Sōda Kazuhiro – Why I Make Documentaries (Viaindustriae, Milan 2023, translated by Matt Schley).

Sōda Kazuhiro has become, in the last decades, one of the most distinct voices working in the contemporary documentary scene. Based in New York, a city where he moved for studying and eventually work for the Japanese public broadcasting NHK in the second half of the 1990s, Sōda has been directing, shooting, and editing (with his wife Kashiwagi Kiyoko as a producer) his independent documentaries for almost two decades. Sōda has also been writing, in Japanese, about filming, and social and political issues for quite some time, on his blog, but also in articles and in books.
なぜ僕はドキュメンタリーを撮るのか Naze boku wa dokyumentarii wo toru no ka is a volume published in 2011 dealing with the process, issues, theory, and discoveries of making non-fiction movies, and was recently translated into English as Sōda Kazuhiro – Why I Make Documentaries (208 pages, Viaindustriae, Milan 2023, edited by Silvio Grasselli, translated by Matt Schley).

This publication is a reflexive diary on his own work in pursuit of answers to many crucial questions which have arisen along his extensive research path. It is the first curated English version of Kazuhiro’s most enlightening and complete writings, enriched with a new iconographic apparatus derived from his films and an updated introduction by the author himself. Discover why seeking answers to such basic things as ‘What is a documentary?’ and ‘Why do I make documentaries?’ turns out to be essential practice for one of the most prominent Japanese filmmakers today.

As written above, the volume originally was published in Japan in 2011, after the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, a tragedy that almost pushed Sōda to halt and cancel the project, and it is structured around Peace (2010), the third documentary directed independently by the Japanese. In the book Sōda recalls how the film came into existence, through the invitation to make a short movie by the DMZ International Documentary Film Festival in South Korea, but also the unexpected encounters while filming, and the difficulties in shaping a work centered around a community of people and cats in Okayama city, Japan. Describing the process of making Peace is for Sōda a chance to reflect on his working method, his belief in what documentary cinema can do, and other important issues related to the ethics and philosophy of filming. Famously, Sōda describes his method and style as observational filmmaking, and when making independent documentaries always tries to follow a series of rules he has himself established:

1 No research.

2 No scripts.

3 No meetings with subjects.

4 Roll the camera yourself.

5 Shoot for as long as possible.

6 Cover small areas deeply.

7 Do not set up a theme or goal before editing.

8 No narration, superimposed titles, or music.

9 Use long takes.

10 Pay for the production yourself.

The volume covers a lot of fascinating themes and topics significant for those who are interested in nonfiction filmmaking. First of all, citing also the writings of Satō Makoto, the power and responsibility that holding and pointing a camera at someone entails. “A documentary camera (especially in the hands of a skilled filmmaker) mercilessly gouges out and lays bare its subject’s subconscious; their inner soul, or what I call people’s ‘soft spots’” writes Sōda. “Depending on how things go, it can leave a subject deeply hurt. In that sense, there’s a possibility for a documentarist to become an assailant, and a very real risk for the camera to become a tool of violence.”

Some beautiful pages are also dedicated to the filmmakers Sōda considers his main influences, the American direct cinema of the 1960s, and especially Frederick Wiseman, who remains for the Japanese author to this day a guiding star in the world of documentary. As the technical innovations helped to shape nonfiction cinema at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s, so did the digital revolution that occurred at the beginning of this century. “The biggest impact this technology had was in freeing documentaries from the production and exhibition format of film” writes Sōda, “Up until then, if you wanted to exhibit your work on a big screen with any semblance of quality, you had no choice but to shoot, edit and project on either 16 or 35mm film. But using this new camera and the DV format allowed you to shoot on digital, edit on a computer, and even show your film using a digital projector. It opened up a whole new path.”

These new tools allowed Sōda to embark in a career of independent filmmaking, a path that was also kindled and forged in contrast to what he had experienced in the world of documentaries made for TV during the 1990s. There are strong echoes here with what Kore’eda Hirokazu has to say about working for TV, although with some major differences, Kore’eda was lucky to work in a different period, with more freedom, and with some enlightened colleagues and producers, Sasaki Shōichirō in primis. Everything on TV, according to Sōda, is often scripted, and once the director or the producers set a theme or a goal for the program, the reality captured is distorted, biased, and without anything left to chance, the latter being one of the most powerful elements in a documentary. As an example of this modus operandi, Sōda brings his personal experience of working with NHK after the terrorist attacks on 9/11 2001. In the aftermath of the tragedy, the Japanese broadcaster was looking for images of tears and cooperation, while Sōda often witnessed in New York scenes of normal daily life and quarrels.
Being open to chance and randomness is a key point for Sōda’s approach to documentary, and it is fascinating to read that he was influenced and inspired in this by the art and the creative method used by Jackson Pollock, and by the way dance was conceptualised by Merce Cunningham, a performer Sōda was able to know and meet through his wife, a professional trained dancer.

Some of the most inspiring pages are the ones dedicated to the art of editing, and a paragraph titled “Changing Yourself Through Observation”, where Soda associated the act of observing through documentary with vipassana meditation, a subject he ended up writing a book about in 2021.
“Many people may think of ‘observation’ as something done in a cool and distant way. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. The act of observation is almost always accompanied by a change in the observer’s way of seeing the world. One loses one’s sense of tranquility, and, before long, is compelled to observe one’s own self as well.”

In conclusion, it is fair to say that beyond the pleasure of reading the reflections of one of the most prominent documentarians working today, this volume is also important in that it is an essential addition to expanding literature, available in English, on film theory produced in Asia.

The book is available for purchase here.

Night and Fog in Zona (Jung Sung-il, 2015)

I’m reposting a slightly edited version of a piece I wrote 8 years ago, an article about Night and Fog in Zona, directed by South Korean film critic, Jung Sung-il.

It’s always fascinating when cinema reflects on cinema, and even more so when a documentary’s subject is director Wang Bing filming one of his movies. Night and Fog in Zona is a documentary, or better yet a cine-essay as it is called by its author: South Korean critic turned director Jeong Sung-il, who follows the renowned Chinese filmmaker throughout a whole winter while working on two of his projects, ‘Til Madness Do Us Part and a sequel to his Three Sisters.

