Yamagata: Docu-karaoke

[batgirl at tkb.att.ne.jp]

On 2007/10/10, at 10:24, amnornes at umich.edu wrote:

> 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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