Movie journal (November 2020): 2 documentaries by Yoshida Kijū, and Okinawa 2018

Wrapping up November with some of the most interesting non-fiction works (made in , or about, the Far East) I’ve watched in the past months.

私たち生まれた島 Okinawa 2018 (Todori Shin’ya, 2020) is an informative documentary about how the new generations of Okinawans deal and cope with the American military bases in the islands. Filmed in the last few years, the film covers the protests againsst the relocation of one of the biggest American bases in Henoko, the election of a female representative (for the communist party) in a small town, and the election of governor Denny Tamaki in 2018. A mix of video journalism and grassroots activism caught on video, the documentary offers an interesting insight of a complex and layered situation.

Sooner or later I will have to write something longer about the documentaries directed by Yoshida Kijū, one of the towering figures in post war Japanese cinema. For today let me just share a few random thoughts about two of his best non-fiction films I’ve recently rewatched.

With The Cinema of Ozu according to Kijū Yoshida 吉田喜重が語る小津安二郎の映画世界 (1994) the Japanese director adds images to his reflections on Ozu written in his beautiful Ozu’s Anti-Cinema. If you have already read the volume, it’s nothing particularly new, but it is a delight nonetheless. I watched the short version, but apparently there also a longer version out there.

While both were made in the same period and share a certain style and approach ーYoshida providing the narration, and the preoccupation with cinema and the act of representing through images as a theoretical structureー Dreams of Tokyo, Dreams of Cinema 夢のシネマ 東京の夢 (1995) is by far my favourite of the two. By telling the story of the early travels of Gabriel Veyre, the Lumière Brothers’ cameraman, in Mexico, Japan and Morocco, Yoshida reflects on the advent of this new technology and the changes and cultural shifts that were caused by the cinematograph and everything that came with it. This relatively short documentary (50’) is a fascinating example of how effective and poetic essay cinema can be when used at its best. Yoshida, using Veyre’s gaze, exposes the power and dangers that the birth of cinema brought with it since its very beginning, forseeing also the prominence that visual representation would reach in the world to come.

One of the most significative passage is, in this sense, one where we see a group of indigenous people in Mexico filmed by Veyre, a group that is definitely not glad to pose for the camera. At a certain point a white person violently grabs the head of a woman and forces her to see and face the camera to get a “better” shot. At this point the footage ends. According to Yoshida probably Veyre sensed that something was not right and decided to interrupt the shooting. Quoting Yoshida “Most people enthusiastically perceived the moving images of the cinematograph as reality itself and so the representation ended up taking precedence over the reality of the world, but Veyre for some unknown reason adopting an opposing standpoint, saw the future of the cinema from a different angle.”

Here the scene:

https://youtu.be/rNpzCJsSEz4


Online Film Festivals: first impressions

Already more than half year has passed since the pandemic generated a tidal wave of changes in our daily lives and habits. Of course the world of cinema and the film industry at large have been affected by Covid-19 too, and one of the consequences is that the international film festival circuit has been completely disrupted.

From last March, most of the big film events worldwide have been cancelled, postponed or have moved online, and it was only in recent months that we saw, with Venice as a frontrunner, the return of the film festival as we used to know it, with all the necessary social distancing and limitations.

Many festivals opted for an online and often limited edition. It has been interesting for me to see how these net-events have been organised and scheduled (ticket price, catalogs, regional restrictions, etc.) and, I have to be honest, it was fun to experience them in all their diversity, and I’m not talking about the movies. Before proceding with some reflections on a couple of online festivals I’ve “attended”, let me make some disclaimers:

– I live in central Japan, in a small city far from Tokyo, and neither very near to Osaka or Kyoto, that is, for me going to a festival here in Japan means to plan in advance and commit time and money.

– I work in the field, so to speak, I write and occasionaly collaborate with film festivals, but I have also a daily job that allows me to survive.

– I really enjoy going to film festivals, watching the movies is only a part of the experience, it’s everything else that makes it special for me, film culture extends way beyond the mere act of wtching a movie, online or not. That is one of the reasons why going to the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival every two years has been a real joy.

That was to clarify my position. Now, in the past months I had the chance to experience, in one form or another, watching many movies or only one, the following online film festivals:

Far East Film Festival, Udine, Italy

Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna, Italy

EXiS 2020, Seoul, South Korea

Open City Documentary Festival, London

Yūbari International Fantastic Film Festival, Yūbari, Japan.

2020 Skip City International D-Cinema Festival, Saitama, Japan.

Le Giornate del cinema muto, Pordenone, Italy (starting soon)

and counting…

The biggest wall that everybody interested in watching film festivals online (or should I call them film events online?) bump into are the regional restriction. Understandably, not all movies can be licensed to stream in all locations, and navigating through these limitations can be frustrating at times. The Udine Far East and Il Cinema Ritrovato had regional restrictions but their sites (actually the MyMovie platform) was very easy to navigate and it was very clear which movies were available in which country.

