The Chinese Cultural Revolution began 50 years ago, and newspapers, websites, magazines, blogs and books have recently taken the opportunity of this anniversary to write about, discuss and analyse the huge and still controversial historical event that shaped the Asian country and whose ripples were felt all over the world.
In 1966, a group of filmmakers from Japan were allowed to enter the country, or rather, they were lucky enough, almost by chance, to be in China just after the revolution was proclaimed (in August 1966) to film and record, almost without knowing what was happening, the changes brought about by the event. This was something of a “miracle”, as there were no formal diplomatic relations between the two countries at the time. The documentary is by no means a critical view of the revolution, as it was still in its infancy, and also because there were areas the group was not allowed to film, but it works as a visual and unique document of the early period of the revolution. The group spent seven months filming landscapes, factories, cities, farms and people across China, and the resulting documentary was compiled the following year under the title Land of the Dawn 夜明けの国.
The film was directed by Tokieda Toshie, a filmmaker who worked for and was associated with Iwanami Production for over 30 years. Among her extensive filmography, at least worth mentioning is Town Politics-Mothers Who Study 町の政治 – 勉強するおかあさん」 (1957), a depiction of a group of mothers-turned-activists in the town of Kunitachi, Tokyo (the short documentary is part of the films featured in this edition box set).
There’s an interesting interview with Tokieda on the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival website, in which she recalls her experiences of filming in China. The film is also discussed in a chapter of Nakajima Takahirō’s The Chinese Turn in Philosophy (2007):
「The film」opens with a scene showing young Red Guards arriving from throughout China and gathering in Tian’an men Square. In the following scene a train appears with a plate indicating “Wansui Maozhuxi [long live Chairman Mao];” it is an express train traveling from Beijing to Shanhai Guan. The narrator of the film tells us that the young people clustering around Shanhai Guan station are tourists going to see the Great Wall. However, Tsuchiya Masaaki suggests that
these young people teeming around the station are not tourists, but are going to Tian’an men Square to see Mao Zedong.
It must be easy to reach such an understanding if we could comprehend the meaning of August 1966, or at least if we could grasp the meaning of the opening scene of the young Red Guards gathering in Tian’an men Square. However, the film presents the opening scene like a picnic or a school excursion, when they take souvenir photos and write their names in Mao notebooks and exchange them. It is “daily life” in the New China, which is regarded as being similar to daily life in Japan where people enjoy having fun. Following this line, the second scene at Shanghai Guan station is to be understood as showing tourists going to the Great Wall. Likewise, if we go to the third scene, it shows people bathing in the Songhua River in Ha’erbin City. In short, “Country of the Dawn” is edited to make the unusual event of the Cultural Revolution become normal and understandable to a Japanese audience.
This is just an excerpt from a chapter in which the author analyses the documentary in relation to Soseki Natsume’s Travels in Manchuria and Korea (here if you want to read more).
A final note on the availability of the film. In 2008 the movie was released on DVD, together with a book about the Cultural Revolution, it’s in Japanese without English subtitles, but if you’re interested you can buy it here.
Aragane is the first full-length movie by Oda Kaori, a talented Japanese director who had her debut in 2012 at the Nara International Film Festival with the short Thus A Noise Speaks, a meta self-documentary that unflinchingly explored her coming out as a female gay and the subsequent reactions from her family. Aragane is a completely different work though, an experimental documentary that Oda directed, photographed and edited herself, but also a “product” of Bela Tarr‘s film.factory, the film school based in Sarajevo and established by the Hungarian director few years ago, a place where the Japanese director studied for three years. Aragane, the Japanese title means “ore” or small pieces of stone, was shot in a Bosnian coal mine and it’s an immersive and hypnotic sensorial experience, a very special and rewarding one that was presented last year at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival and later at the DocLisboa in Portugal.
I had the pleasure of meeting Oda in Yamagata and later on she was kind enough to answer my questions by email, you can read the interview here.
Aragane
Bosnia and Herzegovina, Japan 2015, 68’ Director: Kaori Oda, Cinematographer: Kaori Oda, Editor: Kaori Oda, Producers: Shinji Kitagawa – FieldRain, Emina Ganic – film.factory.
