越後奥三面 山に生かされた日々Echigo Okumiomote: A Traditional Mountain Village (Himeda Tadayoshi, 1984)

Completed only in 2001, although the preliminary works for its construction started 30 years prior (in 1971), the Okumiomote Dam is one of the many mammoth projects built in Japan in the latter part of the 20th century in order to satiate the country’s growing thirst for energy; the other side of the Japanese post war economic miracle.  Constructed also to prevent flooding in the Miwa water reservoir, the main purpose of the dam remains to generate hydroelectric power, a type of energy considered, and rightly so, “green”. However, as a “side effect”, the construction of dams often ends up reshaping the geographical and social landscape of the area where they are built, destroying villages, displacing people, and erasing the cultural and historical heritage of the area.

There are several documentaries that explore how the construction of a dam impacts and alters the lives of people and their histories, from Before the Flood by Li Yifan and Yu Yan in 2005, about the colossal Three Gorges Dam in China, to Mizu ni natta mura (2007) by photographer and director Ōnishi Nobuo on the Tokuyama Dam in Gifu prefecture.
Last August I had the chance to attend a screening of Echigo Okumiomote: A Traditional Mountain Village (越後奥三面 山に生かされた日々) at the newly established Kinema Neu in Nagoya. Side note, this is a mini-theater born from the ashes of the Nagoya Cinematheque, a cinema that, in turn, arised from the jishu jōei undō (自主上映運動), the independent screenings organised throughout Japan during the 1970s and 1980s, in this specific case to show Ogawa Production’s documentaries. 


Echigo Okumiomote is a documentary directed by Himeda Tadayoshi (1928-2013), a film director and visual folklorist who, in 1976, established the Center for Ethnological Visual Documentation, an organization that has produced almost 300 works, both films and videos, exploring and capturing the varied folk culture of the archipelago. Originally released in Japan in September 1984, Echigo Okumiomote was recently restored in 4K. This was my second time watching it, I took part in the crowdfunding project to restore it organised last year (2023), and so I received a temporary digital screener as a perk. 


Shot in four years, between 1980 and 1984, after Himeda visited the village for the first time in the spring of 1979, the movie follows the everyday life of the people of Okumiomote, an isolated mountain village in Niigata prefecture, located near the border with Yamagata prefecture. The village, its inhabitants, the mountains, the forest and the rivers, all together form a fascinating ecosystem and microcosm of a life dependent upon and regulated by the interaction of natural and human elements, where the former are predominant.
This lifestyle and the specific traditions, customs, and habits practiced—changed and improved for centuries by the people—would eventually disappear as a result of the construction of the dam: the village and the surrounding area would be completely submerged. The villagers were relocated to a nearby place, this was the subject of Himeda’s Echigo Okumiomote dai ni-bu furusato wa kieta ka (1996) a documentary that follows the villagers from 1984 to 1995, a film that unfortunately I have have not seen. 

While, as we learn in the first minutes of the film, there had been an anti-dam movement active since 1971, the entirety of the documentary depicts and focuses on various jobs done in the mountains and in the fields by the villagers, such as hunting, plant gathering, and harvesting, and on the rituals practiced in the hamlet. Only the last thirty minutes are a more direct reflection on the disappearance of the village, and on the act of documenting its existence, and thus preserving its memory on film. The work is narrated by Himeda himself—more like a commentary of what is happening on screen, a reflection on his and his staff experience, than a traditional narration— and his presence and that of the troupe are never hidden. Once we even see a special meeting, requested by Himeda himself, when the village’s hunters are strongly opposing the presence of the camera during an upcoming and very important bear-hunting trip.
The theatrical viewing allowed me, ça va sans dire, to focus more, and the darkness of the teather made the colours stand out even more since the very beginning: the blue screen of the title, the white of the snowy landscape, and the greens of the woods in the first opening minutes, plunge the viewer in a world rich and abundant in colours and tonalities.
It’s a didactical movie in a way, but, as written above, the narration by Himeda keeps everything very matter-of-fact. Moreover, while the pace is not fast, the film moves very quickly from one aspect of the village to the other. What slowly emerges on screen is the complex economics of the microcosms that is the village: gathering chestnuts, burning different patches of the land every three years to plant different grains, fishing, hunting bears and chamois, and gathering zenmai, a type of edible fern that, as we learned, provided half of the income for the town. This is one of the most fascinating sections of the film, families would usually go into the woods for a month, living in a shed, gathering, boiling and then drying the plants, everything onsite. There was even a school holiday in the area that allowed kids to go into the woods with their parents for about ten days.
This and all the activities in the fields, mountains, and rivers captured on film signal a natural abundance, on the one hand, and a very harsh life dictated by the natural elements and the cycle of seasons for the people of the village, on the other. I think it is this contrast, together with the specificity of the practices developed in the area for centuries, that makes Echigo Okumiomote a unique and enriching viewing experience, especially seen now, 30 years after everything was filmed.

There is no doubt that by focusing mainly on ancient practices—more on this later—the documentary can be read as a slightly traditionalist work, that is, a film that glorifies the way of the past. While this take might be partly true, I think the images, the time spent by the crew with the people of the village, and the care with which Himeda and his group recorded and preserved aspects of a way of life about to disappear, make it nonetheless a compelling chapter in the history of Japanese documentary cinema. 


An interesting statement by a responsible of the Center for Ethnological Visual Documentation, and, if I’m not mistaken, a member of the crew that was with Himeda in Niigata, posted online in August 2024, sheds light on the process behind the making of Echigo Okumiomote. According to his words, I’m paraphrasing, this is not a film that records the real life of the Okumiomote community in 1984, but a film that captured the various inherited customs before they were submerged under the dam. I think this statement could and should be read more as a stylistic choice than a reflection about what was going on at the time. Also it is worth adding that documentary is always a form of “fiction”, a construction that cannot reproduce or represent the totality of “life” or “lifestyle” of a certain area and a certain time. Documentary is not a point of view on the real, but a real point of view.
In 1984 Japan was about to enter into its bubble economy phase, and lifestyle was changing even in rural areas. By focusing their camera on old and traditional practices still alive in the village, and not on the changes brought by modern life, Himeda and his crew stayed true to their ethnographic and folkloric approach. Not to the extent done in Oku-Aizu kijishi (奥会津の木地師, 1976), when the practice of building a temporary shed in the woods was basically exhumed and brought to life one more time for the camera, but nonetheless, it is a cinematic choice that functions as a philosophical foundation for the film. 

The documentary pairs very well, in my opinion, with Haneda Sumiko’s Ode to Mt. Hayachine (早池峰の賦 ,1982), filmed almost during the same years in the mountains of Iwate prefecture, although their approach could not be more different. On the one hand, Himeda is interested, as we have seen, to preserve and document on film practices on the cusp of oblivion, on the other, Haneda, while documenting an ancient tradition (Kagura), seems to be  more interested in the changes happening in the two towns and how ritual practices have evolved and are evolving in time. 

Echigo Okumiomote was accompanied by a publication of a massive volume about the life of the village, an ethnographic study and document of the area that is as impressive as the film itself.

