January EIGA ARTS review (long)

[Joss Winn]

This post contains a very informal review of the first EIGA ARTS
experimental programme in Japan.  It also contains reviews of the five
films/videos shown.  They were: MONGOLIAN PATY; CREOSOTE;
MOMOIROBEEBIOIRU/PEACH BABY OIL; A BIT BITTER; BABY HOME.

It was intentionally written for readers who might not speak Japanese nor
have been to Japan, so my apologies if some of the below seems blatantly
obvious to some people on this list.  The first part is an informal 'diary'
commentary on the January 30th EIGA ARTS, followed by reviews of each film
in no particular order.


Thankyou for your interest.
**************************


The wednesday before THE saturday, I was asked to give an interview for the
local prefectural newspaper.  A foreigner in Japan is often deemed
newsworthy and a foreigner showing experimental films is a real oddity.
They seemed as interested in my own three efforts and what I was filming
now as much as EIGA ARTS.  The last time there was a noteworthy film event
in Saga city was a couple of years ago when a local filmmaker finished a
feature film set in Saga and all the cast talked in the local dialect.
(Dialects are important in Japan.  Everyone in Japan knows two dialects.
The standard Tokyo dialect - which I learnt at University) - and then their
own dialect (unless you're from Tokyo).  There are some dialects in Japan
that are so different that a conversation between both would be
impossible).  The following day, a local TV station called me up for the
same thing.  An interview is scheduled a week before the next EIGA ARTS.  A
bashful fifteen minutes that will be.  Explaining my own work in English is
hard enough, and this will be in Japanese.

I was not expecting any of the above.  I think it shows my naevity
throughout the last few months of planning EIGA ARTS.  It's quite an
experience organising a show alone, particularly in a foreign country.
It's at once hard work because of the fact that I'm an outsider and
surprisingly easy because I'm expected to make mistakes here so all is
naturally and quickly forgiven.  The people at the venue I rent seem to
look upon me with amusement and bewilderment.  I can approach the media
with anything and am not expected to go about the usual formalities.
Difference is apparent everywhere and organising an alternative space to
show film/video seems to fit nicely in with that.  The poster of the first
EIGA ARTS demanded in the imperative Japanese, "DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT".
People would look at it with a smile.  It's almost offensive but not as
much as if a Japanese person had demanded it.

I arrived at the venue early after running around getting drinks for the
night only to be told that I couldn't sell Sake (Japanese wine-my town
makes a fine Sake so I thought I would sell the one brand). I had wondered
what Japanese alchohol laws would allow.  Litre cans of beer are sold in
vending machines on the street, so I thought it would be ok.  Not so......I
couldn't sell it, so it was free Sake all night.

The venue I use is a huge, newly built, city community centre. For some
reason it's refered to as a women's centre, but I can't understand why.
All kinds of events take place there.  There's even a fully professional
BETA SP studio with two cameras and an observation/editing room.  I rented
it for the day last year, with engineer, for $80.  They tell me that it is
used about three times a year.  Make that four...or five.... (That was
another funny, 'foreigner doing strange things' story).  Anyway, the room I
rent seats upto 90 people, has a new 16mm projector with 100mm lens and
SVHS/VHS/audio facilities.  There is a control deck from where the operator
can perform magic once intiated into how to use it.  I did a short dance,
mumbled gibberish and hoped it would work for me.  It didn't so I called
for the technician/magician who reminded me of the movements again and hey
presto! I applied the right amount of pressure with my index finger to the
computer screen and the curtains closed, a screen opened up in the wall, a
video projector decended from the ceiling and the Elmo clicked into action.
It was at this point that people started to arrive.  Donations were
accepted on the door, a programme in Japanese and English was handed out as
well as a questionaire.  I hate questionaires, but they're very common here
so I thought I would make use of one to get an idea of what people thought.
I also want to get a mailing list going so it was a good way to collect
addresses of interested people.  I got back 30 from 87 people (at one
count) that showed up, which I thought was pretty good.  I wouldn't have
filled one out.  CREOSOTE and BABY HOME were favourites of the night.

