[KineJapan] Oh Deok-soo

Mon Dec 14 22:36:45 EST 2015

Thank you Aaron for sharing the news on Oh Deok-soo's passing, and Oliver
for sharing your thoughts on Oh.

I was also saddened to hear the news. I met Oh a few times, mostly for
interviews, but on one occasion, he took me on a hike on Mt. Takao with a
full gear (portable cooker etc.) that seemed excessive for a day trip. He
left a strong impression on me with his unique views which he articulated
with surprising metaphors and aphorism. When I spoke to him on the phone in
August, he told me quite frankly about his illness, but I had assumed that
he would recover.

I agree with Oliver about the unique ways in which Oh used his own presence
as the magnet to make his own films as well as those of many others
meaningful. I wonder if there is now a large enough demand in the
Anglophone world for a subtitled versions of *Zainichi *and *Against
Fingerprinting *if they don't exist already.

I hastily wrote an obituary yesterday since I felt that I never got to
reciprocate his generosity and was concerned that there might be no
obituary available in English for posterity. I wonder if anyone has ideas
for what the best way to publish something like this. I am going to
copy-paste it below.

I would contact *Japan Times *if I had their contact. Can someone help me?
Please feel free to contact me off the list if you prefer.
shota.ogawa at gmail.com

Shota
-----------------------------------------------------------

Obituary: Film Director Oh Deok-soo, known for documentary *Zainichi*, dies
at 74

Film director Oh Deok-soo passed away from lung cancer on Sunday. He was
74. Oh is known for his feature-length documentary films on Zainichi
Koreans (Resident Koreans in Japan) including *Against Fingerprinting *(1984)
and *The Story of Koreans in Postwar Japan: Zainichi *(1997).

            Born in 1941 in Kazuno City, Akita Prefecture, Oh first entered
the film world as an assistant to Nagisa Oshima, working on *Violence at
Noon *(1966) and *Sing a Song of Sex *(1967), before working for Daiei and
Toei in their film divisions through the late 1960s and the 1970s. Some of
the better known television productions he worked on include *The Guardsman
*(starring Ken Utsui, Daiei/TBS, 1965-1971), *A Lone Wolf *(starring
Shigeru Amachi, Toei/NTV, 1967-1968), and *Key Hunter *(starring Tetsuro
Tamba and Sonny Chiba, Toei/TBS, 1968-1973).

            Oh was a familiar presence in local film festivals and public
symposia, particularly since completing his lifework, *The Story of Koreans
in Postwar Japan*, in 1997 which involved working closely with grassroots
groups across Japan that co-sponsored its production and realized a
nation-wide tour of the film. In addition to making his own films, he was
active in organizing screenings of others’ works that highlighted the
historical presence of Koreans within Japanese cinema. In the screenings he
organized for the History Museum of J-Koreans in Azabu, for example, he
showcased the works of Zainichi Korean directors such as Sai Yoichi, Lee
Sang-il, and Kim Su-gil alongside films made by Japanese directors that
depicted Zainichi Koreans in interesting ways. Each screening was
accompanied by a guest speaker who might be the director, a staff member,
or a viewer with a special attachment to the title, and a post-screening
discussion followed by a party gave the event a unique communal character.

In recent years, he had branched out into exhibiting his own photographs
and probing the possibility of curating a museum exhibition of picture
books and school textbooks written for Korean children in Occupied Japan.
His multifaceted activity as a filmmaker, collector, curator, and cultural
organizer stemmed from his work on the monumental documentary, *The Story
of Koreans in Postwar Japan*, for which he had to condense a vast archive
of music, photographs, home movies, newsreels, and material artifacts into
its running time of four-and-a-half hours.

The unique ways in which Oh’s professional and artistic career developed
*around* rather than fully *within *cinema were also a product of
circumstances. In an interview with film scholar Takashi Monma in 2005, Oh
recounts that most studios had stopped hiring assistant directors when he
graduated from Waseda’s Theater Department in 1965. Even in Toei’s TV
division (Toei Tokyo Production) where he received most of the training and
rose to the rank of Chief Assistant Director, he was still on an irregular
contract with limited benefits or job security. The second half of his time
at Toei was thus spent on a prolonged strike that demanded improved labor
conditions for contract employees. It was only by taking up freelance
assignments to write screenplays for film, television, and manga, while
collectively running a franchised noodle shop that Oh and his fellow
strikers of Toei Production Company Labor Union were able to live through
the 1970s.

