Category: Ogawa Pro

YIDFF 2025 – report 6: Sanrizuka: Disappearing Landscapes—The Heta Project Screening

This is my final piece on this year’s Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. It comes very late, apologies, it’s been a busy time.

Previous reports:
YIDFF 2025: preview
report 1: SPI (Sayun Simung)
report 2: Awards
report 3: From the River to the Sea, and the Mountains: Filmmakers in Solidarity with Palestine – A Gathering
report 4: Appalachian Lenses, Hakishka
report 5: The Future of Dialogue: Yoshida Dormitory, Kyoto University

Heta village and the surrounding area, together with the people who lived there, are at the center of one of Ogawa Productions’ masterpieces—and the final work the collective shot before relocating to Yamagata—Narita: Heta Village (1973). About two decades ago, when the few remaining inhabitants were relocated, the area became a ghost of its past, a past that is threatened to be erased in the coming years with the further planned expansion of Narita Airport. This will cause the partial submersion of the zone, wiping out hundreds of years of culture, traditions, collective and personal memories, and not least, resistance.

After moving to Yamagata in the mid-1970s and after the death of Ogawa Shinsuke in 1992, the collective left behind a massive quantity of unused audiovisual material and notes—Ogawa also left a huge debt, though that is another story.
The Hokusō Regional Materials and Cultural Assets Preservation Network is a volunteer organization established in 2024 to document and preserve the buildings, communities, memories and landscapes that will be lost as a result of the large-scale expansion work currently underway at Narita Airport. One of the areas greatly affected by this expansion is Shibayama Town, where Heta Village was filmed. As part of its activities, in September 2024 the network co-organized Heta Project, a workshop for filmmakers and artists to engage with the material left by Ogawa Pro and create audiovisual works that reflect on the landscape of the area and the memories connected to it.

The results of this workshop were screened at one of the satellite events held in Yamagata on October 13, Sanrizuka: Disappearing Landscapes—The Heta Project Screening. Six short films were presented, and most of the filmmakers were also at the venue to discuss their work.

What I found particularly fascinating was the heterogeneity of the participants—not only in age and nationality, but also in their levels of knowledge about Ogawa Productions, and the history of the area. Some, like Markus Nornes, have been writing and speaking about the documentaries and the resistance of its people for decades; for others, this project served as an entry point to discover the films and to become familiar with the issues affecting the region. The following films were screened:

三里塚ー辺田部落の時間 Sanrizuka—Village Time in Heta Village (Markus Nornes, 2024), 13′.

抵抗のむら The Village of Resistance (Stella Lansill, 2024), 5′.

此処に轟くThis ROAR Here…(Tanabe Yuma, 2024), 9′.

辺田部落へ To Heta Village (Watanuki Takaya, 2024), 10′.

三里塚 シャドー Sanrizuka Shadows (Wang Yijean, 2024), 6′.

辺田部落 瞑想 (祈）Heta Buraku Meditation (Prayer) (Aldo Schwartz, 2024) 12′.

The fact that Ogawa Production’s footage is freely available for artistic and historical purposes is an extraordinary achievement, and it could mark a turning point in the production of archival and compilation films in Japan. As I have already noted in a preliminary study on the subject, this form of cinema is strikingly absent from the Japanese audiovisual landscape—not only within the documentary sphere, but also in the experimental field.

One can only hope that this incredibly rich archive—there is, for instance, a great deal of vibrant color footage of natural elements and animal life, and the very fact that the collective chose not to use it says much about what they were striving for—will finally enter into circulation.
Beyond opening new artistic possibilities for filmmakers—Satō Makoto’s Memories of Agano (2004) is a shining example that pointed in this direction already two decades ago, and if I am not mistaken some of his peers are now moving along similar lines—the archive may also function as a living repository of Sanrizuka: its memories, its struggles, its history.

Two scenes in Sanrizuka – Heta Village 三里塚 辺田部落 (Ogawa Production, 1973)

A recent rewatch of 三里塚 辺田部落 Sanrizuka – Heta Village prompted me to reflect on, and reconsider two of the most significant scenes in the documentary.
I’m referring to the short one with the snake crawling through the grass and Ogawa reflecting on the changing situation in the village, and the one, much longer, when the two young men from Heta are taken by plain-clothes police officers.
It goes without saying that everything I’m writing here is built upon, and would not be possible without, the writings of Markus Nornes; his volume on Ogawa Production was the starting point of this site, and what kindled my interest in the collective.

I’ve uploaded both scenes on YouTube, hopefully they will not be taken down.