The movie starts overground with the camera gazing at some busy workers preparing and checking the machines before going deep down into the mine, the camera then ride on a cart and with a very long tracking shot slowly starts its descent into the inner part of earth. Once inside, we’re introduced and enveloped in a world of darkness, a pitch black curtain broken only by sudden and random flashes of lights revealing a segment of a machine here and a face smeared with coal there. There are really few spoken words, we hear some random sentences uttered every now and then by the workers, but that’s all, much more important is the wall of noise created by movie, the soundscape being a crucial element of it. In the 68 minutes of deep immersion into the chthonian and dissonant world of the mine, we are almost constantly submerged by the cacophonous noise of the machinery, although the movie is also punctuated by sparse but significant and sudden moments of deafening silence. At the end of the movie for instance, when we emerge from the bowels of the earth, the peace and the vivid colors of the changing rooms and the stillness of the hanging clothes have an almost soothing quality for our eyes and ears. As stated by the director herself, Aragane is not a direct inquiry into the harsh conditions of the people working in the mine, although it’s something that eventually and necessarily emerges, but more an attempt to convey on screen the time and the space of the coal mine as experienced by the workers, or, I would add, as experience by the mine itself. It takes some time to get used to the alien space and almost abstract geographies of the mine, for most of the time we don’t really know what’s going on and who is doing what, it’s more like being thrown into a cubistic landscape in the middle of its making. Once we get accustomed to the time and the space presented on screen though, everything slowly begins to make sense, what starts to surface from the images and sounds, and through the tracking shots and the slow and hypnotic camera movements, is the time of the mine – time experienced as duration – and the materiality of the space depicted. On this point Aragane is a documentary very akin to the works of the the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, Aragane reminded me – albeit with some distinctions of course- of Leviatahn, Single Stream and The Iron Ministry, just to name a few.
Aragane is a compelling viewing experience, not a cinematic revolution or a masterpiece of course, but nonetheless a very significant work for Japanese documentary – it’s only partly Japanese to be honest, since it was produced and shot outside the archipelago. What particularly interests me here is that finally Japanese cinema has an important work of non-fiction able to emancipate itself from the imprint of social and political documentary that usually dominates the contemporary non-fiction scene in Japan, and a work that in doing so liberate and explore the experimental qualities of documentary. I might exaggerate, but to find something similar in the history of Japanese cinema we have to go back to the great Matsumoto Toshio and his Ishi no uta (The Song of Stone, 1963).
Directed, shot and edited by Oda Kaori, Aragane was one of my favorite documentaries of 2015, a work that came out from film.factory, a film school based in Sarajevo and founded by renown Hungarian director Bela Tarr.
Aragane it’s an experimental documentary shot in a Bosnian coal mine, an immersive and hypnotic sensorial experience that was presented last year at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, where it got a special mention.
I wrote a review of the movie in Italian for the blog Sonatine, but I’m planning to write one in English as well and post it here, time permitting.
In October I had the pleasure of interviewing Oda for the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto, the following is the original and longer version of that interview.
Can you tell us how you got involved in cinema, that is, how you got interested in watching and making movies in the first place?
I wanted to be a professional basketball player, I played for 8 years since I was 10 years old, but unfortunately my right knee got broken. I underwent two big operations but it was not possible to keep playing seriously. Doctors said NO to me. So I was lost completely because the only thing I knew in life was basketball. I decided to go to the US to study abroad then, you know the typical thought that if you move the place, something may change in your life. There I took a film course, that was the first encounter to filmmaking, I was not cinephile at all and I am still not. (but I like some films, of course)
I made the very first film with my family in 2010 (ノイズが言うには Thus a Noise Speaks). It is a self-documentary made by my real family and myself about the coming-out as gay. The idea was to use filmmaking to communicate with my family and face the fact that they could not accept that I was gay. It was a tough experience but I learned a lot from that and started to see and use camera as a tool for communication. Communication between myself and the subject (the people/ the space).
(A still from Thus a Noise Speaks 「ノイズが言うには」)
How about film.factory? how did you happen to move to Sarajevo and be part of the group?
I got a chance to screen my first film in the student section of Nara International Film Festival in 2011, and there I met Kitagawa Shinji, the person who more than anybody else understands my filmmaking. He was the programmer/organizer of the section. The film got an audience award and we kept in touch since then. In 2012, he wrote me an email that there would be a new program in Sarajevo to support young filmmakers from all over the world. I was very much lost at that time, because it was very difficult to make my next film after a self-documentary by which I confronted the biggest conflict I had.
