Tangemania

In the last of my "reports" on the trailers I made for the Documentaries of Noriaki Tsuchimoto series (one for Minamata, the other for On the Road), i wanted to mention the ones that I put together for his two films on Afghanistan before the Taliban, Another Afghanistan: Kabul Diary 1985 and Traces: The Kabul Museum 1988. 

Tsuchimoto was of course famous for his penetrating documentaries on Minamata disease, but he worked on many other subjects, ranging from student radicals in the 1960s (e.g, Prehistory of the Partisans) to a biography of the poet Nakano Shigeharu. Some films were extensions of the issues raised in the Minamata series, looking for instance at other forms of pollution like nuclear radiation, or at the oceans. He was always concerned with the oppressed and the marginal and read profusely, compiling dozens and dozens of scrapbooks (which his wife Motoko, with whom I experienced the earthquake, showed me once). 

One topic of interest was Afghanistan and he ended up making three films on that country, based on the footage he was able to take during several trips as one of the few foreigners allowed to film in the nation in the 1980s, before the Taliban took power. I think part of his interest stemmed simply from his leftist sympathies, as he genuinely hoped that the socialist regime in those days would do a better job than some other socialist experiments. Another Afghanistan and Traces could be said to lack the critical eye that his Minamata works show, but they are by no means propaganda: just as Tsuchimoto genuinely cares for the Minamata victims through his camera, he goes beyond politics to express an affection for the everyday lives and culture of Afghanis. The resulting films are not as powerful as the Minamata films - Traces is closer to a documentary on art history (though one every art history department should have!) - but they serve both as irreplaceable documents of Afghan life and history (much of which is now gone or profoundly transformed) and as testimony to Tsuchimoto's unending efforts to understand others through film.

The tragedy with Another Afghanistan and Traces is that their original sound was lost by the production company. Tsuchimoto thus had to rework them in 2003 by adding music and voice-over narration. The sense of being on the side of his subjects, which Tsuchimoto usually conveys, is harder to get here. The films then also seem more conventional.

The narration then made it hard to piece together these trailers. Unlike the previous two, where I could take music and then edit together some good shots, I could not recombine sound and image in significant ways. The result is a bit stilted. But the films are better than the trailers!

In somewhat shocking news from the world of entertainment, the wire services are reporting that the actress and singer Tanaka Yoshiko has passed away at the age of 55 of breast cancer. Tanaka, known to fans first as Su-chan, first came to fame as a member of the Candies, one of the big idol groups in the 1970s. After they broke up, she became an actress and appeared in many famous films such as Imamura's Black Rain (for which she won several acting awards), Poppoya, Yoshida's Women in the Mirror, etc. She also appeared a lot on TV. Ironically, her husband was the older brother of Natsume Masako, the idol star who tragically died of leukemia at a young age. Su-chan was too young as well.

Here is one of my favorite Candies songs (Tanaka is the one on the right).

This got delayed by the quake and all, but here finally is my report on the second day of Japanese filmmaker Koreeda Hirokazu's visit to Yale University at the end of February 2011. (You can read the first report here.)

I wanted to give some of our students the chance to sit down and talk freely and immediately with Koreeda in an intellectual atmosphere. Since his English is not good enough to handle such a conversation without translation, I decided to hold a workshop on Saturday the 25th that was done entirely in Japanese. Unlike the first workshop, I did not ask Koreeda to prepare anything and thus left it up to the students to lead the discussion.

The first topic was his new film Kiseki, which literally means "Miracle," but was given the English title I Wish because the international sales agent thought "Miracle" might give the mistaken impression it was a religious movie. It was in fact commissioned by one of the branches of JR, a big railroad company in Japan, to commemorate the opening of the final leg of the Kyushu Shinkansen (bullet train). The story is about two young brothers, living apart because their parents got divorced, who are convinced that seeing two shinkansen pass each other in a special way can create a miracle. Koreeda showed a long trailer the sales agent prepared for foreign distributors (Koreeda stressed that this was not his editing or music!), but you can see an early Japanese version here. The film stars the two Maeda brothers, who are famous in Japan as manzai comedians, performing under the name Maeda Maeda, but who really want to be actors some day. (Koreeda told me over dinner that he was somewhat embarrassed during the auditions because everyone in the staff knew who they were except him.) It also has such Koreeda regulars as Natsukawa Yui (whom I really like), Odagiri Jo, Abe Hiroshi, and Kiki Kirin--as well as newcomers like the granddaughter of Kiki Kirin (she's the daughter of Motoki Masahiro, of Departures fame).

About 15 attended the workshop, but it was mainly my grad students studying Japanese film who pressed him with questions. The conversations didn't always mesh, however. It was less the age-old disjunct between intellectuals and artistic practitioners, than two sides talking at cross-purposes or using different conceptual categories. People were in particular focusing on the many cinematic metaphors that appear in his films like After Life or even Air Doll (the doll could symbolize cinema because, for instance, light passes through her and she works at a video store), but as I mentioned in the first report, he strongly distinguishes himself from cinephilic filmmakers, thus from the hermeneutic, often used by both critics and film scholars, that sees movies as a self-reflexive commentary on film. Thus the air doll, to him, was primarily a metaphor for the breath of life. When pressed on the issue of what he thinks of the power and or violence of the camera, especially towards social others (a question directed, I believe, at the problem of using a Korean actress to play what is essentially a sex slave), Koreeda did not fully answer the question, but emphasized his admiration for documentarists like Tsuchimoto Noriaki and their ability to work with not against their subjects. Koreeda confessed afterwards that he found all these questions quite challenging - he had not really had to answer the question of what he thought cinema was in quite a while - but his ultimate answer in the workshop is that he thought cinema was a mode of socialization (shakaika), a means of relating elements such as characters and audiences/filmmakers. This answer can seem surprising for those who see him as an aesthetic director, but I think it is a remnant of his youthful journalistic aspirations as well as also another way he distinguishes himself from the cinephiles, who often reject subordinating film to social ends.