Those two festivals and Le Giornate in Pordenone use the same screening schedule’s method: each movie is scheduled at a certain day on a certain time, like in a normal film festival, but it’s available to watch online for 24 hours, also to make it easy for people watching from different time zones. On the other hand, the Yūbari Film Festival in Hokkaido basically replicated online the format of the physical festival: there were three “screens” (channels on Hulu Japan, the festival was free if you had the service) each showing different movies, a bit like TV, with the only difference being that the movies were rotating. While this option is without doubt the closer to the real festival, I found the 24 hours window to be the perfect one for me, you still have the “pressure” of missing a movie, but at the same time it’s easy to organise your day.

A different approach is being used by the Skip Digital Festival (at the time I’m writing still happening), if you buy a pass, about 1500 yen, you can can watch, only if you’re in Japan, all the 24 movies presented, at any time during the event.

While, as I wrote above, the online festival is not the same as the “real thing” ーno big screens no communal viewing, no socializingーit is undisputable that for cinema people who, like me, live far from big cities, in other countries, or don’t have much free time, it’s a golden chance for new discoveries. And by the way, you’re finally watching movies like the film festival programmers and directors…on your PC….

Is the online film festival here to stay? I don’t honestly know, but I would say that in the next few years we will see more hybrid experiments between online and physical film festivals happening.

Feel free to chime in and share your experience, you can do it here.

Movie journal (Sept 2020): Toro Axe Part 3: All Things Change, The Tide Pool, Ainu My Voice, The Dawn of Kaiju Eiga

The Covid-19 and the consequent pandemic has also been affecting the film festival circuit around the globe, with many festivals forced to cancel their events, postpone them or moving the screenings online. As bad as the situation is (first world problems of course), this shift in the showing practice, we all hope it’s a temporary solution, gave me the chance of “attending” the virtual edition of a couple of film festivals that under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have been able to be at. The Udine Far East Festival and the Cinema Ritrovato in Italy, and more recently the EXiS Film Festival in South Korea, and the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival here in Japan. Below are some thoughts about a couple of documentaries I had the opportunity to watch at these events.

Toro Axe Part 3: All Things Change (2012, 35′) is Matsumoto Toshio last work, a collaborative video project produced by Sano Gallery initially in 2009, in which six co-writers would participate and create an omnibus film. At first, Matsumoto was not supposed to be involved too much in it, but in 2011 the Great East Japan Earthquake and the consequent nuclear disaster had such a strong impact on him, that Matsumoto decided to change the shape of the project. This new work became a trilogy titled Tōrō no ono, the third installment, All Things Change, was screened at this year EXiS Film Festival (online).

蟷螂の斧: 万象無常 Toro Axe Part 3: All Things Change

The origin of this project was the experience of the horrific disaster (earthquake and nuclear accident) that took place in 2011. This event was so powerful that it changed the way humans see and value things. If we don’t look directly at at the fundamental way death and life are entangled, we will not be able to move forward. For this reason, this visual work became even more disorganized and destructive than “Pilgrimage into Memory” the second installment, containing all different sort of noises and creating a dissonant vortex of chaos. (Matsumoto Toshio)

The film consists of videos shot and produced by 5 artists, Tanotaiga, Inaki Kanako, Oki Hiroyuki, Kunito Okuno, and Tanaka Tanako, blended together by Matsumoto, an attempt, according to the director himself, to get rid of the individuality of the artist, and to create or to move towards an anonymous subjectivity. His last involvement in a visual work as a manipulator of images is the perfect sum of his career, everything he made and worked on during his life resonates throughout this collaborative film, from his early preoccupations about the filmmaker/image maker’s subjectivity, to his interest in the process of the creation of moving images.

The first five minutes are almost like a work by Makino Takashi, colours and particles in motion that leaves room, in the rest of the movie, to a more traditional video documentary about the triple disaster of 3.11. The interest of Matsumoto and his collaborators towards the pullulating life (worms, flies, but also a new born baby) among the landscape of death of the ruins and wreckage left by the tsunami, is as disturbing as it is fascinating. The endless pulse of life, life here considered in its broader meaning encompassing also death and destruction, is not only conveyed through the scenes of swarming insects and the arrival of a new life to this world, but also, in pure Matsumoto style, is embedded in the plasticity and throb of images.

The title is fascinating in itself too, 蟷螂の斧 (tōrō no ono) is a maxim signifying a futile endeavor like a “mantis brandishing a hatchet”, while mujō of the title of the installment, 万象無常 (banshō mujō) All Things Change, is the Buddhist anitya meaning impermanence, and banshō signifies all the creation, the universe.

Ainu My Voice アイヌ, 私の声 (Tomida Daichi, 2020) was presented at the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival (online) section dedicated to women’s empowerment, a collection of shorts dealing with the lives of female subjects, a wide and diverse range of subjects, in contemporary societies.
Shot and composed like a TV commercial, after all it was produced by the fashion magazine MINE, the movie is nonetheless an interesting dive, albeit short ça va sans dire, on a young Ainu woman who is trying to make sense of her life and her belonging to a minority group in contemporary Japan and beyond, in the course of the film she also visits a tribe of native Indians in America. You can watch, legally, Ainu My Voice here.

