Ainu in Japanese film?

[Aaron Gerow]

The 1993 Yamagata Documentary Film Festival did a special program on 
indigenous films, with some Japanese films including Ainu:

*	Chisenomi (JAPAN / 1934, 1993)
*	A Record of the Shiraoi Ainu (JAPAN / 1925)
*	Rider with a Guitar in the Plains (Saito Takeichi / JAPAN / 1960)
*	Ship of Outlaws (Mori Kazuo / JAPAN / 1950)
*	Uepotara--A Traditional Exorcism Rite of the Nibutani Ainu (JAPAN / 
1933, 1993)
*	Words: The Symbol of a People (Kayano Shiro / JAPAN / 1993)

Ship of Outlaws (Gorotsukibune) and Rider with a Guitar in the Plains 
(Daisogen no wataridori) are fiction films featuring Ainu. The 
independent researcher Chupchisekor, who has scoured Japanese popular 
culture for references to Ainu, presented a talk on these films. I also 
wrote a piece for the Daily Bulletin on Rider with a Guitar, which is a 
fascinating film (it is basically a revisionist Western with the Ainu as 
the good Indians that need help from Kobayashi Akira--I show it a lot in 
class). Chupchisekor, who unfortunately died a couple of months ago, has 
made up lots of lists of his findings, but I can't remember all of them. 
Some of the fiction films with Ainu include:

Mito Komon umi o wataru (1961)
Kotan no kuchibue (1959)
Mangetsu (1991)
REX (1993)

And of course anything related to kamui, especially found in anime, can 
be related to the Ainu.

Aaron Gerow
Yokohama National University
KineJapan list owner
For list commands: send "information kinejapan" to 
listserver at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
Kinema Club: http://pears.lib.ohio-state.edu/Markus/Welcome.html