Notes on the Image Forum Festival 1999

[Joss Winn]

The 1999 Image Forum Festival left Tokyo to go to Yokohama, Osaka and
arrived in Fukuoka last week. Below are details (often reading much like a
numerical list-sorry) drawn from this year's festival guide (published in
Japanese and English) and my own brief comments on films that I thought
stood out as particularly interesting.  I was able to attend eight of the
fourteen programmes that were screened between June 2nd and June 6th at the
Fukuoka City Library.  There were sixteen programmes at the Tokyo
screening. The festival will travel to the ICA, London in early September.

The City Library has a very comfortable, modern theatre that I would guess
seats around 200 people. Film  projection was good but video projection,
although void of horizontal lines, was not as crisp as I've seen elsewhere.
It guess it was VHS projected with a decent projector. Each Programme was
introduced by Nakajima Takashi, the Festival Director.

For those that are unfamiliar with the Image Forum Festival, it is worth
noting that it is the largest experimental film and video festival in Asia,
held by Japan's oldest institution for experimental film. Besides the
festival, Image Forum has it's own film school, glossy magazine,
distribution centre, and theatre, screening experimental film and video
from around the world three days a week.  They can be contacted at
<info at imageforum.co.jp> or visit their web site at
<http://www.imageforum.co.jp>.

1999 was the festival's 13th year and included a special programme, "Shall
We Forget [the] 20th Century?", which "included several works which explore
the sensation of video games from within digital film."  It should also be
noted that, for the first time, this year's Grand Prize winner was made on
video.  In an interview for the catalogue, the winner, Uda Atsuko quite
rightly expressed her surprise at winning because every year since the
festival began, the Grand Prize has gone to a film made on Super/Single
8mm.  You might also be interested to know that in thirteen years, the
ratio of male and female Grand Prize winners has been split evenly, almost
every winner has been in their twenties and seven of the winners are
graduates of Image Forum's one year filmmaking course (which, I'm told, has
an enrollment of around 100 students at any one time).  This year, there
were 471 entries from Japan and 56 from other Asian countries.  Over 21
days, three judges (two Japanese and one Korean filmmaker) selected 48
Japanese and 8 works from other Asian countries to be screened in the
festival.  Prizes are, to my surprise, awarded before the festival.  I must
admit, I'm not keen on knowing who the winners are before I watch the films
but this seems to have been the way the selection process has worked since
the festival began.

This year, besides the Grand Prize, there were two Special Jury Prizes,
Four Awards for Excellence, and three Honorable Mentions.

To my dismay, only one filmmaker, Obitani Yuri, was present to talk
publicly at the Fukuoka screenings.  I'm not sure if this was also the case
in Tokyo though there's no mention in the Tokyo programme of any
post-screening interviews.

Filmmaker's/videomaker's in particular may be interested to know that,
according to the catalogue, twenty videos, nineteen 16mm films, sixteen 8mm
films and four 35mm (foreign) films were screened.  Three films were
presented on video (all from the UK) and there were two installations. This
includes invited work from abroad, too.

As well as films in the Competition and the Shall We Forget The 20th
Century Programme, there was a Japanese Invitation Section, a retrospective
Amateur Film Section and an International Invitation Section.  At the
Fukuoka screenings, Obitani Yuri showed three films in his own Section.

I was dissapointed with, 'Ms Fukuda/Fukuda-san' (1998, video, color,
41min), the Grand Prize winner, feeling that Murukami Kenji's video, 'Born
In The Summer/Natsuniumareru'(1998, video, color, 76min), was a more
accomplished work. Born In The Summer is a fake documentary about Murukami
who goes back to his home town to wait for his sister-in-law to give birth.
He gets bored of waiting and decides to pass the time visiting a telephone
dating club where he sits in a room and waits for women to call him and
chat.  He makes several failed attempts to meet women and when he finally
does, the narrative grows steadily more 'unreal'.  The video was supposedly
a strong contender for the Grand Prize but in the end, won a Special Jury
Prize. I'll be showing this video and other work by Murukami at Eiga Arts
in July.

There was only one other prize winner that really impressed me, 'Corrosion
Tone/Shokusenritsu', (1998, 16mm, B/W, 30mins).  It is a beautifully shot
'performance' film concentrating on "the reconfirmation of visual
perception derived from touch."  The filmmaker, Miyake Nagaru, made
wonderful use of light to  sculpt the performer's bodies, indeed
exaggerating the visual  by means of the tactile.  The filmmaker's use of
sound was also well timed, as the bodies were strung together, stretched,
lifted and plucked to a variety of tones, both aural and visual.

