Third part (you can read the first part here and second here)
A slightly different post today, since it’s not about Haneda Sumiko’s own writings, but more about one of Haneda’s documentary, and one of the most significant in her career, Ode to Mt. Hayachine 早池峰の賦 (a.k.a. The Poem of Hayachine Valley). The movie was released in 1982 at the Iwanami Hall, distributed by Equipe de Cinema, where it stayed from May 29th to June 25th (and later from August 7th to 13th). A booklet about Haneda and the movie was published and sold at the theater, in it there are various writings by Haneda, Tsuchimoto Noriaki, people of the village in Iwate, and Paulo Rocha, among others. The Portuguese director, with whom Haneda collaborated as a screenwriter for a segment of his A Ilha dos Amores (released at the Iwanami Hall in December 1983), wrote an interesting piece on Ode to Mt. Hayachine; you can read my translation below (NOTE: This is by no means a professional translation, but I hope the readers can get the gist of it):
Paulo Rocha on Ode to Mt. Hayachine
In an Italian film similar to this one, L’albero degli zoccoli / The Tree of Wooden Clogs, director Ermanno Olmi told us, with rare insight, about the heart and the inner world of Italian peasants. Haneda goes here even further, for her, it is not only the heart of the people who speaks in her movie, but it is as the whole of nature, trees and stones, were speaking to us. Although we are in 1982, immersed in our contemporary problems, at the same time, we live with simplicity in an uncomplicated world that has just been created right now. There is a difference between Olmi and Haneda, and it may be a difference that exists between a country with a Catholic tradition and a country with a Shinto tradition, but still there is a miracle that is common to the two. This miracle is that in their clear mind everything is sublimated and yet, a direct and spontaneous force, an inspiration and a beauty in the detachment of modern daily life is gradually invading our hearts. For Haneda, the mountain gods, the plastic products in the small shops in the village, the people who dance the kagura, and the tourists are just as passionate and fantastic. Everything is just as important to her non-sentimental gaze. That is, past and future, nature and machinery, mountains and towns. What is art for, what is fiction for, what position does the profilmic material occupy in a movie, what position does fiction occupy in art? What about the artist? What happens to the artists filmed? Rarely in the history of cinema have such essential questions been asked in such a direct, simple, generous, and intelligent way. I am a filmmaker, and until now I believed that I would be closer to the truth if I approached it through fiction, but now, after seeing Haneda’s Ode to Mt. Hayachine, I realize that the idea is an arrogant one, we must take advantage of this opportunity, we must learn to see reality correctly in order to know the truth. Ode to Mt. Hayachine gave us the best example of this. In Europe, documentary films are being re-evaluated as part of a movement for a new type of cinema. If Ode to Mt. Hayachine were to be introduced in Europe, they would no doubt be surprised and respectful to find that the path they were looking for already existed in Japan. Centuries from now, when people in the future will want to know what we were like, they will be able to watch Ode to Mt. Hayachine, and the movie will tell them about us, the audience of the film today, and about little-known people who were lost among the mountains, in an unknown valley.
The 2021 edition of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival has ended last Thursday. Like many other events in the past two years, the festival took place exclusively online, this is the second and final dispatch, you can read the first one here.
This is the list of the movies awarded:
The Robert and Frances Flaherty Prize (The Grand Prize): Inside the Red Brick Wall
The Mayor’s Prize: Camagroga
Awards of Excellence: City Hall , Night Shot
Ogawa Shinsuke Prize: Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege
Awards of Excellence: Three Songs for Benazir, Makeup Artist
Special Mention: Broken,
Citizens’ Prizes: Writing With Fire
(Synopses are from the official homepage of the festival)
Wuhan, I Am Here (2021, Lan Bo) A film crew that had traveled to Wuhan to make a fiction film is confronted with the sudden lockdown of the city and decides to go film in the streets. They race through the city, joining forces with volunteers who are offering free resources collected through the internet to the elderly and the homeless. The director and his troupe were able to capture on camera the chaos, tensions, fears and pain experienced by the citizens of Wuhan during the first lockdown of the city, in the first months of 2020. A woman crying on a sidewalk because her husband, at home with cancer, cannot be hospitalised due the Covid situation. A group of volunteers distributing food to the various communities of elderly, but often halted and contested because of bureaucracy and the lack of passes. People denied their right to visit relatives in hospital…the documentary is about stories of struggle and grief, death is very present in the film, stories we all became accustomed to witness in the last two years. This is a documentary whose appeal and point of interest will probably increase with the passing of time, when one day, hopefully, we will look back at the pandemic days and reflect on this huge historical juncture.
Three Songs for Benazir (2021, Gulistan Mirzaei, Elizabeth Mirzaei) In a camp for displaced persons in Kabul, a young man sings for his beloved wife Benazir as if the whole world was theirs alone. We see him next four years later, facing the consequences of the path he was forced to choose in providing for his family, after his struggle to find work. In just twenty two minutes the film says more about contemporary Afghanistan than a dozen newspaper articles about the subject.
