Category: Japanese cinema

Interview with Hamaguchi Ryūsuke

At the end of last February, I had the pleasure of interviewing Hamaguchi Ryūsuke about his Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, a movie that would debut at the Berlinale. The short interview was conducted on zoom and it was published in the Italian newspaper I usually write for, Il Manifesto.

In recent months, with the release and success of Drive My Car, many long and more in-depth interview with the Japanese director have been published around the world, but I decided nonetheless to translate my interview in English and post it here on the blog (even if it’s not really related to documentary). As said, the conversation was about Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and before the release of Drive My Car. In recent months, with the release and success of Drive My Car, many long and more in-depth interview with the Japanese director have been published around the world, but I decided nonetheless to translate my interview in English and post it here on the blog (even if it’s not really related to documentary). As said, the conversation was about Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and before the release of Drive My Car.

Interview with Hamaguchi Ryūsuke (February 27th, 2021)

Although you had already made short and medium length films in the past, this is the first time you have tackled the anthology film format, could you tell us more about this choice?

A few years ago, I made the medium length film Heaven Is Still Far Away, a project also born out of a collaboration with actresses and actors that for me worked partly as a sort of review of Happy Hour, and partly as preparation for my next film, Asako I & II. This experience was also very useful to me because I was able to find my own rhythm, so to speak, in alternating feature films and short or medium length films, something that I think I will continue to do in the future. However, one of the problems with short films is not having a real exhibition outlet, that is, it is very difficult to find a proper distribution for these kinds of works. The solution I tried this time was to combine three shorts into an anthology, making them into a feature film that thus could be distributed. 

Compared to feature films, do you think the format you worked on this time opens up different expressive possibilities?

Of course. All works, whether long or short, must have an end, a point at which they stop and leave the viewer with a strong feeling of having seen a world. Having said that, short films have the possibility, in my opinion, to leave a more intense and vivid impression as they only offer a brief glimpse into a certain world. A shorter film can also show something rare, events whose existence is not certain, leaving everything in suspense and without going too deep into it.

In each of the three episodes that make up the film there are at least three scenes of strong aesthetic and emotional impact. In Magic (or Something Less Assuring), the first episode, the long initial part with the two women in a taxi, in Door Wide Open the scene where the female protagonist visits the professor and in the last episode, Once Again, the final part with the two women embracing. Each of these scenes uses very different acting styles, yet there are parts in them where the characters, within the narrative, are acting, and where the boundary between what is real in the story and what is acted is ambiguous and fluid. Could you tell us how you worked with the actors to create this ambiguous feeling?

I wanted to create this ambiguity, but I also tried to create a clear sense of ambiguity, so to speak. That is, I wanted to create something defined, but something that can be interpreted in different ways. The fascinating thing for me is that the act of acting itself is ambiguous, and in the three scenes you mentioned, the actresses themselves in the midst of their performances must surely have noticed the ambiguity of the question “what is real?”. One strategy I used to create this ambiguity was, first of all, to write it into the scenes themselves, by inserting the act of acting into the narrative. I could not ask the actors to emphasise the fact that they were acting, it was rather a matter of achieving a very light and thin performance that, as in the case of the two women in the taxi, could later be read differently in the continuation of the story, when more information is revealed to us. In addition, it is important that there is something hidden in the performance, as happens for example in the second episode where even the main character, Nao, realises that she does not know exactly why she is doing what she is doing, thus generating a sense of displacement in the scene.

The third episode is set in a world where a computer virus has made the internet unusable. Could you tell us more about the reasons for this choice?

I shot the first two segments in 2019 and the last one in 2020. I originally planned to shoot it in spring, but the pandemic disrupted all the plans and we ended up shooting it in summer. The script was already completed, but an event as big as the pandemic made me tweak it. I couldn’t avoid taking into account the effect the Corona virus had on all of us, so I decided to set it in a kind of parallel world where the internet is no longer usable, a world disrupted by a different kind of calamity. 

