduring filming and during the finishing touches, we still had to find the money. I still cringe when I think back on all the headaches over money we had during this period. In the end, we managed to reach the target amount in autumn of the following year, a year and a half after we had completed and delivered “Hayachine kagura no sato” to the town. During this period, all the footage shot for the film was fully utilized to produce the three-hour and five-minute Ode to Mt. Hayachine, which was shown at Iwanami Hall in Tokyo, gaining a good reputation and being seen by many people.
The film was screened twice a day at the City Hall. On that day, nearly 1,300 people gathered to watch it enthusiastically. We were thrilled that so many people came to see our film, even though the town had a population of less than 8,000.
The 52-minute film was appreciated by the local people, but the 3 hours and 15 minutes film was appreciated even more. Unexpectedly, a woman from Take told us that it was the first time she could properly see the festival and the kagura performances. Come to think of it, when they are busy with the preparation for the festivals and kagura, the women are so busy in the kitchen, that they don’t have time to watch them. Some of them were impressed that the dancers looked so divine when they danced in the film, even though they are usually normal people very close to them in everyday life. What was most gratifying for us was that many people said they felt proud of their hometown.
We were hesitant to let people see the three-hour 15-minute film we donated to the town, because it was so long, and we weren’t sure if it would work as a film to be released in a theater or not. Even though, I showed it to a few people.
A few months later, I was told that the film would be screened at Iwanami Hall as a film distributed by Equipe de Cinema, and I honestly couldn’t believe it. It was unthinkable that such a documentary film would be shown to the public. We reduced the length of the film to three hours and five minutes in order to be able to screen it at the theater, and named the film Ode to Mt. Hayachine. The title of the film best expresses our feelings about the twists and turns that led to the creation of the documentary.
Second report from the Kobe Discovery Film Festival 2022 (you can read this first one here).
On October 15th, the festival held a couple of screenings of home movies from the Kobe area, on the occasion of Home Movie day 2022. It was a very pleasant and eye-opening experience for me, the audience had the chance to see a couple of short films (from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, if I’m not wrong), projected on screen with the person who filmed it, or a family member, in attendance. It was like opening a treasure chest, a personal one, in front of a bunch of strangers, a way to share personal memories, often forgotten, with other people. The home movie day, held since 2002 all over the world, it’s a fascinating event situated at the intersection between personal history, History with a capital “H”, and film studies. It is an exploration of the possibility of building an alternative video history from the bottom up, almost a micro history as it were, excavating personal memories to document social changes, and also an occasion to celebrate a dying format (8mm, super 8, etc.). Besides the specific places and experiences captured on the films projected—a trip to the zoo, scenes of a countryside house, a family vacation, a day at the Osaka Expo 1970—it was interesting to learn how home movies from the 60s generally retain even today a better visual quality and colours (especially the reds), compared to those shot in the following decades. As the film and film equipment got more affordable, the quality of the celluloid also dropped, causing the films to deteriorate easily with the passing of time. Insightful was also to learn, from a live commentary done by a scholar of the subject, that, because of the cost of the film, home movies made in the 50s or 60s were usually edited faster, with shorter cuts that is, while later on the cuts tended to be longer.
In September 1939, after the Nazi invasion of Poland, Maria Kamm and her brother Marcel Weyland were forced to leave their hometown and to start an endless journey around the globe to survive. After fifteen months in a refugee camp in Lithuania, they arrived in Tsuruga, a port city in Fukui prefecture, and from there they moved to Kobe, later to Shanghai, where the family was separated, and finally they reached, at different times, their final destination, Melbourne in Australia.
海でなくてどこに Where But Into The Sea (2021) is a film documenting their odyssey around the world, constructed by interweaving interviews, poetry, letters, and a historical investigation by scholar Kanno Kenji. The film is directed by Ōsawa Mirai, but the idea of the project came about when Kanno met Maria in Melbourne in 2016, and later decided to shape his research also into a visual work. The documentary is a delicate portrait of two people, their family, their past, and how their personal experiences intersected the large historical events of the last century. It is also about a less known and studied fact, how the asylum process for Jewish people worked in wartime Japan and in the Japanese occupied territories.
The movie has a beautiful and poetic ending, made in collaboration with artist Miyamoto Keiko, it was a discovery for me to learn that this scene was inspired, as the director himself confirmed in the talk after the screening, by the films of Satō Makoto—specifically Memories of Agano (2005) and the movie in the movie screened on a tarp, but also Out of Place: Memories of Edward Said (2006). Ōsawa was Satō’s student when he was teaching at The Film School of Tokyo (Eiga bigakko), and he is also the director of 廻り神楽 Mawari Kagura (2018), a documentary that has been on my radar for some time.