The Tide Pool: Where the Ocean Begins (Lim Hyung Mook, 2019) is a movie about the tide pools in Jeju island, South Korea, and their complex ecosystem. As the official description says “A tide pool is an isolated pocket of seawater found in the ocean’s intertidal zone (…) areas where the ocean meets the land: from steep, rocky ledges to long, sloping sandy beaches and vast mudflats.”

An above-average documentary about marine life that is elevated by a stunning photography and a smart use of music. A very “traditional” science documentary, make no mistake about it, with narration, explanations, and an educational purpose at its core, but the images are so beautiful and the colours so popping that it is easy to understand why it was included in a festival about the fantastic.

I’m cheating a bit here, The Dawn of Kaiju Eiga (Jonathan Bellés, 2019) is not properly speaking a documentary produced or made in Asia, but nonetheless it is about a very Japanese phenomenon, the Kaiju eiga. Bellés explores the connections between the advent of Kaiju movies, especially Godzilla, and the horrific history of Japan and atomic bombs. Nothing special and nothing new for an average but well-informed Godzilla fan, but if you’re new to the subject, it might work as a portal. As already noted by many reviewers, while there are some interesting interviews with people who worked for the Godzilla franchise throughout the decades, the lack of images from the movies ruins the enjoyment of it (the movie is made almost completely of interviews). It is by no means the director’s fault, Tōhō and more in general Japanese movie companies are famous for their closure of mind in regards to the usage of images from their works (unless you pay of course, pay a lot).

Voices of Orchid Island ( Hu Tai-Li, 1993)

Hu Tai-Li (1950-2022) was one of the prominent ethnographic filmmakers active in Taiwan, a professor, an anthropologist, and also the president, for two decades, of Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival. Throughout her career, both as a documentarian and as a visual anthropologist, she tackled issues related to national and native identity, colonialism, and how the culture and traditional practices of the tribes inhabiting the island(s) are surviving in contemporary Taiwan.

At the beginning of the 1990s Hu went to Orchid Island, 45 miles off the southeast coast of Taiwan in the Pacific Ocean and just 20 miles away from the Philippines, to explore how the native people, the Yami, were affected by the influence from outside: tourism, TV people, anthropologists, mass-media…

Voices of Orchid Island opens with a self-reflexive touch, we see director Hu discussing the documentary she is going to make with some of the people who are going to be filmed in a short, casual, but significant exchange of opinions on a beach. There she talks with three people (and a kid) from different ethnic groups, two of them are from the Yami tribe, while the third man is of the Bunun tribe, an ethnic group external to the island, and who, at the time of filming, had been living there for three years, working as a doctor. While two of the people are welcoming the director and her endeavor, the youngest among them (from the Yami tribe) has an interesting response:

I often feel that the more research anthropologists do on this island, the worse the island is harmed. I feel anthropologists come to Orchid Island just so they can advance to a certain social status. They just use Orchid Island as a tool, they don’t benefit the subject of their research.

 

In the next scene we hear the voice and see a guide on a bus full of tourist from mainland Taiwan, explaining about the Yami people while filming them (the tourists). We (the viewers) are already thrown on the side of the outsiders/tourists, and fed with information and data about the native people. After this “lecture”, it is unsettling to see the group getting off the bus and hoarding throughout the village like it was some sort of tourist spot or a zoo where to admire some sort of rare animals. Hu constructs a cynical mirror of sort where we cannot hide our own reflection, the tourists are “us” viewers, trapped in a cursed routine by which we experience places we’re not familiar with, and objectify people who live differently from us.  It is really compelling how the director is able to hint at the problematics at work in the island just in a couple of minutes of well-edited images. 

“They don’t regard us as human beings” “They called us barbarians in loincloths” complain two of the Yami people interviewed, but we also hear a deeper and more material complaint:

Recently some TV crews came here (…) sometimes we see ourselves on television, and we feel we’re being exploited for profit, we don’t benefit at all, but the people who film us do. They earn all the money, not us.

On the one side we have the villagers’ will not to be exploited or misrepresented, on the other, the bureaucrats and various heads of tourism, usually from mainland Taiwan, who welcome mass tourism as the sole industry in the island. The whole first part of the movie is dedicated to explore these power relations and how the Yami react and interact with Han Chinese while trying to preserve their way of life. Everything however is more complex and layered than it might appear at first sight, it is not a clash between two different and rigid worlds, but more a nuanced blending of the two parts. We discover, for instance, that the Yami are forced (or maybe they’re doing it willingly?) to stage their biggest festival and a very important ritual dance, mainly for attracting tourists, and in doing so keeping the flow of money that guarantees their survival. 

In the second section of the movie, we meet again with the doctor we saw at the beginning, he’s running a clinic in the island and his experiences with patients are as difficult as they are fascinating. The shamanic healing practices they are accustomed to, and the refusal, but also their mediated and occasional acceptance, of a medicine practice alien to them, brought from mainland Taiwan, is an unsolvable dilemma that Hu is able to convey with empathy towards the subjects filmed. This is for me the most accomplished and most powerful part of the entire documentary. 

For instance, if someone didn’t want to live, how was I to change that? He believed his injury was caused by an evil ghost entering his leg and I couldn’t change his mind.

