Asian Docs

Movie journal (June-August 2021): Minamata Mandala, Sayonara TV, The Witches of the Orient, Challenge, Alchemy

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.

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.

Movie journal (April, May 2021): 13, Youth, Ecosystem 5

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.

Haneda Sumiko’s writings /2

Second part (first part here)

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.

Haneda Sumiko’s writings /1

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.

Second part here

Movie journal (March 2021): Dead Birds, The First Emperor, and Noda Shinkichi

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.

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

A different sort of post today.

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

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

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

Stills from Heliography (1979), in my opinion Yamasaki’s masterpiece

Stills from a video experiment, Flower in the Space (1989)

Best (favorite) documentaries of 2020

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.

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).