A week ago, I had the pleasure of attending the opening weekend of this year’s Kobe Discovery Film Festival (October 15-16, 21-23), as always held at and organized by the Kobe Planet Film Archive. Now in its sixth edition, the event started in 2009 as Kobe Documentary Film Festival, and later changed its name and guiding philosophy (2017), when it broadened its scope to include programs about home movies, film preservation, film restoration, and the (re)discovery of less known movies from the past. I will write, time permitting, about some of the other films I saw at a different time (second dispatch is here), but today I’d like to focus on what, for me, was the highlight of the festival, a short program dedicated to two documentaries made by NDU (Nihon Documentary Union).
2022 has been a sad year for NDU’s former members, but a fruitful one in establishing its legacy in the history of Japanese cinema and beyond. Inoue Osamu, one of the key members of the group, passed away last June, and this year marks also the tenth anniversary of the passing of Nunokawa Tetsurō, one of the main figures of the collective. On the positive side of things, 2022 was the year NDU received its first official international exposure, when last spring the Japan Society in New York organized a special (online) screening of two of their best works, 沖縄エロス外伝 モトシンカカランヌー Motoshinkakarannu (1971) and アジアはひとつ Asia is One (1973). I’ve written about NDU and Nunokawa in more than one occasion (check the links below), and for a more in-depth and better written piece, check Alexander Zahlten’s The archipelagic thought of Asia is One (1973).
The two films shown in Kobe, Tokyo ’69 – One Day Blue Crayons… (1969) and Public Order Project: Martial Law at Noon (1981) – have only recently been (re)discovered or identified as works by the collective and have rarely been screened before (the latter has actually never been shown publicly). Neither is more than half an hour long, but I believe they represent two essential pieces of the fascinating mosaic that was NDU, not least because they encapsulate a certain era of social dissent, and consequently documentary making, in Japan between the late 1960s and early 1980s. After the screenings, Nakamura Yoko, a film scholar specialising in NDU, spoke briefly about the films in the context of NDU and Nunokawa’s career, which was very helpful in understanding the two films, especially Public Order Project: Martial Law at Noon.
東京’69 – 青いクレヨンのいつかは . . . Tokyo ’69 – One Day Blue Crayons . . . (1969) Shot on 16mm between 1967-68, this documentary is a propaganda film funded by the Tokyo headquarters of the Japanese Socialist Party to support Governor Minobe Ryōkichi, who was elected in 1967. While on the surface a piece of political advertising, Tokyo ’69 – one day blue crayons . . . reflects on and depicts various problems facing the capital and its citizens in the late 1960s, a time when urban sprawl was increasingly and dramatically changing. Expropriation and exploitation seem to be two of the main threads running through the film: we learn that 95% of Tokyo’s land was in the hands of 5% of the population, as redistributed after the war. The film also shows how truck drivers carry and deliver goods they don’t use or own, or how workers who come to the city from other areas live in precarious conditions. For example, we see a man from Hokkaido working almost 14 hours a day while living and sleeping in an extremely small rented room.
It is also interesting to note the focus on the lack of crèches for working women to leave their children in, a problem that still seems to be unresolved, and the criticism of the new stadium built for the 1964 Olympics, a structure that, as NDU points out, was of no use to the people of Tokyo after the games. An uncanny resemblance to what is happening now after the 2021 Games. The title of the documentary seems to refer to the final scene, in which we see a young boy drawing pictures with crayons in a sketchbook. At one point he is asked a series of questions, including “What colour is the sky?”, and his annoyed answer is always “shiran” (I don’t know). The hope is that one day the sky will be blue.
According to the festival leaflet, this film has never appeared in Nunokawa’s statements, but it is credited as an NDU production at the very end, in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, a fact confirmed by Inoue before his death. The film was made at the same time as 鬼ッ子 闘う青年労働者の記録 Onikko-A Record of the Struggle of Youth Labourers (1969), also funded by the Socialist Party, a work that shares not only the general tone but also some famous shots. The freight train carrying petrol for American planes to Vietnam passing through Shinjuku station, and a tank parade in the middle of the city.
In its critique of Tokyo and its exploration of the dark side of the 1960s economic miracle, the documentary reminded me very much of Tsuchimoto Noriaki’s 東京部 Tokyo Metropolis (1962), a short documentary made for television that was never broadcast because it was considered too dark and pessimistic (you can watch it, in Japanese and legally, here, here)
治安出動草稿 お昼の戒厳令 Public Order Project: Martial Law at Noon (source)
治安出動草稿 お昼の戒厳令 Public Order Project: Martial Law at Noon (1981). Shot in Super 8 by a group of NDU members in one day – though credited at the end as a Nunokawa production – the film documents the second Six Cities Joint Disaster Prevention Drill, organised in Shinjuku on 1 September 1981. When it was announced that some twelve million people were expected to take part, an astonishing and frightening number, Date Masayasu, a former Shinjuku city official turned cultural critic and writer, declared alarmingly: “We will be moved under the command of the Self-Defence Forces! “. Inspired by this comment, Nunokawa and seven other members of the collective began filming people marching and gathering in Shinjuku, protests in the streets, and military manoeuvres in Tokyo and the surrounding area on 1 September.