The “coming” of Wang Bing has been, and still is, one of the most important events that occurred in the world of cinema in the last 15 years: not only did he contribute asserting the aesthetic value of digital filmmaking, but with his documentaries he also brought an auroral and liberating gaze upon the world.
Jung Sung-il had the same kind of dawning experience watching West of the Tracks in 2001.

“When I was at the Rotterdam Film Festival I bought a ticket for a movie 9 hours and 10 minutes long, I was surprised by its length but went anyway. It begins with a train in movement and it reminded me of the first movie ever made by the Lumière brothers in 1895. Watching Wang Bing’s work I had the feeling of witnessing the cinema of 21st Century just like the audience in 1895 witnessed its birth.”

There’s no narration in Night and Fog in Zona, everything is explained with intertitles: geographical coordinates, places where Wang Bing is headed to, his plans. Sometimes these intertitles also work as a poetic comment to the following scene.
The only time when Wang speaks directly to the camera is in an interview-like fashion at the very beginning of the film, a sequence that works as a brief introduction to his world and his filmmaking style. A few minutes where, among other things, he talks about his filmmaking process, truth in cinema, the impossibility of conveying the totality, his projects, Chinese history and peasants, and the similar cultural background his generation shares with Andrei Tarkovsky.

In 235 minutes Night and Fog in Zona illuminates a great deal about Wang Bing’s approach to filmmaking. Among other things, we learn about his habit of taking photos of the people he films, his relationship with them, and, most fascinating of all, about his “interview technique”: it’s compelling to see how he is able to seamlessly switch from “chatting with” to “shooting at” his subjects, as if there was no real break between the two actions.
It’s also interesting to witness how “Wang searches for the ‘strategic point’, the single position from which all of the actions in the scene can be recorded”. This is a fundamental feature of his filmmaking, as the relationship between the camera and the people and things around it determines both the movie’s sense of space and how space itself is conveyed in his works. And space, together with time/duration, is one of the most crucial elements of his cinema.
Another revelation of Night and Fog in Zona is to discover how Wang Bing is a director whose involvement with the subjects of his movies is deeper than we might think from just watching his works: when the camera is off, he’s often seen giving practical help and advices to his “protagonists”.

Particularly fascinating, from a movie making point of view, is a scene where the director and his two collaborators have an evening meeting to watch the footage shot during the day at the Asylum — footage that would eventually become ‘Til Madness Do Us Part. A few but meaningful minutes where he explains the reasons behind his use of long takes, why avoiding telephoto lens, and other rules to follow while shooting, so that the final work can gain a certain consistency, a certain style.
However, the best quality of Night and Fog in Zona is that it’s not only a documentary about Wang Bing shooting his movies, but it’s also shot and conceived — with all the due differences – just like one of Wang’s documentaries. In terms of style, it mirrors Wang Bing’s filmmaking: long takes, no narration, abstract landscapes and experimental music, everything put together to explore his filmmaking and, in a broader sense, contemporary China, a country gazed upon, as in most of Wang Bing’s works themselves, from a peripheral and rural point of view.
One of the best examples of this mirroring process is to be found towards the beginning of the film, when the Chinese director and his collaborators move to the Yunnan province.

A very long sequence shot from the car everyone is on, that shows us streets, mountains, plains, lights and tunnels almost melting together. A scene almost 10 minute long, matched with a hypnotic and minimalistic music interacting with the abstract landscape captured by the camera.
We encounter these sort of sequences a couple of times during the movie: another powerful one, shown in slow motion, is inside the asylum. Bing is sleeping and ten or so patients are sitting and moving around him. What gives Night and Fog in Zona a further experimental and even meta-filmic touch are two scenes, placed at the beginning and at the end of the movie, that show a Korean girl dressed in red sitting in a theater and making a phone call.
The only flaws to be found in this documentary, an otherwise almost perfect work, are some editing choices, in some cases too abrupt, and the pace of the intertitles, definitely too fast. But that’s just splitting hairs, Night and Fog in Zona is definitely one of the best non-fiction movies seen this year, not only for its fascinating subject, but also for its ability to resonate with Wang Bing’s own style at a deep and aesthetic level.

Report: screening of Gama (Oda Kaori, 2023) in Toyonaka

At the end of last January, I had the pleasure of attending a special screening of Gama, the latest project by Oda Kaori, a talented filmmaker and artist whose previous works I covered in the past for this blog, and for various other outlets (review of Aragane, interview with Oda, review of Cenote).

The work was screened in the city of Toyonaka on January 27th, and was commissioned by the Toyonaka Arts Project 2022. From Oda’s perspective Gama is also a second chapter of sorts, or a “trace” so to speak, of an ongoing project, a movie that will come out next year, Oda is developing about underground areas in Japan, underground both in its literal and figurative sense. The first chapter of this project is a visual installation produced by the Sapporo Cultural Arts Community Center, and projected on an ultra-wide horizontal screen in a underground pedestrian passageway in the city of Sapporo, Hokkaido. The work, also titled Underground, is being screened until the end of March, alternated with works by artists such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul (The Longing Field) or Rika Noguchi (Insects/ Leaves/ Songs of Birds), as part of a project called Nishi 2-Chome Chikahodo Video Creation. Here the official description of Oda’s installation:

Kaori Oda “Underground”
2022 | 09’37”
Kaori Oda consistently seeks for human memories―Where are we coming from and where are we going to―. In this piece, she dives into the underground paths in Sapporo beneath its enormous landscape aboveground. She projects everyday lives and sound footages of Sapporo in the past decades, as well as repetitive caves and holes, or images of the universe. The locations where she projects these moving images are normally closed to public. This film shot in 16mm considers layers of the time lived by the people, redefining them as multi-track timeframe. It invites us to imagine the space where we exist now as well as the very beginning of time.

