Yamagata: Cinema Verite

[Michael Raine]

Not to contest your main point, but Hani's films were a little later than
this weren't they? '55 and '56 I think.

Michael

----- Original Message -----
From: Abe' Mark Nornes <amnornes at a.imap.itd.umich.edu>
To: <KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 1999 6:00 AM
Subject: Yamagata: Cinema Verite


> Cinema Verite: Defining the Moment is the new documentary by Peter
Wintonick
> (Manufacturing Consent) about the history of doc. The most significant
> aspect of the tape is its interrogation of the roots and the way it sorts
> out the national articulations of this stylistic and conceptual break in
the
> history of documentary. He also brings his survey to the present day to
look
> at verite's traces in current practice. I learned a lot.
>
> But significantly, Wintonick left out Japan. I'd like to point out two
> things about this miss.
>
> First, Japan actually experienced the breakdown of conventional
documentary
> style earlier than the West. It has a similar tragectory---fighting the
> phony staginess of Griersonian documentary or propaganda with spontaneity.
> But it first happens in 1952 with Hani Susumu's _Children of the
Classroom,_
> and then his _Children Who Draw_ in 1954. These films were shown in Europe
> and America at the time, but had no impact. It speaks to how the
discourses
> on documentary were ignored by the West. However, inside Japan the
> filmmakers working for Hani turned out to be the among the most prolific
and
> innovative documentary artists of the 1960s and 1970s. How can a
documentary
> that purports to give a global history of cinema verite ignore the films
of
> Tsuchimoto and Ogawa?!!? (And this from a filmmaker who went to the 1993
> Yamagata Film Festival when they held an enormous retrospective of 1960s
> work!)
>
> Second, this seems to be a trend of history that writes out Japanese film.
I
> have seen so many lists and such of significant films/books/etc. of world
> cinema that leave out Japan. This would have been inconceivable in ten,
> twenty years ago. This has implications for all of us.
>
> Markus