Yamagata has begun

[amnornes at umich.edu]

Greetings from Yamagata. The festival kicked off a night before last. I 
missed the opening ceremony, where they showed a couple films on Mt. 
Zao. \this is the volcano that hovers over the city. One of the films 
was Ogawa's film on the poet Makabe Jin (Pass). They always find a way 
to show an Ogawa film or two.

There was an emotional wake for Sato Makoto that night. I was sorry to 
miss that, but they will have a repeat later this week. I'll try to 
write about that at some point. I heard the first one was an 
emotionally draining experience.

The festival always seems to have one controversy, and the first one 
started last night. As you might have heard the festival went from a 
city-run festival to an NPO. Yamagata has had a very unusual structure. 
The international interface and much fo the creative programming was 
run out of Tokyo. The volunteer network and Yamagata staff added 
various programming, some of it substnatial and always including 
collaboration on the main competition. And then the city provided the 
apparatus that makes festivals run----money, accounting, people power, 
etc. When the festival went public, the latter suddenly had to 
transition to the hands of the people who had run other parts of the 
festival organization---as opposed to professional accountants and 
bureacrats. You can imagine how complex this must have been. There were 
inevitable glitches and rocks to navigate.

Amidst all this Iizuka Toshio decided to shoot a documentary about the 
festival. This would be a sequel to the film he shot with Ogawa 
Productions about the first festival in 1989, Eiga no miyako. Iizuka 
was granted pretty unusual access to the staff in Yamagata, including 
some fairly dramatic meetings. At the same time, many people chose not 
to be interviewed (including much of the Tokyo office staff).

Iizuka showed his film last evening, and it caused a bit of a stir at 
the Komian Club afterwards. Iizuka did a pretty poor job of 
contextualizing what was going on. So you have these meetings where 
stuffy bureacrat types are telling off the programming staff that are 
forming the new NPO. However, one is never quite sure what the issues 
are, or what kind of organizational and personal politics are playing 
out in front of you. This slipperiness offered many possible readings, 
some of which put people in an undeservdly unfortunate light. It was an 
impossible topic that probably should have been left alone, unless 
everyone willed 100% disclosure (in one scene the filmmakers are denied 
access to a key meeting and shoot it from outside).

I mention this partly because of what was striking to me. And it wasn:t 
the film. With the collapse of the exhibition infrastructure in the 
last part of the 20th century, people in the countryside had to take 
film culture in their own hands. This is an important aspect of rural 
festivals like Yamagata, which actually hold events all year long and 
serve as nodes in complex networks of self-run screenings. In fact, the 
new director of the festival, Takahashi-san, swapped jobs with the 
previous leader, Miyazawa-san. The latter is now plying the roads of 
Yamagata with a small company that sets up screenings of films (of all 
types) in community halls far from the multiplexes. This is a dimension 
of film culture across Japan that's pretty far off the radar, but which 
is palpable at a committed place like Yamagata.

It's nice to be here.

Off to a retrospective of classics from the so-called golden age of 
Super-8, a program celebrating Fuji's decision to reverse their plan to 
cancel 8mm film production.

Markus