The snake here is seen as a symbol of transformation and rebirth, Ogawa himself is commenting that, I’m paraphrasing, the resistance and battles in Sanrizuka caused the reappearance and the strengthening of old folklore practices and rites, but also the creation of new collective practices, such as the Women Alliance, and the Youth Alliance. He repeatedly mentions the concept of kō (講); following Joan Mellen “at the base of their movement is the revitalization of the concept of the kō, or group meeting, a theme that lies at the heart of Heta Village. The kō began as a Buddhist prayer meeting and later developed many forms, including that of the town meeting. (…) The kō is a historical means among Japanese peasants of uniting people horizontally, rather than vertically by rank. Ogawa shows how this ancient communal tradition provides the backbone to the Sanrizuka movement, sustaining it by drawing on established, familiar, and revered patterns of social organization” (Mellen, 1976)

I’ve always found this section, part of a longer take, beautiful and revealing: two young men from the village are taken away by the police. The camera stops, a group of farmers keep following the cars, sometimes kicking them. The wind blows through the rice fields.
The camera now gently pans 180 degrees towards two ladies talking, one of them is the mother of one of the boys taken away, and grandpa Tonojita, one of the central figures in Heta and the protagonist of the awe-inspiring long opening scene, praises her son. As the long take continues, the camera slowly pans back to the cars moving, we see them going out of the frame in distance, while the drum cans signal their passage. The almost-tribal beating sound and the accompanying voice shouting, through a megaphone, what the police is doing to the village, are also perceived far away and fading.

I read this long passage as a cartography of sorts of what was happening in Heta village at the time: the hamlet, shaken by recent events (the death of young Sannomiya, and the police spreading division and discord among the farmers), was looking within itself to find a new balance and unity to overcome the crisis.
I also read this part of the long take as an embodiment of two of the more significant lines of flight traversing the film: a sense of distance from the action and the battles, but at the same time an extreme proximity to the core of the struggle and its motivations, achieved by turning the gaze towards the lives and histories of the villagers.

Bibliography:


Mellen Joan. The Waves at Genji’s Door: Japan through its Cinema. New York: Pantheon Books, 1976, quoted in
Of Time and Struggle, Four films by Ogawa Productions, Courtisane Film Festival, 2017.

Nornes Abé Mark. Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese
Documentary. University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Movie journal, summer 2022

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.

Yamazaki Hiroshi, Concepts and Incidents 山崎博 計画と偶然

A different sort of post today.

Since the cinematic works of Yamazaki Hiroshi are, to say the least, not really available ー I was lucky enough to attend a retrospective dedicated to his experiments in 16mm, organized by the Image Forum Festival a couple of years ago (you can read more here) ー I thought it would be interesting to post here some of his photographs. After all he was first and foremost a photographer, a conceptual photographer to be more precise, whose works as a filmmaker were a continuation of the path created and explored with his still images.

On s side note, it blew my mind to discover that he was the cameraman who shot the overworldy time-lapse images of the Sun in Ogawa Pro’s The Sundial Carved with a Thousand Years of Notches — The Magino Village Story (1986), a solar connection to be further explored, and another proof, if we needed any, of how the masterpiece shot in Yamagata was also the result of a collective effort, and an interwaving of influences and contributions from different artistic fields.

The following photos are taken from Yamazaki Hiroshi, Concepts and Incidents 山崎博 計画と偶然, an English/Japanese catalogue published on the occasion of an exhibition organized at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum in 2017. The volume covers Yamazaki’s career from his debut, at the end of the 1960s, until his late works, and it’s divided in chapters following the different phases, approaches and interests in photography and film throughout his life, he passed away in June 2017, less than a month after the end of the exhibition.

Stills from Heliography (1979), in my opinion Yamasaki’s masterpiece
Stills from a video experiment, Flower in the Space (1989)

The Japanese Cinema Book – Ogawa Productions

We are currently navigating uncharted waters and I hope all you readers out there are safe and doing well, so today just a brief post to point to the release of an important volume: The Japanese Cinema Book, edited by Hideaki Fujiki and Alastair Phillips for Bloomsbury. As stated by the editors, the volume

provides a new and comprehensive survey of one of the world’s most fascinating and widely admired filmmaking regions. In terms of its historical coverage, broad thematic approach and the significant international range of its authors, it is the largest and most wide-ranging publication of its kind to date.

Ranging from renowned directors such as Akira Kurosawa to neglected popular genres such as the film musical and encompassing topics such as ecology, spectatorship, home-movies, colonial history and relations with Hollywood and Europe, The Japanese Cinema Book presents a set of new, and often surprising, perspectives on Japanese film.

