Tangemania

I have been incredibly busy with my Japanese cinema class in Tokyo, so sorry for the lack of updates. 

I did want to write about the memorial service for Tsuchimoto Noriaki last Saturday. We arrived early at the Josui Kaikan in Jinbocho because my wife had been asked to help at the reception desk. And then more and more people arrived. In the end, the hall was packed with about 500 people and many had to stand. (See the photo in the lobby below.) Pretty much everyone in the documentary, and many in the fiction film world was there.

It was a nice service. Tsuchimoto's daughter showed photos of his last days, staff members like Otsu Koshiro talked about his work, and his elder sister made everyone laugh by kindly suggesting that there might have been a little exaggeration here and there in his description of their childhood life. Hani Susumu gave the toast at the end. At the event, they were selling copies of Tsuchimoto's last book, Dokyumentari no umi e, which is a thick interview book done with Ishizaka Kenji. Chock full of pictures and information, it is a must for anyone who wants to know about postwar Japanese film.

Tsuchimoto-san did not want a religious service and he preferred if we drank and laughed rather than prayed and cried. But his ashes were there in front of that famous shot of him on the sea. I brought my son and we lined up in front of Tsuchimoto-san's ashes. My son had only met Tsuchimoto-san when he was really small, but he put his hands together too. I thanked him for the wonderful and powerful work he left us. 

On Thursday, I took my class to the Edo-Tokyo Museum, which is a nice introduction to Tokyo history in the last 400 years. My main aim, however, was to show them the models of the river-side, temporary theaters in the Edo era, and the model of the Denkikan they have in their modern section (which also features a model of Ryounkaku, or "Twelve Stories," that reaches the ceiling). I had shown them where the Denkikan used to be in Asakusa, but it was nice to show them what it looked like in the mid-1910s. The colorful painted scenes from the movies showing, the excessive decoration, the statue on top--all communicate the cacophony of stimuli that was the thrill of Asakusa, while also rendering it out of this world. The model shows it when it was showing Marcantonio e Cleopatra, a 1913 Italian historical epic directed by Enrico Guazzoni that was a big hit in Japan. Somei Saburo, the great benshi at the Denkikan, made a name for himself narrating this film.  

To commemorate ten years since the death of Kurosawa Akira, Rikkyo University, which has recently developed a film studies program inside their College of Contemporary Psychology, held a symposium on July 12 at their campus in Shiki. 

The first half was devoted to a talk with Nogami Teruyo (Kurosawa's long-time scripter and later production manager) and Kurosawa Kazuko (his daughter and now a prominent costume designer for films such as Kitano's Zatoichi), with Maeda Hideki (dean of the College) and Shinozaki Makoto (director of Okaeri and now professor at Rikkyo) serving as questioners.  The talk was quite congenial and it was nice to see Nogami-san after several years (she kindly gave us a gift when our son was born). Shinozaki-san also mentioned to me that he had just finished filming a 2-hour TV movie. I look forward to that.

The second half was devoted to papers and discussion. Yomota Inuhiko talked about the problems of Kurosawa's last films while emphasizing the influence, especially in Asia, of The Seven Samurai. Hase Masato, who's translating my Taisho cinema book, tried to contrast the usual discussion of the free and dynamic body we are used to seeing through Mifune's acting in Kurosawa, by considering the restricted body in works like High and Low, especially how the two function in films of strategy where fakery plays a central role. Finally, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto argued that the impossibility of showing the "awakening" of Watanabe or its inheritance in Ikiru can be seen as an allegory for the difficulty of considering the brilliance of Kurosawa or his legacy.

The issue of legacy carried on into the discussion. I had a point to raise about that, but decided not to because there was not enough time and it would have been disruptive (Hase-san, when he heard it after the symposium ended, likened it to overturning the chabudai table at a family gathering). But basically, one can argue that Kurosawa's legacy in the last two years or so in Japan is largely the following:

1) Remakes. Recently we have seen first Sanjuro and then Hidden Fortress remade. Putting aside whether these are good films or not, it is a shame that young people in Japan are not seeing the real Kurosawa, but rather imitations. As all the panelists said at the symposium, a few years ago, you could count on a few Japanese students in class having seen Seven Samurai, but now you can't. Maybe these remakes will spark a few people to seek out the originals, but with very little effort being put into film history education in Japan, there is no concerted effort there.