One last question about the situation of independent cinemas (mini-theaters) in Japan at the time of the pandemic, a culture that is very close to your heart and for which you are fighting with various initiatives, such as Mini-Theater Aid (crowdfunding that helped these small cinemas survive last year and that is still active with various support initiatives). What is your relationship with these independent theatres?

For me, they have been an important place to discover films that are completely different from the Hollywood films or TV series I was used to, films that were “boring” compared to the ones I used to see.  Seeing these “boring” films in the space of these small independent theatres, I discovered a new kind of feeling, my body changed and I learned to appreciate a different kind of cinema. Now my films are shown here in Japan, mainly in these independent theatres, and I am in contact with all the people working there, it is for these reasons that I have been actively participating and supporting projects like Mini-Theater Aid.

Haneda Sumiko’s writings /3: Paulo Rocha on Ode to Mt. Hayachine

Third part (you can read the first part here and second here)

A slightly different post today, since it’s not about Haneda Sumiko’s own writings, but more about one of Haneda’s documentary, and one of the most significant in her career, Ode to Mt. Hayachine 早池峰の賦 (a.k.a. The Poem of Hayachine Valley). The movie was released in 1982 at the Iwanami Hall, distributed by Equipe de Cinema, where it stayed from May 29th to June 25th (and later from August 7th to 13th). A booklet about Haneda and the movie was published and sold at the theater, in it there are various writings by Haneda, Tsuchimoto Noriaki, people of the village in Iwate, and Paulo Rocha, among others. The Portuguese director, with whom Haneda collaborated as a screenwriter for a segment of his A Ilha dos Amores (released at the Iwanami Hall in December 1983), wrote an interesting piece on Ode to Mt. Hayachine; you can read my translation below (NOTE: This is by no means a professional translation, but I hope the readers can get the gist of it):

Paulo Rocha on Ode to Mt. Hayachine

In an Italian film similar to this one, L’albero degli zoccoli / The Tree of Wooden Clogs, director Ermanno Olmi told us, with rare insight, about the heart and the inner world of Italian peasants. Haneda goes here even further, for her, it is not only the heart of the people who speaks in her movie, but it is as the whole of nature, trees and stones, were speaking to us. Although we are in 1982, immersed in our contemporary problems, at the same time, we live with simplicity in an uncomplicated world that has just been created right now. There is a difference between Olmi and Haneda, and it may be a difference that exists between a country with a Catholic tradition and a country with a Shinto tradition, but still there is a miracle that is common to the two. This miracle is that in their clear mind everything is sublimated and yet, a direct and spontaneous force, an inspiration and a beauty in the detachment of modern daily life is gradually invading our hearts. For Haneda, the mountain gods, the plastic products in the small shops in the village, the people who dance the kagura, and the tourists are just as passionate and fantastic. Everything is just as important to her non-sentimental gaze. That is, past and future, nature and machinery, mountains and towns. What is art for, what is fiction for, what position does the profilmic material occupy in a movie, what position does fiction occupy in art? What about the artist? What happens to the artists filmed? Rarely in the history of cinema have such essential questions been asked in such a direct, simple, generous, and intelligent way. I am a filmmaker, and until now I believed that I would be closer to the truth if I approached it through fiction, but now, after seeing Haneda’s Ode to Mt. Hayachine, I realize that the idea is an arrogant one, we must take advantage of this opportunity, we must learn to see reality correctly in order to know the truth. Ode to Mt. Hayachine gave us the best example of this. In Europe, documentary films are being re-evaluated as part of a movement for a new type of cinema. If Ode to Mt. Hayachine were to be introduced in Europe, they would no doubt be surprised and respectful to find that the path they were looking for already existed in Japan.  Centuries from now, when people in the future will want to know what we were like, they will be able to watch Ode to Mt. Hayachine, and the movie will tell them about us, the audience of the film today, and about little-known people who were lost among the mountains, in an unknown valley.

Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2021 (online) – second dispatch

The 2021 edition of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival has ended last Thursday. Like many other events in the past two years, the festival took place exclusively online, this is the second and final dispatch, you can read the first one here.

This is the list of the movies awarded:

The Robert and Frances Flaherty Prize (The Grand Prize): Inside the Red Brick Wall 

The Mayor’s Prize: Camagroga  

Awards of Excellence: City Hall , Night Shot  

Ogawa Shinsuke Prize: Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege 

Awards of Excellence: Three Songs for Benazir, Makeup Artist  

Special Mention: Broken,

Citizens’ Prizes: Writing With Fire

(Synopses are from the official homepage of the festival)

Wuhan, I Am Here (2021, Lan Bo) A film crew that had traveled to Wuhan to make a fiction film is confronted with the sudden lockdown of the city and decides to go film in the streets. They race through the city, joining forces with volunteers who are offering free resources collected through the internet to the elderly and the homeless. The director and his troupe were able to capture on camera the chaos, tensions, fears and pain experienced by the citizens of Wuhan during the first lockdown of the city, in the first months of 2020. A woman crying on a sidewalk because her husband, at home with cancer, cannot be hospitalised due the Covid situation. A group of volunteers distributing food to the various communities of elderly, but often halted and contested because of bureaucracy and the lack of passes. People denied their right to visit relatives in hospital…the documentary is about stories of struggle and grief, death is very present in the film, stories we all became accustomed to witness in the last two years. This is a documentary whose appeal and point of interest will probably increase with the passing of time, when one day, hopefully, we will look back at the pandemic days and reflect on this huge historical juncture.

Three Songs for Benazir (2021, Gulistan Mirzaei, Elizabeth Mirzaei) In a camp for displaced persons in Kabul, a young man sings for his beloved wife Benazir as if the whole world was theirs alone. We see him next four years later, facing the consequences of the path he was forced to choose in providing for his family, after his struggle to find work. In just twenty two minutes the film says more about contemporary Afghanistan than a dozen newspaper articles about the subject.

Three Songs for Benazir

Soup and Ideology (2021, Yang Yonghi) Yang Yonghi is a zainichi director born and rised in Osaka. When her father passed away in 2009, of her family, only her mother and herself were left in Japan. The director who now lives in Tokyo, is worried about her aged mother living alone, so she visits her home in Osaka every month. One day, the mother suddenly tells her that she had experienced the Jeju uprising as a young woman. Her memories of the tragic event, buried deep in her heart, resurfaced and came back to life. She begins to talk specifically about how she got involved in the Jeju uprising. With her latest documentary Yang Yonghi continues her exploration of her family history and the history of the two countries she is connected with, Japan and North Korea. The movie opens in 2018, with her mother lying on a bed remembering the killings and the dead bodies piled along the roads, as she was escaping from Jeju island in 1948. Soup and Ideology is a very touching viewing experience, and on many different levels. 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 of her family, her three brothers were sent from Japan to North Korea at a young age, but also an emotional portrait of her frail and old mother, as a Korean who grew up in Japan worshipping North Korea. 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, in the second, when her mother condition worsens, she enters the frame, so to speak. 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/attraction for North Korea, something the director had never completely forgiven her and her father for, was also partly caused by the atrocities committed by the ROK 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 and the historical situation in Jeju in 1948. I found the segment unnatural and it really took me out of the movie. The soup of the title is a dish that her mother usually prepares, and that is later cooked by Yang Yonghi’s Japanese husband, we see the first meeting between her mother and him in one of the first scenes of the movie, as a way of entering or belonging to her wife’s family, the director parents had always wanted her to married exclusively a North Korean national. Soup and Ideology is important piece of documentary and was one of the highlights of the festival for me.