With its plural range of interdisciplinary perspectives based on the expertise of established and emerging scholars and critics, The Japanese Cinema Bookprovides a groundbreaking picture of the different ways in which Japanese cinema may be understood as a local, regional, national, transnational and global phenomenon.

The book’s innovative structure combines general surveys of a particular historical topic or critical approach with various micro-level case studies. It argues there is no single fixed Japanese cinema, but instead a fluid and varied field of Japanese filmmaking cultures that continue to exist in a dynamic relationship with other cinemas, media and regions.


The Japanese Cinema Book is divided into seven inter-related sections:
· Theories and Approaches
· * Institutions and Industry
· * Film Style
· * Genre
· * Times and Spaces of Representation
· * Social Contexts
· * Flows and Interactions

There are a couple of chapters, or parts of them, that cover what is the main interest of this blog, the production and evolution of documentary cinema in the Japanese archipelago, experimental cinema, and amateur/home films. I was positively impressed by the scope of The Archive Screening locality: Japanese home movies and the politics of place by Oliver Dew, the ever-shifting boundaries between amateur/professional filmmaking, and everything that exceeds what we usually consider “cinema” are problematics that fascinate me. I might write something about Dew’s essay and Japanese home movies in general at another time, but today I want to briefly touch on the chapter written by Hata Ayumi. Filling Our Empty Hands’: Ogawa Productions and the Politics of Subjectivity is a dive into Ogawa Productions, with a special focus on how the collective changed their film-making identity, a process seen through the lens of three works made by the group at different times of their trajectory, Forest of Oppression (1967), Sanrizuka – Heta Village (1973), and The Magino Village Story – Raising Silkworms (1977). I will highlight some of the passages in the essay that more resonated with me, mainly those about the collective and their period in Yamagata,  disclaimer: the themes covered and analysed by Hata are much richer and deeper than what I’m about to write.

One of the most interesting issues tackled in the chapter is for me the connection the author draws between, on the one hand, the portrayal of farmers and farmers’ life created by the group throughout their career, and the rise of the minshūshi movement during the 1960s and 1970s in Japan, on the other. “The minshūshi, or ‘people’s history’ project, was part of a larger intellectual movement of the 1960s and 1970s that sought to construct new representations of the minshū, or non elite ‘people’ as political and historical agents, and overcome the view that they had been inert and passive objects of rule throughout history.”

The shift from a style of film-making more focused on the political struggle to a depiction, almost an ethnographic exploration, of the histories and cultures traversing villages and people in Sanrizuka, is one of the reasons Heta Village is a pivotal movie for Ogawa Productions. Hata argues that, what I call a tectonic shift for Japanese documentary, was possible also by the influence and the interaction of the collective with the minshūshi movement, thus repositioning the path of the collective in a much larger historical and political canvas.

One of the most astonishing artistic achievements in the long years spent by the collective in Yamagata filming and farming, was the ability to reach a degree of proximity, almost a merging and an identification, with the subject filmed, the taishō. Not only a proximity with people and their point of view, but also a quasi-fusion with the landscape and its non-human elements as it were, the plants, the seasonal changes, the weather, the geological time of the area, or the Sun perceived as a orbiting star. To read in the essay that Ogawa and his group “took this ideal subjectivity even further with the idea of ‘the human possessed by the rice plant’ (ine ningen), an imagined, metaphorical entity that they strove for in order to capture the essence of rice cultivation.” was for me a confirmation and a revelation. The beautiful poster of Magino Village: A Tale (1986)—some of the words on it are pure poetry, “a movie mandala”, “to carve the time of life into the body of film”—beautifully embodies this strive towards the becoming-rice plant of the collective, and it is in itself a work of art, in my opinion.

There are several scenes in Magino Village that encompass this love and obsession towards rice, farming, and all the human and non-human life that revolves around a plant so important for Japan and its people. Tamura Masaki patiently filming rice flowers bloom is one of the most famous, used also as the cover of the Japanese DVD, but my favourite is the one you can watch below, a scene Markus Nornes has described in his book on Ogawa Pro as “the most prominent haptic images” in the film.