2) TV commercials, pachinko and other forms of licensing. Those of you in Japan might have noticed some recent TV commercials for a new pachinko game put out by the company Fields called CR Seven Samurai. Some of the commercials, which star Asano Tadanobu, redo scenes from Seven Samurai, sometimes shot for shot with amazing accuracy, to the Stones' "Satisfaction." Is that a satisfactory legacy?

3) Copyright. As I have reported on KineJapan, Kurosawa has been used by Toho to argue that films made before 1954, which should now be public domain according to current copyright law, are still under copyright if the director died after the law came into effect. Courts have already repeatedly declared films made before 1954 to be in the public domain and thus have okayed cut-rate DVD producers like Cosmo. Toho sued Cosmo for putting out cheap DVDs of Kurosawa's pre-1954 films by suing under the old copyright law, which technically still is in effect if the copyright lasts longer than under the new law (instituted in 1971). The old law states that films "with originality" are to be treated differently from those without originality. The latter is only protected for 10 years, but the former enjoys a longer period. The law states only that films "with originality" are treated in one of two ways: either copyright will be for 38 years after the death of the author or for 38 years after it was released in the case of works with corporate copyright. It does not make clear which is to be applied in which cases (I do not know court precedent in this regard). Toho, as well as all the other film companies, have long argued that the copyright resides in the corporation, and that in fact is how the new copyright law changed things: it eliminated the ability of individual authors in a studio production to claim copyright and made copyright reside in the company, thus "clearing up" the ambiguities of the old statutes at the expense of film directors et al. Toho also historically has been the studio that, forwarding the producer system, downgraded the role of the director. Toho however realized that its films before 1954 are in the public domain, and now argues that Kurosawa is now really the author of these films (and that Toho deserves to be paid for use of them). Toho won the first round in courts (which may open up a Pandora's box if the families of directors like Kinoshita, Imai, Taniguchi, etc. start insisting they have copyright and should be paid), but Cosmo is appealing. The effect of all this is not only an assault on public domain (I remember reading reporters in Kinema Junpo saying there is no reason public domain should exist), but also a further strengthening of the stranglehold of copyright. That was symbolized by the fact the symposium organizers declared at the start that the clips--and these were only clips--used at the symposium were cleared with Toho, Shochiku, etc. Such a procedure, if it was demanded by the companies, not only violates the academic right to quotation, which Japanese courts have confirmed in recent cases with other media like manga, but it establishes a dangerous precedent. Will scholars or teachers no longer be able to even show one minute from a Japanese film in class or in an academic talk unless they pay the company or get clearance (which might involve getting clearance on the content of the talk)? 

I again believe that excessive enforcement of copyright is one of the biggest threats to current Japanese film culture. Is that the legacy we want Kurosawa Akira, the Japanese film director who really belongs to the entire world, to have?

I was having lunch today with Kanai Katsu, and mentioned that I was going to the National Film Center to see Hanasareru Gang, a film that Suwa Nobuhiro, the director of such films as Duo, M/Other, and H-Story, had made in 1984 when he was still a student. The NFC is now doing a retrospective of the Pia Film Festival and is showing many of the award-winning 8mm films of directors who are now prominent in the film scene, such as Ishii Sogo, Nagasaki Shun'ichi, Ogata Akira, Inudo Isshin, Shiota Akihiko, etc. Well, when I mentioned that, Kanai-san said that he had taught Suwa-san when he was a student at Tokyo Zokei University, and that Suwa-san had recently become president of that university. 

"What?" I said, not believing my ears. A filmmaker just a bit older than me who is now president of one of the major arts universities in Japan? I remember having Suwa-san come to my class when I taught at Yokohama National University and comment on how hard it was to make a career out of making difficult films.

But when I checked the Zokei site, there he was. Even though he only started teaching there in 2002, he became president of the university on April 1, 2008. Speed shusshin!

Suwa-gakucho, omedeto gozaimasu.

By the way, Hanasareru Gang was quite fun: a lot of Godard, but also a lot of elements you later see in Duo. 

John Junkerman reported on KineJapan that the great documentary filmmaker, Tsuchimoto Noriaki, has passed away. A search of the news serviced confirms the bad news. He died today (June 24) of lung cancer. He was 79.

Matsumoto Toshio had mentioned to me at the JASIAS meeting that Tsuchimoto-san was not doing well. I was very sad to see this was true. 