In the last section, the film moves to the resistance of some island’s inhabitants against the big nuclear waste storage facility completed by Taipower at the beginning of the 1980s. The fight and civil resistance is promoted also by a group of Christians,  creolized Christians to be precise, and it intertwines with another big problem affecting the island, that of young people leaving for Taiwan in search of jobs and opportunities.

First they told us they were building a military harbor, then a canning factory. They fooled us and kept us in the dark.

While the resistance against Taipower is a fascinating subject, amplified by the colonialist aspect of the question, an approach that disregard ethnic minorities and exploit their powerlessness, the movie just hints at it and does not explored fully its potential. It definitely would have benefited the documentary to stay a bit longer and delve deeper into the topic, or even better, to make a separate work about the nuclear waste site (it’s very possible that there are already other works out there on the subject that I’m not aware of).

In closing, Voices of Orchid Island is a captivating work, not only because it presents a complex, challenging, and multilayered glimpse at the situation of the place at a specific time in history, but also because it shades light on what it means to approach and confront oneself with “different” cultures, Eduardo Viveiro de Castro would say  different natures, and what this encounter implies for “us” filming/viewing subjects, and for the people being filmed as well.

If you want to know more about the contemporary documentary scene in Taiwan, I’ve written a piece here.

 

 

Cenote (Ts’onot) セノーテ (Oda Kaori, 2019)

I wrote a longer and in-depth piece on Cenote, Aragane, Towards a Common Tenderness, and Oda’s filmmaking more in general for a film publication (hopefully out next year), so what follows are just some of my thoughts on the movie, and my experience with Cenote after multiple viewings.
My interview with Oda, and my piece on Aragane.

The past and present of those living around the cenotes coalesce in this mysterious place. Long-lost memories echo in hallucinatory turquoise underwater footage, an entrancing game of light and dark. Swimming in these sinkholes, director Oda Kaori encounters intriguing shapes and beams of light, the water heaves, drops fall like razor blades.

After debuting on the international scene with Aragane in 2015, although Thus a Noise Speaks (2010) was her actual debut in the film/documentary scene, two years later young filmmaker Oda Kaori released Towards a Common Tenderness, her second feature film. This is a movie about her journey from Japan to Europe, and there across the borders of the former Yugoslavia, and also about the possibilities, limitations, and responsibilities that come with documentary filmmaking.                                                                                                                                  Her new film, Cenote, is again shot outside of Japan, this time in Northern Yucatan, Mexico, and almost completely filmed with an iPhone inside a few ts’onot/cenotes, sinkholes that were used by ancient Mayans as a primal source of water. Some of these sinkholes were also used during ritual sacrifices, and in the Mayans belief system they were considered holy springs able to connect this world to the afterlife.

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When I first saw Cenote at a special screening organized at the Aichi Arts Center in Nagoya exactly a year ago, in July 2019 (the movie was partly funded by the venue), what impressed me the most were the first twenty minutes of the film. It was an exhilarating sensorial experience, almost an unveiling of a new world: the abstract images shot underwater and those gliding on the surface of the liquid, blended with grainy images of people whispering old Mayan stories, all of this soaked in a haptic soundscape, are to this day one of the best combination of images and sound I saw on screen in recent years. However, the second part of the work did not really work for me, the incredible first part was not followed by an equally intense second half, I couldn’t completely connect with it, especially with the way the movie was constructed. This was my reaction after the first viewing, anyway.

In the months that followed, I had the chance to watch Cenote several more times, one more time on the big screen at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in October, and later on through a screener I was kindly given. After multiple viewings some recurring patterns and figures presented throughout the movie started to slowly reveal, and Cenote began to resonate with me in a very different manner compared to when I first saw it. I realized how the whole work is permeated with a dialogic tension, a relation between complementary opposites. For instance, cenotes as a geological phenomena resulting from the impact of a shower of meteorites with the crust of the earth, on the one side, and these sinkholes as a mythical space connecting with the afterlife, on the other. A tension between opposites that is also embodied in the aesthetics deployed by Oda, the digital images shot underwater with an iPhone are counterpointed with those shot in Super 8 and depicting faces, animals, festivals, and ceremonies honoring the dead. This exploration of afterlife and the deceased and their relation with the space they used to inhabit is what especially surfaced for me after multiple viewings. The connection between the dead and the living, and the blurring of the two reigns is made more explicit in a brief and beautiful passage when the movie gazes at funeral rituals in the area, when human bones and skulls are brushed, polished and collected with extreme care as remnants of past lives, but somehow still very present.