So I decided to apply to the program, moving to a new place and meeting new people.
Luckily, my application got accepted.
Can you tell us more about Aragane, where did the idea come from? I heard that originally it was supposed to be a fiction inspired by a Kafka story (A Visit to a Mine), is that true?
Bela (Tarr) gave us an assignment to do an adaptation work. He wanted me to do ‘Bucket Rider’ a short story from Kafka that revolves around man looking for coal. So I went to a coal mine company to do research for the project. The space and the workers were incredibly attractive, immediately I knew I wanted to shoot them as I felt and not through an adaptation work.
What was the involvement of Bela Tarr in the making of Aragane? Did he give you any suggestions, ideas or was he just supervising the project?
I brought some shots I made there and told him that I wanted to make a film. He watched them and said ‘Go and shoot’. We had one meeting when I was still shooting and I had doubts about which direction I should go with the project, should I go more for the people and their story or more with the space itself?
He told me ‘Listen to yourself, what do you want to do?’
I said ‘I am attracted to the space and the physical work of miners’
After shooting, I edited the film and showed the first rough cut to him and he gave me some comments such as ‘maybe you should eliminate this shot’ or ‘keep this one’.
More than once you’ve mentioned space and your relationship with space when making a film, I think is a very fascinating subject. When I watched Aragane I felt very strongly that it’s a work about landscapes (a dark one, the mine), the materiality of it and the machinery in it. An “alien” landscape and the beauty of it. What brought you to focus more on the space/landscape and the machinery, and is there a reason behind the use of long takes?
I think I was fascinated by the space because it was something totally new, complete darkness, magnificent volume of noises, but also sudden silence where there were no machines around.
The space drugged me into the film, my camera (gaze) was a communicator/mediator between what was there in front of camera and myself. I tried to understand and feel what was going on by shooting the space and its own time. Also, I didn’t approach the subject from the angle of the hard conditions of miners, unfairness and danger of their works (even though it is there in the film because it was just there). I hope people would not get me wrong by saying this. I/my camera shared some moments with them, I tried to be with them moment by moment. Focusing on social issue can be something good for miners, to say what is the problem and how ignorant we are about the issue, but I think the best I can do with my filmmaking is to try to be with the subject (space/people/time) and make them seen by being with them.
About the machinery, I think I shot them because their existence is big in that space and also because miners were proud of the machines, especially the huge ones digging into the side walls.
It may be a bit difficult to explain why the shots needed to be so long, but I tried to be honest toward the moments I captured with my camera.
I think the sound in Aragane is as important as the images, can you tell us more on how you were able to capture and magnify the sounds of the machines and, if you can, tell us about your relationship (as a filmmaker) to sounds/noise and soundscapes?
It is very interesting to me that lots of people mention about sounds and soundscapes. The sound was recorded with the internal microphone of a Canon 5D, because I didn’t have something like Zoom, also I was most of the time alone, so my hands and focus was with the Camera/Image. My light was on the helmet to make the curtain space visible, so it would have been impossible for me to take care of the sound recording. What was recorded was done “without care” and automatically.
I did the sound mix myself, changing the volume here and there, cleaning a bit of noises, and making rhymes/music by adding some noise on top of another noise. That was fun and I think made the film to gain a sensorial feeling.
I was just playing with sound in Aragane , but I want to learn more about sound. The film made me realize and feel that Film is an audiovisual art.
It’s interesting that you’ve used the words “sensorial feeling”, the first time I saw Aragane I thought straight away of the works of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab (Leviathan, Manakamana, Iron Ministry, etc.), you told me already you haven’t watched their movies and that you’re not really a cinephile, but I was wondering if you got ispired for your approach by any movies or more in general by any other work of art.
After your email, Matteo, I watched ‘Manakamana’ ‘Iron MInistry’, and ‘People’s park’,
and I see what you see as similar.
It is very interesting because, before you mention about the Lab, I’ve thought that if I stop making films, I want to be an anthropologist. And I feel I am learning about human beings by making movies.
I might not be so good yet and I have not a clear idea about what I am doing with my camera, but it has been very clear for me that my theme is ‘where we come from, what we are, and where are we going?’ .