Back to Gama, the work screened in Toyonaka. The film takes place entirely in Okinawa, and the connection between Toyonaka, a city located in Osaka prefecture, and the Ryūkyū archipelago has a history that goes back after the war, when in 1964 the city of Koza, now Okinawa city, started to send sacred stones and hibiscus flowers to the families, living in Toyonaka, of people who died during the war in Okinawa. The film is shot mainly in natural caves (gama), where civilians took shelter during the early stages of the Battle of Okinawa (April-June, 1945). One of these though, the so-called Chibichiri Gama, tragically ended up becoming the site of a mass suicide, when people were told that American soldiers would eventually kill them all. If I’m not wrong, there’s another cave also mentioned in Gama, one where the Okinawans who took refuge surrendered, because they were told by people who lived in Hawaii that U.S. Army would spare civilians.  

I think it is fair to say that Gama is, formally, a slight departure from Oda’s previous works, at least the feature-length documentaries, and for a couple of different reasons. The first and major one is that the movie has a strong performative element to it, one that was almost absent in Aragane, Cenote or Towards a Common Tenderness. In the film, the caves are used as a set for the stories told by a local guide, who specializes in the history and stories connected to the caves, and who is very passionate about his “job” to the extent he considers it a mission. Engulfed in the darkness of the cave, with just some blades of light cutting the frame, these tragic stories about women, children and old people fearing for their life are declaimed as in a recital. There’s a certain singsong rhythm to the way the man tells his stories, that gives the movie almost a hypnotic sonic quality. On the visual aspect, the play between darkness and light—it is worth mentioning that the work was shot on film—and the balance/imbalance of artificial and natural elements in the frame, make the movie fascinating to look at, and at times looking like a painting. Going back to the performative element, an important and central part of the work is the presence of Yoshigai Nao, a dancer and filmmaker (Grand Bouquet, Shari) who, according to what was said in the talk after the screening by herself and Oda, is for the movie not only an actor or a performer serving the director, but more a member of the staff, she actively participated in some filming decisions as well. Interesting and connected to what we wrote above about Gama being a work that signals a divergence from her previous modus operandi, is also the fact that the movie is the first work Oda did not film herself, it was shot by another female filmmaker and cinematographer, Takano Yoshiko, she was, among other things, the cinematographer for Saudade by Tomita Katsuya (2011).     

While the guide is reciting his stories, Yoshigai, in the film dressed in blue, moves, crawls, and almost dances throughout the cave, a phantasmatic figure, she plays the role, in Oda’s own words, of the “shadow”, possibly conveying presences from the past, human or non-human. The compresence of human histories, in this case tragic war memories, with the geologic time, millennia that here shaped the caves, while not directly expressed, is one of the themes that lies at the core of Gama (and is prominent in Cenote as well). The cave has at its bottom, and is itself composed of, layers of minerals, micro-organisms, animals’ bones, and human bones. Traces of historical and geologic time that are here overlapping.  “Traces” is an important concept for approaching Gama and more broadly Oda’s works, not only because of what we just wrote, but also because of a certain scene in the movie. While the guide is telling his stories, the screen goes completely black, Oda explained that she just turned off all the lights leaving the cave in its natural darkness with the man speaking. As an after effects—this was discussed in the talk after the screening and Oda said she did not notice it at first—the shape of the man and the outlines of the rocks stay for a couple of second on the black screen, giving a sense of a phantasmatic presence, of something that manifest itself while not being there. As a common thread running through her films, it is fascinating to notice how Cenote explores something similar, not formally, but thematically, the presence of the dead both in the sinkholes, and in the Maya ceremonies shot in 8mm.

One of the formal choices that have become a sort of signature of Oda’s style, an abrupt cut from darkness to light and from noise to silence, moves the focus of Gama from the cave, where the guide and his group are searching for and separating human and animal bones, to the outside, where the screen is filled with the blue of the sea and the sky, and the white of the coral beach. Here Yoshigai is playing with pieces of coral, themselves remnants of past lives, making a light and soothing sound with them. The peace of the scene is interrupted, by pure chance according to the director, when the deafening sound of an American aircraft passing nearby transforms the scene into a scream, reminding us, the viewers not the people of Okinawa, about the reality of the physically oppressive presence of the American Army in the archipelago.

As in her previous works, but in Gama is something more prominent, the underground space with its darkness and depth seems to be the perfect locus solus where different times, and different (hi)stories intermingle and intersect. It will be fascinating to see how Oda will be able to organize and infuse these ideas in her next feature-length work.

“Crossing Cinema: the Diary Film, the Essay Film, and the Voice of I” by Ming-Yu Lee

Crossing Cinema: the Diary Film, the Essay Film, and the Voice of I is a volume published by Bookman Books in 2022, and written by Taiwanese scholar and filmmaker Lee Ming-Yu on the possibilities and aesthetics of essay and diary films. I came to the author through my interest towards Taiwanese filmmaker Liu Na’Ou (discovering The Man Who Has a Camera was a revelation for me), to whom the first insightful essay in the volume is dedicated, but I discovered through the book a far richer cinematic landscape, one that explores the possibilities of the visual diary and the essay film. As stated by the author on the back cover:

This book focuses on the unique forms of expression of diary film and essay film, especially how authorship of filmmakers can be integrated in the voice-over as a narrative strategy in first-person cinema. The book is divided into two sections: the first section “essays” contains three chapters, and in these chapters I use films of Liu Na’Ou, Hollis Frampton, Jonas Mekas, and José Luis Guerín as cases for filmic textual analyses, to discuss the issues of authorial presence, the voice-over narration, and audiovisual structure. In the second section “interviews”, four important researchers and filmmakers contribute their thoughts and reflections on how the essay film and the diary film can be approached and understood.

The first part of the volume is very interesting and rich with insights, but here I’d like to focus more on the second section. The first conversation, a correspondence between Lee and scholar and professor Laura Rascaroli was the one that resonated with me the most. Rascaroli is known, among other things, for her research and publications on personal cinema and the essay film, reflections that are here mirrored in the style used, an exchange of emails she had with Lee over three months, between May and July 2016.  What I found particularly fascinating in their exchange is the parallel drawn between diary films and the practice of microhistory, as Rascaroli writes:

Diary-making is a form of history from below, of microhistory: and this is so needed at a time when history from above continues to rewrite our everyday stories as a function of a political goal. Brexit, which you evoked at the end of your last entry, is a case in point, an abrupt and divisive contestation of just this kind of appropriation. I love the diary film not least because it is a channel through which our microhistory can interconnect and so too be a part of a living social fabric in a wider world.