Three Songs for Benazir
Soup and Ideology (2021, Yang Yonghi) Yang Yonghi is a zainichi director born and rised in Osaka. When her father passed away in 2009, of her family, only her mother and herself were left in Japan. The director who now lives in Tokyo, is worried about her aged mother living alone, so she visits her home in Osaka every month. One day, the mother suddenly tells her that she had experienced the Jeju uprising as a young woman. Her memories of the tragic event, buried deep in her heart, resurfaced and came back to life. She begins to talk specifically about how she got involved in the Jeju uprising. With her latest documentary Yang Yonghi continues her exploration of her family history and the history of the two countries she is connected with, Japan and North Korea. The movie opens in 2018, with her mother lying on a bed remembering the killings and the dead bodies piled along the roads, as she was escaping from Jeju island in 1948. Soup and Ideology is a very touching viewing experience, and on many different levels. The movie presents not only the painful memories of the Jeju massacre (April 3rd 1948) as remembered by the director’s mother, and the destruction of her family, her three brothers were sent from Japan to North Korea at a young age, but also an emotional portrait of her frail and old mother, as a Korean who grew up in Japan worshipping North Korea. As the film progresses she is diagnosed with senile dementia, and little by little she loses her memories, including those of the massacre she witnessed, only 18, in the small Korean island. The movie is also partly an act of self-reflection by Yang Yonghi herself, if in the first part she is the one filming her mother, in the second, when her mother condition worsens, she enters the frame, so to speak. We can clearly see her emotions, especially when she visits the island, with mother and husband, for the anniversary of the massacre. There Yang Yonghi understands that her mother’s affiliation/attraction for North Korea, something the director had never completely forgiven her and her father for, was also partly caused by the atrocities committed by the ROK her mother saw with her own eyes. It would have been a better movie for me, had not been for the five or so minutes of animation used to explain her mother story and the historical situation in Jeju in 1948. I found the segment unnatural and it really took me out of the movie. The soup of the title is a dish that her mother usually prepares, and that is later cooked by Yang Yonghi’s Japanese husband, we see the first meeting between her mother and him in one of the first scenes of the movie, as a way of entering or belonging to her wife’s family, the director parents had always wanted her to married exclusively a North Korean national. Soup and Ideology is important piece of documentary and was one of the highlights of the festival for me.
Soup and Ideology
Other documentaries I’ve watched: The Buddha Mummies of North Japan (2017, Watanabe Satoshi), about the practice of sokushinbutsu orself-mummification through which some mountain monks, usually related to Shugendō, are believed to have attained satori. The World’s “Top” Theater (2017, Satō Kōichi), a fascinating trip into post-war film culture in Yamagata, the film focuses on the Green Room, a cinema in Sakata City that was completely destroyed in a fire in 1976. Before the Dying of the Light (2020, Ali Essafi); Dorm (2021, So Yo-hen), partly documentary and partly performance/reenactment, female Vietnamese laborers arrive at a dormitory in Taiwan. Creative and surprising the finale.
Some final thoughts. After going to Yamagata for almost a decade, it was a very singular experience to join the festival online—the system adopted, with movies available only in Japan and at certain time, like in the in-presence edition, raised more than a doubt (I had a press pass, but I will write more on this in the following weeks). Of course I missed the people, the discussions, the city itself, experiencing the movies on a big screen, the food and the drinks, however, the festival turned out to be a satisfying experience. Of the works I watched, a couple were outstanding, but each one was interesting in its own way. Yamagata is, among other things, a nice occasion to reflect on what happened in the documentary world in the past two years, with a particular focus on Asia: new trends and new voices, but also how the cinema of the real captured, mirrored, and represented the events that took place around the globe. See you in two years Yamagata!
This year edition of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival is, like many other events in the past two years, taking place exclusively online. The festival is available only for viewers in Japan and will end next Thursday (October 14th). This is a first dispatch, others, will possibly follow.
(Synopses are from the official homepage of the festival)
Pickles and Komian Club (2021, Satō Kōichi) Questions and heartbreak emerge from the closing of long-established pickled foods store, Maruhachi Yatarazuke, whose 135-year operation was brought to an abrupt end during the pandemic. The film follows the store owner, forced to make a difficult decision, and those who freely gathered at the store and supported the space. If you have attended at least once the YIDFF, you certainly know about Komian Club, the place where all the people of the festival, directors, producers, cinema lovers, press, or just people from the prefecture, used to gather and discuss about cinema, fueled by sake, beer, or just pure passion for documentaries. Unfortunately, the place, together with the pickled store that ran it, closed down and was demolished, in part due to the pandemic. The documentary is a nice glimpse of what the Komian represented for the documentary community in Yamagata, but also a look at the dire situation of old and historical properties and buildings in peripheral areas in Japan.