 

 

 

Ogawa Production retrospective at Cinéma du réel (March 23-April 28)

This year Cinéma du réel, one of the most prestigious documentary film festivals, will kick off its 40th edition this coming Friday, among the more anticipated events of the Parisian festival there will be a special focus on Ogawa Shinsuke and Ogawa Production, a huge retrospective dedicated to the documentary collective that from the 1960s onward changed and impacted the landscape of non-fiction cinema in Japan and Asia. Part of the events celebrating and reflecting on the civil unrest and protests that shook the world in 1968, from March 23rd to April 28th, the festival and the city of Paris will showcase seven movies made by the group in the 1960s:

Sea of Youth – Four Correspondence Course Students (1966)

Forest of Oppression – A Record of the Struggle at Takasaki City University of Economics (1967)

Report from Haneda (1967)

The Battle Front for the Liberation of Japan – Summer in Sanrizuka (1968)

Prehistory of the Partisans (1969, directed by Tsuchimoto Noriaki)

At the end of Cinéma du réel, the retrospective will then move to the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume where will continue its focus on the Sanrizuka Series, movies documenting the struggle and resistance of the peasants and the students, united against the land expropriation perpetrated by the government in order to build Narita airport. The retrospective will last until April 27th presenting also the movies made by Ogawa Pro in its third phase, when the group moved to Magino village in Yamagata prefecture. The collective disbanded in 1992 with the untimely death of its founder Ogawa Shinsuke, a passing that also revealed the dark side of such a unique cinematic endeavor, Ogawa himself left a huge debt made during the years to support the collective and their films.

One member of the collective, Iizuka Toshio, will be in Paris to introduce the Magino films, and discuss his own movies and his relationship with Ogawa Shinsuke and the group. Curated by Ricardo Matos Cabo, whom I had the pleasure of meeting last October in Yamagata, the retrospective will also include other documentaries about the group, Devotion: A Film About Ogawa Productions (2000) by Barbara Hammer, A Visit to Ogawa Productions (1981) with Oshima Nagisa, Filmmaking and the Way to the Village (1973) by Fukuda Katsuhiko, and Kashima Paradise (1973) a French documentary about the struggle in Narita. An important part of the event will be the presence of scholar Abè Markus Nornes who will give a master class on Ogawa and lectures on militant film in Japan and Sanrizuka: Heta Village (1973).

If you’re in Paris, don’t miss this opportunity, experiencing Ogawa Pro’s documentaries on a big screen, in the proper contest and with proper introductions, is one of the best cinematic experiences I had in my life. Here the schedule of the screenings and lectures at Jeu de Paume :

April 3 (Tue), 18:30 Sanrizuka – Heta Village (1973)

April 4 (Wed), 18:00 Winter in Sanrizuka (1970)

April 6 (Fri) 16:30 Sanrizuka — the Three Day War (1970)
18:00 Sanrizuka – Peasants of the Second Fortress (1971)

April 7 (Sat) 11:30 Sanrizuka – The Construction of Iwayama Tower (1971)
14:30 Sanrizuka – Heta Village (1973)
18:00  Filmmaking and the Way to the Village (1973)

April 10 (Tue) 18:30 Dokkoi! Songs from the Bottom (1975)

April 17 (Tue) 16:00 Devotion: A Film About Ogawa Productions (2000)
18:00 The Magino Village Story – Pass (1977)
The Magino Village Story – Raising Silkworms (1977)

April 20 (Fri) 18:00 « Nippon » : Furuyashiki Village (1982)

April 21 (Sat) 11:30 Encounter with Toshio Iizuka
14:30 The Sundial Carved with a Thousand Years of Notches – The Magino Village Tale (1986)

April 24 (Tue) 19:00 The Magino Village Story – Pass (1977)
A Visit to Ogawa Productions (1981, directed by Oshige Jun’ichiro)

April 28 (Sat) 14:30 Kashima Paradise (1973, directed by Yann
Le Masson and Bénie Deswarte)
17:00 Sanrizuka – The Construction of Iwayama Tower (1971)

Inland Sea 港町 (Sōda Kazuhiro, 2018)

Screen at this year edition of the Berlinale (Forum), Inland Sea is the latest documentary by one of the most interesting and original voice working in Japanese non-fiction today, Sōda Kazuhiro.  Based in New York, Soda in the last 10 years or so has built an impressive body of work, Inland Sea is the seventh documentary in his ongoing observational series, among my favorite Theatre 1 and 2, a diptych about playwright Oriza Hirata and his theatrical company, and Oyster Factory, a documentary premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival in 2015. Inland Sea was filmed soon after Oyster Factory, in fact the town is the same, Ushimado, a small village facing the Seto Inland Sea in Okayama prefecture. While in the previous film Soda focused his gaze on a small oyster factory and the problems of surviving in a globalized world (you can read more here), in Inland Sea he follows three elderly people living in the village and their daily activities. Here the synopsis:

Wai-chan is one of the last remaining fishermen in Ushimado, a small village in Seto Inland Sea, Japan. At the age of 86, he still fishes alone on a small boat to make a living, dreaming about his retirement. Kumi-san is an 84 year old villager who wanders around the shore everyday. She believes a social welfare facility “stole” her disabled son to receive subsidy from the government. A “late – stage elderly” Koso-san runs a small seafood store left by her deceased husband. She sells fish to local villagers and provides leftovers to stray cats. Foresaken by the modernization of post-war Japan, the town Ushimado’s rich, ancient culture and tight-knit community are on on the verge of disappearing.