I know it sounds abstract and even pretentious, but I’m serious. I may not get the answers before I die, but I have at least the right to explore and challenge these themes with my life, I guess.
I am inspired by: Wang Bing, Pedro Costa, Raymond Depardon, Wiseman, Cezanne. My bible: Letters To A Young Poet by Rilke.
One last question: what are your future plans, are you working on something at film.factory and how about after film.factory?
I have a few projects now.
One is my essay film, to conclude the experience in Bosnia and filmmaking here. This is my priority right now. It’s in the production stage.
And then I plan to do a workshop of filmmaking/photography/camera in a discipline center in Sarajevo. (It is a institution for the underage kids who commit crimes, not strict as much as a prison). I want to share the possibility of using the camera as a tool of communication and expression with these kids. This kind of workshop is what I want to do as my life time project, I don’t know if I can finance such a project, but I want to try my best to make it a constant practice in my life.
Or I might move to Mexico to do a project after film.factory, one of my colleagues is from Mexico and I want to shoot something there related to sea/water/cave. It’s still in the research/developing stage. Or maybe I’ll go back to Japan, it all depends on if I can support myself and how these projects can be produced!
Feel free to add something you want to say or share.
So many people have been supporting my filmmaking. My family, Kitagawa Shinji, Bela Tarr, and my dear colleagues. Most of the time, I shoot and edit alone and this sometimes make me misunderstand that I am making films alone, but in fact, there is always someone who introduces the subject to me, tries to support me mentally, gives me some thoughts on the film, shares the film, writes about the film, and watches the film. All these people make films. All these spaces and times make films. I’m just one of the gears/energies that make films happen.
Hara Kazuo is one of the most internationally well known Japanese documentarists, his The Emperor Naked Army Marches On (1987) is the first Japanese entry in the Sight & Sound’s poll The Best Documentaries of All Time and a movie that is often screened, talked about and studied in Japan as well as abroad. Now, personally The Emperor is not my favourite work from Hara, Sayonara CP (his debut from 1972) and especially Extreme Private Eros (1974) are better docs for reasons I’m not going to explore here today, and to be honest he’s not even among my favorite directors of non-fiction, but nonetheless I can’t deny he’s a very important and pivotal figure in Japanese cinema. Hara is also the only Japanese documentarist whose writings have been translated in English and collected in a volume, a very good one indeed, that everyone interested in non-fiction cinema should read. The title is Camera Obtrusa: The Action Documentaries of Hara Kazuo: By Hara Kazuo and was published in 2009 by Kaya Press.
All that was to introduce him and to give an idea of his status as a respected director in the international documentary world. The good news is that Hara has a new work out, the first documentary for the big screen after 22 years of absence, he’s been active with feature films, on TV, writing books and with other projects, but 「ニッポン国泉南石綿村 劇場版 命て なんぼなん?」, this the title of the movie, breaks a silence of more than two decades. The film had its premiere at a small event in Tokyo, フィクションとドキュメンタリーのボーダーを超えて, and is about the victims of asbestos exposure in Sennan city (Osaka), where Hara has been intermittently filming for more than a decade, while at the same time working on a project about Minamata’s victims.
I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I hope to catch up with it as soon as possible, although, for some reason, I have very low expectations, but I’m ready and willing to be surprised.
Addendum: Hara won’t be screening it again until summer at the earliest, and most likely the fall (again somewhere in Tokyo), as he’s planning on reworking/editing it after these screenings in Shibuya.