While I think Aragane is a more accomplished and well-balanced work, I believe Cenote is a more deep (non pun intended) and powerful visual experience, and definitely a film more important for Oda’s career. First of all,  the movie gave her the chance to became the recipient of the first Ōshima Nagisa Prize, an award newly established by Pia Film Festival for “young, new talents who pioneer the future of film and attempt to spread their wings around the world”, and secondly to be invited to different film festivals around the world, such as Nippon Connection and Japan Cuts. This international recognition will hopefully expand even further her career, giving Oda the chance, and the funds, to work on the next project. It seems that after having explored two of the classic elements of nature, earth in Aragane, and water in Cenote, she would like to make her next work in (!) and about space, as she stated in a couple of interviews.
More importantly from an aesthetic point of view, with Cenote Oda not only went back to the sensorial filming approach used in Aragane, but she also expanded it and enriched it with the poetic touches that permeates Towards a Common Tenderness. As I wrote at the beginning of this article, the peaks in Cenote are very high and point towards an idea of cinema and filmmaking that, in my opinion, has yet to realize its full potential.

The Japanese Cinema Book – Ogawa Productions

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

One of the most astonishing artistic achievements in the long years spent by the collective in Yamagata filming and farming, was the ability to reach a degree of proximity, almost a merging and an identification, with the subject filmed, the taishō. Not only a proximity with people and their point of view, but also a quasi-fusion with the landscape and its non-human elements as it were, the plants, the seasonal changes, the weather, the geological time of the area, or the Sun perceived as a orbiting star. To read in the essay that Ogawa and his group “took this ideal subjectivity even further with the idea of ‘the human possessed by the rice plant’ (ine ningen), an imagined, metaphorical entity that they strove for in order to capture the essence of rice cultivation” was for me a confirmation and a revelation.

The beautiful poster of Magino Village: A Tale (1986)—some of the words on it are pure poetry, “a movie mandala”, “to carve the time of life into the body of film”—beautifully embodies this strive towards the becoming-rice plant of the collective, and it is in itself a work of art, in my opinion.

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

 

 

 

Best (favorite) documentaries of 2019

Here we go again, like every year and like all (wanna-be) respectable cinema blogs or cinephiles around the web, these are my personal favorite documentaries of 2019. As usual, and it goes without saying, the list below is a reflection of my taste, interests and viewing habits during 2019, and thus it is mainly composed of documentaries made in the Eastern part of the Asian continent (but there are few exceptions of course).

 

Outstanding works (unranked)

Many Undulating Things (Wang Bo, Pan Lu)
History, art, geography and colonialism mixed in an aesthetically challenging piece of work. The movie is an expansion of Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings, a short made in 2018 by Wang Bo and Pan Lu.

No Data Plan (Miko Revereza)
A travelogue and a drifting through America to explore the identities of undocumented immigrants, the director himself and his mother.

Memento Stella (Takashi Makino)
Like a wave of spiritual materialism in continuous becoming.

Cenote (Ts’onot) (Oda Kaori)
After Aragane, and Toward a Common Tenderness Oda moves her attention to the cenotes in Mexico. It’s not a perfect movie, but has some of the most impressive combination of sound and images I’ve seen last year. Entrancing to say the least.

Reason (Anand Patwardhan)
Fascism in contemporary India.

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Honorable mentions:

Indiana, Monrovia(Frederick Wiseman)

Happy Android (Jaina Kalifa)

The Holiday Inn-Side (Charby Ibrahim)

Dutch Angle: Chas Gerretsen & Apocalypse Now (Baris Azman)

 

Special (re)discoveries:

The Man Who Has a Camera (Liu Na’ou, 1935)

Kobayashi Issa (Kamei Fumio, 1941)

Senso Daughter (Sakiguchi Yuko, 1990)

 

Best cinematic experience

By far the best viewing experience I had in 2019 was not at all an orthodox cinematic experience. At Yamagata  I was lucky enough to be at a Gentou (magic lanterns) screening, dedicated to the grass-roots movements in the Miike mine’s strikes during the 1950s.

 

 

Movie journal (Dec. 2019): Man Who Has a Camera, Many Undulating Things, Nuclear Power Plants Now

Three short takes on some of the most interesting documentaries I’ve seen recently.

The Man Who Has a Camera (Liu Na’ou, 1935)

One the the discoveries of the year for me. Clearly inspired by Dziga Vertov, filmmaker, poet and writer Liu Na’ou shot this movie in four cities across national boundaries: Tainan, Canton, Shenyang, and Tokyo. A beautiful film that is in equal part amateur cinema, a city symphony film, and an experiment in poetic filmmaking, less a work about landscapes of certain areas, and more an actuality film depicting faces and people’ feelings across and beyond borders. Incredibly charming, fresh and well constructed, a feverish dream of transculturality that is much deeper and complex than its simplicity on the surface level might suggest. I’m planning to write a longer piece about the fascinating figure that was Lui Na’ou and this film in the near future.

Many Undulating Things (Wang Bo, Lu Pan, 2019)

The film begins and ends in a shopping centre in Hong Kong. We carefully observe the smooth movement of the escalators, the constant flow of people that never stops, the musical fountain that presides over the centre of the internal courtyard, as if this gigantic complex could concentrate the circulation of the entire city, or even, the entire country. From there, it will be more a tale about concrete, enormous port warehouses, glazed galleries built for the 2010 universal exhibition, overpopulated tower blocks, the fragments of still recent colonialism… Through the history of urban changes, we witness the profound social transformation of this territory that is constantly swinging between the East and the West. Hong Kong thus emerges, like an archetypal space of many other cities of globalised capitalism. MANY UNDULATING THINGS offers a complex reflection on the relationships between landscape, nature, urbanisation and society. Thanks to its exhaustive approach, the film questions the function of cities in the development of the capitalist system. A political poem.