While, as mentioned above, the film is part of his observational series, from the very first scene is clear how Soda with his camera and his voice is an important and catalytic presence in the relational texture that is Inland Sea. As Nichols would put it, while Sōda is filming and representing a certain reality, the documentary and the act of filming itself becomes also an important part of that reality. More than in his other works, his voice and that of his wife and their presence is here a fundamental part of the movie, often the people filmed converse with Sōda and we, as spectators, are always aware of the relationship between the camera and its environment. Naturally all documentaries are works of fiction, to one degree or another, but to my eyes acknowledging the presence of the camera and its effects in a documentary shot in an observational style, is one of the main qualities of the movie. It’s a honest and ethic filmic approach that I really value as important, especially in the contemporary documentary landscape, an approach that stems also from the style and methodology adopted by Sōda:

I spontaneously roll my camera, watching and listening closely to the reality in front of me, banning myself from doing research or prescribing themes or writing a script before shooting. I impose certain rules (‘The Ten Commandments’) on myself to avoid preconceptions and to discover something beyond my expectation.

The movie is shot in its entirety in black and white, the only case in Sōda’s filmography, just the very last scene, a boat floating, is in colour. I haven’t read so much about the movie, I wanted to experience it without preconceptions, so I don’t know the reason behind not shooting in colour, but certainly this choice gives a very distinctive elegiac tone to the movie, and a flavour of obsolescence and marginality to the places and the people depicted in it. Compared to Sōda ’s previous movies there is, at least in the first hour or so —  the last 30 minutes are basically a very long and touching monologue of one of the old ladies, Kumi-chan — less talking and more insistence on the daily routine of Wai-chan and Koso-san, long periods of time are spent with the old man on the boat, fishing, and with the old lady, selling the fish.

By focusing on a place on a relatively far corner of Japan, far away from the metropolitan excitement that too often is associated with Japan, a place not yet forgotten, but on the edge of disappearing, and where the population is shrinking — the akiya (empty houses) seen in a sequence are becoming part of the present and near future of the archipelago — Sōda is also hinting, consciously or not, to one of the crucial issues of contemporary Japan and its geopolitical construction as a nation. That is, the parasitic relationship between sprawling urban centers and countryside, often forgotten, exploited (as highlighted by the situation in Fukushima or the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant), or reduced to the folkloric image and touristic destination of Japan National Railway’s posters. In a post on his blog last year commenting on the Ogawa Pro’s Sanrizuka series, Soda wrote that, I’m paraphrasing, the struggle and resistance to the construction of the airport, because of the thick dialect spoken by the farmers at the time, almost incomprehensible to a person born and raised in Tokyo, felt like an act of exploitation perpetrated by the central state towards its colonies.

Another aspect of Sōda’s style that really stands out in Inland Sea and a direct consequence of his methodological approach, is the absence of any explanation on the historical background and context of the subject filmed. His films do not offer any extra information about the people he meets and the places he shoots, but the camera and his documentaries are, in a certain way, an extension of his gaze. It is up to us the viewers to decipher and image what stories lie behind the landscapes and the people captured on screen, for instance we don’t know if the stories told by the very talkative Kumi-san, to whom the movie in dedicated (she passed away in 2015),  are completely true or to what degree they’re even truthful, yet this is life and it is here presented in all its complexity, sadness and beauty.

https://player.vimeo.com/video/250935060

Inland Sea – Trailer from Laboratory X on Vimeo.