Komian Club
Self-Portrait: Fairy Tale in 47KM (2021, Zhang Mengqi) The newest instalment in a series set in a small village in a mountainous region in China. In the winter marking ten years since the director began filming, she tries to get a new building constructed in the village. The girls, who had thus far been the subjects of her films, take up the camera themselves, and begin recording scenes of the village. This is a lovely addition to the series the director has been making since 2011, here the focus is on the children and their interaction with the landscape they inhabit, always breathtaking I have to say, through the mediation of video cameras.
Whiplash of the Dead (2021, Daishima Haruhiko) Weaving together the memories of a university student who lost his life in the First Haneda Struggle in 1967 through the words of his bereaved family and ex-classmates, this film turns the memories of those who protested against government power into questions for the future. The movie is comprised of two parts, for a total of 3 hours and 20 minutes. While in the first 90 minutes the director focuses on the events preceding and leading to the the death of Yamazaki, in the second segment (it could easily have been another movie), the protagonists of the students protests of the late 1960s, now in their 70s, reflect on the reasons of the implosion of the Japanese new left and its movements. The latter part is definitely the one I latched more with, listening to some of the protagonists of the season of politics in Japan, explaining how the hierarchical structure of the factions, the almost military attitude of its members, and last but not least, how the uchi-geba, the internal purges, de facto destroyed the movements, was mind-opening. Of course I’ve read about it in books and papers, and watched movies depicting this falling (and even wrote about it), but hearing it from the people who were on the frontline, was, weirdly enough, liberating. The story of the Mito family, not affiliated with any left group, but a family that helped the young protesters in prison, and later promoted anti-nuclear activism, and whose members (father and two sons) tragically died in 1986, is so fascinating, that would deserve its own documentary.
Whiplash of the Dead
Inside the Red Brick Wall (2020, Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers) Hong Kong, shaken by the “one country, two systems” policy. November 2019, protestors calling for democratic reform are besieged in a university by heavily armed officers. In scrupulous detail, these anonymous filmmakers capture the worn out and anxious youth who are being beat into submission by the violent and cunning forces of power. This was for me the highlight of the festival, so far. Not only a raw punch in the stomach and a visceral viewing experience, but also and incredibly fascinating film on so many other different levels. First of all, there’s the emotional and political side of the resistance, seeing the events of the siege after almost two years, and from a different point of view was, once more, enraging. The second part of the film, when many of the young students broke down, cried and walked out, defeated, from the campus, often criticized by their comrades, was — although something I’ve seen over and over again in the documentaries about the Japanese protests of the 1960s and 1970s—heartbreaking. What was also extremely fascinating, was that all the young people wearing gas-masks and gear, for protection and for anonymity, formed, shall we say, a multitude, a resistance, expressed not through the act of individuals, although there are some speakers who stand out, but more through a sense community and togetherness. It is true that it’s a community that in the second part of the documentary, as I said above, partly dissipates. However, for the period of the siege, twelve long days, it shone as a fight of the multitude. Very interesting was also how the documentary, by filming the violence between riot police, students, aid people, and members of the press (mainly independent press that live-streamed the battles on the internet) was able to capture and create a very powerful sense of space and proximity. A visual cartography of violence, but also of resistance.
Inside the Brick Wall
Other documentaries I’ve watched: Entropy (2021, Chang Yu-sung), a short and abstract experimentation with images shot in a mine; It’s Just Another Dragon (2020, Taymour Boulos); Broken (2021, Nan Khin San Win) a short but touching portrait of abuse and violence in Myanmar. Her Name Was Europa (2020, Anja Dornieden, Juan David González Monroy) a playfully and fascinating trip into the obsession of recreating/simulating/reviving things from the past/present with a deranged and derailed finale. Afternoon Landscape (2020, Sohn Koo-yong), more an installation than a movie, better to be experienced on the big screen probably; Nuclear Family (2021, Erin Wilkerson, Travis Wilkerson) a descent into the heart of darkness of the US; and The Still Side (2021, Miko Revereza, Carolina Fusilier) the latest from the talented duo Revereza/Fusilier, but one I could not really connect with.
Before being overwhelmed by the wave of film festivals approaching —like last year Yubari, Pordenone, OpenCity and for the first time Yamagata are offering an online edition—I wanted to gather some thoughts on a couple of documentaries (and experimental works) I recently watched.
Sayonara TV (Hijikata Kōji, 2020) It’s a pity that the documentaries produced by Tokai Terebi are not released, by their own choice, on DVD and more widely known, and as far as I know they are not even streaming. I had the chance to see some of them in theater here in Japan in the past ten years or so, and while they are not formally challenging, some of the documentaries are really good and worth watching, this one included. I would also suggest Aozora Dorobō (2011) and Shikei bengonin (2012).
