[KineJapan] Nippon Connection 2019

[Michael Raine]

Thank you for this fascinating report, Roger!

On Mon, Jul 15, 2019 at 5:59 AM Roger Macy via KineJapan <
kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu> wrote:

> *Nippon** Connection 2019*
>
> Rather belatedly, since no one else has pitched in, here’s a few
> reflections on the 19th Nippon Connection festival, that finished on June
> 1st.
>
> First, let’s get done with the bad stuff. After my quibbles about
> *Melancholic* at the Far East Film Festival, it won the ‘Visions’
> audience award – an audience whose choices I have sided with in previous
> years. So I should just retreat quietly about those multiple murders and
> their bodies made to disappear in routine working shifts ? After all, the
> violence is mostly off screen. If I were to object to approval of violence
> in a plot, is a well-acted and witty script the place to start ? Yes, if
> it’s the banality of evil made as feel-good comedy. 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, ‘Nippon Cinema’,
> audience award here in Frankfurt. That was *Fly Me to the Saitama*. I
> just wish the money had gone elsewhere.
>
> Fortunately, I’m happy to report that there were many *really good films*
> and that the juries chose excellent films for their awards.
>
> In particular, TAKAHASHI Kensei won the ‘Visions’ jury award for *Sea*, a
> superb graduation project at Josei International University. To give some
> idea how unprepared he was for fame, his film press notes had no contact
> method and he proved just as difficult to contact before the award as after.
>
> *Sea* - 海抜 – even starts with a caption ‘graduation work’, in which the
> frame is seen to wobble uncertainly, but it proved a very assured piece of
> story-telling. After a seemingly unconnected seaside glimpse, we see a
> young man working hard at the very bottom of the economy, as a newspaper
> delivery man. There is the odd piece of dialogue as his boss gives curt
> orders, but basically we are seeing a taciturn life being told visually in
> a compelling way. He desperately wants a Sunday evening off but it’s a very
> long time before we begin to find out why, which will involve revisiting
> that seaside scene of ten 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 that seaside scene, a rape victim sees him,
> reasonably so, as a perpetrator. That’s not why he was absent from society
> for eight years, but it’s why that victim also needs to talk.
>
> There is almost no non-diegetic music until the very final scene. This
> single absence of realist sound provides for a 50/50 ending – in the sense
> that half of the audience are intended to read it one way, and the other
> half another. It was only with the music down in the viewing room, that I
> read the other ending but, I must say, I overwhelmingly prefer my first
> reading, even if Takahashi took 20 takes to get his ‘balance’.
>
> On any reading, the film is far removed from the simple rape-revenge story
> that Takahashi first had in mind and shows, I believe, the value of his
> being able to argue and develop his script with the staff and students at
> Josei. The whole film, with multiple locations and 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*, the debut
> feature by HAKOTA Yūko. The japanese title tells more of the set-up,
> *Burū** awā ni buttobasu*, in which a TV drama director is bounced by her
> friend into making the long weekend trip home to Ibaraki which she
> usually avoids. Avoiding the sit-com traps, Hakota showed that this formula
> could be done with wit and consistent 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 this drama as a kammerspiel, which gives its
> general milieu but there were three important scenes which broaden out
> space and time. Otherwise they are face-to-face pastoral conversations
> initiated by a Christian chaplain with inmates in a detention centre for
> convicts on death row. I found the varied characters totally convincing and
> surprizingly interesting. The chamber drama stood in stark contrast to the
> Brechtian distancing effects employed by Ōshima. For example, the execution
> scene has a strongly implied point-of-view. Even the interview room scenes
> are strongly cinematic in the way they are edited to question and support
> testimony There is a total absence of non-diegetic music which allows the
> silences in the acting to tell.
>
> Sakō’s death-row convicts are acted by a combination of professional and
> non-professional actors. The chaplain himself was taken by ŌSUGI Ren in a
> role much deeper than most he got to play. Ōsugi died soon after the film
> was made and had stumped up also as producer. I asked Sakō-san whether
> Ōsugi knew his time was up and wished for something to be remembered by. He
> thought not – Ōsugi was apparently his usual jokey self on set. I’m not so
> sure.
>
> The one notable change to the festival was that there was a specific prize
> for documentary films this year. The strand still shared the venue in the
> Naxoshalle with the ‘Visions’ strand, but each now competed for a different
> prize. Besides some repeats at another cinema, the only other venue is
> the Filmmuseum about 2 kilometres away. The retrospective there this year
> was on the actress WAKAO Ayako. Unusually for me, I only went to one film
> there, partly because they were familiar films, but also because,
> inexplicably, the Filmmuseum persisted with Japan Foundation prints, mostly
> 16mm, even where recent digital restorations had been made and shown, for
> instance, in New York. I concentrated on the documentaries and the
> ‘Visions’ strand which, by and large, are the non-commercial films.
>
> However, small-hour trains 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 of this film, with its definite articles,
> could be argued to be over-claiming. The lead characters are a woman whose
> stage name is Kiku – or ‘Chrysanthemum’ and an anarchist whose nick-name is
> ‘Girochin’. If there was a thread pointing at the 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
> the story is fictional, there were, historically, several travelling
> women’s sumo troupes at the time. To live hand-to-mouth, without a home,
> would only draw those with little to lose and this story portrays well the
> precarity of existence for many at this time. Interestingly, the theme of
> performing sportswomen in a ring has recently been taken up in the theatre
> <https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/archive-2018/the-sweet-science-of-bruising/>
> as a feminist device to foreground historic women’s forgotten stories, so
> the interest seems to go wider than just my male gaze. Whilst the women
> struggle meaningfully with each other and their masters, the anarchists, on
> the other hand, 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 who
> struggles against prejudice. She gets to tell of her survival at Asakusa
> after the Great Kanto Earthquake. It needs checking but I heard something
> like, ‘Say 15 yen one way and you lived, say it another and were
> slaughtered’. That’s the same weapon of ethnic slaughter as in *Judges*
> 12:6. – something anyone should 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 Fukushima prefecture, 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 country whose medical
> insurance allowed ordinary people to die at home with such dignity and
> tenderness.
>
> But also showing were many other strong documentaries, including the
> Kinema Junpō #1 bunka eiga, *Okinawa** supai senshi*. ‘Supai’ is a tricky
> word to translate. Here it relates to the militarily encouraged paranoia of
> the early forties. Alas, some Okinawans were not above settling old feuds
> by denouncing neighbours as ‘spies’. The english title, *Boy Soldiers:
> the Secret War in Okinawa* refers to another section of this long film,
> dealing with the exploitation of boy soldiers, intended to be
> post-surrender guerrillas to keep the civilian population alienated.
> Perhaps there were really several films here, but directors MIKAMI Chie and
> ŌYA Hanoyo have amassed testimony in quantity and quality, in the nick of
> time.
>
> Somehow, the english title, *Kagura: Troupe on the Beat* had conjured up
> some outreach-focussed, jazzed-up sort of Kagura but I was delighted to
> find it meant nothing like that. ‘*Mawari’ kagura*, of course, means
> ‘beat’ in the specialized english meaning of ‘why don’t we see policemen on
> the beat’. The ‘going round’ here is both a biennial tour of the coastal
> villages of Iwate, and the opening procession at each village. The Kuromori
> troupe are a highly skilled group, several of whose members come from the
> tsunami-deluged villages that are visited. Of course, the film also serves
> as a vehicle to show both loss and recovery. So, despite their being a very
> traditional troupe who didn’t even have the women or girls of the villages
> dancing, 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, but
> it’s enough for this report.
>
> Roger
>
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