[KineJapan] Nippon Connection 2019

[Roger Macy]

NipponConnection 2019

Rather belatedly, since no one else has pitched in, here’s a fewreflections on the 19th Nippon Connection festival, that finished onJune 1st.

First, let’s get done with the bad stuff. After my quibbles about Melancholicat the Far East Film Festival, it won the ‘Visions’ audience award – anaudience whose choices I have sided with in previous years. So I should justretreat quietly about those multiple murders and their bodies made to disappearin routine working shifts ? After all, the violence is mostly off screen. If Iwere to object to approval of violence in a plot, is a well-acted and wittyscript the place to start ? Yes, if it’s the banality of evil made as feel-goodcomedy. No, thank you.

If that were not enough, the other film I disliked at Udine,which won a minor and vanishing audience award there, won the main, ‘NipponCinema’, audience award here in Frankfurt. That was FlyMe to the Saitama. I just wish the money had gone elsewhere.

Fortunately, I’m happy to report that there were many really goodfilms and that the juries chose excellent films for their awards.

In particular, TAKAHASHI Kenseiwon the ‘Visions’ jury award for Sea, a superb graduation project atJosei International University. To give some idea how unprepared he was forfame, his film press notes had no contact method and he proved just asdifficult to contact before the award as after.

Sea - 海抜 – even starts with a caption ‘graduation work’, in which the frame isseen to wobble uncertainly, but it proved a very assured piece ofstory-telling. After a seemingly unconnected seaside glimpse, we see a youngman working hard at the very bottom of the economy, as a newspaper deliveryman. There is the odd piece of dialogue as his boss gives curt orders, butbasically we are seeing a taciturn life being told visually in a compellingway. He desperately wants a Sunday evening off but it’s a very long time beforewe begin to find out why, which will involve revisiting that seaside scene often years before. To do so, we need to go back to the years before that where,as a schoolboy, he was pathetically unable to resist bullying. But at thatseaside scene, a rape victim sees him, reasonably so, as a perpetrator. That’snot why he was absent from society for eight years, but it’s why that victimalso needs to talk.

There is almost no non-diegeticmusic until the very final scene. This single absence of realist sound providesfor a 50/50 ending – in the sense that half of the audience are intended toread it one way, and the other half another. It was only with the music down inthe viewing room, that I read the other ending but, I must say, I overwhelminglyprefer my first reading, even if Takahashi took 20 takes to get his ‘balance’.

On any reading, the film is farremoved from the simple rape-revenge story that Takahashi first had in mind andshows, I believe, the value of his being able to argue and develop his scriptwith the staff and students at Josei. The whole film, with multiple locationsand even a touch of CGI, was made for the princely sum of 800,000 yen.

The ‘Visions’ jury also gave special mention to Blue Hour, thedebut feature by HAKOTA Yūko. Thejapanese title tells more of the set-up, Burūawā ni buttobasu, in which a TVdrama director is bounced by her friend into making the long weekend trip hometo Ibaraki which she usually avoids. Avoiding thesit-com traps, Hakota showed that this formula could be done with wit andconsistent characterization.

My own favourite in the‘Visions’ strand was neither of these fine two films but The Chaplain(Kyōkaishi), written and directed by SAKŌ Dai. The catalogue described thisdrama as a kammerspiel, which gives its general milieu but there were threeimportant scenes which broaden out space and time. Otherwise they areface-to-face pastoral conversations initiated by a Christian chaplain withinmates in a detention centre for convicts on death row. I found the variedcharacters totally convincing and surprizingly interesting. The chamber dramastood in stark contrast to the Brechtian distancing effects employed by Ōshima.For example, the execution scene has a strongly implied point-of-view. Even theinterview room scenes are strongly cinematic in the way they are edited toquestion and support testimony There is a total absence of non-diegetic musicwhich allows the silences in the acting to tell. 

Sakō’s death-row convicts areacted by a combination of professional and non-professional actors. Thechaplain himself was taken by ŌSUGI Ren in a role much deeperthan most he got to play. Ōsugi died soon after the film was made and hadstumped up also as producer. I asked Sakō-san whether Ōsugi knew his time wasup and wished for something to be remembered by. He thought not – Ōsugi wasapparently his usual jokey self on set. I’m not so sure.