Many thanks to Jordan A. Yamaji Smith for the update
I’ve often written, here and elsewhere, about Ogawa Pro and the documentaries made by the collective, first in Sanrizuka – documenting the resistance of the peasants against the construction of Narita airport – and later in Yamagata. A couple of days ago through social networs I found out that finally all the works produced by the collective will see the light on DVD, a project by the Japanese label DIG. First, on June 2nd, we will get 3 of the early documentaries: A Sea of Youth (青年の海, 1966), The Oppressed Students (圧殺の森 高崎経済大学闘争の記録, 1967) and A Report From Haneda 現認報告書 羽田闘争の記録, 1967) and later, presumably in one or two years, all the 20 documentaries made between 1966 and 1986 by the group. The news is big, at least for me, and although I have sample DVDs of many of the movies shot in Sanrizuka and Yamagata, copies kindly given to me by the festival people in Yamagata, it will be nice to have the films “neatly transferred” on DVDs, the samples I have being a copy of a copy of a copy of a VHS. But here comes my biggest concern about this otherwise great news, will the transfer be really a proper one? Almost all the documentaries are shot in 16mm and I’m not really sure about the condition of the originals, in an ideal world we should see them first lovingly restored and then made them available for the home-video release. But the huge debt left by Ogawa complicates everything, what we’re likely to get is something close to the DVD of Kamei Fumio‘s Fighting Soldiers, a bare bones release, watchable of course but with a poor transfer, in the particular case probably due to the condition of the source material. The docs will not have English subtitles, adding them would have helped to “spread the word” of Ogawa Production to a wider international audience, but again, we don’t live in an ideal world and we should be happy and content with what we will get. Be that as it may, I’m pretty excited about this and I’ll write again about the project, the image quality, etc. when I get more information or in June, the time of the first releases.
As 2015 comes to an end, it’s that time of the year again, the period when every cinephile is compelled to make his/her best movies list. I couldn’t not post my own one. I’ve mostly watched documentaries from East Asia, my list is then more like a “Best documentary of 2015 from East Asia” type of list, but at the end I’ve added a couple of movies from other part of the world and some (re)discoveries I’ve done during this 2015. Just a disclaimer, it’s a favorite list more than a best list, here we go (listed in the order I’ve seen them):
Walking with my Mother (Sakaguchi Katsumi, 2014)
An exploration of loss, sickness and memory in a society (the Japanese one) that is getting older and older, told in the shape of a private documentary, here some thoughts on the movie.
Aragane (Oda Kaori, 2015)
The camera follows patiently and almost hypnotically the workers of an old coal mine in Bosnia down into the darkness of their daily routine. The movie is visually stunning, partly documentary and partly experimental cinema, director Oda Kaori knows how to use the digital medium for her cinematic purposes in a work that revolves around the concept of duration and its materiality, and that is almost structural cinema in its construction. I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing the director, the conversation was published on the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto, I’m currently working on an English translation and on a review/piece for this blog (maybe next year).
Oyster Factory (Sōda Kazuhiro, 2015)
The latest work from Japanese director Sōda Kazuhiro, together with Theatre 1 and 2, my favourite among his documentaries. I’ve written more about the film here.
France Is Our Mother Country (Rithy Panh, 2015)
Rithy Panh (2-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, The Missing Picture) constructs a critical and satirical work about the colonial rule of Cambodia by France, using only footage, archival images and propaganda films shot by the rulers themselves. The power of re-editing and collage documentary.
Night and Fog in Zona (Jung Sung-il, 2015)
A documentary about the great Wang Bing by movie critic-turned-director Jung Sung-il, here you can read my review.
The Moulin (Huang Ya-li, 2015)
Formally engaging and elliptical, I don’t really know how much of my fascination for this movie comes from its themes, a group of Taiwanese avant-garde artists active in the 30′ during the Japanese colonial period, and how much from the documentary itself.
Documentaries from other parts of the world:
The Iron Ministry ( J.P. Sniadecki, 2014) and in general all the movies by Sniadecki: Demolition, People’s Park, Yumen….
Jujun (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2015)
(re)discoveries of 2015:
The Vampires of Poverty (Carlos Mayolo, Luis Ospina, 1977)
All the documentaries/works of the great Agnès Varda (it was a pleasure watching 14 of her films this year)
I’m reposting here and Interview I did in 2011 with Fujiwara Toshi, author of No Man’s Zone (無人地帯, 2011), to this day and in my opinion the best documentary about the March 11th’s triple disaster.
The interview was originally posted on the Italian blog Sonatine. You can purchase the DVD of the movie here (with English subtitles).
