Yamagata: Docu-karaoke

[amnornes at umich.edu]

Yesterday was quite the roller coaster. I understand Pedro Costa's talk 
actually made it's way to the topic of sound sometime after I walked 
out the door. I still have no regrets for making my way to other 
venues, even though the Indonesian documentary I ended up in was a 
mess. In a few minutes, the next sound workshop starts. This time it is 
with Kikuchi Nobuyuki, a legend in cinema sound here. He worked on many 
of the best films by people like Ogawa, Tsuchimoto, and Sato---to say 
nothing of Aoyama and many feature filmmakers. I:m looking forward to 
this one. One of Costa's few comments worth passing on was, "I know 
from being on many sets that cinematographers are always in a 
distracted state, worrying about a thousand things; sound men are 
quiet, very Zen, sitting there in peace waiting for shooting, kicking 
into action with total concentration when the time comes."  This bodes 
well for today's talk (and also makes me wonder what personality Costa 
would attribute to directors like him!).

Jasper's comment makes me recall a scene from the other day. The 
politician at the center of Campaign was on the streets, ribbon around 
his shoulder, campaigning for the festival screening of his film. (He 
also asked Kawase Naomi about how cameras affect people being shot, 
adding that he has some experience with this.) There were some 
interesting conversations at Komian about whether this is simple fun or 
pure cynicism. In other words, was it the cheerful dedication to public 
service we see in the film itself, or part of his efforts to ingratiate 
himself to the party so he doesn:t have to pay for his next election. I 
tend to be convinced by the latter argument, but there was lively 
disagreement.

A highlight of the festival for those lucky enough to attend was the 
screening of Kidlat Tahimik:s epic I am Furious Yellow. This is an 
incredibly wonderful, powerful film that charts the growth of post......

[I was just interrupted by Sarah Teasley, who invited me to write a dig 
at all those KineJapan members at the festival who are writing nothing. 
I won't. I am simply trying to create some good karma. I always wish 
that people would write up dispatches on the fly from events I am 
unable to attend. So Sarah, you can write something when you don't seem 
me around!]

.....back to Kidlat. His film charts the growth of post-Marcos 
Philippines and the growth of his own family. The star of the film is 
his son, Kidlat. In terms of tone, I am Furious Yellow is very close to 
Perfumed Nightmare. Whimsical. Cute. Cutting irony. Deceptively complex 
critiques of Hollywood cinema and capital, particular of the American 
variety.

This is a very special film for the way the production itself grew with 
his country and his family. He brought it to the 1989 festival as a 
one-hour film. Then he came back in 1991 with a longer version. And at 
the 1993 edition he returned once again with a three hour version. 
There were other screenings around Japan in the 1990s. Each showing, we 
would see a slightly longer version. Sometimes it would suddenly end. 
Other times, it would shift to silent rushes. He finally added end 
credits to the latest version, but it still has the sense of a 
mysterious living creature because each projection has ended with a 
performance.

Yesterday was no different. Just before the end credits hit the screen, 
Kidlat shouted out from sidestage and then walked into the image 
dragging something. When the lights went up, we say that it was a cart 
filled with cameras and projectors. Kidlat was wearing black robes with 
a colorful cape and a mortar board cap. He exclaimed, "I have returned 
from America with my PhD in spaghetti."  He went on to explain he was 
going to cook a spaghetti dinner for us, laying out a table cloth, 
place settings, then the spaghetti: 16mm film. To the 16mm spaghetti, 
he added the 40 year old 16mm wind-up Bolex he shot the film with, his 
trusty 8mm camera from the 1960s, and the 16mm Canon Scopic camera that 
Ogawa Shinsuke gave him on a 1990 visit to Magino (one I made with 
Kidlat, come to think of it). While Kidlat cooked, his two sons took 
the stage and shot him with DV cameras. Suddenly, they became part of 
the performance. He pointed at the lens: "What is this?" They 
responded, "Di-ji-taal" and started taunting him for being a 16mm 
dinosaur. Kidlat despaired---"How can this be? I just returned from 
Hollywood with my PhD in spaghetti!" Suddenly, he threw off his cap. 
Whipped off his cape and robe. And he was suddenly in a loin cloth from 
the tribal people near his home in Bagio. He said no to digital and 
brought out a bamboo camera and he and his sons danced and played drums 
and gong.

This is a variation of all the performances he's done over the years, 
often with props he's left in various storehouses around Japan. All 
good fun, with the audience clapping and howling. But also 
thought-provoking. How do you ensure that the ways people use DV avoid 
easy conventions and the ideological baggage they imply?  This is his 
ongoing question, and he is now forced to enact the question in his own 
work. This year, the last lab developing 16mm closed down so it is 
impossible to work on film in the Philippines unless you shoot 35mm. 
Kidlat's new project, on his middle son, is half-film/half DV. And a 
third film on his third son is all DV. (And the middle son, Kawayan, 
told me that the long-awaited epic on Magellan is going nowhere 
fast---and the actor that played the explorer passed away!)

 From that high, the day ended on a somber note at Komian. There was a 
wakare-kai for Sato Makoto, who committed suicide just before his 50th 
birthday. As was predictable, his absence from the festival was 
palpable; you could occassionally see conversations at Komian Club and 
in the theaters suddenly turn somber and know what people were talking 
about, or thinking about while they tried to regain control of their 
emotions. Initially, the festival was hesitant to do anything. Better 
to simply "meet under the bridge."  This is a reference to a famous 
story from the 1989 festival, when Makoto was in the middle of editing 
Living on the River Agano. He and his crew had no money, but wanted to 
attend, so they came to Yamagata and pitched a tent under a freeway 
bridge. There was talk of holding a quiet wake for him under that 
bridge, but in the end the festival organized a wakare-kai at Komian.

A few of us from the Tokyo office came prepared with an isshobin of 
daiginjo to share with Makoto. His many students put together a 
documentary record of the speeches at his Tokyo wakare-kai, which drew 
over 500 people despite the fact that it was hardly advertised. The 
room at Komian was packed, most people having to stand. We watched an 
hour of the speeches and interviews. A slideshow or two of Sato's life. 
Some footage of his seminar at Kyoto----one scene showed him telling 
the students about the Yamagata festival, even drawing a map of the 
city, and then a crude picture of one of the venues....cut to the 
classroom, and there was even a student taking careful notes!  This was 
so typical of the cheerful quirkiness we so loved Makoto for. It had 
everyone laughing through their tears.

Markus





Quoting 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
>
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