[KineJapan] 2/6—10 From YIDFF—Living on the River Agano

Tue Feb 1 15:14:40 EST 2022

Hi everyone,

I hope it didn't escape your notice that dafilms.com is streaming 10 key
Japanese documentaries that launched from Yamagata International
Documentary Film Festival.

https://asia.dafilms.com/spotlight-on/1129-yamagata2021

The festival asked me to write up some blog posts about both the films
vis-a-vis the festival. I contributed six short essays, and since they were
only distributed by Facebook, I thought I'd post them here as well.

Cheers,

Markus

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

*Living on the River Agano*

*Living on the River Agano* (*Aga ni ikiru,* 1992) is historically
significant for the way it firmly stands at the transition point between
the postwar social justice documentary and a proliferation of nonfiction
forms, between the eras of 16mm and video, and between collective and
individual production modes. It’s also a great film.

Diretor Sato Makoto first contemplated a career in filmmaking in high
school in the late 1970s, when Tsuchimoto Noriaki (the Minamata Series) and
Ogawa Shinsuke (the Sanrizuka Series) dominated the nonfiction scene. While
the student movement had already quieted down, the films by Tsuchimoto and
Ogawa made him interested in the continuing struggles at Sanrizuka and
Minamata. He became a member of the collective that shot *The Innocent
Sea* (with
Kakesu Shuichi, Katori Naotaka, Shiraki Yoshihiro, Sugita Kazuo and Higuchi
Shiro, *Muko naru umi,* 1983). This was a Minamata film, and he drew on the
national networks of Ogawa Productions and Tsuchimoto’s Seirinsha for
distribution.

Then in 1988, he and a crew of seven went to Niigata to make a documentary
on the other area where Minamata Disease had afflicted the people, the
Agano River. The collective approach to cinema epitomized by Ogawa
Productions was still prestigious and powerfully attractive, so the
filmmakers decided to living collectively in Niigata with the farmers and
fishermen they were shooting. At the same time, people in the film world
were increasingly aware of the pitfalls and challenges of collective
production and they wanted to avoid some of the problems they perceived in
the example of Ogawa Pro. On a YIDFF roundtable (featuring Ogawa’s
Assistant Director Fukuda Katsuhiko among others) Sato recalls what they
set out to do:

The system of actually living and working somewhere no longer existed, but
we were taken by the idea that we had found an opening that no one else
had. We were very clear that the messages in our films should be different.
We didn't want to convey the whole of Minamata, but rather to film its
daily life. We thought that our films should be personal, that we should
try somehow to break down social problems and focus on how lives can be
lived and on the individual. Our way of filming was very 70s in that we
worked in groups, but we absolutely did not want collaborative work to be a
hard and fast rule as it had been at Ogawa Productions. There, it was a
matter of hierarchy and poverty. We decided not to give the director all
the power, and not to exhaust crewmembers without giving them any reward.
We were determined to pay them at least something. We were trying to create
some kind of community, but after three years, we found that we were just
like a miniature Ogawa Productions. I don't think that this kind of thing
will really succeed (Sato, et al., 47).

The film that resulted from this collaboration, *Living on the River Agano*,
was one of the high points of 1990s documentary. However, the production
proved rocky, highlighting the problems of the collective approach. In
retrospect, it appears like something of an experiment, to test whether the
prestigious method represented by the example of Ogawa Pro was viable in an
age when filmmakers were increasingly turning to private matters. Sato’s
comment above was provoked by something Fukuda said: “Film units have
gotten smaller, with all the main filmmakers, like Kawase Naomi, working
either alone or as a couple. Documentary filmmakers no longer get a film
crew together to shoot movies. So it is not only the film subjects, but
also the way people make films, that has shifted from the group to the
individual. I have the feeling that Sato’s *Living on the River Agano *will
be the last collective film in this sense” (Sato, et al., 47).  Indeed,
Fukuda appears to have been prescient in his prediction that this film was
closing an era. Sato himself left collective production for the
conventional mode based on an assembled crew.

The Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival played an important
role in the production of *Living on the River Agano.* At the 1989
festival, Sato and his team famously travelled from Niigata to Yamagata to
show a rough cut and get feedback. I write “famously” for two reasons. One
was that the collective was so poor that had no money to stay at hotels;
instead, they pitched tents next to a river under a large bridge. The other
reason is that the feedback was intense and took them aback. I once asked
Sato for specifics. However, he just laughed as he stroked the top of his
head and said only that it really put them in a tough spot.