Matteo Boscarol I’ve watched a couple of documentaries dealing with the disaster that hit Japan on March 11th, but in my opinion, your work stands apart from them. I think you adopted a broader perspective. Among other things, I felt No Man’s Zone was a visual essay on the impact that images of destruction have on our society. Toshi Fujiwara Yes, you’re right but obviously it was something that was inside me from before the disaster and grew up over the years. M.B. It was also like watching two documentaries, one with the row images and interviews from the area hit by the tragedy, the other one more reflective, with the narration and the editing giving a philosophical frame. T.F. We’ve tried to create two separate layers very deliberately. One of the reasons is that it is a French-Japanese co-production. The cameraman and director are Japanese, and the editor is French…so why not have two layers to incorporate a certain distance within the contest. Originally, we thought of a French voice and the narration was different from the final one. It was more like a fictional story. The idea was that of a French woman and a Japanese director corresponding through the Internet. We collaborated with some French writers, but they didn’t get the right ideas because it was also supposed to be quite critical of the French culture itself. It turned into something rather awfully colonialist. So it didn’t work and I rewrote the whole narration. M.B. In this way, it should be able to reach a foreign audience. The Japanese media didn’t do a good job, but at the same time, the international media excelled in misinformation, especially the Italian media. T.F. Even here in Japan, it’s turning this way. Now the Japanese anti-nuclear movements are paradoxically against the people of Fukushima. M.B. There’s a scene that particularly impressed me and even reminded me of some parts of Ogawa Shinsuke’s Heta Buraku. It’s the one when the camera is following an old lady wandering and speaking in her garden. T.F Thank you for the compliment. It is probably because my cameraman, Takanobu Kato, was working with Ogawa. He was one of the last people to leave the production. It was important that he was with me because, being trained under Ogawa when his production was in Yamagata, he literally lived there raising rice and so on. As such, he knew how to shoot rice fields, and other details of life in the countryside. M.B. In the same scene through the memory of the old lady, there are also references to a wider sense of time, historical and natural cycles, reaching as far as the period after the Second World War. T.F. I would say that it goes even farther back in time; in fact, she recalls her father having been a silk worms teacher. It was before the war when Japan biggest export was silk itself.The images of movies of this kind focus usually on destruction, but we tried to suggest what was there before the destruction. What was destroyed and also what the people of these areas have lost is much more important.
M.B. What triggered you to go to Fukushima a month after the Earthquake to start to shoot? T.F. I was disgusted by the way the images were shown on TV. The live footage didn’t show us how the people used to live, and didn’t give people a chance to communicate. Their lives up there were so different from the lives of journalists in Tokyo; moreover, the images are just raw material without any good editing. My intention was to make a film that would look distinctly different from what we watched on television, which was usually shot very hastily with a hand-held camera. One of my first commitments was to shoot as beautifully as we could. That’s why, when possible, we used a tripod. Already, I’d hated lots of contemporary documentaries because their shots aren’t beautiful. They shoot them too easily. Even though we did it in 10 days, we tried to do it as well as we could. Beautiful editing also was important. M.B. And the voice of Khanjian Arsinée for the narration is very beautiful indeed. T.F. Her voice is incredible. She’ s Armenian, but she grew up in Lebanon so her native tongues are Arabic and French. She moved to Canada when she was 17, in French-speaking Quebec. I liked her voice because she is not totally native in English [the narration is in English] and so we cannot clearly identify the nationality of her voice.
M.B. You went to Fukushima with your cameraman and one assistant—is that right? T.F. Yes, it’s better to have a small crew also knowing that the TV people often annoy them… M.B. How did the people there react to you and your crew? T.F. Again, we were only three and we were not wearing any protective gear or masks, so they were extremely polite to us as they usually are to everybody else. You know, the people of Tohoku have a tradition for hospitality. Also, we were not asking abrupt and stupid questions like “what do you think of that and that…?”. M.B. The problem of how to approach and relate to the people affected by disasters is a crucial one for the art of documentary. At the last Yamagata Documentary International Film Festival, there was a debate on this topic. T.F. I was there myself, and I think the largest problem of these documentaries is that they’re more about the filmmakers going there and not necessarily about the places and the people living there. The general problem is that many filmmakers went to Tohoku, but they made films about their own confusion and panicked state of minds, while they forgot to make documentaries about the damages of the quake and the people who were directly touched by the tragedies. They are too self-centered and unconsciously self-obsessed. An even larger problem that I observe is that the audience in Tokyo takes comfort in seeing these movies, being reassured that the filmmakers are also confused. I find this tendency very problematic for being too masturbatory. They are forgetting the original function of cinema, which must be something open to create links and communications; under such circumstances, we should be mediums to make a bridge between those who experienced the tragedies and us who didn’t. That is one of the reasons why we tried to make “No Man’s Zone” an open film text, instead of sharing the personal experiences (if not self-excuses) of filmmakers. We wanted it to ask direct questions to the audience. Of course, my cameraman worked with Ogawa and I made a film about Tsuchimoto. Thus, I was influenced by others and different generations of documentary’s filmmakers, I’ve kind of skipped the generation of the so-called private documentaries. M.B. Like Kawase Naomi?