As is often the case with NDU’s films, especially the later ones, there is no great explanation of what is happening on screen, or the reasons for what we are seeing. As the film progresses, however, a sense, if not a meaning, slowly begins to emerge. In a country regularly hit by natural disasters such as earthquakes, typhoons and floods, emergency drills are a normal part of life, but this one felt and was very different. The connection made by Date and Nunokawa and NDU with the documentary is a subtle but deep and powerful one, at least for me. Disaster drills of this scale are deeply connected to public order and the idea of a strong and unified nation/state imposing its will from above. Self-Defence Forces landing in Shizuoka from the sea, helicopters flying constantly over the city, the sheer mass of people moving in the streets – it is worth repeating, almost 12 million people! – and the effort to coordinate six cities within the megalopolis, all this is seen and understood in the film as something dangerously close to an act of military mobilisation. The documentary is very effective in capturing and expressing this massive sense of potential fear. A past – the narration mentions, for example, the lynchings of Koreans and other minorities that continued after the great Kantō earthquake in 1923 – that could resurface at any time in the future.
Formally, the film alternates between scenes of helicopters flying over the city – the sound here is distorted and becomes almost hypnotic – and scenes of the Self-Defence Forces, sometimes in slow motion, with scenes of clashes between demonstrators and the police. It is worth noting how different the scale of the protests were from those of a decade earlier. Japanese people continued to protest and demonstrate even after the end of the so-called political season, Narita docet, but the number of people involved and the motivations changed dramatically, for reasons that cannot be explored in this piece. What stood out for me aesthetically, compared to other NDU works, was the extensive use of electronic music throughout the documentary, especially in the final part, when activists and police clash and march to the sound of electronic drums. As a mere curiosity and possible coincidence, it is interesting to note that on the same day, 1 September 1981, Kraftwerk, the German group that more than anyone else pioneered electronic music in popular culture, were also in Tokyo, ready to embark on their first Japanese tour.
The film has not been included in any of NDU’s special features to date and, as the flyer suggests, this special screening in Kobe was made possible thanks to the efforts of Mitsui Mineo, a former collaborator of Nunokawa’s and probably a former member of NDU, who worked with him on his documentaries in Palestine.
An overdue return to my movie journal entries, with some interesting documentaries—as always the definition here is quite broad— I’ve watched in the last couple of months.
Oral History (Koizumi Meiro, 2013-2015). Comprised of interviews with people of different ages, Oral History is a fascinating exploration of memory, or the lack of it, through different generations of Japanese. The work starts by highlighting the lack of historical knowledge in young, and not so young, people, and how this disinformation is shaping their opinions about Japan—a process that felt a bit annoying and patronising, especially in the first interviews, if I have to be completely honest. What makes this experimental work interesting though, is the progression that moves it from presenting various and very shorts interviews to focusing, in its last part, solely on a deep conversation about war and personal memories, expatriation, and grief with an old lady of Korean descent. Besides the fascinating interweaving of personal history with macro-history, and the touching stories told by the woman, what I found also interesting is that here is the interviewer who shows the apparent lack of knowledge about history, the history of Koreans in Japan, Osaka to be precise, and the Repatriation Project established at the end of the 1950s by the North Korean government. Everything is made more powerful, at least in 2022, by the aesthetic choice used, filming only the mouths of the people speaking, a decision that after three years of pandemic and masks (here in Japan at least), feels freshly disorienting. (Part of the e-flux online program curated by Julian Ross)
Before the Flood (By Yifan Li, Yu Yan, 2005). The documentary depicts the final weeks of Fengjie, an old city famous because of Li Bai, one of the most renowned poet in Chinese history. Located on the Yangtze River, the city, at the time of filming, was about to be reduced to dust, and its inhabitants were forced to relocate, in order to make way to the new Three Gorges Dam that would eventually flood the entire valley. The film documents the slow death of a city, or better, the execution of a city and its people, some of them are fighting to stay until the end, by the state and for the so called progress. The lo-fi aesthetics of DV cameras so fundamental in the development of independent documentary in Asia in the 1990s and 2000s, are here used at their best. An ideal sequel, Before the Flood II – Gong Tan, a documentary about another city soon to be destroyed by the construction of a dam, was completed by Yu Yan in 2009.
Filmmaking and the Way to the Village (Fukuda Katsuhiko, 1973). A relatively short documentary, just less than an hour, directed by a member of the Ogawa collective, about the making of the group’s masterpiece, Sanrizuka: Heta Village (1973). Fukuda left the collective after completing this film, decided to stay in the area, and kept making documentaries, for instance A Grasscutter’s Tale (1985). I revisited the documentary after long time, and it was even better than I remembered, years spent watching the films of Ogawa and reading about them, gave me a different perspective on them. The movie offers a glimpse behind the curtain, so to speak, of course you need to be familiar with Ogawa Pro’s filmography and its story, but it’s nonetheless an invaluable document to understand how Heta Village came into existence. The scenes when the collective discusses how the old people of the village enjoy long takes are priceless. It was fascinating also to see how important and integral to the success and reception of the Sanrizuka Series were the screenings. In a pre mini-theaters/independent cinemas era, all the screenings throughout Japan were organized through a network of activists, unions, supporters, people as important for the movies, as the crew that made them.
