Sento (was Kawase)

[Abe' Mark Nornes]

A caveat to my previous post:

I gave you the *Strong* Version of Japanese documentary. 

At that Yamagata symposium, former Ogawa Pro member Iizuka and up and comer
Sento/Kawase were pitted against each other. The contrast was productive to
the extent you accept such a schematic division between "group" and
"individual." This is an ideal with roots in the writings of people like
Matsumoto, but gets codified with the work of Ogawa and Tsuchimoto and its
reception. 

But there were two other filmmakers on the stage: Ise and Kanai, who
represent a spectrum of practice from the standard to the experimental. For
most of the symposium, they watched Iizuka and Kawase have it out, caught
between two ends of a binary with no place to assert their presence. They
must have wondered what they were doing there (Kanai's report on the
sidebar in Eiga Shinbun has little to say about the get together). 

Such strong narratives structure out a vast body of films that don't fit
the mold. And filmmakers that try to tailor their work to the values of the
strong narrative are inevitably compared to Ogawa and Tsuchimoto, and
usually unfavorably (Sato Makoto's Aga ni ikiru, for example). 

Markus