The one notable change to the festival was that there was a specificprize for documentary films this year. The strand still shared the venue in theNaxoshalle with the ‘Visions’ strand, but each now competed for a differentprize. Besides somerepeats at another cinema, the only other venue is the Filmmuseum about 2kilometres away. The retrospective there this year was on the actress WAKAOAyako. Unusually for me, I only went to one film there, partly because theywere familiar films, but also because, inexplicably, the Filmmuseum persistedwith Japan Foundation prints, mostly 16mm, even where recent digitalrestorations had been made and shown, for instance, in New York. I concentrated on thedocumentaries and the ‘Visions’ strand which, by and large, are thenon-commercial films.

However, small-hourtrains on the night before a holiday gave me the chance to see the 189 minute‘The Chrysanthemum and the Guillotine’, set in the 1920s. The english title ofthis film, with its definite articles, could be argued to be over-claiming. Thelead characters are a woman whose stage name is Kiku – or ‘Chrysanthemum’ andan anarchist whose nick-name is ‘Girochin’. If there was a thread pointing atthe Chrysanthemum throne, I missed it.

What we got were two uneven halves with a valuable stone in the middle.The half I much preferred was a story of a woman’s sumo troupe. Although thestory is fictional, there were, historically, several travelling women’s sumotroupes at the time. To live hand-to-mouth, without a home, would only draw thosewith little to lose and this story portrays well the precarity of existence formany at this time. Interestingly, the theme of performing sportswomen in a ringhas recently been taken up in the theatreas a feminist device to foreground historic women’s forgotten stories, so theinterest seems to go wider than just my male gaze. Whilst the women strugglemeaningfully with each other and their masters, the anarchists, on the otherhand, splutter randomly, messily and – anarchically. In contrast to the women,none of these actors manage to make much of any role.

The core of the film is the story of a sumo wrestler of Korean origin whostruggles against prejudice. She gets to tell of her survival at Asakusa afterthe Great Kanto Earthquake. It needs checking but I heard something like, ‘Say15 yen one way and you lived, say it another and were slaughtered’. That’s thesame weapon of ethnic slaughter as in Judges 12:6. – something anyoneshould consider before fashionably using the word ‘shibboleth’.

The winner of the documentary strand here was Sending Off,a study by Ian Garton Ash of a local doctor in Fukushimaprefecture, KONTA Kaoro, who specializes in care for the terminally ill. Dr.Konta was present with director Ash, and I could only be envious of a countrywhose medical insurance allowed ordinary people to die at home with suchdignity and tenderness.

But also showing were many other strong documentaries, including the KinemaJunpō #1 bunka eiga, Okinawa supai senshi.‘Supai’ is a tricky word to translate. Here it relates to the militarilyencouraged paranoia of the early forties. Alas, some Okinawans were not abovesettling old feuds by denouncing neighbours as ‘spies’. The english title, BoySoldiers: the Secret War in Okinawa refers to another section of this longfilm, dealing with the exploitation of boy soldiers, intended to bepost-surrender guerrillas to keep the civilian population alienated. Perhapsthere were really several films here, but directors MIKAMI Chie and ŌYA Hanoyohave amassed testimony in quantity and quality, in the nick of time.

Somehow, the english title, Kagura: Troupe on the Beat hadconjured up some outreach-focussed, jazzed-up sort of Kagura but I wasdelighted to find it meant nothing like that. ‘Mawari’ kagura, ofcourse, means ‘beat’ in the specialized english meaning of ‘why don’t we seepolicemen on the beat’. The ‘going round’ here is both a biennial tour of thecoastal villages of Iwate, and the opening procession at each village. TheKuromori troupe are a highly skilled group, several of whose members come fromthe tsunami-deluged villages that are visited. Of course, the film also servesas a vehicle to show both loss and recovery. So, despite their being a verytraditional troupe who didn’t even have the women or girls of the villagesdancing, the personal testimonies we heard, against occasional found footage,spoke strongly. Mawari was an excellent non-revolutionary film.

That doesn’t exhaust the interesting films at Nippon Connection 19, butit’s enough for this report.

Roger

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