Soup and Ideology

Other documentaries I’ve watched: The Buddha Mummies of North Japan (2017, Watanabe Satoshi), about the practice of sokushinbutsu or self-mummification through which some mountain monks, usually related to Shugendō, are believed to have attained satori. The World’s “Top” Theater (2017, Satō Kōichi), a fascinating trip into post-war film culture in Yamagata, the film focuses on the Green Room, a cinema in Sakata City that was completely destroyed in a fire in 1976. Before the Dying of the Light (2020, Ali Essafi); Dorm (2021, So Yo-hen), partly documentary and partly performance/reenactment, female Vietnamese laborers arrive at a dormitory in Taiwan. Creative and surprising the finale.

Some final thoughts. After going to Yamagata for almost a decade, it was a very singular experience to join the festival online—the system adopted, with movies available only in Japan and at certain time, like in the in-presence edition, raised more than a doubt (I had a press pass, but I will write more on this in the following weeks). Of course I missed the people, the discussions, the city itself, experiencing the movies on a big screen, the food and the drinks, however, the festival turned out to be a satisfying experience. Of the works I watched, a couple were outstanding, but each one was interesting in its own way. Yamagata is, among other things, a nice occasion to reflect on what happened in the documentary world in the past two years, with a particular focus on Asia: new trends and new voices, but also how the cinema of the real captured, mirrored, and represented the events that took place around the globe. See you in two years Yamagata!

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.

Haneda Sumiko’s writings /2

Second part (first part here)

In 2002 Haneda Sumiko published Eiga to  watashi, a memoir of her career and experiences in the world of Japanese cinema from the 1950s to the late 1990s. A revised version titled Watashi no kiroku eiga jinsei came out in 2014. I’m translating and posting some of the most interesting passages of the first version of the book and other writings by Haneda, as I read it. Titles are mine.

At Iwanami Shashin Bunko

In the fall of 1949, Professor Hani Setsuko, a teacher at Jiyū Gakuen and mother of Hani Susumu, contacted me saying “Iwanami Shoten is starting to produce science films and educational films. Would you like to join?” I have never asked why I was the one chosen, but my reaction at that time was negative. Jiyū Gakuen was a strict Christian school, and while I was in school, I didn’t watch any movies. I saw films when I was a kid, when I was in girls’ school, and after the war, but the world of movies was so distant that I couldn’t imagine to be part of it. I also wasn’t really interested in the offer, because when I heard that it was about science and educational films, I thought about my father, who was a teacher, and felt like I didn’t want to be an educator.

“I’m not very interested” I told her. It’s kind of scary to think about it now, but if the story ended there, my life would have been completely different. However, about a month later, she contacted me again “If you are not interested in movies, how about editing a book?”. “Editing a book” was something that I could see myself doing, and so I was happy to accept, because I thought it would be interesting to join the group. At first, I started as an assistant to Hani Susumu, it was in December 1949, and it was about editing a book for the Iwanami Shashin Bunko series. [a series of photo books, ndt]

I was involved in making photography books for the first two years, and for about half a year I was an assistant to Hani Susumu. (…) As a photography book curator I edited 16 books, among which I will never forget “Koya-san” and “Hiraizumi”. I grew up in a foreign country without knowing much about “Japanese things,” so for me, the influence of making these two books was great, and later in my life I ended up using this experience.

Koya-san and Hiraizumi

Haneda Sumiko’s writings /1

If you follow this blog or my social media activity, you probably already know my love for the documentaries of Haneda Sumiko. One of the most important documentary filmmakers that Japan has seen in the last 70 years, Haneda is, in my opinion, the most important female director in the history of the cinema of the archipelago. One of my resolutions for 2021, time permitting, is to let more people know about Haneda, her career and impact in Japanese documentary cinema. In 2002 she published Eiga to watashi, a memoir of her career and experiences in the world of Japanese cinema from the 1950s until her more recent works. A revised version titled Watashi no kiroku eiga jinsei came out in 2014.

Starting from today I will post the translation of what I think are the most significant passages from the book (the first version) and other writings. Keep in mind that neither English or Japanese is my first language, and that I’m doing it just out of passion for the topic and admiration towards Haneda.