Archival film practices, found footage documentary, and compilation documentary in Japan. /2 An evolving terminology?

The second part of this ongoing series (first is here) is about words and the use, or the lack thereof, of certain terminology in Japanese cinema (studies). This is also the article I am less confident about, since it is, strictly speaking, about language, a field I am not an expert in. The following paragraphs are, thus, more a tentative search for words that might not even exist, than a proper analysis or definitive statement.

An evolution of the two articles can be read here. 

A necessary disclaimer: I am by no means advocating for a certain superiority of the English language (or French, Italian, etc.) over the Japanese, nor for a codification of a way to construct a documentary or a film that Japanese cinema should follow and adopt. My effort aspires more to be a survey of a situation that is open to external influences and thus in flux and evolving. I am also not advocating for a perfect correspondence and total translatability between languages, on the contrary, I am all for letting the specificities of geographical areas (not necessarily countries) and groups of people express themselves: different languages, dialects, political conditions and cultures give birth to different types of cinemas, and more broadly, to a diverse approach towards visual expression.  

After all, in Japan this linguistic specificity goes back to the dawn of cinema and is still alive today: the galaxy of non-fiction films in Japanese has been rendered, throughout the years, with a variety of words such as ‘kiroku eiga (record film), the senden eiga (propaganda film), (…)  the bunka eiga (culture film), and, finally, the dokyumentarii eiga‘ (Nornes 2003), and bunka eiga is still used today to categorize and award non-fiction films by the prestigious film magazine Kinema Junpo. It is interesting for the discussion to note how the term bunka eiga has a tendency to denote a certain type of non-fiction cinema that tackle historical and especially social themes, but without experimenting too much with the cinematic language. 

While the absence of a terminology does not necessarily correspond to a lack of a certain mode of doing non-fiction cinema, what interests and fascinates me, is how the scarcity (yet to be proved) of certain documentary and experimental practices in the archipelago, is reflected in the lack of a terminology (again, yet to be proved), and how these two phenomena are related. 

In search for words

As discussed in the previous entry, following the English literature on the subject, I have decided to use the terms archival film practices, found footage documentary and compilation documentary in the title. A constellation of expressions that, together with recycled cinema and collage film, better describes the field I’m here analyzing: a series of cinematic practices that employ found footage and archival images to create works of non-fiction, and visual essays.

That being said, the boundaries between what these practices are and what they are not, are often nebulous. As nebulous are the English terms used, a very shaky ground to build upon, but at least these expressions can function as a starting point. In Japanese, as far as I could gather from my inquiries, there is, again, a scarcity in the specific terminology, or at least, in the use of it .

The English term compilation documentary, for instance, appears not to have a corresponding Japanese translation. That is to say, it is rather rendered with sentences such as 映像素材を映画に編集した (edited the footage into a film), or 映像素材をコラージュした作品 (a work made of a collage of footage), and so on. 

Recycled cinema and collage film are definitely two terms that point towards a practice more in tune with experimental filmmaking than documentary. While the former appears not to have a correspondent word in Japanese, the latter, コラージュ映画 collage film, or 映像コラージュ video collage, is a term that has been used in the archipelago for decades. It is probably so because the term collage came to film studies from and through the pictorial arts and the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century (Braque, Picasso). For instance, I found an essay written in 1998 for the Image Forum Festival by scholar Kitakōji Takashi about a program titled FAKE THE TIME dedicated to collage films—コラージュ映画 in the original title—shot on video or on 16mm by artist such as Johan Grimonprez, Jay Rosenblatt, or Martin Arnold.

As for the term found footage documentary, the situation is more muddled, since in Japan found footage horror is a subgenre, often overlapping with mockumentary, that enjoys great popularity (Noroi: the Curse, and in general the movies by Shiraishi Kōji). Searching ファウンドフッテージドキュメンタリー (found footage documentary) on the internet resulted in a plethora of horror movies and related papers, the only time I found ファウンドフッテージ used in a non-fiction context, was when the articles were translations of discussions in English. 

Different is the case of アーカイヴァルドキュメンタリー or アーカイヴァル映画 (archival documentary or archival film), a term that seems to have gained currency in recent years, in concomitance with the so called “archival turn”. Especially when the writings are discussing the films of Sergei Loznitsa, an author whose works have been screened in Japanese cinemas on several occasions, and some of which are even available on streaming platforms. It is not far-fetched to say that probably the usage of the term started in Japan with the films of the Ukrainian author. So far, I have not found examples whereアーカイブヴァルドキュメンタリー is used to describe a film made in Japan, again my (re)search has not been deep, but I believe it to be indicative nonetheless.  

In the next installment I will tackle some works made in Japan that fit the categories here discussed.

References:

Markus Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era Through Hiroshima, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

.

Archival film practices, found footage documentary, and compilation documentary in Japan. /1 The story of an absence? 

This is a first in a series of short articles dedicated to archival film practices in Japan, an umbrella term that points towards a constellation made of found footage documentaries, compilation documentary, recycle cinema, and collage films.

An evolution of the two short articles can be read here.

While the practice of making found footage and compilation documentaries out of archival material is and has been widespread in Europe and in the U.S. for quite some time—I’m guilty of knowing too little about the history of these films in other parts of the world—researching these cinematic practices in Japan resulted, for me, in a deafening silence and in a dead end.
This and the following articles are an attempt to make sense and examine this scarcity, and an opportunity to focus on the few works made in Japan that can be included into these “categories”.

In 1947, French filmmaker Nicole Védrès made Paris 1900, a compilation film assembled from footage shot between 1900 and 1914, while in 1965 Gianfranco Baruchello and Alberto Grifi experimented with found footage images from Hollywood movies destined to be trashed in Uncertain Verification, and in 1987 in From the Pole to the Equator, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi reworked the colonialist gaze of material shot in 1925 into something very different. These are just some of the most significant examples of compilation film or found footage cinema from the last century. Moreover, in the past few decades the practice of recycle cinema, another term to add to the constellation, has seen a surge in production and quality, brought about by the technological advance and the availability of archival material, but also by a will to inquire the meaning of reassembling images from the past and its impact in the present. Filmmakers as diverse as Bill Morrison, Haroun Farocki, Jonas Mekas, and Sergej Loznitsa have all extensively explored the possibilities and challenged the limits of archival film practices, assembling insightful and boundary-pushing works.

What about the history of these film practices in Japan?
To my knowledge and according to my brief research, in the archipelago this is a story of an absence, as it were, both in the documentary and in the experimental field. Considering that Japan has a long, rich, and heterogeneous history of documentary filmmaking and of experimental cinema, this came to me as a surprise, but also as a topic worth of further investigation.
There are, naturally, exceptions—I will touch on them in the the following articles dedicated to the subject—and there are several documentaries made in Japan that use indeed archival images, especially those dealing with and depicting the Pacific War or the social revolts of the late 1960s. However, these type of works—The tetralogy of documentaries (2014-2024) directed by Daishima Haruhiko about the Sanrizuka struggle and the students movements, or Boy Soldiers: The Secret War in Okinawa (2018) by Mikami Chie and Ōya Hanayo come to mind—are usually made by combining interviews, reenactments, newly shot scenes, and narration, thus I’m not sure they can completely count as the type of practices discussed here. In addition, the archival material in these films is usually used more to demonstrate a point than to provoke a sensation or a reflection on the status of the images.