The open-endedness of the diary form is also a remark I found very poignant:

As Lejeune says, ‘autobiography turns towards the past’, while the diary moves along, heading towards the future, which is unknown to anyone. (Lee)

Epistolarity is, like the diary, a form that is always open to the next ‘entry’. As Raymond Bellour has written, ‘The letter goes on and on. If it is a real letter, it never stops saying, wanting, wanting to say more’ (Rascaroli) 

It goes without saying that the interview with Jonas Mekas is also a chest of treasures. Here on the use of voice-over in his works:

Lee:

When you record your voice-over…

Mekas:

It’s not really…maybe, I don’t know if I would call it voice-over. It’s just part of the film. It has the same function as images, which is not a voice-over, it’s just another element. Voice- over is like you make comments about the images that you see. I don’t make comments about the images. I add another level of content. So it’s not a comment, not a voice-over. You could say that the image-over, sometimes the sound is more important, sometimes images. Images illustrate the sound.

and about diary films and cinéma vérité:

Lee: Does the diary film have something to do with Cinéma vérité?

Mekas: No, no. Cinéma vérité was a variation of the documentary film. The documentary has forms, scripts. It is a scripted gene of cinema. Illustrated with footage. Scripted documentary film, they write a script and they find the footage to illustrate the script, Cinema vérité try to get rid of script scenario, the outcome [wasn’t] determined, there was always a different subject they chose or the theme was different. It was not scripted. They were collecting materials from real life, to illustrate a certain idea. The technique was more open, more real. (…) The diaristic kind of cinema does not have any idea, no predetermined scripts, because you cannot plan life…

To summarize, these are the chapters of the book:

Part one: Essays

1.Re-Discovering Liu Na’Ou and His Man with a Camera: Authorial I. Written Diary, and Cinematic Writing.

2.The Parenthetical Voice-over: Dialectical Audiovisual Structure in Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia) and Jonas Mekas’s The Song of Avila

3. Film-Letter: The Beginning, Exchanging, and Narration in Jonas Mekas and José Luis Guerín’s Correspondence

Part two: Interviews

4. Correspondence: Ming-Yu Lee/Laura Rascaroli

5. Jonas Mekas: To My Dear Friends

7. Joseph Morder: I’d Like to Share This with Someone

6. Roger Odin: Home Movie. The Diary Film, and P-Cinema

Ming-Yu Lee (李明宇) is a filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Radio, Television and Film at Shih Hsin University (Taipei, Taiwan). Research Interests include the Diary Film, Experimental Film, Essay Film, First-Person Cinema, and Film-making. Independent Filmmaker, photographer and film editor having directed several experimental shorts including Time Variations, Going Home, Home Not Yet Arrived, Four Years of Miller. Works deal with the relationship between diary film, home movies, experimental film and questions of identity.

The book can be purchased here.

Documentary discoveries of 2022

No best documentaries list for me this year, unfortunately I have not seen, or liked, enough films to make one. Instead, I have compiled a list of the best documentary discoveries I had in the past 12 months (the first two are actually movies released in 2022). As usual, the films are listed in no particular order.


名付けようのない踊りThe Unnameable Dance (2022) by Inudo Isshin is the portrait of dancer and performer Tanaka Min, one of the most fascinating Japanese artists alive. The documentary retraces some of the events and encounters that guided his life as a dancer and actor, such as meeting Hijikata Tatsumi in the 1960s, and dancing in Paris in 1978, a trip that de facto launched Tanaka’s career, and a place where he met Roger Caillois, a writer Tanaka strongly admired (the title of the movie is taken from a sentence the French writer used to describe Tanaka’s dance). The documentary, using Tanaka’s own narration, continues by retelling his debut as an actor in Yamada Yōji’s Twilight Samurai (2002), an event that kicked off, at the age of 57, his career in cinema, and focuses also on his work as a farmer, an important part of his life, as he famously stated “In agriculture one can find the anti-modern coming from the past. There you find the concreteness of the present.”
The retelling of all these experiences is interspersed with some of his recent performances, always awe-inspiring, even when mediated by the camera. Performances that were recorded in Japan, but also abroad, in Paris, and especially in Portugal, a country where the documentary begins and ends. The film is an enthralling viewing experience also because it is constructed by interweaving Tanaka’s performances with Yamamura Kōji ‘s beautiful and affective animation, used here mainly to depict Tanaka’s memories and dreams as a child.
Particularly significant is also how the documentary includes purposely the audience, their faces and their reactions when filming Tanaka’s performances in public spaces, since dance is, for the artist, born between dancer, place, and audience.

In Fire of Love (2022)American documentarian Sara Dosa crafted a fascinating work assembling images and films shot around the world in the course of their life by two French volcanologists, Katia and Maurice Krafft. Dosa interweaves these images with other videos about them, and wrapped up everything with the narration of actress, filmmaker and artist Miranda July. I would have preferred a movie made entirely of their films without narration, while July’s voice is very affective, but it is nonetheless a powerful viewing experience. Not only because of the spectacular images, but also because the documentary is very good at delving into the obsession and raison d’etre that guided the life, and ultimately the death, of the couple.

Origin of Cosmos (Lothar Baumgarten) was for me the cinematic experience of 2022, I had the chance to see the movie at the Aichi Triennale, where is was screened in a loop in a very dark room as an installation. Shot between 1973–1977 and finished in 1982, Origin od Cosmos is based on a myth of the Tupi people, a South America’s indigenous group, and while conceptually it is a film about the rain forest, it was filmed in its entirety along the Rhine near Düsseldorf Airport. It is a sensorial experience, as people nowadays say, that envelops the viewers with images and especially with the cacophonous soundscape. Animate and inanimate life is displayed and amassed on screen like a Pollock’s painting: stones, insects, trees, soil, mud, plastic, branches, spiders, eyes, the moon, the sky…
It has to be seen in darkness, because in some of its parts the shapes emerging from the pitch black background are very subtle. I definitely need to do more research on the movie, its production history, filming, and on director Lothar Baumgarten himself.