I almost despised the first part, the visuals are fascinating, but the narration and the philosophical frame used didn’t really work for me. From the second chapter onward, the work elevates itself and gets definitely more interestingly nuanced and complex, exploring the historical layers that constitute contemporary Hong Kong, analyzed through cinema, photography and paintings. When it moves to the third chapter, the documentary also explores how colonization in the past centuries worked and was deeply linked to the alteration of the botanical realm, “the reorganization of ecosystems under imperial order (…) was actualised through the glass boxes” an important invention and crucial part of the conquering process pushed by imperialism. The glass box would later mutate and evolve into greenhouses, exhibitions, arcades, spectacles and finally into shopping malls. This section, and especially the second chapter of the movie, is an expansion of Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings, a short made in 2018 by Wang Bo, and definitely forms the strongest part of Many Undulating Things, in my opinion. When the movie moves from the historical perspective back to contemporary Hong Kong, moving also from a visual and hybrid approach that uses old movies and photos to convey its meaning, it loses its power, trying to be too many things at once and meandering in too many directions.
That being said and even though Many Undulating Things feels at times too randomly constructed, and a sort of patchwork of three or four short documentaries, it’s still a fascinating piece of work worth revisiting.

Nuclear Power Plants Now いま原子力発電は (Sumiko Haneda, 1976)

This is an obscure and short documentary made for TV by Haneda Sumiko in 1976, shortly before establishing her own company and releasing The Cherry Tree with Gray Blossoms, if I’m not mistaken. Haneda and her troupe visit the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant to explore the state of atomic energy in Japan, and its lights and shadows. The short is mainly composed of interviews, but the most fascinating part is when doubts about safety concerns start to emerge in the talks. While some people from the Tokyo Electric Power Company, the company that owns the plant, compare the possibility of an incident at the power plant to that of a meteor hitting the earth, there’s a professor from Waseda, if I remember correctly, who says that there have not been enough cases to delineate or guess the consequences, or even to calculate the possibility, of a nuclear incident. The style is that of a TV documentary, and there’s a lot of explanation about how nuclear energy is produced, however, the doubts that the film raises, especially knowing what would happen 35 years later, are chillingly prescient and make it an interesting viewing. Even essential if you consider Haneda, like I do, one of the most important female directors in the history of Japanese cinema.

The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (Hara Kazuo) out on Blu-ray and DVD

The UK-based label Second Run has just released a Blu-ray and DVD of one of the most respected and internationally known Japanese documentaries, The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, directed by Hara Kazuo in 1987. The movie has often appeared in best-documentaries lists around the web and in prestigious magazines as well, it was at number 23 of the Sight & Sound’s best documentaries of all time, a list compiled by critics in 2014.

Here the description of the movie and the extras included in the new release:

Presented from a new director-approved HD remaster, Second Run present one of the most renowned, ground-breaking and inspirational documentaries of the past half-century.

Conceived by Shôhei Imamura, Kazuo Hara’s infamous and audacious documentary follows Kenzo Okuzaki, an ageing Japanese WW2 veteran, on a mission to uncover the truth about atrocities committed as the war in the Pacific reached its bloody end. Ultimately, Okuzaki blames Japan’s Emperor Hirohito himself for these barbarities, and his obsessive pursuit of those he deems responsible soon escalates. Willing to confront the taboos of Japanese society in his fanatical quest for justice, Okuzaki is driven to unsettling acts of violence.

Harrowing and extraordinarily powerful, Hara’s film forces us to face the disturbing realities of war and, crucially, to question the complicity between filmmaker, subject and audience.

Our region-free Blu-ray and DVD editions also features a new interview with director Kazuo Hara, shot by the filmmaker especially for this release; the 2018 Open City Documentary Film Festival Masterclass with Hara and a booklet featuring writing by film historians Tony Rayns, Jason Wood and Abé Mark Nornes.

A great deal has been said and written about the documentary and about Hara himself, but if you want to explore more about the Japanese director, a good angle to approach his filmmaking is Camera Obtrusa: The Action Documentaries of Hara Kazuo (Kaya Production, 2009), a volume collecting some of Hara’s writings. If you want to know more about Kenzo Okuzaki, beyond Hara’s depiction of him in the film, there’s this in-depth paper written by scholar Tanaka Yuki,  “Yamazaki, Shoot Emperor Hirohito!” Okuzaki Kenzo’s Legal Action to Abolish Chapter One (The Emperor) of Japan’s Constitution.

Report from the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2019

The 30th edition of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival has ended more than a week ago. I was fortunate enough to be there, it was my fourth time, and for almost the entirety of the festival. What follows is a short report about things I’ve seen and my general impressions of the event. Please bear in mind that every film festival is experienced differently by each people attending it, depending on age, expectations, interests and the path each of us carve in the forest of movies screened.

