[KineJapan] Kawase Watch

[Jeremy Harley]

Apologies for bringing up the  "Unity in Diversity" slogan again, but
seeing the cosmetic changes at the top after Mori went down, it feels to me
as if in making their choice of Kawase, they just Googled "female
documentary film director" and went with the top hit.

 At the very least the photos of her Tosca production
<https://mainichi.jp/articles/20171105/ddm/013/070/008000c>look bizarrely
and excessively (Japanese shrin-ishness + Mt. Fuji + rising sun)
nationalistic, which would seem to make her perfectly suited for the
Olympic project (using jingoism as lever to advance neo-liberal aims),
unless this work is some kind of aberration.


Jeremy Harley
Mabashi Movie Festival



On Mon, Jun 7, 2021 at 12:38 PM Anne McKnight via KineJapan <
kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu> wrote:

> I started following Kawase's Twitter (https://twitter.com/KawaseNAOMI) a
> couple weeks ago, anticipating she would make some sort of pronouncement.
> But it’s been just a string of fan tweets, her fans weighing in on her
> strength of purpose, coolness. Her role as emissary of culture is quite
> strong, and she tweets from places around the country, and regarding the
> Nara film fest. It struck me as a bit off for her to say:
>
> 今年も熱い夏がやってくる！ 待ってるよ！
> It’s going to be another “hot” summer (meaning, I suppose, energetic and
> awesome)! Unless you are a marathoner in the dead of Tokyo summer, in which
> case it is going to be a REALLy hot summer.
>
> In lieu of tweeting her own position in, say, a thread, she has instead
> retweeted defenses about how it is important to divorce the Olympics from
> politics, the need to leave a “true record” of the events (ちゃんと記録に残して下さること),
> and the universalism of the event in Banpaku-like catch copy (日本が招致した人類の祭典ならば、最後まで開催に尽力する事が当たり前だと思う.).
>
>
> Given the precedent of Ichikawa Kon’s profligate and committee-enraging *Tokyo
> Olympiad*, I am disappointed that it seems to have conceded to the status
> of PR film. “Everydayness” will have such a different status, even if
> athletes are at the center of the stories…
>
> Anne
>
> On Jun 6, 2021, at 8:13 PM, Frederick Veith via KineJapan <
> kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu> wrote:
>
> Kawase ventriloquizing for athletes, who are specifically and
> contractually enjoined from political expression, in a manner which
> magically aligns with the interests of her patrons is…
>
> I’m going to go back to biting my tongue on all of this.
>
> On Mon, Jun 7, 2021 at 12:00 PM Bryan Hartzheim via KineJapan <
> kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu> wrote:
>
>>
>> In Kawase's defense, she's spent a lot of time with these athletes and I
>> get the sense she wants to advocate for them. Focusing on their struggles
>> and achievements was probably a relatively "safe" approach to making a doc
>> about the Olympics, but the politics of that decision are now magnified
>> with the public opposing them in the midst of the ongoing pandemic. She's
>> essentially aligned herself with ministers who say they're proceeding with
>> the games because "they believe in the power of sports."
>>
>> Bryan
>>
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