東京‘69 – 青いクレヨンのいつかは . . . Tokyo ’69 – one day blue crayons . . . (1969) and 治安出動草稿　お昼の戒厳令 Public Order Project: Martial Law at Noon (1981) are two recently discovered works made by the collective NDU (Nihon Documentary Union). I wrote about them here.

死者よ来たりて我が退路を断て Dead, Come and Cut Off my Retreat (1969) is a documentary chronicling the resistance of the students at Nihon University (College of Art) in 1968-69 made by a group of activists called グループびじょん Group Vision, people working at the time at Nippon Eiga Shinsha.
Besides being a powerful documentary about a certain type of resistance at a crucial time in Japan, what I found extremely compelling is how the film is also a profound exploration of places and spaces. It is an interesting documentary also because it gives voice, not much, but more than usual in these kind of contexts in Japan, to women on screen, but also off screen. Among the members of the group, there were at least two women in important positions: Kitamura Takako was one of directors, and Sasaki Michiko one of the cameraman.
Group Vision was also involved in the production of Ogawa Shinsuke’s A Report from Haneda, and Dead, Come and Cut Off My Retreat (the English title is unofficial) has definitely a similar tone. Apparently Jōnouchi Motoharu was also affiliated for a period of time with the group, but I cannot confirm. The group has uploaded the movie on YouTube:

Autour de Jeanne Dielman( Sami Frey, 1975) is a touching document of the filming of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a window open to the fascinating working relationship between Chantal Akerman and Delphine Seyrig, and to the making of a masterpiece. The movie is available through Another Screen, here.

Before the Flood (Yifan Li, Yu Yan, 2005) chronicles the death of Fengjie, on the Yangtze River, a city and its people slowly being executed and reduced to rubbles by the state and “progress”, in order to make way for the new Three Gorges Dam that eventually ended up flooding the entire valley.

2H (Li Ying, 1999) is a compelling piece of documentary cinema about ageing, the Chinese diaspora, and a group of Chinese expatriates in Tokyo at the end of last century. Ma Jinsan is a 95 year-old former Kuomintang general who defected to Japan nearly 50 years earlier, shortly after the Communist revolution, who has a strong connection with Xiong Wenyun, a young avant-garde artist.
Through the DV camcorder’s aesthetics, used here to its full potential, everything is hugely impactful in 2H, from the staged scenes of Xiong and her lover, to the portrait of Ma, from the dialogic relationship between the camera/director Li and all the people filmed, to the touching finale with Tokyo covered in snow.

Incident at Restigouche (Alanis Obomsawin, 1984) is a documentary chronicling two raids on the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation (Restigouche) by the Sûreté du Québec in 1981, as part of the efforts of the Quebec government to impose new restrictions on Native salmon fishermen. The film, constructed through interviews, photos, and original footage, explores the history behind the Quebec Provincial Police (QPP) raids and the reasons of the protests. The Quebec government had decided to restrict salmon fishing, traditionally an important source of food and income for Micmac Indians. It’s a bless every time we can watch a movie from an author we have never seen anything of, and get blown away; a cinematic door opens in front of us presenting and offering a new landscape to explore. This was for me Incident at Restigouche, and I’m looking forward to watching more documentaries by Obomsavin this year.

Model (1981) Every time I watch a new (for me) film by Frederick Wiseman it is a discovery, this one was glorious, one of his most entertaining, and at the same time, ça va sans dire, deep works. A pivotal film in his career, where something new started to surface. Perhaps the first documentary where he started to use extensively the “pillow shots”. Listen to the excellent Wiseman Podcast, a perfect companion to his documentaries, if you decide to delve in his filmography.

C’etait un Rendezvous (Claude Lelouch, 1976), eight adrenalinic minutes of high-speed drive through the street of Paris.

Kobe Discovery Film Festival 2022 – dispatch 3: Koike Teruo’s screen memorial

Third and final dispatch from this year’s Kobe Discovery Film Festival (first and second here and here)

My last day at the festival coincided with the screening of four programs: the state of film preservation today, actor Hayakawa Sessue, the 100th anniversary of Pathé Baby, and a selection of works by Koike Teruo, experimental filmmaker who passed away last March.

Film, the Living Record of Our Memory (2021) is a documentary directed by Inés Toharia, where film archivists, curators, technicians and filmmakers reflect on the current state of film preservation, why it is a vital part of our culture, and how film archives in different countries are facing a set of very different problems. The second screening of the day was Where Lights Are Low, a silent drama directed by Colin Campbell in 1921, with protagonist the Japanese Hollywood star Hayakawa Sessue. I had already watched the movie before, on the streaming edition of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival during the pandemic I believe, but to experience it on the big screen with a live accompaniment was a delight. 2022 marks the 100th birthday of Pathé Baby, to celebrate it, a group of people, lead by Anna Briggs, Michele Manzolini, and Mirco Santi, in conjunction with the association INEDITS Amateur Films / Memory of Europe, assembled a montage of amateur films shot in 9.5mm from around the globe, 9 1⁄2 the title. The work is a visual symphony of everyday life, as it is called in the introduction, that, for its moments of unexpected poetry, reminded me of Liu Na’ou’s The Man Who Has a Camera.

Experimental filmmaker and visual artist Koike Teruo passed away on March 18th, KDFF 2022 dedicated to the director a special program comprised of four of his works, three of which are part of his life-long series Ecosystem, which Koike himself described as something that “has grown as a sort of giant tree for me”: 生態系 -5- 微動石 (1988), 生態系 -20- ストーン (2013), and 生態系 -27- 密度１(2018). One of the four, 衝 (1995), is a short piece, a sort of documentary, shot in Kobe in the aftermath of the earthquake that hit the area on January 17th 1995. Besides the works themselves, a wave of materiality that inundates the viewer with their rhythm and editing speed, especially when experienced on a big screen, what turned out to be particularly interesting for me, was the talk after the screening. Researcher Tanaka Shimpei talked about the importance of Koike in establishing the experimental scene in the Kansai area through events and independent screenings (自主上映会). As Tanaka writes in the catalogue ECOSYSTEM Teruo Koike Visual Works 1974 – 2020:

The career of a prominent visual artist Teruo Koike must be reconsidered through not only his film making which includes collaborations with various modern dances and his improvisational music performances, but also his aggressive independent screening activities which have been maintained since as far back as around 1980’s. And not only should we look back on his rich filmography centering on the “Ecosystem” series, but also by reviewing Koike’s screening activities engaged around Kobe.