In Ota Yo's 'Incorrect Continuity' (1999, 16mm, color, 9mins), he films
passing cars and clouds at a variety of speeds as part of his "research on
the difference between real time and the time and movement created by a
film."  On a couple of occasions he managed something I was unable to work
out.  In one shot, the camera stands above a two lane highway, filming cars
going both ways from top to bottom of the screen.  At certain times, the
speeds of the cars are altered with one side going very fast as the other
side continues at the 'correct' speed.  How he was able to speed up images
on one side of the frame and not the other, I don't know.  Is this possible
in the printing?  He did it again when filming an overhead bypass.  The
cars on the bridge above were clearly speeded up while the cars on the
ground were travelling at normal speed.  Interesting stuff.

For the last few months, I've been looking for experimental Japanese travel
films for the delayed Eiga Arts Travel programme with no luck whatsoever.
I've asked several people and no-one has been able to come up with one.
However, Manjome Jun's 'ANALA' (1999, 8mm, color, 23mins), is a film he
made while travelling around Madagascar, filming plants and monkeys native
to the area.  It appeared to be edited in-camera, often the exposure would
shoot all over the place and film speeds would change, reminding me of his
1996 film, Mongolian Paty.  There seemed to be less attention paid to the
formal aspects of ANALA than one could find in Mongolian Paty, but I do
think it achieved Manjome's intention of telling a "story of what the
forest used to be at one time, told now."  Like Mongolian Paty, the forest
and it's inhabitants do appear to "stand up and dance" at times in
celebration of what they used to be, now.

The 8mm films were projected the same size as the 16mm films.  I thought
that perhaps they'd been blown up to 16mm because the projection was so
good, but was told that it was a xenon projector brought down from Tokyo.
I love 8mm.

Other films I liked were the new version of Onishi Kenji's 'A Burning
Star/shosei'(1999, 8mm, color, silent, 25min), now split into six(?) parts,
almost devoid of the narrative found in the longer version, it concentrates
much more on the natural light of the sun and fire.

For Ito Takashi's, 'A Silent Day/Shizukanaichinichi' (1999, 16mm,
color/b/w, silent, 15min), we were told before the programme began and also
by a title at the beginning of the film that this was a "silent film".
However,for the first half of the film, there was the sound of rough
splices about a second after each shot changed, leading up to a series of
shots where the woman in the film shoots ball-bearings from a catapult.
What had been irritating 'noise' up until then, was put to effective use as
the noise from the 'bad splices' created sounds effects for the shooting
missiles.  By then, it was clear that this was actually, in part, a sound
film concerning a woman "on the despairing road to death."

Sueoka Ichiro's 'Poached Film/Mitsuryosareta Film (1998/9, 8mm, color,
3-8mins), were four selected found footage films, involving refilming, hand
processing, repetition, reappropriation and other 'post-modern' techniques.
This kind of work is much more common in the US than it is here and I'm
told that Sueoka is the only filmmaker in Japan who home processes his
films.

My favorite programme of the festival featured Martin Arnold's brilliant
'Passage a l'acte'(1993, 16mm, b/w, 12min): "Four people at the breakfast
table, an American family, locked in the beat of the editing table."  I'd
read about this film in Scott McDonald's recent series of intereviews and
share his fascination with it.  Arnold takes perhaps ten seconds or less of
a 50's Hollywood film and destroys the continuity of simple movements, such
as lifting a fork to one's mouth or turning one's head, by carefully
reprinting frame by frame.  The film not only exposes the minute details of
the nuclear family but mocks their slightest moevements, gestures and
sounds.

In the same programme, three of Gustav Deutsch's film loops were shown, my
favourite being, '55/95', "a single shot of a 1955 newsreel in which
Leopold Figi, after signing the treaty, declare Austria's post-war
independence."  Silent but for the moment of the declaration.

The final film of the programme and the festival was Deutsch's 'Film
ist'(1998, 16mm, color/b/w, 60min), a collection of scientifc found footage
films which, employing techniques often used by experimental filmmakers,
examine properties common to science and film.  The six sections are:
1.movement and time; 2. light and darkness; 3. an instrument; 4. material;
5. a blink of an eye; 6. a mirror.

So they were the films' I saw and liked.  On the whole, I was a little
dissaponted by the festival but shouldn't complain too much because I
missed several programmes that contained work by well established Japanese
filmmakers and some of the prize winning films.  I'm looking forward to
next year, although before that is the Yamagata International Documentary
Film Festival in October which always includes a good dose of experimental
work.

bye



Joss Winn

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