Yamagata: Hasumi Speech

[amnornes at umich.edu]

Below you will find the speech Hasumi Shigehiko made as the head of the 
jury. The awards had just been announced, and he gave the decision the 
following spin. It's a rough translation the interpreter used as an 
onstage gloss. As you can imagine, the original had a bit more umph to 
it.

Comments in a minute.

Markus

============================================



	No film is made for the purpose of being judged. All works are 
probably made with an eye toward bringing them to the general public. 
In that respect, the position of the individual who serves as a juror 
for a competition is a highly sensitive one. It is merely a relative 
position that is significant only during the unusual period of an 
international film festival, and we are not a group of experts that 
have been assembled on the basis of any objective decision.
	However, just as an international film festival is a place of 
accidental encounters, this panel of jurors has operated as a locus of 
slightly accidental encounters. Each of the jurors must thank the 
Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival from the bottom of our 
hearts for making possible these extremely valuable chance encounters. 
This year, people from Canada, Japan, the Philippines, Portugal, and 
Thailand with connections to the film world have encountered one 
another, and after experiencing a certain kind of intense experience 
together, last night we added to that over five hours of earnest 
discussion.  The results of that discussion have been already 
announced, but it goes without saying that if the combination of our 
ages, generational affiliations, and nationalities had been varied even 
slightly, we could have ended up with completely different selections.

	Almost all of the entries in this year’s competitions were shot on 
video, and those shot on film were distinctly in the minority. This is 
a situation that was unimaginable at the outset of the film festival 
almost twenty years ago, but we can say that it is completely 
appropriate to the twenty-first century.  The advances in digital 
technology that have occurred in the intervening time have brought 
people closer to film in vast numbers unthinkable in the twentieth 
century; this is a situation that surely must be welcomed.

	But we can’t necessarily say that this guarantees an unprecedented 
diversity of works. When we see a certain kind of work, it is difficult 
to deny the impression that a homogenization of the screen that we must 
call “televisionesque” is threatening film. We can’t help but feel 
misgivings about the loss of notions of time and space that are 
specific to the cinema. Despite this, for those of us on this jury it 
was our great fortune to be able to experience valuable works that gave 
us a glimpse of the possibilities of twenty-first century cinema, those 
such as Fengming: A Chinese Memoir from Wang Bing, the director who 
astonished us four years ago with Tie Xi Qu: West of Tracks.

	Even before defining documentary film, the YIDFF has thrust the 
question of what film itself is at filmmakers and spectators alike, as 
the roster of previous prizewinners reveals. Films cannot definitively 
be divided into “fiction” and “documentary”—the border between the two 
categories is forever wavering ever so slightly. Whether cinematic 
works are documentary or fiction, what is important to them is not how 
the filmmakers show us their subject matter, but the worldview they 
reveal through training their cameras on their subjects. We are drawn 
by the question of how they see the world and not by the techniques 
through which they show the world. From the beginnings of the festival, 
Yamagata has provided a great number of people with a place in which 
questions of how we view the world mingle in profusion. For that 
reason, this invaluable experience has been emblemized by the greeting 
now heard around the world, “Let’s meet again in Yamagata!”

	This proud greeting, “Let’s meet again in Yamagata!” must not be 
silenced, even temporarily. Let them remain on the lips of the members 
of the NPO that has taken over responsibility for the festival, of the 
people of Yamagata City and Yamagata Prefecture that support it, of the 
filmmakers and guests who have come to this area from across Japan and 
from every corner of the globe. I am confident that many of the people 
here today carry with them that determination.