Sayonara TV starts as an investigation into the routine of the news channel Tokai TV in Nagoya, at first a camera films the daily work in the office, but after most of the employees express a sense of uneasy at being followed around and filmed, Hijikata moves his focus on three specific employees. However in the course of the documentary the director starts to doubts the factuality of his own endeavour. Reminded me of some work by Mori Testuya and Imamura Shouhei.
The Witches of the Orient (Julien Faraut, 2021). A pop-documentary about the Japanese volleyball players called the “Oriental Witches”, now in their 70s, a team that took the world of sport by storm during the 1960s. The film follows the formation of the team of the Dai Nippon Spinning’s factory in Kaizuka, Osaka, until their victory at the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. Not the kind of documentary I’m usually attracted to, but well, this was highly entertaining. The cinematography is by the great Yamazaki Yutaka (Still Walking, Nobody Knows), and splashy is the use of animation from Attack No. 1, a manga and series inspired by the team itself. The great animation at the beginning is Dan Dan’emon bakemono taiji (1935) by Kataoka Yoshitaro, and the images of the team’s training are from the short documentary Challenge by Shibuya Nobuko.
Shibuya Nobuko in the 1960s
As written above, Challenge, also known as The Prize of Victory (Shibuya Nobuko, 1963) is a short documentary about the so called Oriental Witches, the legendary Japanese women’s volleyball team active in the late 1950s and 1960s. The short was awarded a prize at Cannes in 1964, and Shibuya ended up contributing to Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad, she filmed the section about volleyball of course. Shibuya was a script supervisor, filmmaker, and video reporter born in Dalian, occupied China, in 1932, and she moved to Japan only after the war. As a script supervisor she worked also for Dokuritsu Pro with Imai Tadashi, Shindō Kaneto, and Yamamoto Satsuo. After this documentary, in the next decades she would work mainly for TV, and, as far as I know, worked as an editor for some non-fiction films directed by others (Iizuka Toshio, for instance). She passed away in 2016. Shibuya is a fascinating figure, another forgotten Japanese female filmmaker and documentarian I would like to explore more in the future. On YouTube there’s a channel dedicated to her films, I believe it’s a semi-official one:
Minamata Mandala (Hara Kazuo, 2020). Synopsis from Letterboxd: After years of dumping industrial wastes from the factory to the ocean, Chisso Chemical Corporation contaminated the area of a small Japanese fishing village with excessive amounts of methylmercury. This highly toxic chemical bioaccumulated in fishes of the local water, which when consumed by the local populace resulted in mercury poisoning. In 1977, Minamata disease certification criteria was set by a strange method that tried not to recognize the rights of environmental disease patients. However, an Osaka court won the case for some patients because of a newly developed theory by medical doctors’ recent experiments and proofs. For decades, these patients struggled within the Japanese judicial system for their rights to receive compensation as victims of environmental disease. Those different aspects of these patients’ lives have been filmed by director Hara for the last 15 year inspired by the late director Tsuchimoto Noriaki documentaries.
This would need a longer and in-depth piece, but for now suffice it to say that Minamata Mandala is, in my view, one of Hara’s best works, and the masterpiece of the second part of his career. Not a minute of the documentary (373 minutes!) is superfluous.
Alchemy (Nakai Tsuneo, 1971). Official synopsis: The camera slowly zooms, in over a long period of time, on the light of the sun reflected in the mirror of a bicycle parked at the construction site. To this is added a slowly evolving flicker effect derived from negative-positive reversals, progressively dismantling the distance from the subject. Nakai created a masking film with a calculated pattern of black and white frames into which he inserted positive and negative images and made a print out of two separate rolls of film. The original projection speed was 16 frames per second, but the sound is separate from the open-roll tape rather than burned in, so it can also be screened at 24fps. Also, the original sound consisted of the friction noise of rubbing steel, but in 2019 a new version of the sound was created featuring the friction noise of glass. Two versions of the film exist: 24:15 mins at 24 fps and 40 mins at 16 fps. This was one of the best discoveries of the year for me, thanks to the Collaborative Cataloging Japan (CCJ), a structuralist work made in 1971 by Nakai, clearly inspired by Michael Snow’s Wavelength, but at the same time highly original, and somehow anticipating Matsumoto’s Atman.
Some thoughts on three interesting films I’ve seen in the last couple of months.
13 (Isobe Shinya, 2020) For me easily one of the best works of 2021 so far. Here the synopsis from IDFA:
Filmmaker Shinya Isobe left his camera in exactly the same spot for five years to shoot a picture of the sunset every thirteen seconds. In a series of merged time-lapses, we see the sun moving serenely from left to right. Over and over again. First in a neat line, in total silence. Later patterns appear, supported by a minimalist soundtrack. Isobe overlaid analogue shots from different seasons to produce clusters of shining spots.
