fwd: doc on female puroresu

[Abe' Mark Nornes]

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Silent witness
Documentary film-maker Kim Longinotto doesn't like voiceovers - she prefers
to let her subjects speak for themselves
Emma Brockes
Thursday February 10 2000
The Guardian


Perhaps it was an experience at boarding school that made Kim Longinotto a
woman who would spend her life watching others. She was 13. There was a
school trip. She became separated from the group and, in the confusion, the
teachers of Hampden House, a private school in Buckinghamshire, were made to
look fools. By the time she was found, they had raised her offence from
accidental straying to wilful truancy and all future trips were banned.
Longinotto was sent to Coventry   for two years. "Nobody talked to me. Not
once. The teachers were angry because I got lost, and embarrassed the
school. The students were angry because the trips got cancelled. I was
completely isolated."

In her television documentaries, Longinotto protects the isolated voice from
obscurity by projecting it over the heads of its censors. Iranian women,
conventionally portrayed in the west as weeping fundamentalists or mute
victims of domestic violence, find their tongues in Divorce Iranian Style,
the riveting film she made over five weeks in a Tehran divorce   court. "He
has sexual problems," rages one furious wife in court. "I found out on our
wedding night but kept it quiet not to shame the family." "He is mad," spits
another. "He has been from the beginning. God punish the liar."

"Women can't win against Iranian law," says Longinotto. "But they can win
against the judge who feels sympathetic towards them. You get a sense of
their power, but it's not a legal power, it's their own power." It is a
combination of rhetorical and theatrical power - the same elements that make
up Longinotto's films and have   won her awards at the Paris and San
Francisco film festivals.

She started her career, improbably enough, on the camera crew for the early
80s Madness biopic Take It or Leave It; and her first solo project proper
was shot at Hampden House - "revenge" she called it. But it was The Good
Wife of Tokyo, a film she made in 1992, about the mother of Frank Chickens
singer Kazuko Hohki, that brought her to public attention. More acclaim
followed in 1993, for Dream Girls, covering the fortunes of the Japanese
pupils studying to be stars in the popular revue show   Takarazuka; while
its follow-up, Shinjuku Boys, examined the lives of three "onnabes"- women
living lives as men.

Longinotto doesn't like voiceovers. It is important the development of her
characters emerges through their own dialogue. "You have to be very patient.
You have to give up your own life and totally wait for their life to take
you in. There are times when I'll say, we are just going to sit here for a
bit and the sound recordist will say, what for? It's a frame of mind. To get
to those moments where things are revealed, you have to be quite lazy."

Longinotto speaks softly and a little nervously, which has the effect of
accentuating her thinness. The lower her voice gets, the more you notice her
posture, too, sloping a little to the floor, perhaps from years behind the
camera or her habit of watching, patiently, in the background for a story to
unfold.

At 48, she is editing her 15th film, Fighting Women, a portrait of a
Japanese school for women wrestlers. There are Polaroids of them on the
table. They are wearing make-up and are a strange mixture of the glamorous
and the truck-like. The school, just outside Tokyo, accepts girls between
the ages of 15 and 21, and Longinotto's original plan was to film the new
recruits as they arrived, again after six weeks, and then return for some
final shooting when they stepped into the ring for the first time after six
months. But when the recruits were delayed for four weeks, Longinotto and
her small team began filming some of the existing first-years and found the
story there.

"By the time the others arrived, we had fallen in love with one of the girls
who had been doing it for a year and was going to get thrown out. That was a
risk because, if she had got thrown out, we wouldn't have a story. But you
work out very quickly where your characters are, and have to be dogged about
it."

Female wrestling in Japan routinely attracts audiences of 8,000 and the
participants become superstars - as famous as the male WWF contenders in the
US. Their stage act is just that - a choreographed sequence that ensures the
throws and headlocks they perform on each other won't permanently damage
them.

This was one of Longinotto's conditions for making the film. She has no
taste for violence. "My mum used to watch wrestling when I was a kid and I
used to absolutely hate it. It   seemed so cruel. But they assured us that,
although it was very skilled, no one would get hurt. We got very into it.
We'd be screaming for our girls and they'd all look at us. But I wasn't
screaming for anyone to get hurt. That's why I don't like boxing."

What drew Longinotto to the girls was the same spirit of rebellion that
attracted her to the wives of Tehran. In both cases, it is rebellion defined
by a resistance to the overarching patriarchy. The conceit of this approach
is that you learn more about a country from its outsiders than its
establishment. Outsiders, for Longinotto, are merely the future come early.