Last June, Kobe Planet Film Archive organised a special programme dedicated to the works of filmmaker Takahashi Ichirō and producer-director Ukumori Noritae, two key figures in the development of independent film culture in the Kansai region over the past fifty years. Both passed away in 2021, and many of their works were donated to the Kobe Planet Film Archive. The memorial event focused on the films produced by Eiga seisaku iinkai, a film production committee formed by a group of citizens in 1985, and those made by 8 no kai, a collective formed in 1970 by a diverse group of people, amateur filmmakers and industry professionals, who set up an office in Sakuranomiya, Osaka. Both Takahashi and Ukumori were two important members of these groups.
Both Takahashi and Ukumori were two important members of these groups. As far as I could tell from the few films I was able to see and the leaflet I was given, 8 no kai and Eiga seisaku iinkai – the latter of which seems to be still still active – mainly produced films dealing with environmental and social issues, with a strong focus on grassroots activism in Kansai and the surrounding areas.
The first film I saw was 原発はいま Genpatsu wa ima (Nuclear Power Now), directed in 1982 by Ōmi Michihiro and scripted by Takahashi. The movie exposes not only the myth of the nuclear power’s safety, shattered by the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in 1979, and the release of radioactivity, at first denied and covered up, at the Tsuruga Nuclear Plant in 1981, but more importantly represents an exposure of how labor work in the nuclear facilities was, and still is, exploited. The film, produced by 8 no kai, covers the struggles and protests of workers at a couple of nuclear power plants, active at the time of filming, in areas such as Mihama, Ōi and Takahama in Fukui Prefecture—the area with the highest concentration of nuclear reactors in the world, producing energy mainly for Kansai and its urban sprawl— Kubokawa in Kochi Prefecture, and Onagawa in Miyagi Prefecture. Examining the reality of the subcontracted workers and their horrific working conditions, the documentary could be paired, in an ideal double bill, with Morisaki Azuma’s 生きてるうちが花なのよ 死んだらそれまでよ党宣言 Nuclear Gypsies (1985), an incredible piece of fiction revolving, among other things, around the life of nuclear gypsies, or with the less known documentary いま原子力発電は Nuclear Power Plants Now directed by Haneda Sumiko in 1976.
My second film was 生命ある限り As long as there is life (1988), a work directed by Takahashi and produced by 8 no kai, about the tragedy of the atomic bombing and the hope for peace, as told by people gathered annually at the meeting of the Hyogo Prefectural Council of Atomic Bomb Survivors. The movie is made of a collection of testimonies and interviews of the people living in Hyogo, people who were affected directly or indirectly by the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The last movie at the screening event for me was 風ものがたり 食と農と環境 The Wind Story: Food, Farming and the Environment (1995), directed by Takahashi, produced by Ukumori Noritate, and backed by Eiga seisaku iinkai. This is the final film in an environmental-themed trilogy directed by Takahashi between the mid-eighties and the mid-nineties, started with 24000年の方舟 24000 Years of the Ark in 1986, continued in 1991 with 奇妙な出来事アトピー The Strange Event of Atopy, and completed with The Wind Story. The movie is narrated by famous actor Yūsuke Kawazu, who passed away last February and who has been a very popular face in films and TV in the last sixty years, and features and focuses on three similar environmental experiences. A young couple of full-time farmers living and working in Ikeda, a small mountain village in Fukui prefecture, a joint group of producers and consumers in Takefu, again a city in Fukui, and a group of consumers and activists living in Osaka. All these people share a sensibility towards a life lived with a strong awareness of the interconnection existing between the humans and the elements around them, such as soil, water, mountains, plants, other animals, and so on. The common thread running throughout the short documentary, it is less than an hour long, is the relationship between the soil and the food grown on it and consumed by the inhabitants, a philosophy encapsulated in the motto, often seen and heard in the documentary, “Soil is Life”. Filmed with an interesting visual flair and with a joyful, and sometime loud, soundtrack that almost recalls the folk singers of the 1970s, the most interesting part of the documentary was for me the one about the family in Ikeda. By cultivating rice in a narrow space of land between two mountains and adapting to the physical conditions of the territory, it reminded me of Satoyama, an important concept in Japanese culture, famously and overtly present in two works of Studio Ghibli, Totoro (1988) and Only Yesterday (1991), but also in other documentaries made in the archipelago.
