Yamagata: ode 1 & Oishi Apartments

[Abe' Mark Nornes]

This was the most disturbing experience of the festival.

These two video tapes are first efforts by Takashi Toshiko, who formerly was
involved in the success of the Tokyo Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. The two
tapes work together so well it's difficult to imagine them
separately...combining them in one work probably would have made for an even
stronger piece. In any case, they were very well received for good reasons.
And I should say they were _uncritically_ received for mysterious reasons.
She did not mean to show these works publicly, and has only showed them to
friends up to now. Since they were received quite warmly, you'll probably
have a chance to see them somewhere.

_ode 1_ uses single shots that fade in and out, cross-cutting between two
settings, featuring two women who live together. The first setting is their
apartment; the second is a couple perfomances of an S&M act they run, mostly
for male spectators. The pace is slow and the music makes it rather
hypnotic. S&M has never done much for me, but this was pretty interesting. I
liked how the wild performance played off what appears to be an imminently
typical domestic sphere. But that life inside the apartment still has traces
of the performance. They practice the movements. They sew the leather
costumes.

_Oishi Apartments, Nishi Tengachaya_ is Takashi's visit to her childhood
home, an apartment in Osaka where she lived in a three mat room with her
mother and brother. What is fascinating about this tape is that it's a
one-shot work. Most of these are highly controlled and planned out, as in
the structural film. However, this one has the remarkable spontaneity of
home video---in the framework of the single-shot film. Basically, she leaves
a train station, visits the apartment, meets two women that where there when
she was a kid (the only ones left), and then goes back to the station.

Watching this film, one cannot help but recall _ode 1_. The two women are
now in their 70s and living in impoverished conditions. Takashi recalls that
one of them dressed like a man, and that the neighbors often gossiped about
them. That they kept to themselves, and she avoided them. They clearly take
an interest in the fact that Takashi is not married, but the artist resists
revealing that she herself is lesbian. The conversation is actually quite
mundane, as Takashi checks out the apartment inside and chats with the two
women, but one senses the complex feelings she's feeling. These are all good
reasons to like these two works.

But I was left feeling somewhat distressed by the second work. Takashi
crossed a line, and in showing it publicly so did Yamagata.

When Takashi arrives at the apartment, someone inside sees her and she
starts to run away. But she stops, and points the camera at the ground,
continuing to talk. She enters the apartment and goes upstairs to visit the
second woman, who she finds her in bed, watching television, stark naked.
Takashi continues to shoot. The woman reveals that she lost a leg to
diabetes, and Takashi continues to shoot. When the woman sits up, we see
that she has also lost a breast to cancer, and Takashi continues to shoot.

At one point, the old woman says, "You should shoot some pictures."

This only confirmed the suspicions I was dreading, that Takashi was taking
these images without the knowledge of the old woman. In the question and
answer period, someone asked how she got such a spontaneous interchange with
the women, perhaps trying to draw her out on this issue. She replied only
what was obvious, that she was shooting from the hip, pointing the camera as
best she could without looking in the viewfinder. That sense of spontaneity
and the old woman's carefree exposure of her marked body are powerful
indeed. But captured through a kind of violence that is special to the
documentary.

Since there was some talk afterwards at the Komian Club (the bar where
everyone gathers after all the screenings), a friend asked her if she got
permission to show the film publicly and Takashi said she did. (I have to
add that this seems to contradict her statement that she never went back to
the apartment, and the women say on tape that they have no phone.) In any
case, even with retrospective permission Takashi's invasion of that woman's
privacy is reckless and unethical, and it was disturbing that the only
people who registered this problem were the foreigners.

Markus