I’m aware that this is a very debatable definition and stance, someone might argue that those are indeed archival documentaries, but I tend to side with the definitions provided on the matter by some scholars, who identify archival film practices as acts of creating something novel and aesthetically complex and layered. Alberto Brodesco and Maurizio Cau, for instance, state that ‘In general terms, the expression [archival cinema] describes the operation of reuse, recycling and reappropriation of material shot in the past, which is recomposed to produce new film texts’ (2023), and according to Eric Thouvenel ‘found footage films are far more than the “documentation” of an era; their significance is not located at the level of the represented event, but with the events occurring within the representation itself.’ (2008)
Moreover, when writing about Jay Leyda and his landmark volume on the subject, Bill Nichols points out that ‘the core idea of the compilation film revolves around not only montage and photomontage but also ostranenie, the basic tenet of Russian formalism as put forward by Victor Shklovsky: “the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.”’ (2014)
Furthermore, I believe it is also a matter of the length and the quantity of the material used: the more archival images or found footage are utilised, the more the films approach an idea of recycle cinema that opens new meanings for the images assembled, ‘in such a way as to produce new knowledge about history that evokes a deeper, more sensual, and experiential understanding of the past.’ (Russell 2018)

As for the reasons of the scarcity of these practices in the archipelago, the first that comes to mind is the incredible difficulty in obtaining and using images from films from Japanese production companies. Anyone who has ever tried to organize events, or just use still images from movies for publications is, sadly, well aware of this madness, and even when the permission is granted, more often than not, big studios are asking very high prices.
However, this cannot be the only reason, since there are alternatives, such as using found footage from home-movies or other non-commercial or amateur sources. In the the next articles, I will write about a couple of exceptions, works that can be described as belonging to the categories here discussed, and that make use of some of the aforementioned archival alternatives.

References:

Alberto Brodesco and Maurizio Cau, ed. Found footage. Il cinema, i media, l’archivio. Cinema e Storia. Rivista di studi interdisciplinari n. 2023, Rubettino, 2023.

Jay Leyda, Films Beget Films: A Study of the Compilation Film, Hill and Wang, 1971.

Bill Nichols, Remaking History: Jay Leyda and the Compilation Film, Film History
Vol. 26, No. 4, Indiana University Press, 2014.

Catherine Russel, Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices, Duke University Press, 2018.

Eric Thouvenel, How “Found Footage” Films Made Me Think Twice about Film History, in Cinéma & Cie, Milano University Press, 2008.


Reassessing the human: three experimental documentaries by Oda Kaori

I’ve decided to publish here my essay on three films by Oda Kaori that was originally meant to be published in an international film magazine (things have stalled, unfortunately). I took the decision because in the meantime Oda’s career (the piece was written almost five years ago) has evolved significantly, with more exhibitions, art installations, political and social stances, and films (Gama, and the Underground project).
It goes without saying that now I would write the piece quite differently, mainly in style but also regarding the content. Posting here this short essay does not preclude that in the future I might return to write on the subject; on the contrary, it gives me the chance and the peace of mind to turn the page and freshly reassess the filmography of one of the most fascinating artists working in Japan today.

The essay is available in PDF format here

April 2020

Reassessing the human: three experimental documentaries by Oda Kaori

 “The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness.”[1]

A worker sits down and takes a break. In the deep belly of a mine and enveloped in a pitch black surrounding, he bites a red apple. His helmet lamp provides the only few blades of light in a scene of almost Vermeer-like beauty. In the preceding scenes the noise from the machinery at work in the mine is so unbearable that the words are oftentimes superfluous or just a waste of energy. The life in the mine is only silence or cacophony: there is no middle ground. It is an alien landscape, both visual and sonic, where the human is just one element among several. The beauty of the moment derives from the interplay between darkness and light, from the silence after the wall of noise that precedes it, and from the empathy towards the man conveyed by the camera. 

The scene is one of most significant and impressive passages in Aragane, a feature documentary shot, edited, sound-designed and directed by Oda Kaori in 2015. Oda made her debut in 2010 with the short Thus a Noise Speaks, a personal documentary that unflinchingly explored her coming out as gay and the subsequent reactions from her family, especially her mother. The experience of Thus a Noise Speaks, one where the camera is also used, in Oda’s own words, “as a weapon for revenge against my mother,” was a fundamental experience for the young Japanese director, who was 23 years old at the time: Not only because it was a way of expressing her true self, but also because it was a chance to grasp the incredible power that filmmaking can have, and to realize how harmful a camera pointed at someone can be.

Born in Japan, but partly educated in the U.S.[2] and with three formative years spent in Bosnia, Oda’s artistic arc began from a position of hybridity from the very beginning and afterward wandered around the globe in search of places and stories to explore. The sense of displacement experienced and expressed in her debut short, and her background as a so-called “halfie,”[3] opened the gates for a cinema conceived as a nomadic wandering, and an artistic path that in crossing borders, cultures, genres, and styles, explores what it means to be a subject in flux and always open, as the best ethnographers always are, to what the world has to offer[4]. Moving from one geographical area to the next, from Japan to Bosnia, back to Japan and then to Mexico—but a Mexico filtered through Mayan mythology—Oda’s filmography expresses the idea of a nomadic cinema not interested in broad and essentialist discourses about cultures, but more focused on specific places and the collective experiences and memories linked to such places.

Towards an alien phenomenology

The first (and to this day, most artistically accomplished) example of this approach arrived for Oda in 2015, when Aragane was presented at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. A work, as previously mentioned, that she directed, photographed, edited, and sound-designed, but also a “product” of Bela Tarr’s film.factory, the short-lived film school based in Sarajevo and established by the Hungarian director in 2013, a place where Japanese director Oda studied for three years.

Aragane, meaning ore or small pieces of stone in Japanese, was shot in a Bosnian coal mine as a project for film.factory. An immersive and hypnotic sensorial experience, the movie starts, and thus sets the tone for the rest of the work, with a pounding noise and a close-up of a machine. The scene is followed by a short depiction of life on the surface, with workers preparing and completing various tasks before commencing the deep dive into the mine. Once in, we’re in a different kind of world, one where the only lights rippling and dancing in the total darkness are those of the headlights of the workers and of Oda herself, and one where the noise is so deafening and monotonous it turns into a sort of alien music.

Aragane is not a direct inquiry into the harsh conditions of the people working in the mine (although that is something that eventually and necessarily emerges) but more an attempt to convey on screen the time and space of the coal mine as experienced by the people working in it. Creating a sensory experience of the place, an experience constructed through the interplay of machines, darkness, head lamps and the miners, Oda hints at a different field of perception and at a different type of time. For most of the duration of the film, we don’t really know what’s going on and who is doing what: what is missing is a central orientation, a focal point around which the movie can organize itself in the usual sense.

