Re: Re-enactment & mise-en-scène in Japanese reality TV

[Mark Nornes]

On Jun 23, 2004, at 12:30 AM, anne mcknight wrote:

> Does anyone have a
> sense where, when, how re-enactment and modelling acquired what seems 
> to be
> their out-of-proportion presence? Do most of them, as my sense is, 
> have to
> do with managing fear in some way?

I have not read anything about this, nor do I have anything profound to 
say about it. However, I was watching a delightful Takeshi show last 
week called something like Takeshi's Medical Horror Hospital. It was 
the usual structure: talent looking alternately delighted or horrified 
by reenactments and dramatizations. For this show, they pick serious 
medical topics and plug it in.

Last week was skin cancer and gout. The former enabled them to show 
many genki young girls in bikinis and then threaten them with terrible, 
beauty-defacing illness. The latter was dramatized with a man who lives 
the typical salaryman Life---working hard, drinking hard---that 
suddenly shows a crazy set of symptoms and then suddenly dies over 
dinner with his wife and daughter. This is rendered with all the 
conventions of the horror cinema (canted angles, noirish lighting, 
dramatic music), and each sequence ends with the entry of a real doctor 
who examines the talent and pronounces them healthy or near death.

It was great fun, but scared the bejezus out of my 4 year-old son. He 
spent much of the show standing behind my chair, but couldn't get his 
eyes off it.  It made a huge impression. Now everytime I crack a beer 
he warns me, "Watch out, you might get tsufu!"

Recommended viewing.

Markus

PS: There have occassionally been controversies over reenactment. Some 
have been discussed on KineJapan in the past and you could dig them out 
with a search. Before the 1960s, the debate seemed to have been more 
about the degree of reenactment that's allowable in a documentary. But 
after Hani's direct cinema-like documentaries about children in 
classrooms came out, you started getting words like yarase thrown into 
the mix. The two main debates were around Record of a Single Mother 
(Hitori no haha no kiroku) and the White Mountains (Shiroi sanmyaku). 
The debate around the latter is the easiest to find, as it's reprinted 
in the Best of Kinema Junpo volume.