The film reminded me of Yamazaki Hiroshi‘s Heliography, his photographs and his collaboration with Ogawa Pro for Magino Village: a Tale (the time-lapse scenes of the Sun). 13 is an incredible viewing experience that connects our human time, the 5 years of the shooting, to the cosmic time of the star(s). The apex of this sensation for me is when a bunch of luminous suns appear on screen towards the middle of the work. The overlapping images shot on film (16mm) reach here an almost haptic quality, and the bright spots are, as it were, holes in the sky that let an otherwise unbearable light filter through. The instrumental music used enhances this overwhelming sense of joy and cosmic gratitude, yet, 13 works without music as well, and like in the best examples of pure experimental cinema (Brakhage), the succession of images by itself creates a visual, and almost musical, rhythm.
Ecosystem 5: A Tremulous Stone (Koike Teruo, 1988)
The Ecosystem movies are a series of films that work with abstract patterns of extraordinary density and complexity; the series is inspired by the complex chaos systems present in nature.
A storm of materiality in flux, a very tactile visual experience, a cacophonous but smooth, almost Merzbow-like (and not because of the sound), experience. I would love to see it on a big screen.
Youth: The 50th National High School Baseball Tournament (Ichikawa Kon, 1968) Unpopular opinion maybe, but I prefer this to Tokyo Olympiad, and I don’t even particularly like baseball. The first part is among the best examples of cinema I’ve seen this year: beautiful photography, really stunning, by Uematsu Eikichi (a cinematographer who worked for Kamei Fumio’s Record of Blood: Sunagawa, among other works), fast-paced editing like in an action movie, incredible popping colours, a moody music, inventive camera angles, a clever sound design, and an exploration of different landscapes and lives of young students practicing baseball in Japan. The most fascinating moment for me was when the movie touches on how the history of the tournament and that of the country are indelibly intermingled. There’s a cut in the first 30 minutes or so, from the smiling faces, in colours, of contemporary (at the time) fans, to the bombings of the Pacific War, that is pure cinema, and it’s worth alone the viewing. The second part, where the 50th tournament itself is the main subject on screen, loses for me, a non baseball person, some of the appeal, but it is still very well crafted and a showcase of Ichikawa’s cinematic touch, and has a very poetic ending. One of the discoveries of the year for me.
In 2002 Haneda Sumiko published Eiga to watashi, a memoir of her career and experiences in the world of Japanese cinema from the 1950s to the late 1990s. A revised version titled Watashi no kiroku eiga jinsei came out in 2014. I’m translating and posting some of the most interesting passages of the first version of the book and other writings by Haneda, as I read it. Titles are mine.
At Iwanami Shashin Bunko
In the fall of 1949, Professor Hani Setsuko, a teacher at Jiyū Gakuen and mother of Hani Susumu, contacted me saying “Iwanami Shoten is starting to produce science films and educational films. Would you like to join?” I have never asked why I was the one chosen, but my reaction at that time was negative. Jiyū Gakuen was a strict Christian school, and while I was in school, I didn’t watch any movies. I saw films when I was a kid, when I was in girls’ school, and after the war, but the world of movies was so distant that I couldn’t imagine to be part of it. I also wasn’t really interested in the offer, because when I heard that it was about science and educational films, I thought about my father, who was a teacher, and felt like I didn’t want to be an educator.
“I’m not very interested” I told her. It’s kind of scary to think about it now, but if the story ended there, my life would have been completely different. However, about a month later, she contacted me again “If you are not interested in movies, how about editing a book?”. “Editing a book” was something that I could see myself doing, and so I was happy to accept, because I thought it would be interesting to join the group. At first, I started as an assistant to Hani Susumu, it was in December 1949, and it was about editing a book for the Iwanami Shashin Bunko series. [a series of photo books, ndt]
I was involved in making photography books for the first two years, and for about half a year I was an assistant to Hani Susumu. (…) As a photography book curator I edited 16 books, among which I will never forget “Koya-san” and “Hiraizumi”. I grew up in a foreign country without knowing much about “Japanese things,” so for me, the influence of making these two books was great, and later in my life I ended up using this experience.
If you follow this blog or my social media activity, you probably already know my love for the documentaries of Haneda Sumiko. One of the most important documentary filmmakers that Japan has seen in the last 70 years, Haneda is, in my opinion, the most important female director in the history of the cinema of the archipelago. One of my resolutions for 2021, time permitting, is to let more people know about Haneda, her career and impact in Japanese documentary cinema. In 2002 she published Eiga to watashi,a memoir of her career and experiences in the world of Japanese cinema from the 1950s until her more recent works. A revised version titled Watashi no kiroku eiga jinsei came out in 2014.
Starting from today I will post the translation of what I think are the most significant passages from the book (the first version) and other writings. Keep in mind that neither English or Japanese is my first language, and that I’m doing it just out of passion for the topic and admiration towards Haneda.