Born in Ichinomiya city, he graduated in Kobe, and after his experience in Iran at the end of the 1970s, where he worked in a petroleum complex, and where he experienced first hand the Iranian Revolution, Koike returned to Japan, started again to make films, and began to organize screening events. In 1980, together with Okuda Osamu founded Cosmic Caravan (1980-1982), a group engaged in showing and making experimental movies. After this experience, Koike and others, among whom Zeze Takahisa, formed Voyant Cinémathéque (1983-1996), a group active for more than a decade in Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe, that promoted experimental cinema, and helped new artists by providing them venues for showing their work. Koike continued to be very active in showing and organizing events (installations, visual performances) in the new millennium as well, he learned to play the Japanese flute in the mid-1990s, and often accompanied the screenings of his works, not only with his live improvised performances, but also with professional dancers.

Image Forum Festival 2022: Silver Cave, Humoresque, A Short Story, and The Cleaning Lady After 100 Years: Spectre.

Yesterday I had the chance to attend one of the programs of this year Image Forum Festival, in Nagoya. Every year the event is held first in Tokyo, and later in the year, in a scale-down format, in other cities in Japan: Yokohama, Kyoto, and Nagoya.

In the past decade I went to the festival in Tokyo a couple of times, once in Kyoto if I remember correctly, and recently just in Nagoya, since it’s for me, a closer location. The event is dedicated mainly to experimental cinema and video, produced all over the world, with a particular attention of what is going on in Japan and Asia. The festival has been for me a source of wonderful discoveries, here I wrote about the 2018’s edition, here about Stop-Motion Slow-Motion, and here about Heliography by Yamazaki Hiroshi. Unfortunately this year I could just see a tiny fraction of what I planned and wanted to, just four works of the East Asian Experimental Film Competition.

Silver Cave

Silver Cave (2022) by Cai Caibei is an interesting piece that plays with surfaces, and the flat metallic substance that animates and “moves” for most of the work. For its focus on abstractions, rhythm, and its quasi meta-filmic quality, it reminded me of the works of some pioneer animators of the beginning of last century, such as Walter Ruttmann. Silver Cave won the Award for Excellence at the festival.

A Short Story

Filmmaker and artist Bi Gan’s latest work, A Short Story (2022) tells about a black cat that embarks on a bizarre journey to meet three curious characters. Presented in the short competition at Cannes last spring, the work is populated with dream-like images, visual inventiveness, and poetry, but I could not really connect with it.

ユーモレスクHumoresque

I was really looking forward to checking　ユーモレスク Humoresque (2022) by Isobe Shinya, who in 2020 made 13, one of my favourite films of that year. I had already read that this work was something very different from what he had done before, Humoresque is 46 minutes long and was shot digitally, so I was somehow prepared. As the description in the official catalog reports the work is

an abrupt turn from “13”, this film employs the technique of home movies to tell the story of the lives of a mother and child across four seasons. Day after day, water drawn from a lake is filtered and bartered for food. One day, a man visits with a portable gramophone. The song it plays is Dvorak’s “Humoresque.” What does he think about this music?

and according to Isobe

I created a fictional world by converting and extending home movie shooting as a filmmaking technique. Many of the scenes in the film were inspired by their real-life counterparts. The small story in front of us, the big story far away, and the story that is no longer here. This film is an attempt to assimilate them in fiction and reality.

Some images are really mesmerising, the way sound is used is remarkable, and while very different from the time-lapse experiments Isobe is known for, Humoresque is still a movie about time, the thickness of it, and the passage of it. That being said, I definitely need to watch it again to give it a proper assessment. Humoresque was awarded the Grand Prize at the festival.

The Cleaning Lady After 100 Years: Spectre

The Cleaning Lady After 100 Years: Spectre (Shichiri Kei, 2022) is a reimagining of the filmmaker’s own multimedia stage drama The Cleaning Lady, where the ghost of her mother appears to an old woman. This was probably the most powerful work among the four I saw, in a completely digitised world the human presence is not even a memory, even the words uttered are just part of the cacophonous soundscape presented in the film. No straightforward meanings emerge from the work, but images and sounds slowly and aggressively point towards and put the viewer through a sensorial and exhilarating experience. The film loses part of this power towards the end when the spoken words try to enunciate philosophical ideas.

Leafing through the catalogue made me realised how many interesting and possibly wonderful works I missed: a retrospective on contemporary Chinese independent cinema, Qingnian Express: New Voices and Visions of Chinese Independent Cinema Today (curated by Tong Shan and Ma Ran), TUNOHAZU, the latest by Tezka Macoto, a retrospective on artist and graphic designer Tanaami Keiichi, and much more.

The Written Face (Daniel Schmid, 1995)

Presented in its 4K restored version last summer at the Locarno Festival, 書かれた顔 The Written Face (1995) offers a fascinating and at times experimental portrait of Bandō Tamasaburō, kabuki actor known in Japan especially for being one of the most talented onnagata ever, a man who plays the role of a woman in traditional Japanese theatre. Bandō has also directed a couple of movies, and appeared as an actor in a number of films, among which I would like to highlight at least 夜叉ヶ池 Demon Pond (1979), an excellent movie by Shinoda Masahiro, with an outstanding performance by Bandō in the double role of a girl and a mythical princess.
The Written Face is a Japanese-Swiss coproduction directed by Swiss filmmaker Daniel Schmid, who assembled together Bandō’s on-stage performances, which make up the bulk of the film, with interviews of artists he was inspired by, such as actress Sugimura Haruko, the face of many works by Ozu and Naruse, dancer Takehara Han, the elderly geisha Tsutakiyokomatsu Asaji, and Ohno Kazuo, the great butoh dancer, subject of another movie directed by Schmid and also released in the same year, Kazuo Ohno (1995). The movie is also punctuated by short interviews with Bandō himself, and wrapped up with a film within a film, Twilight Geisha Story, a short movie without spoken words starring the actor himself in the role of a geisha at the end of her career.