CREOSTE was the longest film/video that I showed and I felt a little uneasy
as I watched it.  I had asked Eric Saks for the video early on in my
preparations and had really enjoyed it but realised on the night that the
heavy narration and intertitles were a bit alienating for the Japanese
members of the audience. I explained that I thought it was an important
video, had received a lot of attention in the US and that Japanese people
should be aware of it.  That it was worth watching for it's visual
qualities alone and that the brief synopsis in the programme would provide
an explanation of the narrative. Actually, I think I scared a few people
away with it.  A lot of Japanese people said it was 'difficult' (it's
difficult whether you understand English or not) although everyone agreed
it was quite beautiful.  It's a beautiful, meticulously made B/W video with
a loose narrative about a young boy that goes missing on a Boy scout
camping trip.  This story is 'embroidered' with the life story of St
Francis, resulting in a complex, hallucinatory narrative structure. The
narrative is complemented by editing and post production effects which
succeed in creating a very dense texture on video.  One would not be so
surprised to find this on film, but Eric's video has material qualities
(layers of stop-frame animation, puppetry techniques, intertitles) that
defy the usual complaints of video's 'flat' image.  Eric had mentioned that
he was pleased with the way it looks projected and I understand why.
Projection brought it to life.  I find his use of the word, 'embroidered'
to describe the narrative, quite apt because texturally, the video kept
reminding me of raw cloth. It's difficult to explain, but the use of sound
(often a rough, analog sound like a dirty needle on a record player or an
old, worn out film soundtrack with too many splices) combined with the
layers of still images and post effects, gave it a coarse, material quality
on screen.  If it sounds like CREOSTE was just trying to look like film,
then I apologise.  There's something else going on with the video which is
'pure' video and which I don't think could be done with film (it could be
transfered to film but not manipulated  with film itself).  Anyway, I once
read a review of a bottle of wine that described the wine as reminding the
taster of sawdust on a sunlit attic floor, so before I plummet to those
depths of pretension, I'll stop.

The other favourite of the night was BABY HOME.

BABY HOME is a black and white experimental documentary composed of still
photographs taken from the last thirty minutes of a home birth.  The entire
film was made from 72 still images (2 rolls of 35mm film) using an
animation camera and edited with the sound recorded at the time of the
birth.  The only words discernible during the film are 'baby home', spoken
by a young child present at the birth.  The film was made to support the
home birth movement which opposes the high-tech methods and interventionist
medicalization of hospital births.  BABY HOME differs from most
documentaries in that rather than presenting a passive audience with
information, the audience is forced to sit and explore each frame actively
and look and understand what is happening on screen.  The still photos and
the sound go some way to depicting this, but also stop the viewer from
becoming too passive, and the viewer is left to fill in the spaces with
his/her imagination.
..
Something that struck me about BABY HOME was the use of sound.  It sounds,
technically, quite poor and yet because of this, it is one of my favourite
elements of the film.  I wonder whether the film was planned in advance, or
whether the filmmaker, David Woods, had just intended to shoot rolls of
still film at a friend's birth.  I ask this mainly because it 'sounds' like
David picked up a domestic tape recorder and did the best he could at the
time to record the sound.  This 'raw' use of sound, gave me a strong sense
of 'being there' with everybody else and yet I was easily reminded that I
wasn't because I was made so aware of the apparatus used to record the
sound.  I was pleased to sense that in BABY HOME,  the soundtrack was not
meant to be a mere compliment to the photographic realism but rather acted,
for me anyway, as the dominant expression of both the filmic and pro-filmic
realism.  The images, were no less interesting and because we are clearly
presented with still images, I was often inclined to appreciate them as I
would, still images in a newspaper or in a book. The photography is
remarkable. Several images stay in my mind: that of a young girl staring
intently at the camera; a woman's profile inches from the mother's stomach;
a shot looking down onto the mother as she is giving birth which clearly
depicts the intimacy between all the people present and not only the mother
and father. And of course, there are several shots of the  mother and
father's faces in the run up to the actual birth revealing the differences
in their own immediate experience of the event, yet clearly they were
sharing something very intimately also.   In addition to these images, many
of them conveyed the sheer physicality of the event.  I wish I could find a
more sophisticated way to put it, but seeing the woman standing, leaning,
sitting, lying, squatting, made me think of her in terms of size and
weight, particularly when her body was closely juxtaposed with the head or
hand of another person. I hope this makes sense.

The images in BABY HOME are compelling, not only in the way they are
employed dramaticaly, but in that I was able to feel close to the event
because of David's patience with the images and also his use of techniques
I understood to be self-reflexive.  Having said all of this, perhaps the
most memorable image is the 30 seconds (one minute?) of black screen that
we are shown as the baby is born.  The audience at EIGA ARTS clapped and
let out sighs of relief as we heard the baby being born (the sound,
notably, was left running), mixed with laughter at not being able to see
the actual birth after such a dramatic build up, and looking around at
people's reactions, I saw through the darkness, smiles on people faces, a
few people were wiping away tears and one guy was having trouble
controlling his relief and kept breaking into nervous laughter.  I
understood the use of a black screen during this climactic moment of the
birth as quite rightly reminding us of our position as spectators.  The
images allowed us the priviledge of being able to see something very
private, personal and unique.  But the black screen reminded me that I
shouldn't rely on images to understand what was being depicted.  The sound
was more than enough for me to imagine what was happening and share some of
the emotions I could hear being expressed on film.  But ultimately, I
wasn't at the birth, and sometimes it's useful to be reminded that the
audience is priviledged only to the extent that the filmmaker decides upon.



