Japanese Experimental Cinema Programme in London: Richie, Jonouchi, Oe

Thu Nov 18 07:18:38 EST 2010

To UK KineJapan-ers - come along to this rare screening of Japanese experimental films!

Nippon Year Zero:
Japanese Experimental Film from the 1960s-1970s

Date |Time: November
23rd (Tue) | 7:45pm

Venue: Bethnal Green
Working Men’s Club, London

Total Running Time: 80
min + Introduction | Discussion

Price: £5 concession
or Close-Up membership | £9ZIPANGU FEST
More info:http://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/film-program/23-november-2010-nippon-year-zero-japanese-experimental-film-from-the-1960s-1970s.htmlhttp://zipangufest.com/events/2010/close-up-x-zipangu-fest-nippon-year-zero

Programme:

 Donald Richie

  War Games (1962) (22 min) (16mm)

  Dead Youth (1967) (13 min) (16mm)

 Motoharu Jonouchi

  Shinjuku Station (1974) (15 min) (16mm)

  Gewalt Pia Trailer (1968) (12 min) (16mm)

 Masanori Oe

  Great Society (1967) (17 min) (DVD)

Programme Notes:

Close-Up Film Centre
(www.closeupfilmcentre.com/) and Zipangu (www.zipangufest.com/) have
collaborated for the 1st annual Zipangu Fest to put together a
programme of Japanese independent and experimental cinema from the 1960s and
1970s. This special event includes films never before screened in the UK and
offers an engaging insight into a decade that was defined by political ferment
and avant-garde activity in all sectors of its art world. The three chosen
filmmakers, Donald Richie, Motoharu Jonouchi and Masanori Oe, all capture the
zeitgeist they were intrinsically a part of, yet articulate themselves in ways
that range from the poetic to the abrasive, often mixing the two expressions. The
retrospective programme invites its audience to an introduction to Japanese
experimental filmmaking through the eyes of three landmark figures in the independent
art scene. 

War Games

War Games is a neatly balanced cine-poem on violence
and innocence and a quietly observed soliloquy on freedom. The portrait of children
enacting the creation and breakdown of a community captures Richies’ charming
persona and endearing view of the world yet unearths some deeply felt loathing
for humanity and its history. Tatsumi Hijikata, one of the originator of the
(in)famous dance form butoh, assisted
Richie in production and the result is a masterpiece in visual poetry that is a
treasure to behold.

Dead Youth

By 1967, Richie was
considered an established independent filmmaker, screening his work at
legendary Tokyo venues Sogetsu Art Centre and Theatre Scorpion, as well as
receiving a collective award at the first Knokke-Le-Zoute Experimental Film
Festival in Belgium with the Film
Independents. Dead Youth provides
another testament to the elegance of his artistic vision, as sombre emotions
and painful memories are transmitted without the use of dialogue.

“Oh, movies can do anything that
life can do. They can move you, they can teach you, they can make you meditate,
and they can make you dream. They can do everything that life can do. They're a
simulacrum. This is their great power” [Donald Richie]

Gewaltopia Trailer

The title Gewaltopia Trailer has a dual meaning in
the Japanese language; one meaning for the word yokoku (trailer) could mean a compilation of extracts to promote a
film, but it can also mean a prediction, a prophecy for the future as a Gewaltopia. The film accumulates footage
from his earlier films and arranges them in different contexts, a
characteristic style of Jonouchi’s who often re-edited his films for each
screening and provided different soundtracks. The jarring aural atmosphere,
exemplary of the emergent noise-music scene, haunts the screen in an oppressive
hypnosis and will seduce you into entrancement.

Shinjuku Station

The Shinjuku district
was the epicentre of Tokyo’s art scene and the political fever pitch where protests
took place on a regular basis during the 1960s. Jonouchi’s compilation footage
of the area defies documentary imagery and transforms itself into something
altogether more poetically subjective, attempting to capture the chaos of the
location through his camerawork and editing. In 1974, Jonouchi projected images
of the past onto himself whilst reciting Dada-influenced and virtually
inaudible poetry generating a cacophony of images and sounds, drawing from and
participating in the maelstrom of political and artistic expression during the
era.

“In their meticulous assemblage of individual shots of different spaces
imbued with the symbolic significance of political confrontation, [Jonouchi’s
films] rejected the theatrics of spectacle, instead establishing a radical
materialism of spaces in both structure and methodology” [Jonathan M. Hall]

Great Society

If Richie’s films
were an American’s insight into Japan, Oe’s six-screen projection piece Great Society takes the intercultural
dialogue back full circle onto the U.S., where he accumulated a compilation of American
news footage and avant-garde imagery into a hybrid mesh to express distrust in
singular point of views. A project commissioned by CBS, the six screens
presented interact, mirror and fissure against one another, emanating an aura
of vibrancy and confusion that was internationally a characteristic of the
decade. 

We would like to
thank Go Hirasawa (Meiji Gakuin University) for his contribution to the
programme and arrangement of print distribution. His edited text Underground Film Archives meticulously
documents the Japanese underground filmmaking scene in the 1960s, and was a
valuable reference point for our programme. Our thanks also extend to the Image
Forum and Donald Richie.

Notes on the
Filmmakers:

Donald Richie

Donald Richie is best
known as a legendary commentator on Japanese culture, co-author of the
definitive guide to Japanese cinema, Japanese
Film: Art and Industry, and a regular contributor to The Japan Times. Little known is the fact that he is also a creator
of moving images as poetic as his writing, and was a key figure in the
underground art scene of Tokyo where he introduced American experimental cinema
to Japanese artists and participated in the collective Film Independents alongside Takahiko Iimura, Nobuhiko Obayashi and
Kenji Kanesaka.

An interview with
Donald Richie by Zipangu founder Jasper Sharp: http://www.midnighteye.com/interviews/donald_richie.shtml

Motoharu Jonouchi

Motoharu Jonouchi was
one of the leaders of the Nihon University Film Studies Club and the legendary
VAN Film Research Centre where artists enacted cross-disciplinary
collaborations to explore the art of film. Jonouchi, also the assistant
director on Hiroshi Teshigahara’s feature-debut Pitfall (1962), picked up his camera to record artistic events,
such as ‘happening’ art by Hi-Red Centre in Hi-Red
Centre Shelter Plan (1964) and butoh dance
in Hijikata Tatsumi (1967), as well
as socio-political protests in Mass Collective Bargaining at Nihon
University (1968) and the emergence of drug experimentation in Document LSD (1962). Yet what was most
remarkable about Jonouchi was his ability to integrate his personal vision into
his documentation, creating a concoction of personal and collective, imaginary
and tangible spaces.

Masanori Oe

Relocating to New
York in 1965, Masanori Oe participated in the cultural and psychedelic revolution
of the 1960s that took place in North America, which would alter his life and
art from thereon. His drug-induced internal experiences were projected
externally onto his filmmaking practice, where he pursued exhibition formats
that went beyond fixed-frame projections to explore other reams in expanded
cinema and environmental art. He later joined Jonas Mekas’ collective Newsreel and interacted at the Third
World film studios with distinguished experimental filmmakers such as Stan Vanderbeek.
Upon his return to Japan in 1969, he reignited the Japanese underground (angura) art scene and joined Zerojigen in their infamous street
performance-rituals to document their happenings in The White Hare of Inaba (1970).

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