Yamagata:halfway

[Nornes, Markus]

The Yamagata festival in in full swing. There seem to be more films than ever, and many familiar faces. This year the earthquake weighs heavy. After all, Sendai is just on the other side of Mt. Zao. The opening ceremony eschewed flash for a lovely string quartet playing before a lone Sogetsu flower arrangement. There is a program with the ambition of showing pretty much every independent earthquake film that's been made, so devastation imagery streams into one of the venues at any given moment during the festival. Many of the local festival staff have been going back and forth as volunteers. One old friend runs the local youth hostel; with business down more than 50%, he has been using his new spare time work in the tsunami areas. This week, however, he is determined to see every earthquake film playing. 

I devoted my first day to these 3/11 films. Beginning with the second film one watches, a common visual trope emerges. Of course, there are the boats and cars sitting on top of three-story buildings, mountains of wood or cars or refridgerators, or certain churches or primary schools that appear from film to film. But I am thinking of the trucking shots. A key challenge for all these filmmakers is communicating the scale of the disaster before their very eyes. How does one expressive the incomprehensible vastness of the destruction and the surfing it implies? Half a century back, just west of here, crews of filmmakers faced the same dilemma---not to mention a similar landscape---in the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Back then, their strategy was the pan. They scanned the disaster from a fixed point. The first films about the atomic bombings are filled with such shots. Today, they have replaced the pan with the truck. Or more specifically, the car or bike. The tsunami films are chock full of lengthy shots photographed from moving vehicles. 

Why the difference? I think it indicates vast changes in production modes and machines. Back then, the filmmakers were shooting 35mm and it is hard to imagine a great cinematographer like Shirai Shigeru shooting without a tripod. The pride in craft was too strong. Today, everyone has light cameras. Most of the films were shot with consumer level videocams. Of the films I have seen, only Sketches of Mujo used a tripod and featured strong photography and clean, creative sound editing---production values that seemingly betray the titles. It is all the other films that feel like rough sketches. But they all feature long, devastating images shot through the windows of moving cars. 

Pretty much all of these reveal a mix of dread and fascination for the incredible power of the wave. The directors of one of the films, The Great East Japan Earthquake: A Lesson for the Next Generation, let's this fascination get the best of him. He went up the coast, beach by beach, community by community, collecting incredible handy cam and cellphone video footage. This is combined with his own material and aerial archival footage for a horrific before/during/after montage. Over and over again. Just as you catch your breath, he slides to the next community and the horror starts all over again. There were interviews, but I don't remember any of them. 

The interviews in these films are fascinating, and their most revealing aspect. They are the entrance point to thinking about what makes a given film tick. Lives After the Tsunami and Mori Tatsuya's 311 are typical. The interviewers stop people cold and start asking questions. These are "man on the street"-style interviews, where the directors approach people on what is left of their streets and tentatively barge into their lives. The directors are clearly uncomfortable, betraying their own suspicions that they really shouldn't be probing strangers about the tragedy they are still trying to sort out. Many of the interviews are discomforting. Others work out in the end. 

One of the few of the films where the interviews feel natural (or contractual?) is Sketches of Mujo. I asked director Omiya Koichi about this. He worked in a two person crew, and like the other filmmakers he simply approached people cleaning up their homes or searching the wreckage. A few people refused to talk on film, in which case he simply moved on. Others agreed to talk, and the degree to which they bared their souls is sometimes heart-wrenching. One old fisherman, speaking in dialect so strong it is hard to follow him, lost everything and admits to thinking more about death than life. The earthquake broke the dam for a nearby tailings pond and unleashed a torrent of pollution into the ocean, rendering the fishing and sea weed aquaculture impossible. While explaining that his son was at Yamagata University and so was still alive, loses control and starts sobbing uncontrollably. Between sobs he talks about his impending graduation. Why he loses it is ultimately unclear, but perhaps it is because there is no reason for his son to return home. As the filmmakers move on, leaving him to his thoughts amidst the rubble, the man waves to the camera from the distance.

Too many of the other interviews are intrusions from start to finish. The filmmakers arrive uninvited. And even if they chat, there is an undying voyeuristic vibe that is hard to shake. This is entirely missing from films that are made by people who are insiders. For example, Tsuchioto was made by Okubo Yui, who was born and raised in Otsuchi-cho in Iwate Prefecture; he stitches together home movies he made before the tsunami with interviews with his family. They all survived, although his visit to the house he grew up in revealed it to be nothing more than a heap of wood and roof tiles. These interviews have the intimacy of home movies, because that is essentially what this is: it steps into a long tradition of amateur films made for small publics.

However, many films feel completely different. The filmmakers either are palpably nervous about approaching people or they seem oblivious to their intrusion. At one end of this spectrum, the interviews of Lives After Te Tsunami. Director Morimoto's entire demeanor, and especially his voice, expressly his own discomfort. On the other end is 311, the film by journalist/filmmaker Mori Tatsuya. Mori is brazen. He is relentless in his pursuit for the perfect interview.  And some of the interviews are actually unforgivable. 

311 is one of the "wadai sakuhin" (a film everyone is talking about) of the festival. Mori was actually one of four filmmakers that participated in the film, which is little more than a road trip to the north.  The Tokyo-based filmmakers pile into a van chock full of supplies, a mere ten days after the earthquake. They head straight for Fukushima, tracking their progress with a Geiger counter. It goes up and up as they approach the damaged power plant. They begin to take precautions, donning plastic suits and goggles with every cracks sealed with duct tape. The thing is, this first half is filled with nervous laughter and gallows humor (eg., speculation about who will die first). As one audience member pointed out, they could do this because the pain and tragedy of radiation is invisible. The laughter is understandable as a way to deal with the knowledge that they're being bombarded wit radiation, but it also gives the entire first half the feel of a beer run. 