I like Kawase and what she does; she is of my generation, but we do different things and that’s ok with me. I could say that I do documentaries like in the 60s, except that there is no more politics involved. Japanese leftist politics disintegrated in a very rapid way after the 70s. M.B. Do you think March 11th will change something in filmmaking? T.F. In my opinion, it should. But I haven’t seen the change yet. After all, only 9 months have passed. One thing for sure is that we have to try to do something different, different from what we were doing before. Actually, before the quake, I was working on a movie but now I’m not sure if it’s worthwhile to complete it. It’s about Japan before March 11th.
It’s a different period, it’s like being after a war in a way. M.B. We should consider March 11th almost as important as August 15th, 1945.
A few months ago, I talked to Sono Sion, and he said that the tragedy was paradoxically “good” because it suddenly uncovered many problems affecting the Japanese society. For instance the relationship between urban centers and countryside, that is Tokyo-Tohoku… T.F. I totally agree with him. We (in Tokyo) are just parasites, which is repeatedly stated in No Man’s Zone. The nuclear plants have been there for almost 40 years, and what is awful is that even now after 9 months in Tokyo, people don’t want to admit that we’re responsible.
And even now [this interview was conducted during the Christmas period], it’s like nothing has happened at all.At the Tokyo FilmEx this year, a lady in the audience from Fukushima was quite surprised after watching the movie. She walked outside and found the streets in full illumination for Christmas. M.B. Can you tell us something about the music used in the film? T.F. It was composed and performed by a free jazz American musician who’s been living in France for many years. His name is Barre Phillips and we’ve worked together before [Independence, 2002]. Again, we decided on a non-Japanese composer, one of the best that you can get, and also one that was not so expensive and not too commercial. The funny thing is that he recorded the music in a chapel of an ancient monastery in the south of France. In No Man’s Zone, there are a lot of Japanese traditional views with images of Buddhas and small gods, so I thought it would be interesting to have the music recorded in a Catholic chapel. In this way, the music and the narration can maybe suggest something universal. That’s why I wanted someone else and not myself to do the narration in English. It would otherwise have become just a documentary about my experience. This nuclear accident is asking tremendous and huge questions to all of us, to our civilization and how we have related ourselves to nature and to the universe, how we perceive our lives. We actually have to think about the philosophical and even the religious aspects of it all, I would say, and it’s stated at the end of the film, that Japan, embracing western civilization, has accepted its idea of a nature existing for us, to serve humans. It’s actually a very Christian concept. It is not even Jewish or Islamic; it’s a particular belief of Christianity to say that God created everything for us.
Today just a quick note to announce a small topic shift I’d like to give to my blog. I will still primarily write about Japanese documentaries, but in the past months I realised just how limiting it is to keep the focus only on the works coming out of Japan and by doing so missing the chance to explore the rich and vibrant non-fiction scene of East and Southeast Asian countries. To be honest, I don’t know where this decision will bring the blog and even if there will be real changes in my blogging at all. Reviews of Asian documentaries? news about a new DVD/Blu-ray or an interesting movie from China, Taiwan, South Korea or the Philippines? More about film festivals in the region? I have no idea, stay tuned.
In the autumn film festival madness, there are more film fests between October and November than stars in the sky, a very tiny but special place is occupied by the Kobe Documentary Film Festival, an event established in 2009 at the Kobe Planet Film Archive. An important place for cinephiles and cinema lovers, the archive is a small structure, the theatre has only 38 seats, set up in 2007 and currently managed by Yasui Yoshio, one of the most renowed film historians and archivists of Japan. Incidentally Kobe has a special relationship to the seventh art, Edison’s Kinetoscope was imported to Kobe in 1896 and one year after the city was also the first place in Japan where the Lumiere brothers brought their Cinematographe.