The Written Face opens with Bandō on stage, his performance, however, is filmed from the side and not frontally as seen by the audience. These scenes are alternated with brief passages in which the actor strolls through the streets, or explores the stage and the areas surrounding it, as if he were watching the performance he himself is acting in. Once the show is over, after the roaring applause of the off-camera audience, the film shows Bandō removing his make-up, the white patina covering the face, the wig, the heavy dress, and profusely thanking the musicians. At this point we cut to the actor in plain clothes chatting with a child, probably his young son, who is playing with a portable video game. While the scene itself is very brief and not too significant in itself, when considered in the context of the movie, so far made mainly of acting on stage, ritual gestures and traditional music, it represents a counterpoint that zooms us out of the stage performances, and anchors the film to the time it was filmed, the 1990s. While most of the movie, as written above, is made by the beautifully choreographed performances of Bandō, everything else that surrounds them— interviews, words, and “pillow shots”— functions as an indirect explanation of his artistic approach, and partly as a deconstruction of what is happening on stage. One of the crucial points of the movie is when we first hear Bandō’s voice reflecting on his art and approach. He is sitting in a hotel facing what is probably Osaka Castle at sunset, and explaining to the interviewer what he is trying to express when he takes the stage as onnagata: “I do not represent a woman, but I suggest the essence of women. That is the nature of the onnagata, isn’t?”.

In order to do so, Bandō has often seeked inspiration, throughout his career, from the art of the four aforementioned figures, each of them representing a different and unique type of femininity. A clip from Naruse Mikio’s 晩菊 Late Chrysanthemums (1954) suggests the particular type of femininity, strong and direct, Sugimura often represented in her long and glorious film career. At the other end of the spectrum, the dancing body of Ohno, 88 years old at the time, immersed in the blue of dawn, and surrounded by water, captures and expresses something more ethereal and dreamlike. Ingrained in the nihon-buyō‘s tradition are the dance movements that Takehara performs for the film, delicate, elegant, and almost imperceptible, while the voice of Tsutakiyokomatsu, trembling but still full of life, is a sign of a fierce vitality, she was 101 years old at the time of the shooting.


After the short Twilight Geisha Story, a segment about twenty minutes long, which perhaps represents the weakest part of the work, in the last ten minutes, the movie returns to a kabuki play with Bandō protagonist. The performance is Sagi Musume (1762), also the opening performance of the documentary, one of the most famous and celebrated kabuki play in Japan. It is the story of a girl, abandoned by her lover, who is transformed into a heron and dies on a snowy night. Bandō’s performance is here breathtaking in its beauty.

Haneda Sumiko’s writings /5: from “Ode to Mt. Hayachine 早池峰の賦”

Fifth part of an ongoing series of translations dedicated to the writings of Haneda Sumiko (4th here, 3rd here, first and second here and here)

The short passages translated below—from 早池峰の賦 published in 1984—are very important and central to properly understand Ode to Mt. Hayachine, and more broadly, Haneda’s approach to documentary filmmaking. Just to provide a bit of background: Haneda discovered yamabushi kagura in 1964 in Tokyo, and the following year, the beauty of the performances and their connection with Tōhōku, when she visited Ōtsugunai, where she attended a kagura performed in an old magariya, an L-shaped farmhouse typical of the area. When she went back to the town in 1977, she noticed how the magariya and the culture associated with them were slowly disappearing from the scenery. She really wanted to start her documentary from a performance held in one of these old houses, an image that had stayed in her mind for decades, but instead she decided to go the opposite direction and started the movie by filming the demolition of one of these old farmhouses. It is interesting to note that, the first and shorter version of the documentary, 早池峰神楽の里 Hayachine kagura no sato, opens with kagura performed in the entrance of an old house, not a magariya, if I’m not wrong, and that the demolition scene is absent.

NOTE: This is by no means a professional translation, but I hope the readers can get the gist of it:

I first became aware of the Tōhoku region when I was in primary school, and read about a famine in the area in a children’s book. I think this was probably about the great famine of 1934. I had completely forgotten what it was about, but the tragic impression stayed with me for a long time. So when I think of the Tōhoku region, the first thing that comes to mind is a dark and impoverished image.

When I thought about making a movie about Hayachine kagura, I thought that Kagura is like a flower that blossoms and has its roots in the soil, that is, the harsh living conditions of the Tōhoku region. The true value of the flower cannot be understood unless it is depicted together with its soil. But how should this soil be expressed? In 1979, this was quite difficult.

When I first visited Ōtsugunai in 1965, the old farmhouses were still there, and the atmosphere of the old times was still strong. However, the rural landscape has now completely changed. Wide paved roads. Large concrete buildings. Houses just like in the city. Colourful tin roofs reflect the sunlight, and there is no longer any sense of history, poverty or darkness. I was at loss in front of this rural landscape.

The image of kagura I had in my mind was the one I saw during my first trip to Ōtsugunai [in 1965 when Haneda attended a kagura performed at the entrance of an old magariya, t/n]. I tried to find a place that somehow came close to that image, and in my mind I was constantly trying to recreate a scene like that. However, I soon began to feel that there was something wrong with obsessing over only old things. I realised that in order to depict the life of kagura, which has continued to live until today, even when the houses are new and the roofs are red, first of all it was important to accurately capture the present life of the farmers, and I also realised it would be a mistake to go too far in pursuing the perfect form, and thus to lose the vitality of the present. I was forced to change my methodology.

I thought that starting the shooting with the destruction of the magariya was quite symbolic. I filmed the demolition of the magariya as a symbol of the transfiguration of the rural areas in the Tōhoku region, but it also became the “demolition” of my own way of thinking. It doesn’t matter if the magariya are no more. It doesn’t matter if the roofs are blue or red. I wanted to make this work as an expression of the spirit of the farmers in Tōhoku, beyond what is visible to the eye, and as an expression of the ever-changing flow of history.