When they finally get scared enough to turn north the tenor of the film transforms as they enter the tsunami zone. Not surprisingly, our first view is of endless devastation from the moving van's window. What is different is the soundtrack, which is filled with the oos and aahs of their confrontation with radical disaster; I am sure every filmmaker did that, but only this crew includes the soundtrack. This second half basically turns into a search for bodies. Mori and company would probably think that's unfair, but it is true that nearly every cold interview they make centers of how many family members the interviewee has lost. Sometimes the interviews go well. Other times the don't. The most suspicious of the bunch is with a father that has just pulled open a blue tarp to examine a body. He was hoping it was hoping it was his daughter but the body was too bloated to tell. Mori finds this out by asking the father just after he replaced the tarp. But he shoots this interview from the hip; he hides the fact that he is shooting, worried that he wouldn't get his money shot. When the father starts walking Mori pulls the camera up to his shoulder and the father immediately puts a hand in the lens to stop him from shooting.....but they keep the entire sequence. 

This is hardly the only scene where one asks about the propriety of the entire project. At the climax, they encounter a team of rescue workers that pull a body out of a truck. It is wrapped in blue tarps, and a telephoto close-up shows them peel away the plastic to reveal a face. Just about this time, a worker realizes that they aree being photographed and he throws a board at the cameraman. A huge argument ensues, with the worker criticizing them for being insensitive to the dead and their families. For his part, Mori tells him they did not shoot the body itself (I am hoping he didn't realize one of the cameras was) and that they were simply trying the capture the reality of the situation. His self-defense is really weak. After nearly two hours of discomfort, it is easier to accept the inclusion of his sequence and it's position as the climax as an admirable bit of self-criticism, if not a challenge to all the filmmakers that deign to walk into the disaster zone. The filmmakers took some heat both on and off stage (I heard Matsue Tetsuaki telling one of the directors that he didn't think any of it should be shown publicly). I am sympathetic,  appreciating the self-critique and the implicit attack on the media while disliking th entire project at a fundamental level. I can't decide if it is the best or worst of the earthquake films. 
By way of contrast, one of the 311 filmmakers made what is the best of the bunch, and from an  entirely different stance. Taking a page out of the Ogawa Productions rule book, he strikes up a  deep friendship with a group of families that evacuated their homes, which were about 20 kilometers from the nucear disaster. He hangs out with them over many months, gains their trust, and you can see their relationships grow deeper and deeper over the course of the film. He follows them from one evacuation center to the next, and joins them on troops to their homes to pick up important documents. Incredibly, the tsunami stopped in the genkan entryway of the main couple's home. These interviews were far more "real" than anything Mori captured. Indeed, this is the only earthquake screening I know where the subjects of the film actually attended the screening and thanked the filmmaker in front of the audience. The film never reaches the achievements of a work like Heta Village, but it definitely has the flavor of a Ogawa Productions film. In fact, he is working on a part 2 which will delve into the history of the village these people cannot return to. It is entitled Fukushima: Memories of the Lost Landscape, and was diced by Matsubayashi Yoju. 

Beyond this, I saw a short about a fireworks display in the tsunami area, which switched between beautifully poetic 8mm footage and painfully sharp HD video of the wreckage (Locus---Onahama 0811), and chronicle of an Olympic mogul star's return to her hometown of Shiogama to do little besides lead rajio taiso exercises (Snow After the Day). There w also the omnibus film collected by Kawase Naomi, where (mostly) fiction filmmakers made 3 minute 11 second shorts with the most tenuous connectons to the earthquake. And this is only a small fraction of the 29 films Yamagata collected for this event. 

There was also an exciting symposium with the earthquake filmmakers tonight, but I elected to go to a magic lantern program. It turns out that back in the 1950s,the magic lantern was very much alive. Labor unions and other organizations would essentially create slide shows with various levels of storytelling. This program was made of original slides preserved by Planet Film Library, and featured a lively narration by benshi Kataoka Ichiro. 

There was slot going on while I was watching earthquake films. There is a fantastic program of Cuban films, featuring especially Santiago Alvarez and Sarah Gomez; and Fernando Perez is on hand. Another program looks at local filmmaking in Yamagata. They are showing the 6-hour Showa Housekeeping, which is a record of how a housewife ran her daily life before the mechanization of everything. There are three new films on Tsuchimoto Noriaki, and a newly subtitled print of Ogawa's Forest of Pressure. Of course there is the famous New Asia Currents event, which collects the best Asian docs from the last year or so. And New Docs Japan, which is just what it sounds like. I sat on a very fun panel on documentary criticism with Matsue Tetsuaki, Chris Fujiwara and others. There is an amazing program of tv documentary from the 1960s and 70s, where I saw a pretty powerful 1962 film by Oshima and Tsuchimoto about a strike at a damn construction site---it strikingly foreshadows Ogawa's Peasants of the Second Fortress. And in the last couple days I will be busy being MC for a big program that reunites Taiwanese and Japanese filmmakers from the 1999  Yamagata festival. 

Oh yeah, there is also an international competition section. 

We are about at the half-way point. I could stay here forever.

Markus





Chair, Department of Screen Arts and Cultures
Professor of Asian Cinema, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures
Professor, School of Art & Design
University of Michigan