"There has been a change going on in Iran. As women become more educated,
they become more confident. You   really get a sense of a place in transit.
The modern Iranian woman wants everything: a divorce, a new husband, her
kids and she wants to work."

In Japan, too, there is a notable progression in attitude between the women
Longinotto filmed in Dream Girls, her documentary about the students at
Takarazuka - a sort of Japanese Royal Ballet school meets the Parachute
Regiment - all of whose careers were forcibly ended at 25 with the
expectation they would marry, and the female wrestlers. "The girls at the
wrestling school were all saying they didn't want to get married, that this
was the best thing they had ever done and that if they'd got married, they
would have been   fed up. One girl said to her mother, it would be very
difficult for me to get married because if my husband hit me, I'd punch him
back. Her mother said, well, you can't get married then."

Longinotto's own relationship with authority has strongly influenced her
film-making. When she was nine, her parents, who lived in London, sent her
to Hampden House as a boarder. "I loathed every second of it. And what I
hated was the meaningless little tasks that they made you do - just like in
Takarazuka, which reminded me very much of my boarding school. They were to
do with teaching you not to have self-respect. Things like cutting the lawn
with nail scissors. It was like the wearing away of your self-worth."

The reason her parents sent   and kept her there when she was so miserable,
particularly during the two years of isolation, was not malice, she
suggests, but lack of interest. "I think that, now, people like my parents
wouldn't have had kids. I think then you just did because that's what
everybody else did."

Longinotto repays their neglect with a coldness that might be shocking if
you couldn't see her struggling a little to pull it off. "My mother had a
business, but I never quite worked out what it was," she says with a light
sneer. Is she still in touch with her parents? "No, well it was my mother's
funeral - yesterday? No hang on, what day is it? Tuesday, Tuesday." The tone
is breezy, but her eyes are on the floor.

When she left school, she discovered her father had Italian roots and, after
a bit of digging, she took up the abandoned family name of Longinotto. "A
new name with no baggage." Rather than go home to her parents, she became
homeless, first in London, then in a dusty traipse around Europe. "It wasn't
so bad..." she begins, before stopping herself. "No, it was. It was
terrible. I was starving. I wouldn't beg, so it was a case of..." she trails
off. Dustbins? "Mmm. One of my first films was about homeless women in a
hostel near Greek Street."

When she returned to London the prospect of chancing it on the streets once
again had lost its charm. She applied and was accepted at Essex university,
where she studied English and European literature for three years and
decided that she wanted to be a writer. A PhD loomed - she considered doing
one on the novel and cinema - but she was saved from it at the 11th hour by
Lambeth council. "I was doing a library project for them, where you go round
parks and tell people stories with a microphone and at the end say to them
that if they want to read the stories, they should go to the library. But no
one ever wanted to go to the library."

Since one of her main interests was bringing society's marginal figures to a
wider audience, she started re-considering her choice of medium. And, after
those terrible two years at boarding school, she had a fear of living the
life of an isolated writer. "Also, I'm not very good at writing," she
whispers. "That was the main reason, really." Instead, she enrolled at film
school in Beaconsfield and decided that what she wanted to do was make
documentaries about people whom others always presumed to speak for. This is
what she saves her quiet urgency for.

"What I love about making documentaries is that I can disappear. It is
getting involved in a situation and letting it speak for itself. I love the
way you go somewhere and get into   another world and lose yourself and
discover things you couldn't have imagined. I love that moment when you film
something and it unfolds in front of you and it's a privilege to be there
and your heart goes and you think, this is happening and I'm filming it. The
whole of the Japanese shoot was like that. We'd go back and lie on our beds
and go, I can't believe it."

Gentleness and kindness are not the same thing, but Longinotto has both. We
are walking through Soho after the interview when she pulls up sharply to
give money to a man under a blanket. This isn't surprising since she has
been there herself, but she is mindful of all the characters in the scene.
While fishing about in her bag she half turns to me and mumbles "sorry" for
the delay. "Sorry, I have to..." she tails off without finishing, but the
story has told itself.

• Kim Longinotto introduces extracts from Fighting Women tonight at 9pm
at the Lux Cinema, Hoxton Square, London N1 (Box office: 0171-684 0201).

Copyright Guardian Media Group plc.