Sato Makoto, RIP

[Mark Nornes]

Today, I received the crushing news that director Sato Makoto died on  
September 4 at the young age of 49.

Makoto has long struggled with depression, and took some serious  
blows from this problem over the last 10 months. He was in and out of  
hospitals, and apparently tried to commit suicide last month. When he  
emerged from a chemically induced coma, he and his family decided to  
change hospitals. At the entrance to the new hospital, he had a  
change of heart, ran away to a nearby apartment building, and threw  
himself from an upper floor.

For anyone who knew Makoto, his struggle with depression was so  
perplexing. He was such a kind man, always funny and thoughtful in  
turns. He loved to drink, and I count him as one of the most engaging  
drinking interlocutors I've ever had. He left films that, more than  
anything, tap deeply into the good stuff in humanity. They are decent  
films from a decent man, works that leave you smiling and chuckling.

It seems fitting to me that he left us with two films about Niigata  
as the bookends for his career. His last film was actually his  
biography of Edward Said, Out of Place. However, I will always think  
about the way the Agano River and its people frame his career. I met  
Makoto about the time he completed Living on the River Agano. He  
asked me to subtitle the film, a daunting task considering the  
challenges of even understanding Niigata-ben. Needless to say, we  
worked very closely together because I needed his help to translate  
the much of the script into standard Japanese before I could move it  
to English. I vividly remember our meetings, this first encounter  
with his seriousness of purpose, his love of life and his subjects,  
and also his intellect. He was still a beginner when it came to  
filmmaking, but I was impressed with the sophistication of his  
approach to the problematics of nonfiction.

Of course, Living on the River Agano was about old people suffering  
the effects of mercury poisoning, Niigata Minamata disease. But  
taking a hint from especially Ogawa and Tsuchimoto, he and Kobayashi  
Shigeru and the rest of his crew spent years working on the film and  
centered the end product on the humanity of these oldsters, not their  
disease. It was an unusual and wonderful film, and Makoto spent much  
of the rest of his career trying to move out of the shadow of those  
titans. I think he finally achieved that with Memories of Agano. This  
documents the return of Makoto and cameraman Kobayashi to the Agano  
River. They found that many of the friends they made from the first  
films had either moved into nursing homes or died. Their fields  
fallow, homes empty, Makoto had to think hard about how to represent  
passing. The resulting film is a complex, experimental documentary  
portrait of a place they knew so intimately.

Once again, I was asked to do the subtitles. This film presented the  
old dialect problem with a new twist, because he refused to put  
Japanese subtitles on the original film. I remember sitting in on one  
of the press screenings, the critics walking out of the theater  
scratching their collective heads and laughing about how tough it was  
to understand. How was I to subtitle a film that no one could  
understand in the first place? As it happens, Makoto and I had had  
many wonderful discussions about subtitling and translation over the  
years. We talked about the ideas I was developing about "abusive  
subtitles," and he allowed me to add some abusive flourishes to my  
subtitles for Mahiru no hoshi (subs that faithfully reproduce the  
excessive repetitions and speech patterns of his subjects, one scene  
where the "sub"-title covers the entire image, etc.). Makoto and I  
spoke at length about the problems presented by Memories of Agano,  
and in the end we adopted a strategy of the fragment—subtitles that  
came in and out, used ellipses, bracketed translator's notes, and the  
like. He joked that our collaboration was one of those cases where  
the translated version is better than the original.

This I doubt. Memories left a lot of people cold, but I liked it very  
much. It is a mature work that showed incredible control over his  
material and medium. His use of quotation—in this case, of his first  
film—was brilliant, and in the course of that intimate work of  
translation I came to deeply appreciate the complexity of that film's  
structure. It kept giving and giving, something all artists strive  
for and few really achieve.

Sato Makoto had arrived at that sweet spot. I was so looking forward  
to where he was going. What a sad day.

Markus

PS: Here is an interview I conducted with him for Documentary Box,  
probably the longest interview of the Documentarists of Japan series.  
http://www.yidff.jp/docbox/25/box25-1-1-e.html

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