history of documentary

The Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival has completed its line-up, once more a rich and very interesting one, at least if you’re into the world of non-fiction cinema. The biennial event co-established in 1989 by Ogawa Shinsuke and dedicated to the exploration of the world of documentary, in its broadest sense, will take place as usual, in the Japanese city of Yamagata next October from 8th to 15th. I’ll be there for 3 days, from the 10th to the 12th, and hopefully I’ll be able to write down and post something, possibly a brief daily report, after-screening parties permitting….anyway, let’s see what this year program is offering us, of course I’ll focus more on the Japanese works.

These are the sections:

– International Competition

– New Asian Currents

– Perspectives Japan

– Yamagata Rough Cut!

– Latinoamérica The Time and the People: Memories, Passion, Work and Life

– Double Shadows—Talking about Films that Talk about Films

– Past and Future Stories of the Arab Peoples

– Cinema with Us 2015

– Yamagata and Film

The competition this year is graced with the presence of some big names such as Patricio Guzmán and Pedro Costa, in Yamagata with The Pearl Button and Horse Money respectively. Another title, among the 15 in competition, that has attracted my attention is the long (334′) Homeland (Iraq Year Zero) by Abbas Fahdel, “two years in the life of a family amidst the Coalition Forces’ 2003 invasion of Iraq”. There will be only one documentary representing Japan in competition, We Shall Overcome (戦場（いくさば）ぬ止（とぅどぅ）み) from director Mikami Chie who 2 years ago was at the festival with her The Targeted Village (標的の村). We Shall Overcome continues to explore and document the ongoing “battle” of Okinawans against the plan to build a new American base in Henoko, and telling the story of Fumiko, an elderly woman who witnessed the battle of Okinawa in 1945, the film is connecting the past with the present of the archipelago. The documentary is also enriched by Cocco‘s voice over, the singer and actress herself is from Okinawa and is known by Japanese cinema fans because of her amazing and phisical performance in Tsukamoto Shin’ya’s Kotoko (2011).

Three Japanese docs and thus more to talk and write about in the New Asian Currents section, a selection that in total includes 20 works from different parts of Asia. Distance is the debut behind the camera for Okamoto Mana, reading the description on the festival site it seems to be a sort of self-documentary, created by crossing family home movies with new shooting material, and in doing so reflecting on the director’s family and her past. The second work made by a Japanese is Each Story (Okuma Katsuya) a movie that takes place in India and “For their summer homework, Jigmet and Stanzin are assigned to study the Epic of King Gesar, passed down from generation to generation in the northern Indian region of Ladakh, where the boys live. As they splash in the river and run through the streets, the boys come to understand each story shared with them by the adults of their village.” Last but not least there’s Aragane, the feature debut for Oda Kaori, an artist leaving in Sarajevo and studing in a graduate program under Tarr Béla. I had the privilege of watching the documentary on a sample screening, and although it was on a TV screen, I was very impressed. The camera follows patiently and almost hypnotically the workers of an old coal mine in Bosnia down into the darkness of their daily routine. Aragane is visually stunning, Oda knows how to use the digital for her cinematic purposes, partly documentary and partly experimental cinema, the movie possesses an impressive sound design, and a stilistic and poetic touch akin to the works produced by The Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Harvard University (Leviathan, Manakamama). I’m really looking forward to seeing it on a big screen and with a proper sound system.

Not from Japan but worth mentioning are the two Special Invitation Films: Almost a Revolution (Hong Kong, by Kwok Tat Chun, Kong King Chu) and Sunflower Occupation (Taiwan, by the Sunflower Occupation Documentary Project), both of them dealing with students street protests and uprising occured in Hong Kong and Taiwan in the last two years.

In the next post I’ll write about Perspectives Japan, a selection of new Japanese docs, and Latinoamérica—The Time and the People: Memories, Passion, Work and Life, a retrospective on the so called Third Cinema (Tercer Cine) and its resonances with the contemporary non-fiction production in Latin America.

Kamei Fumio’s Fighting Soldiers is a defining work in the history of Japanese documentary, possibly one of the first non-fiction works made in the archipelago to have a very distinctive authorial touch, to the extent that it is often referred to as the “first Japanese documentary”.

In 1939, on behalf of Toho (PCL had changed its name to Toho just three years earlier), Kamei and cameraman Miki Shigeru went to China to make a propaganda documentary, or rather a war record, about the Japanese Imperial troops involved in the ongoing invasion of Manchuria. However, Kamei made something very different from what the government and the army expected, and the film was immediately banned from release. What the authorities particularly disliked was the portrayal of the soldiers, and also the depiction of Chinese casualties. As the head of the Japanese Metropolitan Police Board famously remarked at an advance screening: “These aren’t fighting soldiers, they’re tired soldiers!” .

I’m going to focus on the first 5 minutes of the film, one of my favourite openings in Japanese cinema and a powerful example of Kamei’s use of montage, a “method of philosophical expression” that the Japanese director so beautifully explained in his book Takakau eiga:

I think documentary film must be like haiku. If the viewer observes something with shot A, then shot B must produce the space for the viewers to freely develop their own creative possibilities. Shot B, therefore, demands a new observation by the viewer. Shot B is what i call the MA of documentary film.
(quote from “The Flash of Capital” Eric Cazdyn, pag. 64)

Kamei was obviously and directly influenced by Soviet cinema and, in particular, Soviet montage theory, a technique he mastered while studying film in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) in the early 1930s.

You can watch the opening here:

All the following stills are taken from the first five minutes of Fighting Soldiers and are here displayed in chronological order:

(1)

(2)

After the opening credits, the film begins with an old man praying in front of a shrine, images of destroyed houses, shots of children staring at the camera (1) and a powerful close-up of the same old man (2).

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

In the next scene, a group of people carrying all their belongings, walk away from the destroyed town (3) through a barren land (4), soon after, the movie cuts to a close-up of a small statue hands on its face, almost frozen in a scream of despair (5). Next we see the same statue from a different perspective with the expanse of dry land on its background (6).

(7)

(8)

In the next shot we see the departure (or arrival) of Japanese tanks (7) from the land they conquered and destroyed, these war vehicles are seen from a medium distance. Next, in one of the most stunning shots and cuts in the history of Japanese documentary, the point of view shifts and we are now on a tank moving through the ruins of the bombed city. It’s a short tracking shot, and there’s also an amazing close-up of a Japanese flag flapping from the tank, but what we see in the background of the flag is the village reduced to rubble (8).

As a filmmaker, Kamei had the philosophical necessity, paradoxically even though he was making what is still considered a propaganda documentary, to bring to the fore what is usually relegated to the background: the suffering, the grief, the destruction and the loss that every military conflict brings. Because of this inner conflict/dichotomy, Fighting Soldiers is still hated or loved by many viewers and critics, and the film is considered by many critics and scholars to be both a cinematic miracle and an enigma. To make matters worse, in the years that followed, Kamei himself would often repeat and write that what he had made was in no way an anti-war film.
Problematic films, more than perfect ones, encourage us to think about and engage with their themes, they do not offer easy and ready-made points of view or solutions, they keep coming back to us, view after view, challenging our vision. Fighting Soldiers is one of these films, and one of the best to come out of the world of Japanese non-fiction cinema.

It’s a real shame that the film isn’t as well known in the West and that, apart from a cheap Japanese DVD, we don’t have a proper DVD or BD release.

Tag: history of documentary

Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2015 – International Competition and New Asian Currents

Fighting Soldiers 「戦ふ兵隊」(Kamei Fumio, 1939)

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