Titles are mine

Iwanami Shoten, and from China to Japan

Both before and after the war, the path for women to become directors was closed from the very beginning.  It took many years of long practice to become a filmmaker; to become a director, you had to start as an assistant director, but for women, this was never a possibility. There are of course some exceptions like Sakane Tazuko, who, before the war, seized this opportunity from working with Mizoguchi Kenji, or Tanaka Kinuyo, who grabbed the chance from being one of the first and biggest stars [in Japanese cinema].
That being said, the situation was apparently different in the world of documentary films, and I, knowing nothing of all this, one day, almost by chance, became a director.

Shortly after the end of the war, in 1949, Iwanami Shoten, through Nakaya Ukichirō, established a new branch, the Nakatani Laboratory. Iwanami Shigeo, the founder of the company, saw the situation of audiovisual education brought in by the United States after the war, and thought that not only print culture but also video culture would be important from that moment on, and that is the reason Iwanami wanted his company to venture in the world of video productions. However, Iwanami died without realizing this.

It was Kobayashi Isamu, the managing director of Iwanami Shoten, who continued the idea started by Iwanami. The Nakatani laboratory was established in the hope of becoming a place were “good science films” could be made. Under the guidance of professor Nakatani, renown for his research on snow, the staff centered around Yoshino Keiji, who shot “Snow Crystals” and “Frost Flowers”, at the time highly regarded science films. Kyodo News reporter Hani Susumu was also scouted and became one of the core members of the group.

I was born in Dalian, Manchuria, and lived in the mainland for several years, but went to Manchuria again and graduated from elementary school and girls’ school in Lüshunkou. After that, I entered Jiyū Gakuen in Tokyo and graduated there in the year of the end of the war. On August 15 1945, the day of the end of the war, I went back to Dalian. For three years until the repatriation, under the occupation of the Soviet army, I worked for the women’s department in the only permitted organization, the “Dalian Japanese Labor Union” in the Japanese settlement. I missed the first repatriation, which began in 1946, and with the second one I arrived in Maizuru in July 1948. I wanted to move to Tokyo, but at that time Tokyo had restrictions, and people without jobs could not move in. I worked for a company called Shizuoka Prefectural Educational Book Publishing for a while, but from the spring of 1949 I found a job at the GHQ Chapel Center near the Diet Building and so finally I could go to Tokyo.  I was 23 years old.

Second part here

Movie journal (March 2021): Dead Birds, The First Emperor, and Noda Shinkichi

Wrapping up March and the first 3 months of 2021 with some of the most interesting non-fiction works I’ve watched this year so far.

Dead Birds (Robert Gardner, 1963)

I discovered the existence of the movie through Expedition Content, thus I watched it and experienced it knowing what was behind it, colonial gaze and everything else that comes when a movie is constructed to fit a certain, problematic to say the least, view of the world. 
That being said, some of the images used are so powerfulーI’m here referring especially to the long shots of the battles between the two tribes, or the children washing the intestine of a pig in a river ーthat they escape the film own narration and the conceptual framing of the work. The movie is available here.

The First Emperor (Hara Masato, 197?)

From IFFR:

In 1971, Hara Masato and a group or actors started shooting his 16mm film, The First Emperor, based on an old Japanese book about history and myths that is known as the Kojiki (‘Record of Ancient Matters’). He did not finish the film. A year later, he started filming again with a small Super8 camera, all on his own, now intending to make some shots of the locations he had not previously been able to film. On the way, he reconsidered his ideas and realised that the myths could not be found anywhere outside and were not filmable in a material sense, but that they were located in cinema itself or in the making of cinema. He decided that recording his hunt for locations was the best way to finish The First Emperor, in which the Japanese myths could also serve as material. The smallest universe known as cinema corresponds with the universe of telling myths about Creation. This is a travelogue by the film maker himself and a film about film, while it is also a myth about film.