Titles are mine
Iwanami Shoten, and from China to Japan
Both before and after the war, the path for women to become directors was closed from the very beginning. It took many years of long practice to become a filmmaker; to become a director, you had to start as an assistant director, but for women, this was never a possibility. There are of course some exceptions like Sakane Tazuko, who, before the war, seized this opportunity from working with Mizoguchi Kenji, or Tanaka Kinuyo, who grabbed the chance from being one of the first and biggest stars [in Japanese cinema]. That being said, the situation was apparently different in the world of documentary films, and I, knowing nothing of all this, one day, almost by chance, became a director.
Shortly after the end of the war, in 1949, Iwanami Shoten, through Nakaya Ukichirō, established a new branch, the Nakatani Laboratory. Iwanami Shigeo, the founder of the company, saw the situation of audiovisual education brought in by the United States after the war, and thought that not only print culture but also video culture would be important from that moment on, and that is the reason Iwanami wanted his company to venture in the world of video productions. However, Iwanami died without realizing this.
It was Kobayashi Isamu, the managing director of Iwanami Shoten, who continued the idea started by Iwanami. The Nakatani laboratory was established in the hope of becoming a place were “good science films” could be made. Under the guidance of professor Nakatani, renown for his research on snow, the staff centered around Yoshino Keiji, who shot “Snow Crystals” and “Frost Flowers”, at the time highly regarded science films. Kyodo News reporter Hani Susumu was also scouted and became one of the core members of the group.
I was born in Dalian, Manchuria, and lived in the mainland for several years, but went to Manchuria again and graduated from elementary school and girls’ school in Lüshunkou. After that, I entered Jiyū Gakuen in Tokyo and graduated there in the year of the end of the war. On August 15 1945, the day of the end of the war, I went back to Dalian. For three years until the repatriation, under the occupation of the Soviet army, I worked for the women’s department in the only permitted organization, the “Dalian Japanese Labor Union” in the Japanese settlement. I missed the first repatriation, which began in 1946, and with the second one I arrived in Maizuru in July 1948. I wanted to move to Tokyo, but at that time Tokyo had restrictions, and people without jobs could not move in. I worked for a company called Shizuoka Prefectural Educational Book Publishing for a while, but from the spring of 1949 I found a job at the GHQ Chapel Center near the Diet Building and so finally I could go to Tokyo. I was 23 years old.
Wrapping up March and the first 3 months of 2021 with some of the most interesting non-fiction works I’ve watched this year so far.
Dead Birds (Robert Gardner, 1963)
I discovered the existence of the movie through Expedition Content, thus I watched it and experienced it knowing what was behind it, colonial gaze and everything else that comes when a movie is constructed to fit a certain, problematic to say the least, view of the world. That being said, some of the images used are so powerfulーI’m here referring especially to the long shots of the battles between the two tribes, or the children washing the intestine of a pig in a river ーthat they escape the film own narration and the conceptual framing of the work. The movie is available here.
The First Emperor (Hara Masato, 197?)
From IFFR:
In 1971, Hara Masato and a group or actors started shooting his 16mm film, The First Emperor, based on an old Japanese book about history and myths that is known as the Kojiki (‘Record of Ancient Matters’). He did not finish the film. A year later, he started filming again with a small Super8 camera, all on his own, now intending to make some shots of the locations he had not previously been able to film. On the way, he reconsidered his ideas and realised that the myths could not be found anywhere outside and were not filmable in a material sense, but that they were located in cinema itself or in the making of cinema. He decided that recording his hunt for locations was the best way to finish The First Emperor, in which the Japanese myths could also serve as material. The smallest universe known as cinema corresponds with the universe of telling myths about Creation. This is a travelogue by the film maker himself and a film about film, while it is also a myth about film.
There are many iterations of this “movie”, the work completed by Hara in 1973 was 7 hour long, and there are later versions of 4 and 2 hours. A decade or so ago, I saw a 7 hour version (not sure if it was the first version), with live accompaniment by Hara himself, few years ago the 4 hour long, and last month the restored 2 hour edit (two-screen version). The latter is for me the best, a lysergic trip into the fabric of filmmaking and memories, and film as memory. Hara and his works is something that should be explored more—not only in connection with the so called Japanese new wave, he co-wrote Ōshima’s The Man Who Left His Will on Film, and the concept of fûkeiron (landscape theory) in film, to which this movie certainly belongs —but also as a unique filmmaker who works “outside” of cinema as traditionally conceived, in a liminal space formed between personal cinema and amateur filmmaking.
Japanese science and PR films are a well of discoveries, particularly those produced in the late 1950s and 1960s, when many directors who later would have become big names, started their career working in this genre. In the last past months I’ve had the chance to watch a couple of shorts directed by Noda Shinkichi, a director, poet, theorist and producer who was affiliated and collaborated with, among others, Matsumoto Toshio, and who was a central figure in the development of documentary in Japan.
