inquiry - depictions of Tokyo

[Mark Nornes]

On Sep 26, 2004, at 12:47 AM, Aaron Gerow wrote:

> Speaking of documentary, Tsuchimoto Noriaki's Dokyumento rojo is a 
> brilliant essay on the reconstruction of Tokyo before the Olympics.

At the recent retrospective of Tsuchimoto's entire filmography, they 
showed all of the "prefecture films" he made for Iwanami, and one was 
on Tokyo-to. People were looking forward to a couple of the others, 
which got into some trouble with the sponsors and production company 
and led to the formation of Blue Group. However, everyone was blown 
away by the Tokyo film. Like Document: Rojo, it shows Tokyo under 
reconstruction before the Olympics. One of the best scenes was taken 
from the top of a 4 or 5 story building next to Shinjuku Station. A 
real estate developer points to the mostly empty construction sites 
below them, dreaming of sky scrapers. Little did he imagine!

Markus