Record of Blood: Sunagawa 流血の記録・砂川 (Kamei Fumio, 1956)

Before the battle of Sanrizuka to halt the building of Narita airport, and before the massive revolts of 1968-69, there was Sunagawa and the resistance against the expansion of the American base in Tachikawa (Tokyo). In the third installment dedicated to the struggle, Kamei Fumio, the grandfather of Japanese documentary, captures the clashes and fights of the farmers, labor unions and students groups (Zengakuren among others) with the police. The always useful YIDFF, a festival that held a huge Kamei retrospective in 2001, gives us more background:

This is the third film in the Sunagawa series following The People of Sunagawa (1955) and Wheat Will Never Die(1955). Making use of the second film in the series, it explains the progress made during last year’s struggle and then documents the state of this year’s efforts. On October 12, 1956, 53 surveyors and 1,300 armed police rushed the gathered union and Zen Gaku Ren (the All Japan Federation of Self-Governing Students Associations) members who then formed a scrum to protect themselves. 278 people from both sides were injured. On the 13th, at the protest’s peak, 5,000 workers and Zen Gaku Ren members had been mobilized when the police attacked the demonstrators’ picket lines. 844 protesters and 80 police were injured. Public opinion erupted against the the violence of the armed police and the government’s lack of a policy, and on the 14th, the radio suddenly announced that the government would stop its survey. Sunagawa overflowed with joy and excitement, and a victory demo was held. On the 15th, a National People’s Rally was held to celebrate the victory of Sunagawa’s fight against the base, and protesters who had sustained grave injuries came from the hospital to address the meeting.

Stylistically the movie has many of the elements that would be used by Ogawa and his group in their Narita/Sanrizuka series: hand-held camera scenes of pure chaos shot in the midst of the fights, but also moments of peace when traditional songs are sung and meals are communally eaten by farmers, students and labor union members.
Here is a short but impactful scene of one of the first clashes between the protesters and the police in the Autumn of 1956:

It is interesting to notice that two points of view are here used to depict the situation: one that shows the fight from the outside, from a certain distance that is, and the other where the camera is engulfed by the bodies of the participants and is actively part of them. The gaze of the movie is without any doubts on the side of the inhabitants of Sunagawa, an aesthetic statement that reflects and results from the choice by the cameraman and the crew to live together with the farmers and students for several months.

Here, like in many other of his documentaries, Kamei also uses narration, but the voice explaining the timeline of the facts and commenting on what is going on on screen, sometimes with emphasis, is that of a female. In the film and in the struggle, Women, mainly middle-aged or old farmers, are always on the front-line and a vital part of the resistance, like in the documentaries about Sanrizuka (although infamously they were not an active part of the Ogawa collective itself).

It is also worth noting how the Sunagawa struggle is one of the few battles against the state/power in Japan that in the end was won by the people. If it is true that in 1959 the Supreme Court overturned the previous decision of the Tokyo District Court that found all the U.S. bases on Japanese land unconstitutional, in 1968 the plan for the extension of the base was cancelled, and finally in 1977 the base was given back to Japan. As pointed out by Dustin Wright “Without the farmers of Sunagawa, the Anpo (Japan-U.S. security treaty) protests of 1960 would have been something else entirely”, equally I think it is not too far fetched to say that without Kamei Fumio and his works on the Sunagawa struggle, the Sanrizuka/Narita series and consequently the post-war Japanese documentary landscape would have been something completely different.

Record of Blood: Sunagawa is available on DVD in Japan (no English subtitles) as a part of this box set released by Iwanami Shoten.

On Kamei’s Fighting Soldiers (戦ふ兵隊 1939)

From the archives: Kamei Fumio, Hani Susumu, and Ogawa Production in two Italian publications (1967, 1970)

The Centro sperimentale di cinematografia (Experimental film centre) in Rome is one of the oldest cinema schools in the world and the oldest in Europe. Founded in 1935, the centre nourished and helped establishing, in different degrees, the career of many important filmmakers, photographers and actors. Japanese director Masumura Yasuzō famously studied at the school for about two years at the beginning of the 1950s under luminaries such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti, an experience that without doubt helped shaping his approach to cinema and his views as a filmmaker.
In 1937 the centre started to publish its own film journal, Bianco e Nero, a monthly magazine that is still been published to this day. A couple of years back I bought a copy from 1967 (February) that has an article, penned by film critic Claudio Bertieri, on the documentaries of Hani Susumu and Kamei Fumio. In November of the previous year the Festival dei Popoli in Florence, an event dedicated to non-fiction still running today, presented a mini-retrospective on Japanese documentary, and Bertieri discusses in the short article, titled Susumu Hani, Fumio Kamei ed il documentario giapponese (Susumu Hani, Fumio Kamei and Japanese documentary), the movies he was able to see at the festival. He devotes most of the article on Hani, Yuki Matsuri (1953), Children in the Classroom (1954), Children Who Draw (1955), Twins in the Class (1956) and Hōryū-ji (1958) are the documentaries here analysed, while the rest of the piece is spent examining Kamei’s It’s Good to Live (1956) and The World of Yukara (1964), a trilogy about Ainu’s traditions. Although written in 1967 — a period when Japanese documentaries certainly were not known or available to watch as they are today (well, they are not that discussed even today…)— and with few dated observations here and there, most of the analysis remain solid to this day. Documentary as opposed to mainstream cinema ‘the man in the street here [in Europe] has not seen Louisiana Story, in Japan he does not know Hani or Kamei’, Hani’s ability to capture moments of pure innocence in children, or Kamei sensibility when portraying human suffering are spot-on insights.

