More Yamagata News

[amnornes at umich.edu]

Yamagata is as lively and enjoyable as ever. One of the pleasures is 
seeing so many people you know in one place. There are few events were 
so many people gather like this, partly because after the films are 
over there is one gathering point----an old pickle factory---where 
everyone hangs until they kick us out at 2:00 with an employee 
wandering around playing Auld Langs Eyne on a boom box. So rude. If the 
the ancient rafters of this place collapsed, film culture in Japan 
would be reduced to the shakey, barren studios in the capital and the 
Tokyo Film Festival.

One big surprise of this year:s festival is the sidebar on science 
films. We see the originary moment of this program in Iizuka Toshio's 
Eiga no miyako futatabi, which I wrote about yesterday. In that scene, 
the festival staff present the idea at a meeting with the head of the 
organizing committee, who has already been structured as a nemisis (he 
may in fact be playing that role). His response is to push 
backFScience films?!? No one cares about dull science films, and the 
march of progress has made their science irrelevant. The staff explains 
their plans for outreach through the local schools, to try to make 
science fun, etc. They clearly packaged it along these lines. The cover 
of their catalog (which has nice little articles on UFA, kulturefilm, 
Painleve, Higuchi, etc.) is a colorful manga filled with insects, 
animals, cells, slime, gears, and two bug-eyed kids holding 
Doraemon-like apparatuses. The plan obviously worked. They have filled 
every seat and turned people away from every show. Those who went were 
lucky to see stunning films like Marine Snow in the original 35mm.

Last night there was a symposium asking the question, "Should Yamagata 
have a documentary festival?"  The answer being obvious, I elected to 
go to a small gathering at an izakaya for Miyazawa-san. This is the 
former director who we see displaced in the Iizuka film. Organized by 
critic Murayama Kyoichiro, the attendees were many of the movers and 
shakers that constitute the infrastructure for film culture in Japan. 
It was a fun and relaxing evening, and Miyazawa-san deserved the little 
celebration. [An aside: one participant had a great story about Ogawa 
Shinsuke which I wished I:d heard before I published my book. Ogawa 
reprimanded a few of his staff members who wanted to pay into the 
social security net here, asserting that they shouldn:t have anything 
to do with the side of power. Of course, when Ogawa died it turned out 
he had been putting money in for years.]  As we left, someone 
announced, "It seems people at tonight's symposium have heard about our 
gathering for Miyazawa. If anyone asks, make sure they know it's no 
'ura-symposium.'"  Of course, it is meaningful that they just happened 
to have their dinner during the scheduled "Should Yamagata have a 
documentary festival symposium."

Documentary Box hit the streets yesterday. I imagine it will be online 
soon. This is the final number of what has been a really great 
newsletter. In the pages of this last issue, you will see article after 
article waxing nostalgic and wishing the festival organizers good luck 
in their new life as an NPO. The most notable article may be director 
Yano Kazuyuki's swan song; after years of saying he was going to quit, 
he takes stock of the last ten festivals and bids farewell. If it's on 
paper, he must be serious this time.

My filmic highlight so far?  Yesterday's program at Tohoku Geikodai 
showed classic 8mm films (all the original---often unique---prints, 
which must have made the projectionist pretty nervous). In the program 
was Yamazaki Mikio's "Kaihen no kioku". Yamazaki, coming out the heady 
70s indie film culture, wanted to express that era's violence in an 8mm 
film---this was 1982. Basically, he cuts between what appears to be a 
lovely scene of beheading by the sea and a hand in close-up. The hand 
appears in three modes: with a white glove, completely covered with 
band-aids, and bare. The bare hand has been sliced with a hundred 
(seems like a thousand) cuts, including a couple onscreen with a 
boxcutter. They slowly ooze with life force until being replaced by 
glove.  Bandaids. The ocean...  I:ve never seen an 8mm film with such 
impact as that.

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