Yamagata: ode 1 & Oishi Apartments

[Livia Monnet]

Takashi's tapes sound interesting,any chance to see them somewhere or get a
copy.Thanks. At 19:00 99-10-27 +0900, you wrote:
>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
>
Livia Monnet

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