Country Life Under Snow この雪の下に (1956) is a fascinating depiction of the harsh life in a rural area in Yamagata prefecture, while Transporting the Olympics オリンピックを運ぶ (1964) is a documentary about the logistics and the behind the scene of the 1964 Olympics. How things (boats, yachts, traffic cones, film reels, etc.) and animals (horses, pigeons) were transported from and to Tokyo. Directed by Matsumoto and Noda, the film was part of the official coverage of the event, but the two crafted an interested filmic object nonetheless (the classic music used, for instance, reminded me of the Japanese new wave). The work tells us that without the people working behind the scene, such a big scale events would not be possible.
Since the cinematic works of Yamazaki Hiroshi are, to say the least, not really available ー I was lucky enough to attend a retrospective dedicated to his experiments in 16mm, organized by the Image Forum Festival a couple of years ago (you can read more here) ー I thought it would be interesting to post here some of his photographs. After all he was first and foremost a photographer, a conceptual photographer to be more precise, whose works as a filmmaker were a continuation of the path created and explored with his still images.
On s side note, it blew my mind to discover that he was the cameraman who shot the overworldy time-lapse images of the Sun in Ogawa Pro’s The Sundial Carved with a Thousand Years of Notches — The Magino Village Story (1986), a solar connection to be further explored, and another proof, if we needed any, of how the masterpiece shot in Yamagata was also the result of a collective effort, and an interwaving of influences and contributions from different artistic fields.
The following photos are taken from Yamazaki Hiroshi, Concepts and Incidents 山崎博 計画と偶然, an English/Japanese catalogue published on the occasion of an exhibition organized at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum in 2017. The volume covers Yamazaki’s career from his debut, at the end of the 1960s, until his late works, and it’s divided in chapters following the different phases, approaches and interests in photography and film throughout his life, he passed away in June 2017, less than a month after the end of the exhibition.
Stills from Heliography (1979), in my opinion Yamasaki’s masterpieceStills from a video experiment, Flower in the Space (1989)
As usual, the list below is a reflection of my taste, interests, and viewing habits during 2020. For obvious reasons I have not attended any film festivals in person, but the online viewing events organized all over the globe were, for me at least, one of the few positive things to come out of this annus horribilis.
Synopsys in italics, followed by my quick take and the trailer:
Expedition Content (Veronika Kusumaryati, Ernst Karel)
In 1961, filmmaker Robert Gardner organized the Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea (current day West Papua). Funded by the Dutch colonial government and private donations, and consisting of several of the wealthiest members of American society wielding 16mm film cameras, still photographic cameras, reel-to-reel tape recorders, and a microphone, the expedition settled for five months in the Baliem Valley, among the Hubula (also known as Dani) people. It resulted in Gardner’s highly influential film Dead Birds, two books of photographs, Peter Matthiessen’s book Under the Mountain Wall, and two ethnographic monographs. Michael Rockefeller, a fourth-generation member of the Rockefeller (Standard Oil) family, was tasked with taking pictures and recording sound in and around the Hubula world. Expedition Content is an augmented sound work composed from the archive’s 37 hours of tape which document the strange encounter between the expedition and the Hubula people. The piece reflects on intertwined and complex historical moments in the development of approaches to multimodal anthropology, in the lives of the Hubula and of Michael, and in the ongoing history of colonialism in West Papua.
Visual representation and the obsession with it has become, in our society, a black hole absorbing and distorting everything around it. Expedition Content, by offering us for most of its duration a black screen —the are only some written words, and a couple of minutes of images towards the end—allows the sound to take prominence. The freshness of the encounter and discovery, different languages, different sounds, different time, is here preserved and conveyed with an almost haptic quality. It is a work where the experience for the “viewer” is thus channeled through sounds and voices, however I firmly believe it is primarily a film to be watched, possibly on a big screen, in that it establishes its discourse within the frame of the power of (here absent) images.
Expedition Content is also a theoretical piece that goes deeply into colonialism and how the anthropology endeavor, at least a certain way of doing anthropology, is deeply embedded in it. The last 20 minutes of the movie (I’m not revealing more because I don’t want to spoil it) are in this regard an incredible exposure of the stance of the anthropologist as a colonial subject.
By far the best work I saw this year, fiction or non-fiction, it definitely deserves a stand alone and more in-depth piece (I’m working on it, hopefully it will be ready early next year).
The Brilliant Biograph: Earliest Moving Images of Europe (1897-1902)
A compilation film of newly-restored rare images from the first years of filmmaking. Immerse yourself in enchanting images of Venice, Berlin, Amsterdam and London from 120 years ago. Let yourself be carried away in the mesmerizing events and celebrities of the time, and feel the enthusiasm of early cinema that overcame the challenge of capturing life-like movement.