There were many topics discussed during the workshop, but one answer I found noteworthy was the one he gave about novelizations. Koreeda, like a number of filmmakers in Japan, such as Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Kawase Naomi, and Aoyama Shinji, has penned novelizations of some of the films he has made. Some directors do it for the money and extra publicity (indie directors don't get paid much in Japan), but Aoyama won a major literary award for his novelization of Eureka and Koreeda did have dreams of becoming a novelist when he was young. He talked a bit about the difference between film and literature, especially how the latter tends to offer more explanation than cinema does, but he interestingly noted that, while he feels that he loses possession of his films upon their release, as they become the property of the audience, writing the novelization is one means he has of taking the film back into his hands. Thus emphasizing the personalized nature of the novel put another interesting twist to Koreeda's view of cinema as socialization.

The last big event of Koreeda's visit was the 35mm screening of Still Walking (with print provided by the IFC). We had a big turnout and a lot of good questions after the screening. Many focused on the production of the film. Koreeda's own mother died in 2005 and the film emerged from that experience. Half the dialogue spoken by the mother in the film, played by Kiki Kirin, comes in fact from Koreeda's mother. The song played in the film, Bluelight Yokohama, made famous by Ishida Ayumi, was also one of his mother's favorite tunes. (The title of the film comes from a line from the song's lyrics.) Koreeda even mentioned that both he and Abe Hiroshi, the lead actor, grew up in families dominated by strong women, and so the weak men in the film fit their own experience. This personal vision, however, was in tension with other visions on the set, perhaps "socializing" it, if we want to use that word. While he did not improvise much dialogue on the set (though the first dialogue in the film when You and Kiki cut radishes was improvised), Koreeda did try to use the children, who were less tied to the script, to break up any stiffness or theatricality in the adults' acting. Some effects, such as the interesting shot of Kiki Kirin out of focus with a towel in focus in the background (after she chases the butterfly in the house), were also discovered on the set. Even the set design, like all the bric-a-brac under the porch, were not out of Koreeda's experience, but actually borrowed from what was under the porch in an old medical clinic (only the entrance to the house in the film is real; the rest was built on a studio set). In the end, Koreeda emphasized that Kiki Kirin is not his mother: the character has separated from him and become Kiki's own. 

There were the usual questions about influence, but Koreeda insisted, for instance, when asked about the impact of Ozu's home dramas, that he refuses to watch films when writing his screenplays (again, the anti-cinephilic stance). There are some similarities with Tokyo Story - the disappointing kids, the doctor in the house - but Koreeda again emphasized that he feels himself closer to the more pessimistic Naruse Mikio than to Ozu. The rather gray worldview, where no one is a villain and no one is a hero, is he argued also more a result of his work in documentary than of his viewing of Japanese home melodramas. Still Walking is stylistically quite different from Maborosi, especially in its tight editing, but it shares with that film a refusal to directly depict character psychology. Still Walking, he argued, was a drama of things, as he used shots of minor objects, from toothbrushes to broken tiles, to evoke larger emotions and thus serve as the medium for psychology. That, perhaps, was another way Koreeda "socializes" spaces and objects in cinema.

It was a great event and I would like to thank Koreeda and all the cooperating institutions for their generous support.

A great new anthology has just come out in Japanese that takes up the broad issue of spectatorship of Japanese film from a variety of perspectives. I had written about this earlier.

Kankyaku e no apurochi (観客へのアプローチ)

Ed. Fujiki Hideaki (藤木秀朗)

Shinwasha (森話社), 2011. ISBN 978-4-86405-020-3

It is part of the excellent Nihon eigashi sosho series put out by Shinwasha, but somewhat different in that it is just bigger (apparently Nagoya University, where Fujiki-san teaches, helped out with the publication).

The book features a splendid variety of scholars from Japan and abroad, including some of the best working on Japanese film and image culture. 

The contents include Miyao Daisuke writing about Hayashi Chojiro's (Hasegawa Kazuo's) female fans, Nakamura Hideyuki (who also contributed to my film theory publication) writing on 3-D film in Japan, Kato Atsuko on film industry market surveys, Kim Donghoon on cinema in 1920s colonial Korea, Fujiki Hideaki on film as social education in interwar Japan, Kinoshita Chika on Makino Masahiro's Onna keizu, Kitamura Hiroshi on Yodogawa Nagaharu, Thomas LaMarre on otaku consumption, Usui Michiko on utsushie, Joseph Murphy on film and literature in 1920s Japan, Sasakawa Keiko on Mizoguchi Kenji's The Downfall of Osen in Osaka (the film is available with subtitles as part of the Talking Silents series), and Hata Ayumi on 1970s movement cinema. 

I made a contribution, one that discusses the history of Japanese film criticism in light of its uneasy relation with theory. I would like to thank Dogase Masato for translating it.

You can get the book through Amazon.jp.