“The darkness, no sunlight, no moonlight”

“timber dust floating”

“pump, electric saws”

“grey fog”

“steam evaporating from T-shirts”

“a flickering head lamp sways”

“A small universe within a universe”.

“I see because there is light”

“In this underground world people and machine carry the same weight”[5]

Once we get accustomed to the things, events and musicality of the noise presented on screen, though, everything slowly begins to make sense. What starts to surface from the images, sounds, tracking shots and slow and hypnotic camera movements, is the time and the materiality of the mine itself. When a long and dark scene towards the end of the movie, with the carts ascending to the surface of the earth, is brutally interrupted by a static image of the outside of the mine covered in snow, it is almost like a revelation. After an hour of darkness inside the bowels of the earth experiencing a different perception of time and space, the whiteness of the snow, the colors of the clothes and those of the equipment hanging are so sharp and bright that gazing upon them almost induces vertigo.

With the sensory and cacophonic descent into the alien landscape that is the life in the mine, Aragane is also an exploration of the relation between the people working inside and the place itself. This is a crucial point in understanding Oda’s works: her films are, for the most part, and especially on first viewing, an overwhelming visual and sensory experience that seem to focus more on the non-human elements of what is filmed. However, when fully absorbed, they reveal the true potential of what her cinema can do at its best: establish a cartography of non-human landscapes and, at the same time, reflect on the role and position of the human element in this “new world.” It is not by chance that the central part of the movie, the core and one of the most significant scenes in the entire documentary, is the beautiful scene that we have described at the very beginning of this essay.

“Tell me how I can touch a butterfly without breaking her wings”[6]

The preoccupation towards people is one of the central themes of Towards a Common Tenderness. Released in 2017, the movie is many things: a visual poem structured like a diary about the experience Oda had while filming her first and second works, but at the same time a reflection on the act of filming, and, as in Thus a Noise Speaks, the power the camera has when pointed at someone.

The movie starts with a beautiful murmur of voices and sounds, with Oda herself pronouncing lines from her memories and reading from Notes on Cinematography by Robert Bresson and Rosemary Menzies’ Poems for Bosnia. It then moves to a shot of her first movie (a shot of a shot) of her mother crying when Oda comes out. The movie is, in fact, structured as a long letter sent to Oda’s mother, in which the director speaks directly to her mother about her experiences with the camera and everything that happened to her after she decided to become a filmmaker. Toward a Common Tenderness uses a mixed visual style, with abstract and poetic images intertwined with shots recorded by Oda in Bosnia and Herzegovina during her period at Bela Tarr’s school, outtakes not used in Aragane, and other images from unfinished projects.

The central part of the documentary is when Oda was a guest at a family of Romani descent for a week. When talking about this experience, she recalls how she couldn’t finish filming the project because she could not stare at the old husband and go deeper inside him, depicting the loss and grief his family went through when one of their members passed away. Rosemary Menzies’s poem shown at the end of the movie through extreme close-ups of the printed page is exemplary of the conundrum that haunts and informs the whole movie. “Tell me how can I touch a butterfly without breaking her wings.” How can we gracefully depict the beauty of things without destroying it? How can we film reality without annihilating it or destroying the things and the people in it?

“…reveals the base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself”[7]

If Aragane is a movie revolving formally around darkness, slow movement, and repetition, and Towards a Common Tenderness a reflection on the riddle that is the act of filming, Cenote is a movie that combines the two approaches.

It is about water, light and their connection to the cosmos, but also about people and their collective memories. Cenotes, or ts’onot in a form of Mayan, are natural sinkholes found in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, the only source of water for people living far away from rivers or lakes, and considered sacred places in ancient Mayan civilization.

Abstract images of the underwater world inside the cenotes intercut with people reciting, almost whispering, old Mayan poems, and other voices, in Spanish, recalling memories about life near these natural pits. Swimming in the water, the camera is enfolded in a reality that is perceived and created by the play of water and light. The first ten minutes, the more experimental part of the work, are in this sense an absolute bliss, an exhilarating and liberating artistic experience that brings us back to the womb of the earth, to the origin of life, or, as one of the quoted Mayan poems states, to the place where the sun sinks, disappears and reappears every day. Blotches and blades of colors flash on screen, drops of water dance like subatomic particles on the surface of water, and fish swim as peacefully as ancient deities. While this formal experimentation is noticeable in the path blazed by Aragane, a cinema of sensation that shifts the representation of humanity towards the periphery of reality, the non-human elements presented in Cenote expand further, reaching the spiritual and the mythical.

Another novelty that Cenote brings when compared to Aragane or even Towards a Common Tenderness is the presence, throughout the film, of a dialogic tension, both aesthetically and thematically, between words and noise, light and water, grainy images and digital sharpness, mythical time and geological time, and people and natural elements. Using 8mm film (Super8) and images shot underwater with an iPhone, Oda creates a difference and an aesthetic space, a poetic “ma” (間) that reflects and has a parallel in the space between the two worlds explored: the sensory experience taking place underwater, on the one hand, and the close-ups of faces and the voices of people on the other. Faces of people, but also animals, chicken, butterflies, dogs, cats, and local festivals are filmed in 8mm, while the world inside the cenotes is filmed with an iPhone. The dialog between these two types of images, the intercut between these two worlds, becomes the structural backbone around which the movie develops.

The sound and words spoken in the movie, folklore, mythical stories, memories of people who live near a cenote, and legends of children who drowned in them are all weaved together, recited and spoken in Yucatec Maya and Spanish. The stories told are important, of course, but the musicality of the words is an element that, paired with the underwater sounds and the distorted noise captured or created by the camera’s microphone, form a sonic tapestry of rare beauty. The soundscape used in Cenote, more than the one adopted in Aragane, where the human voices were relegated to very few words, hints at an idea of the cosmos in which humans are part of a larger dimension, both in time and space. The images confirm this larger scope on a geological scale: the sinkholes are a product of a celestial encounter between a shower of meteorites and the earth’s crust, but at the same time, a mythical place for ancient Mayan civilization, a portal and a threshold where, according to the Popol Vuh, this world and the afterlife touch each other. The connection between these two realms is an important part of Cenote, and, as a matter of fact, the movie also works as an exploration of collective memories and ancient mythologies, both still very present in the area and the villages around these sinkholes. The dead (via the poems), the women sacrificed in the pits, and all the legends and stories retold by the villagers, form a layer where the past, real or mythical, and the present coexist. This present-permeated-by-the-past has a phantasmic quality channeled into the movie by the images in 8mm, which always feel distant from the here and now, and by the voices in Spanish and Yucatec Maya, always out of sync and hovering above the images, as it were. The connection between the dead and the living is made more explicit in a brief and beautiful passage when the movie gazes, bathed in a frail and milky light, at funeral rituals in the area, when human bones and skulls are brushed, polished and collected with extreme care as remnants of past lives.

