Tag: Reviews

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.

Shibuya Nobuko in the 1960s

As written above, Challenge, also known as The Prize of Victory (Shibuya Nobuko, 1963) is a short documentary about the so called Oriental Witches, the legendary Japanese women’s volleyball team active in the late 1950s and 1960s. The short was awarded a prize at Cannes in 1964, and Shibuya ended up contributing to Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad, she filmed the section about volleyball of course. Shibuya was a script supervisor, filmmaker, and video reporter born in Dalian, occupied China, in 1932, and she moved to Japan only after the war. As a script supervisor she worked also for Dokuritsu Pro with Imai Tadashi, Shindō Kaneto, and Yamamoto Satsuo. After this documentary, in the next decades she would work mainly for TV, and, as far as I know, worked as an editor for some non-fiction films directed by others (Iizuka Toshio, for instance). She passed away in 2016. Shibuya is a fascinating figure, another forgotten Japanese female filmmaker and documentarian I would like to explore more in the future. On YouTube there’s a channel dedicated to her films, I believe it’s a semi-official one:

Minamata Mandala (Hara Kazuo, 2020). Synopsis from Letterboxd: After years of dumping industrial wastes from the factory to the ocean, Chisso Chemical Corporation contaminated the area of a small Japanese fishing village with excessive amounts of methylmercury. This highly toxic chemical bioaccumulated in fishes of the local water, which when consumed by the local populace resulted in mercury poisoning. In 1977, Minamata disease certification criteria was set by a strange method that tried not to recognize the rights of environmental disease patients. However, an Osaka court won the case for some patients because of a newly developed theory by medical doctors’ recent experiments and proofs. For decades, these patients struggled within the Japanese judicial system for their rights to receive compensation as victims of environmental disease. Those different aspects of these patients’ lives have been filmed by director Hara for the last 15 year inspired by the late director Tsuchimoto Noriaki documentaries.

This would need a longer and in-depth piece, but for now suffice it to say that Minamata Mandala is, in my view, one of Hara’s best works, and the masterpiece of the second part of his career. Not a minute of the documentary (373 minutes!) is superfluous. 

Alchemy (Nakai Tsuneo, 1971). Official synopsis: The camera slowly zooms, in over a long period of time, on the light of the sun reflected in the mirror of a bicycle parked at the construction site. To this is added a slowly evolving flicker effect derived from negative-positive reversals, progressively dismantling the distance from the subject. Nakai created a masking film with a calculated pattern of black and white frames into which he inserted positive and negative images and made a print out of two separate rolls of film. The original projection speed was 16 frames per second, but the sound is separate from the open-roll tape rather than burned in, so it can also be screened at 24fps. Also, the original sound consisted of the friction noise of rubbing steel, but in 2019 a new version of the sound was created featuring the friction noise of glass. Two versions of the film exist: 24:15 mins at 24 fps and 40 mins at 16 fps.  This was one of the best discoveries of the year for me, thanks to the Collaborative Cataloging Japan (CCJ), a structuralist work made in 1971 by Nakai, clearly inspired by Michael Snow’s Wavelength, but at the same time highly original, and somehow anticipating Matsumoto’s Atman.

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.

Koya-san and Hiraizumi

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

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)

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


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.

‬

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.

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.

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.