One of the highlights of the Le Giornate del Cinema Muto/Pordenone Silent Film Festival, which this year moved its edition online. An incredible and touching dive into the anodyne beauty of everyday life, captured 120 years ago.
Concrete Forms of Resistance (Nick Jordan)
Filmed in Beirut and Tripoli, Lebanon, Concrete Forms of Resistance is a documentary centred upon Tripoli’s abandoned ‘Permanent International Fair’, designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer in the mid-1960s. The film presents themes of progress and crisis, labour and capital, material and memory, contrasting the utopian vision of the original plans with the stark realities of sectarian divisions, regional conflicts and rising economic inequalities.
A short documentary I watched back in February, although it feels like ages ago, Jordan’s film is an enthralling journey through the recent history of the Middle East seen through the lens of Oscar Niemeyer’s works.
Dick Johnson is Dead (Kirsten Johnson)
As her father nears the end of his life, filmmaker Kirsten Johnson stages his death in inventive and comical ways to help them both face the inevitable.
Stylistically I was expecting something different, so it didn’t have the impact I thought it would, yet the way Kirsten Johnson is able to blend grief and laughs was touching, healing and in the end refreshing.
Edo Avant-Garde (Linda Hoaglund)
Edo Avant-Garde reveals the pivotal role Japanese artists of the Edo era (1603 – 1868) played in setting the stage for the “modern art” movement in the West. During the Edo era, while a pacified Japan isolated itself from the world, audacious Japanese artists innovated stylization, abstraction, minimalism, surrealism, geometric composition and the illusion of 3-D. Their elegant originality is most striking in images of the natural world depicted on folding screens and scrolls by Sotatsu, Korin, Okyo, Rosetsu, Shohaku and many others who left their art unsigned.
While thematically is in another universe, stylistically the movie is very similar to Hoaglund’s ANPO: Art X War (2010). Coproduced by NHK, Edo Avant-Garde was shot using a special Sony 4k camera, and the sound and music used are also superb. For me it was the perfect viewing experience during the partial “lockdown” we had here in Japan in Spring. Soothing.
Me and the Cult Leader (Sakahara Atsushi)
Me and the Cult Leader — A Japanese Documentary on the 1995 Tokyo Sarin Gas Attack perpetrated by doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo, following victim Atsushi Sakahara’s travels with current cult executive Hiroshi Araki.
Don’t be misguided by the trailer below, the film is a slow meditation on the banality of evil, and an exploration of a fascinating and problematic relationship.
Archiving Time (Lu Chi-yuan)
In Taiwan, there is a group of people participating in this race against time. They are hidden inside the film archive of New Taipei City’s “Singapore Industrial Park”, where the 17,000-plus film reels and over a million film artifacts have become their spiritual nourishment. Day after day, they shuttle back and forth inside, carrying their doubts, their learnings, and their faith. What they are doing is awakening these long-neglected film reels, then piecing together the no-longer-existent social atmospheres and lives of distant pasts recorded on them. And spending time in this archive has become everyday life for these film archivists and restorers.
If you are a lover of movies and interested in how preservation and archiving are changing and shaping what the history of cinema, in this particular case, Taiwan cinema, will be in the near future, this is the documentary for you.
Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds (Werner Herzog, Clive Oppenheimer)
Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds takes viewers on an extraordinary journey to discover how shooting stars, meteorites and deep impacts have focused the human imagination on other realms and worlds, and on our past and our future.
While Family Romance was a complete letdown, a disaster both stylistically and content-wise, I quite enjoyed this documentary released on Apple TV a couple of months ago. “Enjoyed” is the correct word because this is, make no mistakes about it, 100% Herzog, for better or worse, and at the end of the day a documentary fully drenched in the public persona he has become in the last 10 years or so. That being said, the themes tackled and the time framing of the events narrated and shown on screen really resonated with me.
Ghosts: Long Way Home (Tiago Siopa)
After a spell cast by Grandma Faraway, the oldest son of a small family encounters the ghost of his late Grandma Maria still living in her old house, and they chat as they used to.
Moving between documentary and fiction, the film explores the memories of a family and those of an area, in a slow-paced style reminiscing of Pedro Costa’s cinema. Beautifully photographed, this hybrid experiment works also a visual poem and an ode to rural Portugal and its ancestral and magical/pagan beliefs. The dreamlike quality that is infused throughout the whole film really works well, but at the same time I think that some scenes could have been left out, especially those in the second half of the movie when the magical realism and the ghost story aspects are pushed too much on the surface and become too on the nose, so to speak.
Lil’Back: Real Swan (Luis Walkecan)
Dancer Lil’ Buck grew up jookin and bucking on the streets of Memphis. After a breathtaking video of him dancing to Camille Saint-Saëns’ “The Swan” accompanied by cellist Yo-Yo Ma went viral, everything changed.
A documentary about a topic I was not familiar at all, and yet, or because of this, it was a nice surprise, a discovery of a world.
Asian Docs 
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