Conclusion

Like some of the works made at the Sensory Ethnography Lab[8], and to the cinema of Bela Tarr and Wang Bing, Oda’s filmmaking has, in the past years, built a unique trajectory in the film world: a brand of experimental documentary born at the intersection between visual anthropology and a cinema that prioritizes a pre-reflective engagement with the world. The result is an oeuvre that traces and establishes new connections between people, things, memories and the landscape they inhabit and from which they emerge. The human element is thus repositioned and reframed according to a different vision of reality, compared to one that often dominates the field of documentary, especially in contemporary Japan. This artistic approach is also traceable in her works as a painter: for instance, in a series of CD covers of Aragane’s soundtrack she painted by hand. Each cover is a thick impasto depiction of a scene from the movie, or a memory from her filming inside the mine. Another example is a series of portraits of women Oda made inspired by the story of the women who were thrown into the cenotes as ritual sacrifices. In these paintings, the faces of these women seem to resurface from the water like deities, made by the recollection of what Oda experienced while filming and swimming in these sinkholes.

Visual and sonic experimentation which engages with the world and creates a cinema that, while reassessing the human element and abandoning a human-centered perspective on reality, continues at the same time to show a deep care, affection and interest toward people. This is the biggest accomplishment of Oda’s artistic trajectory so far.

[1] Paul Cézanne, quoted in Cezanne’s Doubt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1945. Later in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. by Hubert and Patricia Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern, 1964).

[2] She studied film at Hollins University in Virginia.

[3] “People whose national or cultural identity is mixed by virtue of migration, overseas education, or parentage” Lila Abu-Lughod, Writing Against Culture, in Fox, Richard G. Hg, Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe, S. 137–162.

[4] More than fifty years before, a similar approach to documentary was proposed by Matsumoto Toshio: “Matsumoto’s avant-garde documentary theory focused instead on the revelation of the existential force of an object or the actual people filmed through the process of subjective film-making” Hata Ayumi, ‘Filling our empty hands’: Ogawa Productions and the politics of subjectivity in H. Fujiki, A. Phillips ed. The Japanese Cinema Book, Bloomsbury 2020.

[5] From Toward a Common Tenderness

[6] Poem by Rosemary Menzies’ quoted in Toward a Common Tenderness

[7] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ibid.

[8] At the time of Aragane’s release, Oda had not seen any works made by, or in connection with, SEL.

Film journal, spring 2024 (part two): Mother of Many Children, Clouds of War

note: I took the liberty of writing about a non-Asian documentary today, and it might become the new rule…

Mother of Many Children (1977) is the first feature-length documentary by Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin, one of the towering figures in contemporary non-fiction cinema, and an artist who has been making films about indigenous struggle, representation, and from a Native perspective for almost five decades. Mother of Many Children is not only her first feature-length film, but also one of her best works, in my opinion—I personally think Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993), and Incident at Restigouche (1984) are her two other masterpieces. Insightful, touching, multilayered, and beautifully constructed, it focuses on several Native women of different indigenous people, and from different backgrounds, living in Canada at the time (1977). As Randolph Lewis poignantly notes in his book Alanis Obomsawin The Vision of a Native Filmmaker (University of Nebraska Press, 2006):

Mother of Many Children works on a horizontal plane: rather than diving deep into one or two subjects, it moves around the Canadian landscape every few minutes, pausing to focus on a woman of interest, to take in her story, before moving to another interviewee, often someone quite different. The result of this lateral movement is a feeling that all these women are connected, despite differences in language, tribal affiliation, educational background, and geography.

Mother of Many Children is available on the National Board of Canada’s homepage: https://www.nfb.ca/film/mother_of_many_children/

Mother of Many Children

Clouds of War 戦雲（いくさふむ）(2024) is the latest documentary by journalist and filmmaker Mikami Chie, a director who, in her previous works (The Targeted Village, Boy Soldiers: the Secret War in Okinawa, We Shall Overcome) has been focusing on the current situation in the Ryūkyū archipelago (Okinawa), its complex geopolitical history, and on the resistance of its people against the several American bases operating in the islands.
Clouds of War was shot in the span of eight year, starting in 2015, and documents the construction of military ports and ammunition depots by the Japanese Self-defense Force, and more broadly the general militarisation happening in Okinawa main island, Yonaguni Island, Miyako Island, and Ishigaki Island. These spine-chilling changes affecting the land and its citizens, such as the construction of underground shelters built in Yoneguni, or a plan for the evacuation, to Kyūshū, of all the inhabitants, are done in preparation to the next war on the horizon, the one between China and Taiwan.
If the picture painted by the documentary is as interesting as it is frightening, less inspired is the way the documentary interweaves all the footage together. The style is journalistic, like in the previous works of the director, but there’s here a lack of focus, in my opinion. It’s very informative nonetheless, and there are some very powerful and profound moments.

Clouds of War

Film journal, spring 2024 (part one): The Minamata Mural, A Grasscutter’s Tale

Both for their importance in the history of Japanese documentary, and for their intrinsic artistic value, the two films below would deserve a longer and deeper analysis, but time is always scarce here… perhaps in the future…

For some reason, in my exploration of the documentaries made during his long career by Tsuchimoto Noriaki about the Minamata disease and its victims, The Minamata Mural (1981) completely escaped me, at least until now. The film asks the delicate question of how it is possible to represent and depict the suffering and the struggles of Minamata’s victims, and more broadly, how artists can express, through their medium of choice, the sorrow caused by other tragedies as well, such as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the suffering inflicted to minority groups in Japan.
Tsuchimoto and his crew follow Maruki Iri and Akamatsu Toshiko, a couple of artists working on a series of panels dedicated to the people of Minamata, showing us the couple at work on the mural, and during their visits in Kyūshū, when they meet some of the people affected by the disease. By showing how these encounters, especially with two young girls, influenced and changed the perspective of the two artists, Tsuchimoto is also, subtly but obviously, reflecting on his own (at the time) decade-long endeavour in capturing and siding with the people in Minamata.
The segment around the middle of the film, when activist and writer Ishimure Michiko reads her poems over the close-ups of the huge mural, is a spine-chilling and heart-wrenching masterpiece of a sequence. For me, one of the most impressive qualities of the scene, besides the poetic words by Ishimure, is how powerfully the camera is able to convey the intensity of the paintings.
Another striking aspect of the documentary is how Tsuchimoto and his cameramen are able to capture and convey on film the beauty of the young people affected by the disease. Shiranui Sea (1975), probably the peak of Tsuchimoto’s career, has a balance and a grace in depicting the people of Minamata, particularly the young ones, that can be found here as well.

One of the two cameramen in The Minamata Mural is Segawa Jun’ichi, a director of photography who, among other films, worked in the seminal Snow Trail—directed by Taniguchi Senkichi in 1947, from a script by Kurosawa Akira, and starring Mifune Toshirō in its first role—and with Haneda Sumiko in Ode to Mt. Hayachine— he was mainly in charge of filming the mountains—a documentary filmed around the same period as the one here discussed. It would be interesting to know if Segawa shot the paintings, was involved in filming the people and scenery in Minamata, or was involved in both (I’m inclined to think it’s the former).