Discovering these two groups was a refreshing experience for me, one that intensified my interest in filmmaking conceptualized and done on a local level, in connection with the territory. A type of documentary that often flies under the radar, because it embodies a different idea of filmmaking and documentary, not always lavish, spectacular, and without high production values. At the same time I don’t think it can be called pure video activism, there is a political message at its core of course, but at least in the three films I’ve seen, there’s also a special care towards creating a story, an alternative narrative, to capture the viewers and make them part of a community. I don’t know for sure how these documentaries were screened in the 1980s or 1990s, probably in city halls, community centers, other kind of public or private spaces, or even in few selected mini-theaters, but it’s fascinating, and this is my opinion and personal reading of it, how this exhibition through alternative venues, while minor in scale and numbers, gave them an enhanced resonance and different type of reception. The relationship between documentary filmmaking and its exhibition practices, in the past, but also nowadays, in Japan, but also in the rest of Asia, is a very interesting topic worth a research and an in-depth analysis.
Originally published in 2018, edited with some minor changes on September 2022, in remembrance of Suzuki Shiroyasu (1935-2022)
Cinephiles and film buffs on the internet, and specifically those active on social media, are often times obsessed by lists. Although I’m not a big fan of them when used to rank movies, it is nonetheless unquestionable that lists are one of the best tools, when properly used that is, to discover new movies and explore novel cinematic landscapes.
In the past month I’ve asked on Twitter to list some of the most significant or favourite personal documentaries/diary films made in Japan. Some friends were kind enough to reply and share some titles, some of which I wasn’t aware of.
With this feedback in mind, I started to collect my thoughts and compile a list of what I consider the most important personal documentaries made in Japan since the advent of cinema. I’ve also included some titles I have not seen yet, don’t kill me for this, but I’ve trusted what has been written and discussed by people I trust and respect.
Before starting to explore what the list has to offer, let me clarify what we mean when we talk about “personal documentary”. Keeping in mind that the definition is always vague, in flux and susceptible to change, and so is the term documentary, I think we can approach a sort of truthfulness by stating that personal documentaries are works often made, but not always, in the first person and about the life of the director/cameraman. For these reasons often they are also called, or more precisely they overlap with, diary films and first-person cinema.
In Japan the term often used to define this kind of works is “Self Documentary” セルフ ドキュメンタリー. Illuminating in this respect is this piece written by Nada Hisashi for the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in 2005. Also available on the YIDFF site, an interview with Matsumoto Toshio conducted by Aaron Gerow, in it the theoretician and director criticized some trends in the Japanese self documentary scene of the 1990s, a take that, for what is worth, I agree with:
there are problems with an “I” which doesn’t doubt its “self” and the so-called “I-films” (watakushi eiga) share those: they never put their “I” in question. Since they don’t attempt to relativize themselves through a relationship with the external world, they gradually become self-complete–a pre-established harmony.
With this in mind, let’s start:
Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (Hara Kazuo, 1974)
My favourite film by Hara Kazuo, at the moment, maybe together with Minamata Mandala, one of the cinematic highlights of the second part of his career. The movie is one of the first and finest examples of diary cinema and personal documentary in Japan, and contrary to what many films made in the following decades did, Extreme Private Eros is a sublime embodiment of the famous artistic motto of the 1960s and 1970s “the personal is political”.
Impressions of a Sunset (Suzuki Shiroyasu, 1975)
If Extreme Private Eros is where the Japanese personal documentary started, Impression of a Sunset is where the diary film à la Mekas emerged in the Japanese archipelago. Mostly unknown outside Japan, it’s in every way a diary composed by images where Suzuki, after buying a CineKodak 16 (a pre-war 16mm camera) at a second hand camera shop, starts filming his wife, his newborn baby and his workplace. With Impressions of a Sunset and other works such as 15 Days (1980), Suzuki is more a poet with a camera than a documentarian in the sense we give the term today.
Embracing (1992) and Katatsumori (1994)
Probably the most known personal documentarian from Japan, Kawase started her career with short home movies about the search for her father, who abandoned her as a child, in Embracing, and about the strong bond with her grandmother, who became de facto her adopted mother, in Katatsumori.
Memories of Agano (Satō Makoto, 2004)
I’ve written extensively about the movie and its hybrid and experimental qualities, clearly it’s much more than a personal documentary, but director Satō and his cameraman returning to the locations and the people filmed more than 10 years before in Niigata, make it a movie perfect for this list.
Dear Pyongyang (2006) and Sona, the Other Myself (2009) by Yang Yong-hi
A documentary by zainichi Korean director Yang Yong-hi about her own family. It was shot in Osaka (Yang’s hometown) and Pyongyang, North Korea. In the 1970s, Yang’s father, an ardent communist and leader of the pro-North movement in Japan, sent his three sons from Japan to North Korea under a repatriation campaign sponsored by ethnic activist organisation and de facto North Korean embassy Chongryon; as the only daughter, Yang herself remained in Japan. However, as the economic situation in the North deteriorated, the brothers became increasingly dependent for survival on the care packages sent by their parents. The film shows Yang’s visits to her brothers in Pyongyang, as well as conversations with her father about his ideological faith and his regrets over breaking up his family. In Sona, the Other Myself the director continues the exploration of her family, Sona is the daughter of her brother who moved to North Korea from Japan in the early 1970s. Narrating her story, the film shows the struggles of a generation that migrated from Japan to North Korea, and the life of their offspring, who were born and raised in North Korea. (from Letterboxd).