            It was paradoxically during the prolonged strike that Oh found
the key to direct his own films. Through befriending the editors of the
Zainichi Korean magazine *Madan *and later cofounding its informal
successor *Jansori*, Oh became involved in the burgeoning movement of young
Japan-born Zainichi Koreans to develop a public sphere outside the two
traditional organizations that represented the interests of Pyongyang and
Seoul. When the anti-fingerprinting protest broke out in 1980 and developed
into a major social movement by 1985, he found himself ideally situated to
document the movement from within, thanks to the significant overlap
between the target audience of *Jansori *and the main actors of the protest
movement. He founded his independent production company Oh Kikaku for the
project which was completed and screened within a year while the protest
was still ongoing.

            On a number of occasions, Oh raised objection to the label
“Zainichi Korean film director” which he found to be constrictive. But no
other director has so consistently explored the interrelation between
Zainichi and film, or to rephrase in his preferred expressions: “what it
means to be Zainichi Koreans living at a time when we have access to these
images.” If it is apt to call him a representative Zainichi Korean film
director, it is not because his interest was limited to Zainichi Korean
issues, but because he took up the challenge of weaving Zainichi Koreans’
social concerns into the fabric of cinema. It is in this spirit that we can
appreciate the opening of his maiden film, *Against Fingerprinting*, that
shows an alien registration card set on fire. This was, he confided in an
informal conversation I had with him, a visual homage paid to Yasuzo
Masumura’s *Black Test Car *(1962) that opens with a similar shot although
with a burning car in place of a registration card. With Oh’s
documentaries, we can learn about Chesa (a Korean ceremony of ancestor
worship) to a-ha’s “Take On Me,” or make unexpected connections between
Zainichi Korean history and Anton Chekhov’s *Three Sisters *or with Yoshio
Tabata’s postwar hit, *Kaeribune *(Repatriation Boat).

At a time when Directors Guild of Japan is chaired by Sai Yoichi and Eiren
(Motion Picture Producer Association of Japan) have nominated works by Sai,
Lee Sang-il, and Yang Yong-hi to compete for the Foreign Language Oscar in
the Academy Awards, it appears all but certain that Zainichi Koreans have
gained citizenship in the world of cinema. Oh’s legacy might be understood
in the reverse term. Instead of making it in the film business, he made
film relevant to as many Zainichi Koreans as he could.

On Mon, Dec 14, 2015 at 7:06 PM, Oliver Dew <olidew at gmail.com> wrote:

> I was very sad to hear this news. I met with Oh on several occasions over
> the past few years, and he was always so generous and forthcoming. He was a
> wonderful person to talk to, and to interview. I last saw him just over a
> year ago and he seemed to be in very good form. He was very active as a
> curator in recent years. I went to see him lead a series of screenings and
> discussions at the Korean community association meetings near where he
> lived in Chofu, and to an exhibition of stills from Shimon ōnatsu kyohi
> (Against Fingerprinting) at Gallery 1/F. He was there discussing the images
> with visitors and giving them souvenirs he'd brought back from a recent
> trip to his birthplace in Akita (he gave me some miso). KineJapaners who
> came to the Japanese Film Symposium at Meiji Gakuin in July 2014 will
> remember him as a lively and engaging discussant. I hope that his films
> will not become harder to access now that he is no longer here to discuss
> them with us. He was a vital figure, as a filmmaker, an activist, and as an
> archivist, as a collector and remediator of others' images. My thoughts are
> with his wife and sons.
>
>
> Oliver
>
>
> On 13 Dec 2015, at 18:25, Gerow Aaron <aaron.gerow at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> The film director Oh Deok-soo has died at the age of 74. Starting out as
> an assistant director to Oshima Nagisa and then working in TV, Oh
> eventually became an independent documentary filmmaker, making especially
> works on the situation of zainichi Koreans in Japan.
>
> http://mainichi.jp/articles/20151214/k00/00m/040/026000c
>
> Monma Takashi interviewed Oh for the YIDFF's Documentary Box:
>
> http://www.yidff.jp/docbox/26/box26-1-1-e.html
>
>
> Aaron Gerow
> Professor
> Film and Media Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
> Director of Graduate Studies, EALL
> Yale University
> 320 York Street, Room 311
> PO Box 208324
> New Haven, CT 06520-8324
> USA
> Phone: 1-203-432-7082
> Fax: 1-203-432-6729
> e-mail: aaron.gerow at yale.edu
> website: www.aarongerow.com
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> KineJapan mailing list
> KineJapan at lists.osu.edu
> https://lists.osu.edu/mailman/listinfo/kinejapan
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> KineJapan mailing list
> KineJapan at lists.osu.edu
> https://lists.osu.edu/mailman/listinfo/kinejapan
>
>

-- 
----------------------------------------
Shota Ogawa, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Languages and Culture
461 COED
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
University City Blvd.
Charlotte, NC 28223
http://humanities.lib.rochester.edu/onfilm/
----------------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/kinejapan/attachments/20151214/6afbbee8/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
KineJapan mailing list
KineJapan at lists.osu.edu
https://lists.osu.edu/mailman/listinfo/kinejapan