The Minamata Mural

“This linking of memories, this setting remembrances in motion, is not a nostalgia but an immanence,”

Crisca Bierwert

A Grasscutter’s Tale (1986) is one of the Japanese “documentary treasures” I have been meaning to watch for quite a long time. The occasion finally came last April, when it was screened at Athénée Français Cultural Center in Tokyo, part of a very interesting retrospective about resistance and political struggle on film, organised to launch the new documentary by Daishima Haruhiko, Gewalto no mori – kare wa Waseda de shinda (ゲバルトの杜　彼は早稲田で死んだ, 2024).

The film focuses on grandma Someya, born in 1899, one of the farmers who lived and worked on the land to-be-expropriated for the construction of Narita Airport. She fiercely opposed the second phase of the airport, a stance that severed her relationship with her family, and resulted in her living alone on her land.  The film consists of nineteen stories narrated by grandma Someya’s own words, and mainly of images of the old lady cleaning her field. 

Part of the Sanrizuka notes  Fukuda Katsuhiko (1943-1998) took after he left Ogawa Production at the end of the 1970s, after the collective left for Yamagata, the film is a crucial work to better understand the history and development of documentary practices in Japan, in that it heralds a shift in the way documentary was conceived, theorised and practiced in the archipelago. The film occupies at least two spaces: militant cinema with a focus on the resistance of one person (Someya-san) against the construction of Narita Airport on the one side, and a mode of cinema that explores the different (hi)stories traversing a physical space, Sanrizuka, and how these intersect with the personal history of one individual. Moreover, seen from a different perspective, A Grasscutter’s Tale can also be considered as an example of “oral cinema”, that is, a cinema that connects and activates the untapped potential of storytelling and the spoken word in relation with the moving image. By combining images and tales that are parallel and do not touch each other, so to speak—as previously noted, the images show mainly Someya-san working on her field—the film constructs a segmented and open portrait of a life, a poetic bricolage made of stories and images that invites the viewers to wander inside of this personal/historical “landscape”.

The film has an episodic structure and is composed of chapters, some funny and some tragic, such as the story of her sons who died, her husband who worked as barber, a strange dream remembered, the time she first came to Sanrizuka, or how she once ate only matches as a child to avoid starvation. Sometimes A Grasscutter’s Tale edges towards the experimental. In the segment about the dream, the screen is completely dark except a bright light on the upper left corner, in another, the voice of the director explain (if I’m not wrong) again on a black screen, how the reenactment of an episode from the old lady’s life was scrapped from the final work at the request of her son, who was in it.
The screening I attended was in 16mm, a rare chance to better appreciate the colours and the texture of the work. The greens of the crops and of the grass are almost tactile, and the time-lapse scene of the setting Sun, here a fiery red, is akin to that in Magino Village, a very different film, but a work that nonetheless shares many common traits with A Grasscutter’s Tale.

1日240時間 240 Hours in One Day (Teshigahara Hiroshi, 1970)

Held in Osaka from March 15th to September 13th, the 1970 World Exposition was, along with the Tokyo Olympics of 1964, one of the events that most reflected the changes happening in Japanese society, and especially in the world of art, between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. According to scholar Yoshimoto Midori, Expo ‘70, as it is commonly known, has become in this century “one of the most frequently discussed topics in the Japanese art world”, and the subject and the setting of many comic books, movies, and books. It is worth mentioning here at least Urasawa Naoki’s manga 20th Century Boys (1999-2006), and Crayon Shin-chan: Storm-invoking Passion! The Adult Empire Strikes Back (2001) directed by Hara Keiichi.

Many of the people invited to participate in the event were part of a wave of artists that was affected by and shaped the 1960s, when art was conceived and practiced as a form of political activism and social resistance, a period kicked off in 1960 with the ANPO protests. The act of participating in Expo ‘70 was considered in itself, by many, a betrayal of what was theorized in the previous decade: a “selling out” to power and a symbolic gesture that (re)institutionalized art, after the urban and rural revolts of the sixties had sought a path outside of the official circles. However, for some of the criticized artists, the event “provided unprecedented opportunities to realize ambitious and big-budget projects that would otherwise never have been conceived” (Yoshimoto), and pushed artistic boundaries, helping to explore unkown creative landscapes.

One of the artists who joined Expo ‘70 was filmmaker and theorist Matsumoto Toshio. In the second half of the 1960s, with some of his short films, Matsumoto had reflected on the protests against ANPO, and more broadly on the artistic and political fervor of the time. For Expo ‘70, Matsumoto created Space Projection Ako, a work projected on ten screens inside a pavilion dedicated to textiles production. On the occasion of the previous World Exposition, held in Montreal in 1967, many artists had already begun to experiment with multi-projections films, for instance Canada ’67 by Walt Disney Production, a work in which the audience was surrounded on 360 degrees by nine large screens, where images of Canada were displayed. On the one hand, art funded by large companies, Space Projection Ako by a textile company, Canada ’67 by a telephone company. On the other, an experimentation that explored the limits, possibilities, and role of visual media, and intermedia, in contemporary society, thus casting a fascinating glance into the evolution of the relationship between technology and humanity. 

It is in this socio-historical context that Teshigahara Hiroshi and Abe Kōbō collaborated once again—together they had already made at least three masterpieces: Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another, and The Man Without a Map— to make what would become their last join effort, 240 Hours in One Day (1日240時間).  A short visual experiment directed by Teshigahara and based on an idea by Abe, 240 Hours in One Day was sponsored and screened at the Automobile Pavilion during Expo ‘70. Rediscovered and restored only in recent years, the short film was shown on a couple of occasions in the past decade, and last March at the Osaka Asian Film Festival, a screening event I was lucky to attend. 

…but they say that the passage of time that the dream fish experiences is quite different from when it is awake. The speed is remarkably slower, and one has the feeling that a few terrestrial seconds are drawn out to several days or several weeks.
The Box Man, Abe Kōbō

The short film was originally projected at the World Exposition on four screens, three arranged horizontally, the fourth, trapezoidal in shape, placed almost on the ceiling. At the Osaka Film Festival, the work was projected on one flat screen with the 4 original screens forming an upside down T, so to speak (the still that opens this article gives hopefully an idea of it).

240 Hours in One Day is set in a city of the near future, where Dr. X and his female assistant have successfully developed a miraculous drug. When inhaled, this medicine, an accelerator known as Acceletin, allows the user to function ten times faster than normal, perhaps a reference and homage to the protagonist of Alfred Bester’s novel The Stars My Destination (1956), or Ishinomori Shōtarō’s Cyborg 009. At first, people celebrate the newfound freedoms offered to them by this miraculous drug that extends a single day to 240 hours, but gradually things start to change.
Teshigahara experiments with a dizzying combination of genres, and the tone is always playful and joyous, a bit all over the place to be honest, and probably by design, because the work does not take itself too seriously. In this regard, it reminded me of the best and most delirious PR movies (industrial films) of the 1960s, such as Noda Shinkichi’s Nitiray A La Carte (ニチレ・ア・ラ・カルト) (1963) or Kuroki Kazuo’s 恋の羊が海いっぱい (1961).