Along with Ogawa Shinsuke (the subject of Markus Nornes's great Forest of Pressure), Tsuchimoto was the most important postwar Japanese documentarist, famous for his films covering the mercury poisoning incident in Minamata like Minamata: The Victims and their World (1971). He produced many other great works such as PR films like Document: On the Road (1964) or An Engineer's Assistant (1963) and the radical documentary Pre-Partisan (1969). His filmmaking was quite partisan, as he would take the side of the victims in the Minamata incident, quite powerfully, for instance, filming them as they press their case at the Chisso stock holder's meeting at the end of the first documentary. But he also kept his camera back, letting the subjects tell their story as Tsuchimoto, sometimes on screen, sat beside them listening. He even showed them edited versions to ask for their impressions and suggestions.

I had the privilege of meeting Tsuchimoto-san many times, the most memorable being when Yasui Yoshio (of Planet) and I traveled to Minamata to interview Tsuchimoto-san for Documentary Box. Tsuchimoto-san not only showed us around Minamata, including taking us to the showroom of Chisso (I was surprised they didn't block him at the gate!) and sitting down with us to talk on tape for four hours. Yasui and I spent a long time editing that 4 hour discussion into a reasonable length, but when we sent the text to Tsuchimoto-san, it came back half-rewritten. I would joke in later years that this interview with a documentary filmmaker was not much of a document, but his rewrite was a labor of love. He wanted to include more about Segawa Jun'ichi, his cameraman who was on his death bed at the time. In particular, he wanted to include Segawa's discussion of the famous Lupe debate between the documentarist Kamei Fumio and Miki Shigeru (cameraman for directors like Mizoguchi, Kamei and others), which sprung from a time when Miki refused to film a child who had just escaped a burned out Chinese village in WWII. To Segawa, as with Tsuchimoto, documentary -- if not cinema -- was a profoundly moral endeavor. The rewritten interview was Tsuchimoto's last tribute to Segawa, one of his teachers. I heard that he put a copy of the magazine in Segawa's casket. 

You can see a trailer for Fujiwara Toshifumi's TV documentary on Tsuchimoto, which includes scenes from several of his films, here. The trailer for Fujiwara's theatrical documentary on Tsuchimoto, Eiga wa ikimono no kiroku de aru, contains several scenes from Victims and their World, such as when a victim's mother confronts the president of Chisso.

I should note that you can purchase a two-hour, English-subtitled VHS version of  Minamata: The Victims and their World from Siglo. 

Meiji Gakuin University, which has one of the better film studies programs in Japan, will be holding its annual film symposium this Saturday (June 21) at the Shirogane Campus in Tokyo. This year's topic will be "Women's Action in Japanese Cinema," with papers on such topics as Misora Hibari (who often dressed as a man in her films), Oryu (Fuji Junko's character from the Hibotan Bakuto yakuza series), Yasuda Michiyo (now Okusu Michiyo), Shihomi Etsuko, pinky violence, etc. It starts at 10 am in Room 2301. Here is the announcement in Japanese. 

The Meigaku symposium has been a feature in the Tokyo film studies scene for over a decade, and several of the symposia have resulted in books. The first book, for instance, was on Mizoguchi (I have a piece in that), and others have been on Ri Koran, Yoshida Kiju, Yamaguchi Momoe, etc. I'm still hoping they put out a book from the Nikkatsu Action symposium: it was a lot of fun doing a talk on stage with Shishido Jo!

Since I will be taking the students in my Summer Session course to see Kabuki, I traveled to the Ginza  yesterday to buy tickets. I decided to take a shot of one of the more peculiar movie theaters in Tokyo--at least location-wise--the Ginza Shine Patosu (Cine Pathos). It is just down the street from the Kabuki-za, but it is literally under that street. It used to be a rep house, but is now a three-screen theater that shows an odd mix of the commercial and the artistic. Sokurov's The Sun opened here (I have a piece on that film in the official book), and this is where I saw Matsumoto Hitoshi's Dai Nihonjin. The first film may fit this underground space, given how much of it takes place in an air raid bunker, but the second is rather insistent upon rising above the ground, even if in somewhat parodic a manner. 

Below is the photo I took. To the left is Harumi-dori (the Kabuki-za is a couple hundred meters further on). To the right is the entrance to a tunnel that goes under the road and comes out the other side. In that tunnel is the theater plus a couple of eating establishments. You can check out another introduction to this theater on the Cinema Street site.