MONGOLIAN PATY was filmed on Super 8 (projected on 16mm) in the Gobi desert
and elsewhere and is a combination of a series of very long takes of the
landscape (with a naked woman occasionally rolling around on a stage in a
tent-not quite sure why, other than that it was a very funny, quite surreal
juxtaposition) and manually advanced single frames.  The film opens with a
three minute shot of the landscape with a single flower in the foreground.
As the flower moves in the wind, lounge music plays on the soundtrack.  The
length of this take combined with the music makes it very humorous and it
was a great scene to open the night with.  Long takes of a statue of a dog
in the middle of a field, single frames of horses and sheep moving around
the fields super fast and the reoccuring naked woman in the tent, created a
very funny film.  But besides the humour, technically the film was
interesting in it's combination of manual single frame shooting and long
single takes.  The exposure was dead on a times and way off at other times
and, together with the shooting speed,length of cuts and seemingly
unrelated soundtrack, the landscape seemed to dance.  The movements of the
flower at the beginning of the film were just a prelude to the filmmaker's
notion of 'film as dance' which became less explicit in the subject matter
but more explicit in the filmmaking techniques.


MOMOIROBEEBIOIRU/PEACH BABY OIL was the other Japanese film of the night,
and like MONGOLIAN PATY, it won the grand prize at an IMAGE FORUM festival.
It was the only film of the night made by a woman and concerns a woman in
her early twenties who wonders what to do about growing up.  The film's
narration is quite poetic and consists of her asking the same type of
question over and over again: "What to do if (this happens)......What to do
if (that happens)......". It depicts a woman questioning the neccessity of
growing up, of her body changing and getting bigger while her mind remains
childlike.  "My body is too, too big" she repeats, suggesting not that she
is fat (far from it) but that her body has grown from being a child's and
with it, the image of her body and the use of her body (sexually) has
changed too.  Some members of the audience were uncomfortable with the
nudity in the film as the woman acted with the innocence of a child yet
obviously, as an adult, signified something erotic.  She rubs breasts with
another woman and lies beside her and we are forced to question our own
attitude towards nudity and sexuality.  The woman clearly considers herself
a child still and the nudity certainly has the naivety of childhood, so
when watching the film, I tried to remind myself that perhaps what I am
seeing is not necessarily erotic and what would I feel if she really were a
child?  It seemed that it was questioning (among other things) the
portrayal of nudity and it's relation to eroticism.  At what age does the
body become erotic?  How are we supposed to view an adult's naked body when
the person admits to being a child?


I programmed A BIT BITTER on the strength of it winning the Soeul short
film festival and being invited to the YAMAGATA INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY
FILM FESTIVAL.  Having read about it and seeing the director describe it as
a documentary, I was surprised to find that it was clearly scripted and
filmed like a fiction film even though the actors were quite possibly
amateur and staging their own lives for the camera.  Although the filmmaker
was a man, it was made by a collective of filmmakers in Korea (the Korean
indpendent scene deserves some attention) and was cowritten by Park
Chan-ok, a female filmmaker with several notable films of her own.  The
film concentrates on the hardships of being a woman in Korea, particularly
the working class woman whose family is affected by union disputes, a
neglectful husband, and the military dictatorship of the 1980's.  The
outlook is depressing, pessimistic and exhausting.  In this sense, the film
does convey much of the 'realism' that the documentary genre attempts to
achieve and in a style that is controlled, quiet and solemn.  My impression
is that the 'actors' did not have to do much acting, and that the script
was already written for the filmmakers.  They depicted an image of modern
Korea still suffering and struggling, offering no immediate signs of hope
for this generation of young adults.   I was pleased to show it at EIGA
ARTS because it does attempt to question the lines between fiction and
documentary, not through theoretical sophistication, nor through
particularly reflexive filmmaking but merely by the fact that the
filmmaker's and the the people in the film have come together to say, 'this
is what we see.  These are our lives and the lives around us.'


If you've made it this far, thanks for your interest. There's an
appropriate  saying in Japanese (used all the time) that means something
like "thankyou for your efforts".  Indeed, thankyou.



Joss Winn

EIGA ARTS
1217 Shinden
Kubota-cho
Saga-gun
Saga-ken
849-0203

Tel. (81)-(0)-(952)68-4722

<edq39077 at saga-ed.go.jp>

http://www.sirius.com/~sstark/org/eiga/eiga.html