Ending Note: Death of a Japanese Salesman (Sunada Mami, 2011)
Recently retired from a company after some 40 years of service, Sunada Tomoaki, father of filmmaker Sunada Mami, is diagnosed with terminal cancer and only has a few months left to live. True to his pragmatic core, Sunada sets out to accomplish a list of tasks before his final departure: playing with his grandchildren, planning his own funeral, saying “I love you” to his wife, among others. (from Letterboxd)
Everyday is Alzheimer’s (2012), Everyday Is Alzheimer’s 2 – The Filmmaker Goes to Britain (2014) Everyday Is Alzheimer’s the Final: Death Becomes Us (2018) by Sekiguchi Yūka
Director Sekiguchi Yūka documents and depicts the daily life of her dementia-diagnosed mother and how this changed her family’s life.
Yongwanggung : Memories from Across the Water ( Kim Im-man, 2016)
Statement from the director: “Yongwangung was a Gutdang (shaman’s shrine) where first generation Korean women who crossed the seas from Jeju to Japan use to go before the Second World War. In 2009, I heard that the shrine was about to be demolished by the Osaka city government. My childhood memory of my mother praying in the kitchen came back when I was filming elderly women in Jeju. I felt the urge to have a shamanistic ritual for my mother who had been hospitalized.”
Home Sweet Home (Ise Shinichi, 2017)
This was one of the movies I was more eager to see last year, but unfortunately I couldn’t catch it. The film covers 35 years in the life of filmmaker Ise Shinichi’s family, documenting his disabled niece Nao since 1983.
Special mentions
Toward a Common Tenderness (Oda Kaori, 2017)
It’s one of my favourite viewings of the year, but it has just come out and I need to rewatch it, that’s why it’s not included in the list. The balance between the personal and the poetic is what makes it special.
Magino Village – A Tale (Ogawa Shinsuke, 1986)
As the mysterious object of Japanese documentary per excellence, Magino Village goes of course far beyond the realm of personal films, but somehow this sprawling movie is, among other things, the result and the partial documentation of more than a decade spent in Yamagata by the Ogawa collective.
A mini retrospective on the streaming platform DAfilms.com, from 17 January to 6 February (free of charge until 24 January) introduces 10 Japanese documentaries presented at the Yamagata International Film Festivalfrom 1989 to 2021. A fascinating path through the cinema of the real produced in Japan in the last three decades.
In 1973 when the Ogawa Production collective made Narita: Heta Village, the sixth documentary on the struggle and resistance of the peasants in Sanrizuka against the construction of the new Narita airport, they not only created one of the most important documentaries in the history of Japanese cinema, but also captured and foreshadowed a series of shifts that would take place in the archipelago in the following years. By moving the attention and the camera from the clashes, a “civil war” as it has been described by many, to focus more on the life of the peasants, their customs and their sense of time, the collective anticipated the interest that cinema and literature would later show towards rural and provincial areas. From a cinema more linked to contingent events taking place in the political and social sphere, towards one more interested in macrohistory and its large movements and cycles. This interest of the group, led by Ogawa Shinsuke, is reflected in their decision to move to the north of Japan, to the Yamagata prefecture, where the collective lived for 14 years, from the second half of the 1970s until the end of the following decade. As it was revealed later, after Ogawa’s death, this period was not without internal conflicts, and within itself it had many of the problems that had already poisoned many of the New Left groups during the 1970s, such as a marked authoritarianism, and an absolute lack of female presence in crucial positions. If the cinematic peak of this long period spent in Yamagata is Magino Village – A Tale / The Sundial Carved with a Thousand Years of Notches (1986), an unidentified filmic object that constructs a mythological and epic mapping of the area and its inhabitants, perhaps it can be said that the most important legacy of the collective and of Ogawa himself is the creation, in 1989, of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (YIDFF).
Held once every two years in the Japanese city, the festival has become, in its three decades of existence, an important event for those who love the cinema of real and its infinite expressive possibilities. The festival has always stood out to me for the way it is experienced, horizontally so to speak, after the screenings: professionals and filmmakers mingle and interact with enthusiasts, cinema lovers or even just the curious, who come to enjoy the almost party and rock concert-like atmosphere of the event. At the same time, however, Yamagata has also been, since its very beginning, an important launching pad for many Asian authors and for the creation, especially in the 1990s, of a transnational documentary film culture. The first of its kind in Asia, the event contributed to the birth of other festivals, the Taiwan International Documentary Festival for instance, and it also functioned as a pole of attraction for the new wave of Asian filmmakers who came to the fore during a crucial period for the area, the period of democratisation of art with the advent of digital, in China but also in Hong Kong and other parts of South East Asia more generally.