There are many iterations of this “movie”, the work completed by Hara in 1973 was 7 hour long, and there are later versions of 4 and 2 hours. A decade or so ago, I saw a 7 hour version (not sure if it was the first version), with live accompaniment by Hara himself, few years ago the 4 hour long, and last month the restored 2 hour edit (two-screen version). 
The latter is for me the best, a lysergic trip into the fabric of filmmaking and memories, and film as memory. 
Hara and his works is something that should be explored more—not only in connection with the so called Japanese new wave, he co-wrote Ōshima’s The Man Who Left His Will on Film, and the concept of fûkeiron (landscape theory) in film, to which this movie certainly belongs —but also as a unique filmmaker who works “outside” of cinema as traditionally conceived, in a liminal space formed between personal cinema and amateur filmmaking.

Japanese science and PR films are a well of discoveries, particularly those produced in the late 1950s and 1960s, when many directors who later would have become big names, started their career working in this genre. In the last past months I’ve had the chance to watch a couple of shorts directed by Noda Shinkichi, a director, poet, theorist and producer who was affiliated and collaborated with, among others, Matsumoto Toshio, and who was a central figure in the development of documentary in Japan.

Country Life Under Snow この雪の下に (1956) is a fascinating depiction of the harsh life in a rural area in Yamagata prefecture, while Transporting the Olympics オリンピックを運ぶ (1964) is a documentary about the logistics and the behind the scene of the 1964 Olympics. How things (boats, yachts, traffic cones, film reels, etc.) and animals (horses, pigeons) were transported from and to Tokyo. Directed by Matsumoto and Noda, the film was part of the official coverage of the event, but the two crafted an interested filmic object nonetheless (the classic music used, for instance, reminded me of the Japanese new wave). The work tells us that without the people working behind the scene, such a big scale events would not be possible.

Movie journal (November 2020): 2 documentaries by Yoshida Kijū, and Okinawa 2018

Wrapping up November with some of the most interesting non-fiction works (made in , or about, the Far East) I’ve watched in the past months.

私たち生まれた島 Okinawa 2018 (Todori Shin’ya, 2020) is an informative documentary about how the new generations of Okinawans deal and cope with the American military bases in the islands. Filmed in the last few years, the film covers the protests againsst the relocation of one of the biggest American bases in Henoko, the election of a female representative (for the communist party) in a small town, and the election of governor Denny Tamaki in 2018. A mix of video journalism and grassroots activism caught on video, the documentary offers an interesting insight of a complex and layered situation.

Sooner or later I will have to write something longer about the documentaries directed by Yoshida Kijū, one of the towering figures in post war Japanese cinema. For today let me just share a few random thoughts about two of his best non-fiction films I’ve recently rewatched.

With The Cinema of Ozu according to Kijū Yoshida 吉田喜重が語る小津安二郎の映画世界 (1994) the Japanese director adds images to his reflections on Ozu written in his beautiful Ozu’s Anti-Cinema. If you have already read the volume, it’s nothing particularly new, but it is a delight nonetheless. I watched the short version, but apparently there also a longer version out there.

While both were made in the same period and share a certain style and approach ーYoshida providing the narration, and the preoccupation with cinema and the act of representing through images as a theoretical structureー Dreams of Tokyo, Dreams of Cinema 夢のシネマ 東京の夢 (1995) is by far my favourite of the two. By telling the story of the early travels of Gabriel Veyre, the Lumière Brothers’ cameraman, in Mexico, Japan and Morocco, Yoshida reflects on the advent of this new technology and the changes and cultural shifts that were caused by the cinematograph and everything that came with it. This relatively short documentary (50’) is a fascinating example of how effective and poetic essay cinema can be when used at its best. Yoshida, using Veyre’s gaze, exposes the power and dangers that the birth of cinema brought with it since its very beginning, forseeing also the prominence that visual representation would reach in the world to come.

