<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Today, I received the crushing news that director Sato Makoto died on September 4 at the young age of 49. </DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Makoto has long struggled with depression, and took some serious blows from this problem over the last 10 months. He was in and out of hospitals, and apparently tried to commit suicide last month. When he emerged from a chemically induced coma, he and his family decided to change hospitals. At the entrance to the new hospital, he had a change of heart, ran away to a nearby apartment building, and threw himself from an upper floor. </DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">For anyone who knew Makoto, his struggle with depression was so perplexing. He was such a kind man, always funny and thoughtful in turns. He loved to drink, and I count him as one of the most engaging drinking interlocutors I've ever had. He left films that, more than anything, tap deeply into the good stuff in humanity. They are decent films from a decent man, works that leave you smiling and chuckling. </DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span">It seems fitting to me that he left us with two films about Niigata as the bookends for his career. His last film was actually his biography of Edward Said, <I>Out of Place.</I> However, I will always think about the way the Agano River and its people frame his career. I met Makoto about the time he completed <I>Living on the River</I> Agano. He asked me to subtitle the film, a daunting task considering the challenges of even understanding Niigata-ben. Needless to say, we worked very closely together because I needed his help to translate the much of the script into standard Japanese before I could move it to English. I vividly remember our meetings, this first encounter with his seriousness of purpose, his love of life and his subjects, and also his intellect. He was still a beginner when it came to filmmaking, but I was impressed with the sophistication of his approach to the problematics of nonfiction. </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span">Of course, <I>Living on the River Agano</I> was about old people suffering the effects of mercury poisoning, Niigata Minamata disease. But taking a hint from especially Ogawa and Tsuchimoto, he and Kobayashi Shigeru and the rest of his crew spent years working on the film and centered the end product on the humanity of these oldsters, not their disease. It was an unusual and wonderful film, and Makoto spent much of the rest of his career trying to move out of the shadow of those titans. I think he finally achieved that with <I>Memories of Agano</I>. This documents the return of Makoto and cameraman Kobayashi to the Agano River. They found that many of the friends they made from the first films had either moved into nursing homes or died. Their fields fallow, homes empty, Makoto had to think hard about how to represent passing. The resulting film is a complex, experimental documentary portrait of a place they knew so intimately. </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span">Once again, I was asked to do the subtitles. This film presented the old dialect problem with a new twist, because he refused to put Japanese subtitles on the original film. I remember sitting in on one of the press screenings, the critics walking out of the theater scratching their collective heads and laughing about how tough it was to understand. How was I to subtitle a film that no one could understand in the first place? As it happens, Makoto and I had had many wonderful discussions about subtitling and translation over the years. We talked about the ideas I was developing about "abusive subtitles," and he allowed me to add some abusive flourishes to my subtitles for <I>Mahiru no hoshi</I> (subs that faithfully reproduce the excessive repetitions and speech patterns of his subjects, one scene where the "sub"-title covers the entire image, etc.). Makoto and I spoke at length about the problems presented by <I>Memories of Agano, </I>and in the end we adopted a strategy of the fragment—subtitles that came in and out, used ellipses, bracketed translator's notes, and the like. He joked that our collaboration was one of those cases where the translated version is better than the original. </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span">This I doubt. <I>Memories</I> left a lot of people cold, but I liked it very much. It is a mature work that showed incredible control over his material and medium. His use of quotation—in this case, of his first film—was brilliant, and in the course of that intimate work of translation I came to deeply appreciate the complexity of that film's structure. It kept giving and giving, something all artists strive for and few really achieve. </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span">Sato Makoto had arrived at that sweet spot. I was so looking forward to where he was going. What a sad day. </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Markus</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">PS: Here is an interview I conducted with him for Documentary Box, probably the longest interview of the Documentarists of Japan series. <A href="http://www.yidff.jp/docbox/25/box25-1-1-e.html">http://www.yidff.jp/docbox/25/box25-1-1-e.html</A></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV></BODY></HTML>