Science fiction, comedy, musical, animation, documentary, and metafiction are weaved together in an aesthetic divertissement that is also a light critic of the obsession of our society with speed and production. The film also offers an obvious reference to the changes produced by the invention of means of transportation; after all, the film was screened in the Automobile Pavilion. What particularly stood out to me is the inventiveness of the different cinematic styles used, and how the four screens are used to create a cinematic viewing experience that is spatially different from the usual one: the characters move freely from one screen to the other, and sometimes each screen represents a distinctive point of view on the same scene.

As pointed out by Tomoda Yoshiyuki, professor and scholar that did a short but fascinating talk after the screening, in the last scenes of the film, when the doctor runs away and spins so rapidly that he becomes a wheel of light and colours, Teshigahara and Abe are hinting at something different that goes beyond the pure negative sides of an accelerated society. The two artists are pointing towards the post-human changes and becomings that new technologies inevitably bring with them, a becoming-thing that was one of the  themes often touched by Abe in his books.

Reference:
– Expo ’70 and Japanese Art: Dissonant Voices An Introduction and Commentary, Yoshimoto Midori, Review of Japanese Culture and Society, Vol. 23, 2011.
– The Box Man, Abe Kōbō, Vintage, 2001.

Final thoughts on the Noda Shinkichi’s retrospective (October 2023, Yamagata).

As a sort of work in progress, draft for a possible future research, or more probably simply as a trace of a significant and very rare viewing experience, in the past weeks I published the unedited notes and reflections I took while attending the Noda Shinkichi‘s retrospective (Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, October 2023).
A total of 38 films were screened in 5 days (you can read the synopsis of each film here).
My thoughts on days 1-2, 3 and 4.

Final thoughts

Unfortunately, I could not attend the last day of screenings, day five, at the festival. Mental and physical exhaustion kicked in, as usually does at these kind of events, but I also opted to see some of the films presented in the main program, after all I had to write a general piece on the event for the Italian publication I freelance for. As a sort of justification and excuse, I recall people saying that the films presented on the last day were the “less interesting” ones of all the Noda’s program. ..
That being said, I can definitely say that the retrospective was a very impactful viewing experience; as a film writer interested in Japanese documentary, I found the program to be revelatory. It was a very well curated showcase, and I really appreciated the fact that the films were not presented chronologically, but divided into thematic blocks.
There are some incredibly powerful and fascinating works in Noda’s filmography —personally Forgotten Land, The Matsukawa Incident, Nitiray A La Carte, The Feast of the Gods, and Good Road for the Living and the Dead are some films that, for different reasons, still resonate with me to this day. However, the stongest point of the event was, in my opinion, that it presented a significant section of Noda’s filmography, and in doing so it highlighted the developments of Noda’s style and interests in the course of almost five decades, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the developments and transformations of post-war Japanese documentary. All the films screened hint, in their totality, at connections, coincidances (cit. Joyce), and constellations with other works and names in the field of Japanese non-fiction cinema: Matsumoto Toshio, Ogawa Pro, Haneda Sumiko, Kitamura Minao, and others.
Each day of the program, there was at least a talk or a discussion with experts and documentarians, the one, by far, most deep and fascinating saw the great Kitamura Minao, a filmmaker and visual anthropologist (or visual folklorist as he, probably, would like to be called), talking about his personal experience with Noda, with whom, in 1978, he co-founded the Japan Visual Folklore Society. I believe Kitamura, his films and his writings, should be (re)discovered, sooner rather than later.

Some of the films that were shown in Yamagata are available on streaming, legally and for free (see below), or for rental. After the festival I was able to revisit some of them, especially The Feast of the Gods, and Good Road for the Living and the Dead deserve probably a longer treatment and a specific focus, an article or a longer essay (?).

Festivals in Tohoku Part 1
Marine Snow: The Origin of Oil 
Carrying the Olympics

Unedited notes on the Noda Shinkichi’s retrospective (October 2023, Yamagata).  Day 4.

As a sort of work in progress, draft for a possible future research, or simply as a trace of a significant, and very rare viewing experience, I have decided to publish, unedited, the notes and reflections I took while attending the Noda Shinkichi’s retrospective, organized at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, in October 2023.
A total of 38 films were screened in 5 days; you can read the synopsis of each film here.
Below you can find the notes I took on day 4 (my notes on the first two days, and the third one):

Day 4

The Mikagura Festival of Tomiyama Village 1985
Opens with 1970s folk music. Shots of mountains. Graphs. Photos in black & white explaining how part of the town was moved because of the construction of a Dam. 
Production of tea and shitake mushrooms.
Cut to new credits: 1985 January 3rd and 4th. Creative way to use multiple openings. In the following films, there are multiple endings. 
Describing step by step each phase of the festival. Preparing mochi. Purifying rooms, musical instruments, and people who will join the festival. Offerings to the tree. 
No direct sound. Music and images combined.
Small room. Dances start.
Men, men, men. No women for most of the time. We see some of them in the audience later. 
All the music is very similar, what changes is the dance. Ichi no mai, Shishi mai, Yubayashi no mai, Oni no mai.
Interesting: drunk (?) young people  interacting freely with the masked dancer. Masks are very expressive and feel very specific to the area.
Atmosphere is very “casual” (or better, popular?) from the very beginning. It’s a ritual, but not hyeratic. Everyone seems relaxed, joking, while others are performing, the singing and chanting themselves are not perfect, it’s all over the place. After all it’s a matsuri, not a ceremony or only a performance. 
Meaning of matsuri: giving new life to people and area, renewing life. 

The Procession of Weird and Wonderful Masks 1988
No narration, solemn music.
Shot of people wearing masks, all together on the stairs.
Panning on each mask slowly. Amazing colours and shapes. Again they feel very specific of the area. It’s a film about masks.
Parade. Close-ups of masks and people’s faces.
Like in the films about strikes/protests: images filmed on the street in the parade shaking-style, are alternated with shots from above, and low angles shots from street level. Fast editing. 
End: introducing each mask, explanation cards, mask on a black background. No sound in this part.

Sarushima-Island With a Fort: Ruins and Graffiti 1987
Music. No narration. Shots stay longer on soil, walls, stones. Panning. 
Concrete shelters. Holes in the walls (bullets). Graffiti and traces of war overlap. Different times. 
Sometimes there is no sound. Sometimes music (guitar).
Camera pans on walls, entrances, tunnels, corridors.
The ending is very beautiful (Noda master of ending in this period): black frame with a tiny bright square (entrance/exit out of tunnel) oscillating for a long time. Bright spot gets bigger. We’re out. Cut to the island (mirroring the beginning). Zoom out slightly. Stay on the image for long. End. Filmed between in 1968 and 1983 (really?!) edited together in 1987. 

