Ann Arbor Film Festival review Highlighting the Japan program

[Nornes, Markus]

Here is a review of the 50th Ann Arbor Film Festival, with a huge shout out to the festival's Japanese experimental film programs (which were programmed by David Dinnell and Tomonari Nishikawa).  They were, indeed, very very good!

My only beef. Sicinski thanks them for this "contribution to films studies," noting how the program helped contextualization the more famous work like Spacey and Atman. But one thing I have noticed about foreign understandings of the experimental film in Japan is that it is skewed to films that are primarily visual. Indeed, not a single film in this series needed translation, and this is typical. Thus, no Jonouchi. No Suzuki. Etc. etc.

Maybe next time.

Markus


Possibly in Michigan: The 50th Ann Arbor Film Festival
Written by Michael Sicinski<http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/author/61>

Published on 07 May 2012


http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/possibly-in-michigan-the-50th-ann-arbor-film-festival


The festival offered the rare, unmissable opportunity to see two full programs of Japanese experimental films and videos, co-curated by Dinnell and leading filmmaker Tomonari Nishikawa (whose gorgeous Tokyo-Ebisu was shown on opening night of the fest). The first program, "Space/Time," presented ten films from the 1970s and 80s. As the title and the timeframe implies, these films tend to share certain concerns with the contemporaneous structural / materialist efforts taking place in the West, although seeing the works in a bundle, certain aesthetic preferences begin to emerge, notably a persistent sound / image divide wherein music or noise accompaniments float along as somewhat separate entities, the camera's motility and the structure of editing providing the artist's primary formal investigation. There is also a continual interest among some makers, such as Isao Kota (Dutch Photos, 1974) and Takashi Ito (Spacy, 1981), to explore the specific collision point between cinema and photography, motion and stillness. This attitude results in the most compelling films, such as Spacy (apparently the towering classic in this bunch, and easy to see why), or Hiroshi Yamazaki's Heliography (1979), which applies tricked-out camera obscura technology to the horizon line, resulting in a cool, raging "sunspot cinema." As for Atman (Toshio Matsumoto, 1975), another major classic in the program, its endless zooming into the face of a woman wearing a demonic Noh mask, and its violent electronic soundtrack, were an admirable but unwelcome blend of Ernie Gehr and Sion Sono. By the end of its 12 minutes, I just wanted my mommy.

Nishikawa and Dinnell's second program, "In Praise of Shadows," featured Japanese film and video from the 1990s and 2000s. Although the Tanizaki title was more aesthetically apposite for some films than others—particularly Takshi Ishida's Gestalt (1999), a canny combination of actually light play and two-dimensional drawing—the program as a whole displayed an impressive array of approaches to visual experimentation in the last two decades. The work on the docket that was most familiar to many of us, Eriko Sonoda's marvelous Garden/ing from 2007, burst onto the scene several years ago with its impish structural play between large-format photos of a recessed backyard window and the actual spatial description of that same space with a video camera. Taking nothing away from Sonoda's brash originality, but the two programs Ann Arbor presented this year helped both to contextualize her work in a manner many Western critics (like me) sorely needed, and to clarify just how intelligently she has expanded on the vocabulary of forebears such as Ito, Kota, Matsumoto, and Shiho Kano (Still, 1999). All in attendance agreed that Dinnell and Nishikawa had truly provided a service, and they deserve our thanks for expanding our frame of reference.



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

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