[image: 1991_YIDFF_Aga_small.jpg]

I do recall the first official press screening of the film in Tokyo. By
this point, it was a highly anticipated film, and the theater was crowded
with filmmakers, programmers and critics. After the film, Hasumi Shigehiko
held court with the filmmakers in the lobby, effusively praising the film.
Aside from his cultural capital, being a professor (and future president)
Tokyo University, Hasumi was one of the most powerful critics in Japan. He
would go on to be one of the film’s champions. And Sato needed that support
because the film also had many detractors. They mainly kept their
criticisms off stage and out of print, but people were often dismissive and
sometimes brutal.

The main criticism had to do with the tone and stance of the film. This was
not the in-your-face activist film that had dominated independent
documentary since the end of the Occupation. Many had hoped for a concerted
critique of the corporation that dumped mercury into the river, and one
linked to government complicity and obstruction. In other words, they were
using Tsuchimoto as a measuring stick and *Living on the River Agano* came
up short. It’s true, Sato and his crew chose a more indirect approach that
centered the film on the lives of the old people along the river. There are
no clinical analyses of the disease and its horrible effects on the body.
Rather, Sato mainly uses intertitles to explain the historical and
political context of Niigata Minamata Disease. We see it registered on the
human body mainly in indirectly, for example in the close-up of a gnarled,
shaking hand.

Hasumi recognized and celebrated the continuities between the films of
Ogawa and Tsuchimoto and *Living on the River Agano.* This is a film that
was firmly rooted in the lives and being of the people before the camera.
The filmmakers took a deferential approach to filmmaking that was cognizant
of the power of the filmmaker, while trying hard to think and record from
the place of the other. This is the source of the film’s powerful affect.

Over the years, Sato continually developed and articulated this approach as
a filmmaker, writer and professor. In an era where independent documentary
filmmakers were increasingly turning inward, to the self, through
autobiographical modes, Sato asserted the importance of building the
other’s gaze into the film. His most developed treatment is this theme may
be found in the two-volume book entitled, *Horizons of Documentary *(2001).
In his most powerful chapter, Sato pointed out that “The camera possesses a
violent power. At the very least, for the person that is turned into a
subject, *being shot* for a film, is like *having something stolen”*
(104). Drawing
on Oshima Nagisa, Sato asserted three principles for the documentary: “love
for the subject,” “long-term recording” and “responsibility towards the
subject” (169-171). Sato provocatively argued the camera bears “fangs” (
*kiba*) that directors bare before their subjects, proposing that a
politics and ethics for documentary filmmaking was inescapable. That
anything else would be irresponsible. This was Sato’s starting point as a
theorist, filmmaker and a human being. These are the very values and
principles that animate *Living on the River Agano*.

With time, the whispered criticisms of the film have all but disappeared,
and the rich achievement of the film has become crystal clear. Sato
demonstrated a righteous ethics of documentary; indeed, he lived it.
Unfortunately, that sentence was cast in the past-tense. Despite a cheerful
and enthusiastic demeanor, Sato profoundly suffered from depression. Every
once in a while, he would disappear from sight for the sake of self-care.
However, in one particularly dark bout with depression, he tragically
elected to end his life in 2007 at the age of 49.

However, his legacy, starting with *Living on the River Agano,* is as
strong as ever. Today in Japan, any discussion of documentary theory and
practice inevitably cites Sato. His pupils are working throughout the
industry. His writings printed and reprinted. And at the Yamagata
International Documentary Film Festival, one hears Sato’s name resound in
the Q &As, panels and bars. At the 2017 YIDFF—a decade after his
passing—Sato’s pupils mourned his death and celebrated his life with a
series of discussions. The events climaxed with a big party…under the very
bridge his crew slept under in 1989. There was a huge vat of potato soup,
free-flowing sake, and Sato’s ghostly presence projected on the pillars of
the bridge. Those present included his many students and collaborators, as
well as the many filmmakers and programmers from across Asia who have been
touched by Sato’s legacy. This, I think, perfectly sums up the spirit of
Yamagata and the role it has played in the history of Asian documentary.

[image: 2017_10_9 YIDFF65_small.jpg]

[image: 2017_10_9 YIDFF70_small.jpg]

Sato Makoto. *Horizons of Documentary *(*Dokyumentarii no chihei, *Gaifusha,
2001).

Sato Makoto, Yamane Sadao, Fukuda Katsuhiko, and Araki Keiko. “From
Political to Private: Recent Trends in Japanese Documentary,” in *The
Pursuit of Japanese Documentary: The 1980s and Beyond* (Tokyo: YIDFF, 1997).

---

*Markus Nornes*
*Professor of Asian Cinema*
*Interim Chair, Dept. of Asian Languages and Culture*

Department of Film, Television and Media, Department of Asian Languages and
Cultures, Penny Stamps School of Art & Design

*Homepage: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nornes/
<http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nornes/>*
*Department of Film, Television and Media*
*6348 North Quad*
*105 S. State Street**Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285*
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