One of the most significative passage is, in this sense, one where we see a group of indigenous people in Mexico filmed by Veyre, a group that is definitely not glad to pose for the camera. At a certain point a white person violently grabs the head of a woman and forces her to see and face the camera to get a “better” shot. At this point the footage ends. According to Yoshida probably Veyre sensed that something was not right and decided to interrupt the shooting. Quoting Yoshida “Most people enthusiastically perceived the moving images of the cinematograph as reality itself and so the representation ended up taking precedence over the reality of the world, but Veyre for some unknown reason adopting an opposing standpoint, saw the future of the cinema from a different angle.”

Here the scene:

https://youtu.be/rNpzCJsSEz4


Online Film Festivals: first impressions

Already more than half year has passed since the pandemic generated a tidal wave of changes in our daily lives and habits. Of course the world of cinema and the film industry at large have been affected by Covid-19 too, and one of the consequences is that the international film festival circuit has been completely disrupted.

From last March, most of the big film events worldwide have been cancelled, postponed or have moved online, and it was only in recent months that we saw, with Venice as a frontrunner, the return of the film festival as we used to know it, with all the necessary social distancing and limitations.

Many festivals opted for an online and often limited edition. It has been interesting for me to see how these net-events have been organised and scheduled (ticket price, catalogs, regional restrictions, etc.) and, I have to be honest, it was fun to experience them in all their diversity, and I’m not talking about the movies. Before proceding with some reflections on a couple of online festivals I’ve “attended”, let me make some disclaimers:

– I live in central Japan, in a small city far from Tokyo, and neither very near to Osaka or Kyoto, that is, for me going to a festival here in Japan means to plan in advance and commit time and money.

– I work in the field, so to speak, I write and occasionaly collaborate with film festivals, but I have also a daily job that allows me to survive.

– I really enjoy going to film festivals, watching the movies is only a part of the experience, it’s everything else that makes it special for me, film culture extends way beyond the mere act of wtching a movie, online or not. That is one of the reasons why going to the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival every two years has been a real joy.

That was to clarify my position. Now, in the past months I had the chance to experience, in one form or another, watching many movies or only one, the following online film festivals:

Far East Film Festival, Udine, Italy

Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna, Italy

EXiS 2020, Seoul, South Korea

Open City Documentary Festival, London

Yūbari International Fantastic Film Festival, Yūbari, Japan.

2020 Skip City International D-Cinema Festival, Saitama, Japan.

Le Giornate del cinema muto, Pordenone, Italy (starting soon)

and counting…

The biggest wall that everybody interested in watching film festivals online (or should I call them film events online?) bump into are the regional restriction. Understandably, not all movies can be licensed to stream in all locations, and navigating through these limitations can be frustrating at times. The Udine Far East and Il Cinema Ritrovato had regional restrictions but their sites (actually the MyMovie platform) was very easy to navigate and it was very clear which movies were available in which country.

Those two festivals and Le Giornate in Pordenone use the same screening schedule’s method: each movie is scheduled at a certain day on a certain time, like in a normal film festival, but it’s available to watch online for 24 hours, also to make it easy for people watching from different time zones. On the other hand, the Yūbari Film Festival in Hokkaido basically replicated online the format of the physical festival: there were three “screens” (channels on Hulu Japan, the festival was free if you had the service) each showing different movies, a bit like TV, with the only difference being that the movies were rotating. While this option is without doubt the closer to the real festival, I found the 24 hours window to be the perfect one for me, you still have the “pressure” of missing a movie, but at the same time it’s easy to organise your day.

A different approach is being used by the Skip Digital Festival (at the time I’m writing still happening), if you buy a pass, about 1500 yen, you can can watch, only if you’re in Japan, all the 24 movies presented, at any time during the event.

While, as I wrote above, the online festival is not the same as the “real thing” ーno big screens no communal viewing, no socializingーit is undisputable that for cinema people who, like me, live far from big cities, in other countries, or don’t have much free time, it’s a golden chance for new discoveries. And by the way, you’re finally watching movies like the film festival programmers and directors…on your PC….

Is the online film festival here to stay? I don’t honestly know, but I would say that in the next few years we will see more hybrid experiments between online and physical film festivals happening.

Feel free to chime in and share your experience, you can do it here.