Even more interesting, but for different reasons, is Cinema: Giappone e Zengakuren (Cinema: Japan and Zengakuren) a short book published in 1970 by Samonà e Savelli, later Savelli – La Nuova Sinistra, a publisher established in 1963 and the first to directly represent the extra-parliamentary left-wing in the Italian publishing world. Over the next decade the books printed by Savelli – La Nuova Sinistra, also fueled by political and social unrest in the peninsula, would gain momentum and become a cultural reference point for left-wing groups such as Potere Operaio and Lotta Continua , and for the newspaper Il Manifesto.

The book is devoted to Ogawa Shinsuke’s The Battle Front for the Liberation of Japan – Summer in Narita (1968), the first movie in the Narita/Sanrizuka Series. A brief introduction that outlines the Japanese political situation and the fierce resistance by the peasants and the students, is followed by a translation of some writings by members of Ogawa Production, just a couple of paragraphs nothing more, while the main part of the volume is a transcription of the dialogues spoken in the film. It was a period where revolutionary cinema(s) of the globe were connecting to each other and were trying to build a common front against capitalism, the people in power and the establishment. The back cover is in this regard illuminating: Comitato di Cinema e Rivoluzione: Baldelli, Filippi, Ivens, Ogawa, Rocha, Solanas, Straub (Cinema and Revolution’s committee: Baldelli, Filippi, Ivens, Ogawa, Rocha, Solanas, Straub).

Reading these two publications after almost 50 years since they were originally printed was a very fascinating discovery, Ogawa and Kamei are two of the most important documentarists in the history of world cinema and essentially the reason this blog exists. Cinema: Japan and Zengakuren in particular is revelatory not as much for the information it contains, there are some mistakes of course—in the pre-internet age Japan was still a land far away and often misrepresented—but more as an artifact of an era long gone but still able to resonate with our present. An era when the arts were explicitly politicized, in a state of never-ending struggle and ready to change the world.

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Autumn madness: Kobe Doc Fest, Ogawa Production in London and much more


It’s again Autumn madness, that time of the year when there are more cinema-related events around the world than stars in the sky: festivals, special screenings, symposia, festivals, home-movie days and again festivals, festivals and festivals. For cinephiles around the globe it is at the same time a period of blessing and curse, which festival to go to? which screenings to attend? and how not to spend all the money saved during the year…
Let’s take a look of what the Autumn madness has to offer this year in terms of Asian non-fiction cinema.

By far the biggest festival in the region, the Busan International Film Festival, kicks off on October 6th and this year is a special one for BIFF, following the problems the event has been facing in the recent 12 months (you can read more here and here).
The line-up is as always huge and varied, and if we include the market, trying to follow even only a small portion of the screenings offered is an almost impossible task. Anyway, as South and Southeast Asian documentary is concern, these are some movies that will be shown and worth seeing if you’re in Busan:

Documentary Competition

Diamond Island (Davy Chou, 2016) Cambodia/France/Germany/Thailand/Qatar

Sunday Beauty Queen (Baby Ruth Villarama, 2016) Philippines/Hong Kong, China/Japan/United Kingdon

Time to Read Poems (Lee Soojung, 2016) South Korea

A Whale of a Tale (Sasaki Megumi, 2016) Japan/United States

Absent Without Leave (Lau Kek-Huat Chen Jing-Lian, 2016) Taiwan/Malaysia

Burmese on the Roof (Oh Hyunjin, 2016) South Korea

Farming Boys (Jang Sejung Byun Siyeon, 2016) South Korea

Neighborhood (Sung Seungtaek, 2016) South Korea

Railways Sleepers (Sompot CHIDGASORNPONGSE, 2016) Thailand

SUN (Won Hoyeon, 2016) South Korea

The Crescent Rising (Sheron Dayoc, 2016) Philippines

Documentary Showcase

Becoming Who I Was (Moon Changyong Jeon Jin, 2016) South Korea

Fake (Mori Tatsuya, 2016) Japan

In Exile (Tin Win Naing, 2016) Germany/Myanmar

Ta’ang (Wang Bing, 2016) Hong Kong, China/France

The Remnants (Lee Hyuk-sang KIM Il-rhan, 2016) South Korea

WEEKENDS  (Lee Dongh, 2016) South Korea

If you want to know more and read each movie’s synopsys, do please visit BIFF’s homepage: Documentary Competition and Documentary Showcase.

