[KineJapan] Nippon Connection 2019

Tue Jul 16 06:49:48 EDT 2019

Thank you Roger. I hope some of these films would be shown at the MCJP in
Paris
Best

Jacline

Le lun. 15 juil. 2019 à 17:32, Michael Raine via KineJapan <
kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu> a écrit :

> 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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