As usual I didn’t see many of the films in competition, most of them are by big names, and, hopefully, will be screened in theaters o streamed on platforms in the near future. That being said, I really wanted to see Wang Bing’s Dead Souls, but its length deterred me, not the actual length in itself, but the fact that it would have eaten up a whole day of movies. Anyway I ended up not seeing it and I’m not sure I made the right decision, Dead Souls won the main prize, the Robert and Frances Flaherty Prize, and surprisingly to me, the citizen price as well. The other major award, the Special Jury Prize, was given to Indiana, Monrovia by Frederick Wiseman, a solid work, but not the best documentary by the American director, in my opinion, the main problem I had with the movie was the “fast” editing of certain scenes, the landscape scenes to be precise.

AM/NESIA: Forgotten “Archipelagos” of Oceania is the program I was most excited about, and it turned out I was right. The first work I saw at the festival was Lifeline of the Sea, a propaganda documentary made in 1933 with the support of the Navy Ministry of Imperial Japan, a film depicting the colonization and militarization of several islands in Oceania. It’s an extremely important document, almost ethnographic in its first part, when it depicts the various traditions and beliefs of the people inhabiting the islands, and overtly propagandist in the second part. It does that in such a bluntly way, it does not sweeten the pill so to speak, that it doesn’t hide the the fact that colonization is first and foremost about using other territories resources and exploiting people. A chillingly matter-of-fact documentary that found its perfect counterpart in the work screened soon after, Senso Daughter. Directed by Sakiguchi Yuko in 1990, the movie focuses on the legacy of the Japanese occupation of Papua New Guinea during the Second World War. A sad legacy that arises from rape, starvation and terror. It is an unflinching gaze at the horrors perpetuated by Japanese military towards women, the so called “comfort women”, in Papua New Guinea, told through interviews with ex-soldiers. While admitting the violence of war, almost all these veterans deny any violence or forced prostitution of women, on the other hand the director researches and presents us a very different reality when she interviews women who survived that period and painfully recollect those times. It is interesting to note that the documentary was released just a couple of years after Hara Kazuo’s The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, a movie that covers a different but related topic in the same area. Imamura Shohei also explored the topic of comfort women, sent from Japan in his film, in Karayuki-san, the Making of a Prostitute, a made-for-TV documentary aired in 1975.
A big surprise for me was to find out that Sakiguchi Yuko is the same person who directed from 2012 to 2108 Everyday is Alzheimer, a series of three personal documentaries about her mother’s dementia. A trilogy of films that had a relative success in the indie scene and in the mini-theater circuit.
AM/NESIA was a real discovery for me, unfortunately I saw only one more film, Kumu Hima (Dean Hamer, Joe Wilson, 2014) about a transgender person in contemporary Hawaii and how colonialism has affected and continues to affect people’s bodies as well, not only lands and territories. I bought the catalog, a beautiful book with which, hopefully, I will try to continue the exploration of the films produced in the continent. A forgotten cinema.

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The other program that I followed somehow closely was The Creative Treatment of Grierson in Wartime Japan. While some of the movies screened are “classics” of documentary cinema, Night Mail, Coal Face, or Housing Problems, the screenings were often packed, typhoon notwithstanding. When Night Mail was shown for instance, during the scenes when it is shown how the postal mail is delivered around the country without the train stopping, the audience was cheering and clapping enthusiastically like at a Marvel movie. I was really impressed, and this made me ponder about who these kind of festivals and screenings events are made for. They’re definitely not only for “experts” and professionals, and I was glad to notice that many people in the audience were young, well younger than me at least.
In the same section I saw Kobayashi Issa (1941), a film commissioned by the Nagano Prefectural Department of Tourism and directed by Kamei Fumio. I had high expectations for this, if you read this blog you know my love for Kamei, and this short movie completely blew me away. Told in a poetic and subtle way, using the haiku of poet Kobayashi Issa, the documentary goes against all the idyllic depiction of countryside and mountain life that one would expect from a work commissioned by such an institution. Instead Kamei sets his gaze on the poverty and on the conditions of the people living in the area, presenting also a witty deconstruction of a frame of thought that wants to consider countryside like an “other” or furusato, a ”home” where to go back, an origin. One scene in particular stayed with me because it summarizes the tone of the movie perfectly. An old man’s face in close-up (remember Fighting Soldiers?) is accompanied by a narration that solemnly says something like, I’m paraphrasing of course, “what is this man gazing at?”. When the camera zooms out and cut to the bigger picture though, we see him urinating against the mountain landscape. Definitely one of the best discoveries of the festival, still very fresh and relevant today, both for its thematic approach and its style.