(pp 81-82)

Haneda Sumiko’s writings /4: from “Ode to Mt. Hayachine 早池峰の賦”

This is the 4th part of an ongoing series of translations dedicated to the writings of Haneda Sumiko (third part here, first and second here and here)

Distributed by Equipe de Cinema, 早池峰の賦 Ode to Mt. Hayachine (a.k.a. The Poem of Hayachine Valley) is the second work conceived and directed independently by Heneda Sumiko. The movie was released in 1982 at Iwanami Hall, where it stayed from May 29th to June 25th (and later, due to its success, again from August 7th to 13th). A booklet about Haneda and the movie was published and sold at the theater, and more importantly in 1984 Haneda published 早池峰の賦 (Hayachine no fu), a fascinating volume about the origin, production and shooting of the film, how the various versions of the documentary came about, and about her relationship with the people of Take and Ōtsugunai, the two villages where kagura is performed. As for the versions of the documentary, the first one, backed by Iwanami Eiga, is titled 早池峰神楽の里 Hayachine kagura no sato, a 52-minute long film that, among other things, is interesting in that it has a male voice narration, while the following versions have a female one. 早池峰の神楽 Hayachine no kagura is a second version, assembled by Haneda after the previous was completed, using more footage shot during the years, while the third one, 早池峰の賦 Ode to Mt. Hayachine, the version usually screened, is 185 minutes long , and very similar to the second one (195′), that was cut down of 10 minutes in order to be screened at Iwanami Hall. The book was, like the film, an unexpected and moderate success, and the first experience for Haneda writing a volume about one of her films.

In the short passages here translated from the volume 早池峰の賦, Haneda narrates the first steps that led to the conception and production of the documentary. She discovered yamabushi kagura when she attended a performance held in Tokyo in 1964, the following year, together with cameraman Segawa Jun’ichi, she visited the two villages of Take and Ōtsugunai, at the time part of Ōhasama town, where they witnessed the various kagura dances performed, also in a magariya, an old style farmhouse typical of the area. Haneda was so impressed by the area and its atmosphere, the people and the performances, that she decided to make a documentary. She even wrote a provisional script, but was not satisfied with it and so the project was shelved. The chance came again in 1977, after she independently made 薄墨の桜 The Cherry Tree with Grey Blossoms and gained more confidence in her career as a filmmaker.

NOTE: This is by no means a professional translation, but I hope the readers can get the gist of it:

To make a film I really wanted to shoot, that is, by myself [without the help of a production company, t/n] was for me something like a dream, almost impossible to realize. Thus, when I made The Cherry Tree with Grey Blossoms as an independent work, it was like a new road was opening in front of my eyes. When I made that movie its subject was one tree, it does not go away and it didn’t require so much time and money to be made, however, this time it was different, the subject was people, and many, since there are about 20 performers in the kagura group. If I wanted to film the kagura, I needed the proper filming equipment and a considerable amount of money, above all, what I needed to make the movie, was the cooperation and the understanding of the kagura performers and the people of the area. 

In the early summer of 1977 I visited, after 12 years, the town of Ōhasama. I told Ōhasama’s major, Murata-san, that I wanted to make a film that would not be a documentary about kagura, but would portray the culture, life and spirit of the land that has supported kagura, and that it would be a record of the town that I would make and give to the town. Often people came to the town to film kagura, leaving nothing behind for the people of the area. [in the conversation with the major recollected in the book, there are complaints about NHK troupes coming to the area and leaving soon after the main festival is over, without leaving behind anything, t/n]

The decision to form a group to make a movie was decided only a year and a half after this first meeting with major Murata, in the meantime we had the chance to visit and talk with him many times. (…) At the time I was still a Iwanami Eiga employee, and I was very happy to know Iwanami Eiga provided full support for this personal project. More fortunately, the fundraising campaign was able to secure a certain amount of funding, and Tohoku Electric Power agreed to purchase the film necessary. About a year and a half after meeting the mayor for the first time, on 13 February 1979, the 早池峰神楽の里を作る会 ‘Group for making the film Hayachine kagura no sato’ was established. The mayor himself named the film “Hayachine kagura no sato”, which I thought was not a bad title. The group started its activities with the goal of producing a film with a fund of 30 million yen, and a running time of 50 minutes. I thought that fifty minutes was too short, but the production costs would have been much higher otherwise.

However, it was not so easy to raise money, money could never keep up with the speed of film production, nduring filming and during the finishing touches, we still had to find the money. I still cringe when I think back on all the headaches over money we had during this period. In the end, we managed to reach the target amount in autumn of the following year, a year and a half after we had completed and delivered “Hayachine kagura no sato” to the town. During this period, all the footage shot for the film was fully utilized to produce the three-hour and five-minute Ode to Mt. Hayachine, which was shown at Iwanami Hall in Tokyo, gaining a good reputation and being seen by many people.

The film was screened twice a day at the City Hall. On that day, nearly 1,300 people gathered to watch it enthusiastically. We were thrilled that so many people came to see our film, even though the town had a population of less than 8,000.

The 52-minute film was appreciated by the local people, but the 3 hours and 15 minutes film was appreciated even more. Unexpectedly, a woman from Take told us that it was the first time she could properly see the festival and the kagura performances. Come to think of it, when they are busy with the preparation for the festivals and kagura, the women are so busy in the kitchen, that they don’t have time to watch them. Some of them were impressed that the dancers looked so divine when they danced in the film, even though they are usually normal people very close to them in everyday life. What was most gratifying for us was that many people said they felt proud of their hometown.

We were hesitant to let people see the three-hour 15-minute film we donated to the town, because it was so long, and we weren’t sure if it would work as a film to be released in a theater or not. Even though, I showed it to a few people.

A few months later, I was told that the film would be screened at Iwanami Hall as a film distributed by Equipe de Cinema, and I honestly couldn’t believe it. It was unthinkable that such a documentary film would be shown to the public. We reduced the length of the film to three hours and five minutes in order to be able to screen it at the theater, and named the film Ode to Mt. Hayachine. The title of the film best expresses our feelings about the twists and turns that led to the creation of the documentary.