Yamagata: Docu-karaoke

[amnornes at umich.edu]

Yesterday, an Australian bloke accused me of being the prime 
propagandist for the Yamagata festival, and I guess I:m guilt as 
charged. But still just telling it as it is. It:s really a special, 
living animal---as director Yano wrote in his Documentary Box article.

Of course, there are low points. Just came from one. Fujioka Asako had 
the brilliant idea of a set of workshops/master classes on sound and 
documentary. Sound rarely gets the attention it deserves, in theory, 
pedagogy or practice. And I think it:s particularly bad in Asia. 
Documentarists here clearly aren:t paying attention to sound. It:s 
obviously enough for them that it:s being recorded by the mike on their 
camcorder, which signals either an overemphasis on the image or on the 
basic recording functions of the documentary. In any case, the 
workshops are very much needed. Costa was an interesting choice, but 
the first thing he said was, "Well, I didn:t prepare anything. I never 
do and that:s the point."  That sounded like trouble. He went droned on 
for an hour about his filmmaking, so catatonic I thought he was going 
to drop his head on the table and go to sleep. He opened with a 
dismissal of theory, and when he finally got to sound an hour later he 
held up the Soviets as his idols---obviously, never read Eisenstein, 
Pudovkin et al's theoretical statement on sound. In between, he decried 
the monstrosities he was forced to watch upstairs as a member of the 
competition jury, and advised the assembled young directors that they 
only needed to watch Chaplin to understand cinema. How watching a 
silent film helps you craft a better sound track was unclear. He did 
get into sound, stating that his basic message was that it was 
"expensive." That you can:t do anything with amateur equipment (not 
helpful for this crowd of Asian independents), and then the next minute 
he asserted that the trick was how to eliminate money from the 
equation. That's about the time I left for lunch.

Luckily, yesterday was fantastic. There was the second installment of 
J-Pitch here, a UniJapan project initially created by John Williams. I 
think this was another collaboration Asako brought to Yamagata. Great 
idea. Basically to have producers of one sort or another come in an 
explain how the system works. There was a nice session with a serious 
and impressive NHK producer, and then yesterday's bit with Kawase's 
producer from France (she joined him for the first part). He was quite 
interesting and, although Costa just got in a direct dig at the guy, I 
thought he was refreshingly supportive of the artistic end of things in 
ways that I rarely see in American producers.

There was also a nice panel on postwar German documentary. Their theme 
was on war memory and the documentary. Four directors on stage. After 
discussing their own work and positions, which were strongly 
self-conscious about generational difference (moving from accusatory 
attitudes to more reflective and sympathetic ones). The panel had been 
taken to the Japanese doc Ants (Ari no heitai), which is about a vet 
who gives testimony to the atrocities he witnessed and participated in. 
The panel spontaneously invited the Japanese director to the stage, 
which initiated a fascinating back and forth about differences and 
similarities between Germany and Japan. Andreas Veile asked a series of 
pointed and great questions of the director. He noted that the Japanese 
vet's assertation that he was just an ant, no choice but to follow 
orders, was a discourse familiar to all Germans. They hear the same 
thing, and he felt this was a way of avoiding taking responsibility. He 
noted that the Japanese director intercut those scenes with close-ups 
of ants, and wondered if that meant there was no ironic or critical 
difference between the vet and the filmmaker. He worried that there was 
none, considering that he reiterated the ant image in the title of the 
film. The Japanese director responded by veering into well-worn tropes: 
hi no maru, national anthem, victim consciousness, basically steering 
around the question. Andreas wasn:t satisfied---I love follow-ups, they 
are so rare----and he reiterated the question and phrased it more 
directly. Same result. The Germans later wondered if there was a 
translation problem, but I suspect that the Japanese director wasn:t 
equipped to understand the question in the first place.

They also noted that his film had many images of the war in China, and 
they asked the Japanese director if this was the first time such images 
were inserted into the public sphere here (the film gave them that 
sense, and the heroic posturing of the intro and Q&A did as well). The 
Japanese director and the MC explained that there were few images out 
there, that the war was taboo in Japanese society, and cited only 
Emperor's Naked Army when they asked about films. The Germans, on the 
other hand, explained how a series of films---most especially Holocaust 
and Shoah---rocked German society. I suppose this is the way most 
Japanese see the situation, but in conversations with the Germans at 
Komian last night we discussed how it's a little different. WWII is 
everywhere in japan, all the time----in contrast to the states where we 
really don:t hear much about it unless "the greatest generation" is 
being invoked to start a war somewhere. I suspect there are as many tv 
shows, reports, newspaper and magazine articles as Germany. But the 
German directors talked about the incredible impact Shoah had, how 
everyone knows the film and most saw it. But I'd bet good money that 
the people walking around outside without festival badges have never 
heard of Hara Kazuo. Fascinating how all those films about the war 
create no reverberations like in Germany. We wondered if it said 
something about the two societies, or does it have something to do with 
the relative position and prestige of film?

The day ended with a big bang. Another Asako and Company project was 
documentary karaoke night. It was a crazy and wonderful idea. The 
festival staff approached a number of directors---from India, Japan, 
China, Philippines, etc.----to create music videos\documentaries to 
which they added karaoke subtitles. The Fins did their revolutionary 
music. The science film staff created a wonderful film with the 
Tetsuwan Atom song. Kawase danced to her film with her child on stage. 
But the highlight had to be, again, the Germans. But less because of 
the Germans than the film that the Tokyo office put together. The tune 
was Beethoven's 9th, the finale, which clearly needs a conductor. So 
there was festival director Yano, who is famous world-wide for being 
invisible during the festival, off in some corner smoking and never 
ever taking any stage. Yano conducting the 9th, probably stumble-down 
drunk, in the office, out on the street at night in a lovely image 
befitting a jazz album cover, a bunch of Germans next to the screen 
leading the entire theater in a rousing chorus. Yano will never live it 
down. When he arrived at Komian later that night, the entire place 
erupted in En Die Freude as he slinked away to another room.

Markus