I couldn’t see many of the documentaries screened in the New Asian Currents program, usually one of the most interesting of the festival, but I was able to catch a couple, among these, worth mentioning are Cenote (2019) by Oda Kaori and Temporary (2017) by Hsu Hui-ju. I had already seen Cenote in Nagoya a few month ago, but this was too good of a chance to re-watch it with better sound and on a bigger screen. The movie confirms Oda as one of the most original and interesting voices working in documentary today, if Aragane was a revelation (I wrote about it here, and interviewed her 4 or so years ago about the movie), her next project, Toward a Common Tenderness (2017), was conceptually different, but kept the aesthetic touch present in Aragane, adding to it a poetic and essayistic element. With this work Oda continues on the same path started with those two movies, the long take aesthetic is here translated underwater and intertwined with stories and legends told by the people of the area, Cenote(s) are natural sinkholes in Mexico, sources of water that in ancient Mayan civilization were said to connect the real world and the afterlife. If Aragane was a movie that revolved formally around darkness, slow movement and repetition, Cenote is a work about water and light. Images and soundscape are, as usual in Oda’s films, impressive and deeply interconnected, particularly in the scenes shot underwater inside the the sinkholes. Swimming in these Cenotes, the camera is enveloped in a reality that is perceived and created through water and light, going deep back the to womb of the earth, to the origin of life, as it were. When I saw the movie in Yamagata, I felt it worked less than the first time, maybe it was festival fatigue on my part, but I think the movie in its final part loses some of its power. Perhaps the words and faces of the Mexican people, shot in a beautiful and grainy 8mm, could have been used differently. That being said, the intensity I got from some of the scenes was almost overwhelming, Oda is aiming here higher than in her previous works, she’s trying to convey deeper and even religious meanings, and although not always successfully, there are moments when I felt that the underwater images (filmed with an iPhone!) combined with the sound/noise, reached almost a sort of spiritual materiality. I definitely need to re-watch it.
Temporary is an interesting documentary, albeit not completely successful, that experiments with reenactment “in the ruins of an abandoned factory, three temporary workers—a young man, an older man and an older woman—behave like a choreographed family, as they clean up, construct a table, and eat together.” It felt more like a draft for a future feature film than a proper work, and indeed director Hsu Hui-ju after the screening said that she’s now filming and making a new work about one of the men who appeared in the short movie. More interesting for me was to see another documentary by the same director (she had 3 movies in Yamagata!), Out of Place (2012), shown in the Cinema with Us program, this year dedicated to the depiction of disasters in Japanese and Taiwanese documentary. Out of Place It’s a personal documentary in which Hsu films the town of Xiaoling, after Typhoon Morakot completely swept it away in 2009. The grieving process of the people is intertwined with a quest for an identity by the director herself, her family and the people who lived in the village, most of them said to belong to the Pingpu ethnic minority. Besides the value of the documentary itself as a visual piece, there’s nothing really exceptional about it, the work excels at conveying a complex multi-layered picture of a group of people whose origins are very shifting and hazy. Instead of giving us simple solutions in easy and stereotypical sentences like “going back to our ancestral roots” or “find who we really are” and so on, Hsu expresses in images all her doubts about the importance of belonging to a certain group, and, this is my personal reading of it, in the end, the uselessness of finding a solid origin or a fixed identity. It was a very moving screening experience for me because, by pure chance, I sat next to the director and her young daughter, whose birth was filmed and shown on screen, and it was very sweet seeing them exchanging glances and smiles.
Not to insist too much on the subject, but this, after all, small movie, consolidated my opinion that contemporary documentary in Taiwan, or at least a certain portion of it, is in a really good and healthy stage, not only from a purely artistic point of view (read more here), but also as an example of an effervescent culture not afraid of exploring, and even moving away from, its multi-layered and complex origins.

In competition, besides the above-mentioned Monrovia, Indiana, I saw Memento Stella (2018) by Makino Takashi, an experimental movie in line with Makino’s previous works, a visual feast and experience like no others, and a film that I haven’t completely digested or absorbed yet. Interesting was also taking a glance at two other special programs, Rustle of Spring, Whiff of Gunpowder: Documentaries from Northeast India and Reality and Realism: Iran 60s–80s, where I had the chance to see for the first time A Simple Event (1973) by Sohrab Shahid Saless, passionately introduced by Amir Naderi, a beautiful discovery.

Among the festival’s satellite events that were organized in the city, I was lucky and brave enough, on the day the big typhoon hit Japan, to venture to the Yamagata University and attend a very special event. The use of Gentou (magic lanterns) in the social and grass-roots movements of the 1950s, with a special focus on the revolts and strikes in the Miike mine. The topic is so deep and rich of implications to understand the development of documentary in Japan, that I should write a separate article. The 1950s is a period often forgotten or neglected when discussing representation of social protests in postwar Japan, the priority is usually given, and in certain cases deservedly so, to the more cool or stylish production of the 1960s. For now, if you want to know more about Gentou, there are these two excellent pieces: On the Relationship between Documentary Films and Magic Lanterns in 1950s Japan by Toba Koji, and The Revival of “Gentou” (magic lantern, filmstrips, slides) in Showa Period Japan: Focusing on Its Developments in the Media of Post-war Social Movements by Washitani Hana

The festival was, as usual, an extremely exhausting but exciting experience, I would say it is a unique event, but I don’t really go to many other festival around the world. What I can certainly say is that it is a celebration of film culture, where everybody meets everybody else, directors, film professionals, cinema lovers, students or professors alike. As someone has rightly pointed out on-line, the YIDFF is more akin to a rock festival than a film festival. I couldn’t agree more.