One of the most interesting festivals of the season, at least for me, is the Kobe Documentary Film Festival, a small and minor event organized every year since 2009 at the Kobe Planet Film Archive. This year the main theme will be “The pleasure of children movies” and as usual a wide range of movies will be screened, a fascinating program goes under the title of CIE Films (CIE 映画) where CIE stands for “Civil Information and Education Section”. Established by the Allied Powers soon after the end of World War II as a special section of the General Headquarters (GHQ), its task was to advise the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) on policies relating to “public information, education, religion, and other sociological and cultural problems of Japan.” CIE donated about 1300 Natco 16mm projectors to the Japanese Ministry of Education to be distributed around the country, and with them short educational movies from United States, Canada and other countries in hopes of implementing the process of democratization in the country through cinema. This part of history of Japanese cinema is an important one if we want to grasp and understand the subsequent development of educational film, and by extension documentary, in the archipelago. A first part of the program is thus dedicated to foreign movies introduced in Japan by CIE, Everyone’s School (1948), Near Home (1948), Beautiful Dreamer (1949), Freedom of the Press (1951), Experimental Elementary School (1949) and Nanook of the North (1922),  with other programs continuing on the same trail and presenting Japanese educational films produced from the late 50’s to the 70’s, science, art, environment and big events (like the Expo in Osaka in 1970) are some of the themes tackled in the short movies, including 5 works created in different style of animation (puppet and stop motion paper animation).
It is worth mentioning that a program is also dedicated to the less known works (about and with children) of Shimizu Hiroshi, on of the finest Japanese filmmakers of the last century, but one who definitely deserve more space and consideration in the world cinema community. A good starting point is this DVD box set put out by Criterion, and two sets from Shochiku (the first is the same as the Criterion one) and “amazingly” both come with English subtitles.
The Festival will take place from October 21st to the 25th and will be preceded by the Home-Movie Day on October 15th, if you read Japanese the festival home page has the complete line-up.

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From Kobe to Tokyo, where the 29th Tokyo International Film Festival will open its gates on October 25th, South and Southeast Asian non-fiction cinema will be represented by a bunch of works, to keep on the radar the new endeavor by  Matsue Tetsuaki (Live Tape, Flash Back Memories), DDT: Dramatic Dream Team!! -We are Japanese Wrestlers!, a year in the life of a pro-wrestling group, Welcome to SATO, about a children’s center in the day laborers’ town of Kamagasaki, and Mamoru Hosoda’s Job: Animation Film Director“A Soulful Film Illuminating Hope”, a documentary made for TV (part of NHK’s The Professionals series) about director Mamoru Hosoda.

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Let’s leave Asia and move to Europe, and more precisely to London, where from November 17th to Dec 11th the Institute of Contemporary Arts is organizing a retrospective on Ogawa Shinsuke‘s (or better Ogawa Production) works. I’ve written many times on this blog about Ogawa and the importance of his movies for the history and development of documentary in Asia (although not yet a long and more in-depth piece), and of course a must is Forest of Pressure written by Abe Markus Nornes. This is the schedule:

Thu 17 Nov: The Oppressed Students (1967)

Sat 19 Nov: The Battle Front for the Liberation of Japan – Summer in Narita (1968) +Sanrizuka – The Three Day War (1970)

Tue 22 Nov: Sanrizuka – Peasants of the Second Fortress (1971)

Thu 24 Nov: The Wages of Resistance: The Narita Stories (Otsu Koshiro and Daishima Haruhiko, 2015)

Sat 26 Nov: Heta Village: Rending Village Time | A lecture by Markus Nornes +Sanrizuka – Heta Village (1973)

Sun 27 Nov: Filmmaking and the Way to the Village (Fukuda Katsuhiko, 1973) +Devotion: A Film About the Ogawa Productions (Barbara Hammer, 2000)

Wed 30 Nov: Dokkoi! Songs from the Bottom (1975)

Sat 10 Dec: “Nippon”: Furuyashiki Village (1982)

Sun 11: The Sundial Carved with a Thousand Years of Notches – The Magino Village Story (1986)

If you’re in London, it’s really a chance not to be missed.