The online retrospective organised by the YIDFF in cooperation with DAfilms is an excellent opportunity to discover some of the most important Japanese films presented at the festival since its foundation. Two works ideally open and close the retrospective, A Movie Capital, a documentary on the first edition of the festival made in 1991 by Iizuka Toshio, one of the members of Ogawa Production, beautifully captures that sense of collaboration and artistic brotherhood between Asian directors mentioned above. While Komian and Pickles by Satō Koichi— presented during the 2021 edition, moved online due to the pandemic— gives an idea of the sense of commonality in Yamagata during the event. The closure of Komian, a popular venue for post-screening discussions and meetings, follows to the closure of a local tsukemono (pickled food) business, Maruhachi Yatarazuke pickling company, the owner of Komian. The film is an occasion to remember and treasure the experiences offered at the venue, but also an example of how the gentrification process, magnified by the economic damage caused by COVID-19, is active and reshaping the urban texture even in small Japanese cities.
The most artistically accomplished works presented in the retrospective are, however, others. All of them are worth watching of course, but I would personally recommend Living on the River Agano by Satō Makoto (I wrote about three of his movies here), Yang Yonghee’s 2005 film Dear Pyongyang, Storytellers by Hamaguchi Ryūsuke and Sakai Kō, and Cenote (2019) byOda Kaori (here an interview with the artist and a piece on the movie). Here the complete line-up:
A Movie Capital // Toshio IIZUKA // 1991
Living on the River Agano // Makoto SATO // 1992
The Weald // Naomi KAWASE // 1997
The New God // Yutaka TSUCHIYA // 1999
A2 // Tatsuya MORI // 2001
The Cheese and the Worms // Haruyo KATO // 2005
Dear Pyongyang // Yong-hi YANG // 2005
Storytellers // Ko SAKAI, Ryusuke HAMAGUCHI // 2013
As usual, the list below is a reflection of my taste, interests, and viewing habits during 2021, this year mainly, but not exclusively, online. I’m not sure all the titles can be considered documentaries, but this is, after all, the fascinating beauty of dealing with documentary cinema. Synopsys in italics, followed by my quick take and, when available, the trailer:
Kanarta – Alive in Dreams (Ōta Akimi). Sebastian and Pastora live in a Shuar village in the upper Amazonia of Ecuador. Sebastian is not only a respected healer, but also a medicinal botanist who experiments with unknown plants he encounters in the forest. His unique practice seeks to cultivate new knowledge, reconnecting him with his ancestors. Pastora is one of the rare female leaders in Amazonia, who struggles to negotiate with local authorities for her community. With powerful plants such as ayahuasca, they revive and energise their perceptions of the future. These plants allow them to acquire power and a faith to cope with the obstacles they now face, given that their lives have been irreversibly affected by the modern state system. There is a lot to like about this movie, and, like in the best works that cross the boundaries between documentary, visual anthropology and experimental cinema, every new viewing reveals extra layers. On the one hand Kanarta shows the problems Shuar people and their culture encounter in dealing with modern society and the way their community adapts and changes in response. On the other, it also offers a glimpse of their being part, almost as if made by the same flesh, of the Amazon forest, and their vital connection with the medicinal plants, “plants that make reality” as one of the people suggests. However, what really kept me engaged throughout the whole movie is that the documentary is permeated by joy, there are lots of laughs and funny scenes, usually fuelled by chicha, an alcoholic beverage made of fermented potatoes. The joy is also coming from the movie and its protagonists being in a constant state of exploration, through the visions and through the wandering in the forest in search for new plants or new places where to build a house. Kanarta offers also some emotional and even dramatic scenes, it’s very touching for instance, when we see Sebastian’s son receiving his medical diploma during a small ceremony, and father and mother posing with him for the camera with pride and smiles. This contributes to build a stronger sense of attachment for the two protagonists, Sebastian and Pastora, who are willing to show and tell the director about their culture and their way of living. The main reason why everything works though—from the more poetic scenes, to the more visceral ones, when Sebastian takes ayahuasca for instance—is because the documentary is structured in a dialogic manner, so to speak. The camera is not a passive actor in the scenes, but it’s part of, and often influences, what is going on, directly or indirectly. Furthermore, Ōta is very good at transmitting, through an immersive visual and sensorial experience, the powerful feeling of empathy that emanates from Sebastian and Pastora, and the Amazon forest itself.
13 (Isobe Shinya) The 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. One of the best movies I’ve seen this year, documentary or not, I wrote about it here.
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Inside The Red Brick Wall (Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers) On 17 November 2019, the police laid siege to protestors at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in a blockade lasting nearly two weeks. Beleaguered students fought teargas with makeshift whiteboard shields, hoping to escape and return home to safety. With the media barred from on-site access, an anonymous collective films from within the campus, recording the teenage protesters’ hopes and distress. From the very first shot the documentary is imbued with a sense of precariousness and anger, and by filming the violence between riot police, students, aid people, and members of the press —mainly independent press that live-streamed the battles on the internet— captures and creates, through a masterful use of editing, a very powerful sense of space and proximity with the students, a visual cartography of violence and resistance. The scenes when many of the young students break down, cry and walk out, defeated, from the campus, often criticized by their comrades, is— although it is something I have seen over and over again in the documentaries about the Japanese protests of the 1960s and 1970s—heartbreaking. What is also extremely fascinating for me, is that all the young people wearing masks and gear, for protection and for anonymity, form, more than a revolt of the individuals, a resistance of the multitude. The sense that the struggle is about something bigger than the siege itself is very palpable.