In these 7 years the mini festival, it’s more like a retrospective than a “real” fest, has presented works of Yanagisawa Hisao and Tsuchimoto Noriaki –in its 2 first editions, a special devoted to the great Tōhōku Earthquake and documentary in 2011, and the following year a retrospective on NDU and Nunokawa Tetsurō, a showcase that I was able to attend, a real discovery that allowed me to deepen my knowledge of one of the most important Japanese film collective of the 60s and 70s, a real treat.
Kobe Documentary Film Festival kicks off tomorrow, October 31st, and will last until November 10th. This year the main focus won’t be on one filmmaker or a movement in particular, but the screenings will be more varied. Discovering Images—The Age of Matsumoto Toshio, a documentary on Matsumoto Toshio by Takefumi Tsutsui, almost 12 hours (the work is divided in 5 parts) to retrace the career of one of the most important Japanese filmmakers and theorists of the post-bellic period, is maybe the most important to me. London (1994), Robinson in Space (1997) and Robinson in Ruins (2001) by Patrick Keiller, under the wave, on the ground (波のした、土のうえ) by Komori Haruka and Seo Natsumi will also be screened, and last but not least a special selection from the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, 5 films screened in the last 25 years at the prestigious event.
Unfortunately I won’t be able to attend the festival this year, what I really wanted to see was the massive documentary on Matsumoto – I missed it at Yamagata as well, and under the wave, on the ground, but I’m sure there will be more chances to catch up with them.
ZakkaFilms, a label specialised in Japanese movies, has announced three new releases to be included in its Filmmakers’ Market, Flowers and Troops (花の兵隊, 2009), Fukushima: Memories of the Lost Landscape (相馬看花, 2012) and The Horses of Fukushima (祭の馬, 2013) all of them by Matsubayashi Yoju. According to ZakkaFilms homepage Filmmakers’ Market is “a new marketplace for documentaries that tears down the walls separating Japanese filmmakers and foreign viewers and allows filmmakers to bring their English-subtitled works in for direct sale (..) All of the DVDs are packaged by the directors and producers themselves, so some may have only Japanese on the package or in the booklet (we note as such below), but and all of them have English subtitles.”
I had the chance to see two of the three documentaries, those about Fukushima, here in Japan on the big screen. While I liked Fukushima: Memories of the Lost Landscape – it’s in fact one of my favourite movies about Japan’s 3.11 triple disaster together with Fujiwara Toshi’s No Man’s Zone (無人地帯, 2012) – I couldn’t really connect with The Horses of Fukushima.
Here the synopsis of Fukushima: Memories of the Lost Landscape taken from ZakkaFilms homepage
The Enei district of Minami Soma town lies within the 20 km exclusion zone around the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. In early April 2011, immediately after the devastating tsunami and nuclear meltdown forced people to evacuate the area, filmmaker Yoju Matsubayashi rushed here with relief goods. From a chance meeting with city councilor Kyoko Tanaka, he began making this film. Living together with the evacuees in school classrooms designated as temporary refuge centers, he captured an extraordinary period in the lives of the local people. Interspersed with humorous episodes and deep emotions, the film delves into memories of a local culture that has been taken away by the tragedy.
More the focusing on the place and the ruins, avoiding whenever possible a kind of disasterporn that was very present on TV and in many movies soon after the earthquake, Matsubayashi turns his camera towards the people, their memories and their stories. The more the documentary approaches its center and core, the more the shaky images and those shot from moving cars disappear, the pace of the movie itself becoming slow and more contemplative. The landscape, the lost landscape, is recreated in the film by the words and recollections of the people to whom Matsubayashi talked, or better by the conversations between them. It’s also a time-landscape, the memories of the elderly have the power to convey and embrace larger historical cycles, the conditions before the war, the poverty of the post-bellic period and the resulting process of industrialisation that forever changed the face and the balance of forces in the area, the devil pact with the nuclear industry being the most prominent one.
Flowers and Troops seems to be an interesting piece of work as well, a movie that explores the lives of Japanese soldiers who refused to come back to Japan from Thailand and Burma after the Pacific War, a theme that Imamura Shōhei, Matsubayashi studied with him, delved into during the 70s with several made-for-TV documentaries (they’re included in this box-set).
You can order and purchase the three DVDs by Matsubayashi directly on ZakkaFilms homepage.
Asian Docs 
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