The Cove in Japan

[Christine Marran]

Thank you Mark for your comments about the reception of the film. The 
Japan Times coverage gives no sense of the film.  The film is indeed 
about more than animal rights. 

As Mark suggests, there is much to discuss in terms of the documentary 
style and for me much of the stylistic interest in the film lies in the 
way in which the hidden and the exposed get articulated filmically.  The 
core of the film is the attempts of the fishermen to hide their  
slaughter of dolphins, the filmmakers' attempts to hide as they film the 
slaughter (leading to the use of military technology and so on to plant 
cameras at night). One scene, taken by hidden cameras in the shadowy 
dawn, captures the offhanded remarks of fishermen waiting for the 
morning sunrise to begin the day's task of  slaughtering of the dolphins 
captured in the bay. I wish I had a copy of the scenario, but I seem to 
recall that the men discussed the war.  Does someone remember this?  The 
primary visual interest in the film for me was this repeated shift from 
lightness to darkness, from the  visible to the invisible: the small 
dolphin's nose as it disappears under the water after repeated attempts 
to surface or of the fisherman scuba diver's flippers as he scans the 
bay bottom for dead dolphin bodies in the bloody red waters.

The article does not cover the attention in the film to marine zoos. It 
is clear that the fishermen make much of their profit from selling Taiji 
dolphins to global sea worlds. This is not new information. The illegal 
trafficking of dolphins is highly profitable. So lucrative is the sale 
of dolphins to sea zoos that Taiji is creating its own training ground 
for the dolphins they catch.  The crux of the film is that  the toxic 
food market and the highly profitable global sea market are highly 
implicated. The film does spend quite a bit of time addressing the 
problem of overfishing, too, with the tuna at the core through a 
particularly memorable sequence of days at Tsukiji compressed into about 
a minute of film, contrary to the JT article.

Perhaps this film is ultimately about time--the amount of time it takes 
to suffocate a creature, to train an actor, to fish seas to emptiness, 
to poison the child without his knowledge.  It is an emotional film not 
because it is an "animal rights" film that "is more about compassion 
than mercury" but because it is about life, illness, and death and the 
ways in which the health of human and nonhuman animals get compromised 
under the cover of blue tarps and through government-funded programs 
(school lunches).  Minamata is certainly relevant here and I can see why 
it came up repeatedly in the Q and A.
Thanks again Mark R.


-christine marran


> On Friday, "The Cove" had its first screening in Japan at the FCCJ. 
> Actually, there were two simultaneous screenings, because the venue 
> was so packed that Karen Severns, the film programmer and event 
> organizer, opened a second room downstairs to accommodate everybody. 
>
> Coverage by the Japan Times is here:
>
> http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20090927a3.html
>
> Overall, "The Cove" is a fairly polished production. More so than, 
> say, "Darwin's Nightmare". There's a lot of underwater photography and 
> clearly they had significant budget. As a documentary, it's 
> complicated, highly ambitious, and of course not unproblematic. My 
> sense was that the film goes some length to control its animal rights 
> appeal, trying to avoid the kind of overt sentimentalism that would 
> cause people who are indifferent/unsympathetic to tune it out. Yes, it 
> is foregrounded in the film, and some will find that objectionable, 
> but there are actually quite a few different claims being made, e.g. 
> about the fishing industry, environmental pollution, government 
> policy, food culture, and Japan's strategy to control the 
> International Whaling Commission. The film is not very flattering to 
> Japan but it also spends a decent chunk of time to make the point that 
> most Japanese are not aware of the issues and practices being exposed.
>
> The most alarming claim concerns mercury in the world's oceans, and 
> this was really the focus of the press conference. Ric O'Barry, the 
> protagonist of the film, asserts that dolphins in the world's oceans 
> now contain levels of mercury higher than what was found at Minamata, 
> that it is moving up the food chain at an alarming rate. Minamata was 
> invoked repeatedly during the press conference. One claim in the film 
> that is not mentioned in the Japan Times article is that much of the 
> whale meat being sold in Japan is actually dolphin meat being passed 
> off as the genuine article, and it's full of methyl mercury. For me, 
> this recalled a comment by Tsuchimoto Noriaki 
> <http://www.japanfocus.org/--Kamanaka_Tsuchimoto_Field/2614>: "I used 
> to think that after witnessing Minamata disease, humankind would have 
> learned a lesson. But if you look at where the world?s mercury levels 
> have gone since, it?s clear that's simply wrong."
>
> Being at the FCCJ press conference, my sense was that the audience 
> response was less "mixed" than the Japan Times article suggests. Most 
> of the comments during Q & A were from journalists, and most of them 
> seemed to be about clarifying information or getting details. There 
> was no discussion of the film as a film, i.e., how it was constructed, 
> its documentary style, etc. Nobody questioned that. The comments of 
> Dr. Endo were the only deeply critical reaction, and he was very 
> agitated. Endo did not respond when the moderator called upon him to 
> formulate a question, and finally somebody just grabbed the microphone 
> away from him. Later, he calmed down and was given the final question. 
> When asked about the science behind the film, O'Barry's response 
> pointed back to Endo's own research. Everybody laughed and Endo fell 
> silent.
>
> As far as I heard at the press screening, there are as yet no plans to 
> distribute the film in Japan. However, it will screen here at TIFF 
> next month, and maybe somebody will decide to pick it up then.
>
> M


-- 
Christine L. Marran
Associate Professor of Japanese Literature and Cultural Studies
Department of Asian Languages and Literatures
University of Minnesota