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Minamata Mandala (Hara Kazuo) After years of dumping industrial wastes from the factory to the ocean, Chissō 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 years, inspired by the late director Tsuchimoto’s documentary MINAMATA: THE VICTIMS AND THEIR WORLD (1971). Not a minute of the documentary (it’s 373′ long) is superfluous. This is, in my view, one of Hara’s best works, and so far the pinnacle of the second part of his career as a filmmaker.
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The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) (C.W. Winter, Anders Edström) An eight-hour fiction shot for a total of twenty-seven weeks, over a period of fourteen months, in a village population forty-seven in the mountains of Kyoto Prefecture, Japan. It is a geographic description of the work and non-work of a farmer. A portrait, over five seasons, of a family, of a terrain, of a soundscape, and of duration itself. Undeniably it’s an impressive cinematic achievement and is worth engaging with it, but for me, once the “artificiality” of the movie becomes apparent, it loses part of the appeal and power. I’m not revealing more to avoid spoilers (but are there really spoilers?). Also, I’m approaching the movie from a special angle: I live in Japan, in a somehow similar place to the one depicted in the film. All that being said, the soundscape is astounding, and I like how the movie’s editing is often constructed following the sounds. I really should, and I wish to one day, experience it in a theater.
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Soup and Ideology (Yang Yong-hi) Confronting half of her mother’s life—her mother who had survived the Jeju April 3 Incident—the director tries to scoop out disappearing memories. A tale of family, which carries on from Dear Pyongyang, carving out the cruelty of history, and questioning the precarious existence of the nation-state. With her latest documentary Yang Yonghi continues to explore how her own personal life is tragically connected to the post war history of Japan and Korea. The movie presents not only the painful memories of the Jeju massacre (April 3rd 1948) as remembered by the director’s mother, and the destruction a family, her three brothers were sent from Japan to North Korea at a young age, but it is also an emotional portrait of her frail and ageing mother. As the film progresses she is diagnosed with senile dementia, and little by little she loses her memories, including those of the massacre she witnessed, only 18, in the small Korean island. The movie is also partly an act of self-reflection by Yang Yonghi herself, if in the first part she is the one filming her mother, and we don’t really see her too much, in the second, when her mother condition worsens, she enters the frame more often, and becomes the co-protagonist of the film. We can clearly see her emotions, especially when she visits the island, with mother and husband, for the anniversary of the massacre. There, Yang Yonghi understands that her mother’s affiliation and attraction for North Korea, something the director had never completely forgiven her for, was also caused by the atrocities committed by the South Korean Army her mother saw with her own eyes. It would have been a better movie for me, had not been for the five or so minutes of animation used to explain her mother story in Jeju in 1948. I found the segment out of place and it really took me out of the movie.
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Shiver (Toyoda Toshiaki) A music movie featuring a performance of Taiko Performing Arts Ensemble ‘Kodo’ and Koshiro Hino. Filmed entirely on Sado island. Partly a filmed music performance, partly a visual experiment connecting music, landscape and spirituality, Shiver is a fascinating piece of work that fits perfectly with what Toyoda has being creating in recent years. Through the spiritual encounter between Sado landscape and the hypnotic music of the taiko drummers, Toyoda touches and expands some of the themes tackled in some of his most recent films, such as the The Blood of Rebirth, Monsters Club, and The Day of Destruction. That is, the primal nature of the world we inhabit, and how we, humans, can connect with it through music, a similar approach was also at the core of Planetist in 2020. Something primal not in a temporal sense as something that comes before, or ancestral, but more as something essential that is always present and awaits to be discovered and brought to light. Like the rock/monolith towards the end of the work, which seems to have some kind of energy inside, and whose light is filtering through the cracks only when the music plays.
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Whiplash of the Dead (Daishima Haruhiko) Weaving together the memories of Yamazaki Hiroaki, a university student who lost his life in the First Haneda Struggle in 1967 through the words of his bereaved family and ex-classmates, this film turns the memories of those who protested against government power into questions for the future. The movie is comprised of two parts, for a total of 200 minutes, in the first 90 minutes the director focuses on the events preceding the death of Yamazaki, while in the second segment, that could easily have been another movie, the protagonists of the students protests of the late 1960s, reflect on the reasons of the implosion of the new left and its movements. The story of the Mito family, not affiliated with any left group, but a family that helped the young people in prison, and later promoted anti-nuclear activism and whose members (father and two sons) tragically died in 1986 in a mountain incident, is so fascinating that would deserve its own documentary.
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Discovery of the year: Alchemy (Nakai Tsuneo, 1971). 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. A structuralist film 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.
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Honourable mentions: Her Socialist Smile (John Gianvito), Summer of Soul (…or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (Questlove)
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:
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