Good Road for the Living and the Dead: Niino Bon Odori, Festival to Send Off the Gods 1991 

The Feast of the Gods on a Winter’s Night: Toyama’s Shimotsuki Festival 1970
B&W. Images of the area. Music. Images of fire. Images of shide (paper hanging from the ceiling). Images of hands. Close-ups of hands. Fire. Water boiling. 
Fire and smoke are often on the foreground.
Dancers are almost never shown from far away. Camera is in the middle, part of the constellation formed by people and objects. Performers shown in a fragmented way. Everything is continuously cut. Camera goes back to shide, fire and water many times. Kitamura explained in the after talk that fire and water come together in the ceremony. 
Chants, dances and images become monotonous like in a trance. Cinema-trance.
No narration or explanation. Just a card at the beginning.
As Kitamura Minao said: this is a festival captured without knowing almost anything about it. Sensorial. 
The most experimental of the folklore films.
Exceptional.

Good Road for the Living and the Dead: Niino Bon Odori, Festival to Send Off the Gods 1991 
People dancing for three days welcoming the dead during Obon. 
Again, shot from above, from street level and low angles. Colourful.
Impressive images of all the town dancing. Different times soak the images in different lights (twilight, dawn, etc.)
Singing and dancing together as in utagoe: identity making?
Young people make kind of a mess, but scenes are kept in the movie like in the first movie of the day. The film takes its time, slower rhythm, music and dances envelop the viewer slowly. Cinema-trance, but of a different sort from the previous.
People move toward the graveyard. Burning the small floats. The spirits of the dead. 
Fascinating and creative the ending, long time black screen, music. The dead. 

Personal note: there’s a similar festival in Gifu (Gujō Hachiman, 3 days in Obon) but it’s so packed with tourists that we can’t even enter the town (link to Hayachine and tourism). Impossible now to film a festival like Noda did. 

Snow as Flowers: Niino’s Snow Festival 1980
Opens with the deep blue of the sky and a beautiful map of the area. 
Constructed like Mikagura Festival: documenting each step of the festival. Shots and scenes are here much longer.
Again, Noda does not shy away to show the rough/popular side of the festival: two guys parading are drunk, people interacting quite directly and roughly with the performers, one guy is caught yawning.
Wondering is the presence of the camera enhanced or altered the behaviour of some participants. Less poetic and experimental compared to the two previous films. Noda getting more interested in folklore itself than in the representation of it?

to be continued

Unedited notes on the Noda Shinkichi’s retrospective (October 2023, Yamagata).  Day 3.

As a sort of work in progress, draft for a possible future research, or simply as a trace of a significant and very rare viewing experience, I have decided to publish, unedited, the notes and reflections I took while attending the Noda Shinkichi‘s retrospective, organized at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, in October 2023.
A total of 38 films were screened in 5 days (you can read the synopsis of each film here).
Below the notes I took on day 3 (my thoughts on the first two days are here):



Day 3

Tying Land and Sea 1960
The film opens like a Shōchiku movie, but the colour palette is not very poppy.
Various ports in Japan: Yokohama, Toyama, Kobe, Niigata, Hiroshima, Hokkaido, Nagoya, Shikoku, etc.
Interesting how in the film, the narration uses the term ura nihon to describe cities on the West coast, nowadays it is considered offensive and it’s not used anymore. Noda uses it in other movies too, the geography ones, I think.
The editing’s rhythm mirrors the music, when it is fast the music also gets fast, or more “aggressive”. 
Focus is not on people but on the things (there are very few close-up shots of faces)

Carrying the Olympics 1964
If the previous was like a Shōchiku, this one felt like an action produced by Nikkatsu, although the focus on things is similar.
The music is louder, mainly classic, organ and baroque.
Starts from the empty pool and the national stadium, empty.
New monorail.
Trucks transporting materials for the Olympics.
Equipment arriving for the players from different countries.
Aeroplanes, luggage, horses.
Night scene with oblique shots and superimposition of the 5 rings (one of the most beautiful images of the film).
The editing is much faster than in the previous movie. 
Same scene is shot from different angles. Mirroring the subject of the movie, the images are continuously moving, rarely we get a static shot for more than 2 seconds.
The camera is always panning, zooming in or out, or the image is vibrating (telephoto lens), or the camera is moving because it is on a truck.
Shots from the perspective of the cones, of the pigeons, of the reels for TV.
While the subject is “simple”, formally it is a very sophisticated movie, very smartly constructed. 

Nitiray A La Carte 1963
From the very first shot to the last, the film is pure experimentation, visual and sonic. 
Music by Takahashi Yūji is hinting at a space age to come.
Abstract titles.
Stagy parade of models like in Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter.
Felt like an installation sometimes.
The narration is comedic and almost surreal.
Slow motion, shots in the mirror, close-up of lips, 4 screens.
Shot of the meeting from above.
Kids parading.
Graphs/animation about the history of the company.
Pure art-house entertainment.
The music suggests a futuristic product (nylon) constantly evolving, the images are experimental as the company is experimenting with new chemicals. This sense of looking ahead and moving away from the past is also hinted at by alternating black and white scenes with the ones in popping colour.

A Town Not Yet Seen 1963
One view was not enough for me to fully appreciate it.
Street, water flowing, walls, stones, meat hanging.
A small stone bridge reflected on the water.
The film is in dialogue with Matsumoto Toshio’s The Song of Stones, and The Weavers of Nishijin (1962).
I found the music a bit too intrusive.

The Loneliness of Two Long Distance Runners 1966
Credits written on cardboard with ants.
Starts with a black screen and music (in English)
The scene is repeated 19 times.
Every time we notice something new, the police, the official cameraman, the audience, the smile on the face of the young Japanese.
The music matches ironically with what we see on screen: “c’mon” “you move me baby” “go go go go go” “oh yeah!”
The perception of what is on screen changes with repetition and music, the more we see it the more it gets funny.
Difference in repetition. 

Collapsed Swamp, or Painter Yamashita Kikuji 1976
Unfortunately, I haven’t taken so many notes on this, I’ll add some lines from the Osaka’s “phantom” retrospective organised in 2020.

Film opens with the artist’s face.
He was in the war, and so was his brother, all his art is about expressing what is almost impossible to express, the horror of war.
His paintings depict scenes where animals and spirits coexist with humans.
Noda and Yamashita were colleagues at Tōhō Studio, where they both experienced the Tōhō dispute.
It’s a very peculiar film about an artist, in that it’s in black & white, the words of the artist are prominent. 
Yamashita’s words were recorded in 1969, images were captured between 1970 and 1972. Work completed in 1976.
When the film moves to the Owls it becomes almost comedic, but a surreal comedy.
Scenes when Yamashita talks about being questioned by the police on images of him smashing birds head: Violence on the protesters in the late 60s?

Mizutani Isao’s Wanderings through Ten Spiritual Worlds  1984
Silent but originally was accompanied by the artist’s own narration, benshi-like.
Pouring paint on canvas at night.
Morning, Mount Fuji in the background. Frozen Yamanaka Lake.
When is pouring paint, his face is like a Noh mask. Performance for the camera?
Cut inside. Making the final touches. Close up of details. Insects.
Summertime. Finished paintings are placed in different parts of the city: stairs, middle of a street, etc.
Feels like performance art. A happening.

Carrying the Olympics 1964