Yamagata: The New God

[Abe' Mark Nornes]

There are people on the list who saw the film at Yamagata who will disagree
with me, but I think Tsuchiya Yutaka's _The New God_ was by far the best
Japanese work at the festival. I would go so far as to say its among the
most important Japanese documentaries of the decade and, depending on its
reception and Tsuchiya's subsequent work, could eventually be seen as a
turning point coming at the end of the decade.

You might remember Tsuchiya from posts by Joss, who had some troubles
showing Tsuchiya's _Does the Emperor Have War Responsibility?_ In this fine
example of video activism, Tsuchiya and a friend go to Yasukuni Shrine on
the anniversary of the war's end to talk to old people about the topic of
the title. There are many impressive things about this project, not least of
which is the fact that he step into Yasukuni in the first place. To me this
indicated a precious flexibility and unwillingness to make the right wing
monolithic in order to dismiss it. For this reason, one cannot watch _The
New God_ without taking into account this earlier work.

The premise for _The New God_ is amazing: Tsuchiya the video activist hooks
up with an ultranationalist punk band, and each tries to figure the other
out. He gives the lead singer, Amamiya Karin, a video camera and both she
and Tsuchiya record the development of their unlikely relationship from
their own perspectives. He arranges for her to visit the Red Army members
who hijacked a plane to North Korea back in the early 1970s (I can't
remember the dates). As the deep similarities between the extreme left and
extreme right become clear---including the impoverishment of their
politics---Tsuchiya and Amamiya find themselves drawing closer together on a
new ground...one that incidentally includes infatuation. By the end of the
tape, they have become a number, she has quit her affiliation with a
ultra-nationalist organization to rethink her musical activism, and we'll
have to see if they live happily ever after.

First a word on style, but only one or two. _The New God_ fits uncomfortably
into the rubric of the private film, that genre that has so dominated the
1990s Japanese documentary. It constantly threatens to devolve into a love
story, but Tsuchiya is too smart and too dedicated to an engaged documentary
to let that happen. It starts out looking like a somewhat conventional
documentary until he hands a camera to her and shows her how to use it. From
that point on, they become collaborators (something novel to the personal
film as it is construed here in Japan) along with another band member, Ito
Hidehito. In addition to the footage each shoots, all three offer their own
voice-over commentary on the soundtrack. Tsuchiya makes great use of the
confessional mode that seems to specific to video as a medium. When they
turn the camera on their own bodies, they constantly reflect on the latest
twists and turns of their encounter. It's a mutual self-reflection,
energized by the fact that each speculates on the motives and emotions of
the other. Some complained of a sense of performance during these private
sessions with the camera, but that is only a matter of course. All
documentary involves performance, but it also provokes what never would have
happened without the presence of the machine.

To focus on these matters of style would be to limit _The New God_ to the
confines of the private film. What has generated this phenomenon is
precisely a refusal to enter the world, camera in hand. A dismissal of the
political and the engaged, and a concomitant retreat to the safety of the
self, the family and the friend (or in the case of someone like Oki, I'm
tempted to add the aesthetic). I would argue that this comes from a freezing
of the politics of engagement in the mid-1970s, when the student movement
boiled down, when the vanguard of the Red Army exposed a corruption within
the Left by killing its own, when the advances of third world and feminist
filmmaking and theory were passed by, when the oil shock hit hard, when the
airport was completed. Stuck with a conception of the political defined
decades in the past, young people today are quick to dismiss it. Tsuchiya
cites their constant consumption of the newest of the new as a deflection of
the emptiness this causes, a way of engaging something safe, or creating a
place to stand, and the other safe haven is the personal. This situation
helps explain why Tsuchimoto feels silenced, why Hara cannot escape the
paradigm of _Heta Village_'s Ogawa Pro, why Matsue probably made a complex
film about identity in spite of himself, and why most young filmmakers seem
unwilling to take their cameras into that troubling world out there.

So Tsuchiya's use of the private film constitutes a critique from within,
because instead of using it to confirm one's identity and worth through
public screening of the private sphere, he uses it to engage the public
arena with a resolutely refreshing passion. Bringing in the Red Army was a
brilliant move, and reminds us of that other Red Army revolutionary=artist,
Adachi Masao, who posed the choice in the early 1970s as one between
politics and art. While most of his contemporaries chose art (or silence),
Adachi chose politics and departed for the Middle East to become a
terrorist. But Tsuchiya is dedicated to avoiding these kinds of either-or
choices and traps. He seems the be the only one around capable of this. His
commitment to escape the closed circuit of consumption and dedicate oneself
to something larger is also a refusal to become dead-ended in the vestiges
of Old Left party politics or New Left revolutionary politics.

I was not the only one who left the theater feeling like I had _finally_
seen a committed, passionate, engaged documentary by someone from my own
generation, that someone from my generation had finally arrived. This said,
I must also point out that while the film breaks down easy oppositions of
right and left, New and Old, private and public, it leaves everyone on shaky
ground. This is why, ultimately, _The New God_ will either be one of the
most interesting films of the 1990s, or it will mark a turning point. The
jury is out, but in the mean time you can still buy the CD.

I'm about over my cold; here endeth my Yamagata epistle.