[KineJapan] 5/6—10 From YIDFF—Storytellers

Tue Feb 1 15:15:12 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

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

*Storytellers*

*Storytellers *(2013) works a special kind of magic. I’ll explain the trick
behind the magic below, but first a word or two about the film. It’s the
third installment in what has come to be called the “Tohoko Trilogy”
directed by Sakai Ko and Hamaguchi Ryusuke, Tohoko being the northern
region of the main island of Japan. The first two films are *The Sound of
Waves* (*Nami no oto,* 2012) and *Voices from the Waves* (*Nami no koe,* 2013).
They are three of the most interesting films made in the wake of the triple
disaster of 311. *Storytellers* doesn’t address the earthquake and tsunami
directly, but it’s all the more powerful when experienced in the context of
the earlier two films centered on 311 survivors.

As it happens, Yamagata is directly to the west of the tsunami zone. A
mountain chain lies between the two, but it’s only 70 miles as the
radiation flew from the Fukushima plant to the theaters of Yamagata City.
Aside from taking in more refugees than any other prefecture, the disaster
packed a psychic hit for its citizens. The Yamagata International
Documentary Film Festival takes place every other year, but the staff run
screening events all year, every year. After 311, they packed up their
projectors, screens and generators and drove into the disaster zone,
setting up screenings of Ghibli and other entertainment films for the
victims of the disaster.

And at the film festival itself, they organized a large sidebar of 311
films entitled “Cinema With Us.” The 2021 festival featured the sixth
edition in this series. Over the years, Yamagata has collected every 311
documentary they could. There are now hundreds of titles among the 8,000
films in their archive (https://www.yidff.jp/library/library-e.html).
Looking over my notes, I watched roughly 300 of them for a project I never
finished—because it just became too distressing. Among all these films, the
Tohoku Trilogy stands out above most of the others, thanks to its
indirectness, its quiet emotional power, and a unique formal device.

Hamaguchi was the first to go to Tohoku. The Sendai Mediateque had started
a project to record every aspect of the triple disaster, both by collecting
media produced by victims and shooting their own records and interviews (
https://recorder311-e.smt.jp). Hamaguchi heard about a call for cameramen
through his old school, the Tokyo University of the Arts. He went in May
and convinced his old classmate Sakai to join him that summer.

They found themselves frustrated by the set format of the interviews, which
forced people into a box where all questions and answers were framed by
their victimhood. The recorded conversations were inevitably stilted and
overly formal. Indeed, while conventional documentary positions the
interview as a fount of truth, it is actually as constructed as the most
experimental of films. There is nothing natural about it.  In contrast to
this conventional approach, Sakai and Hamaguchi completely rethought the
documentary interview in the three films of the Tohoku Trilogy.

To this end, they drew on past experience. Hamaguchi had only recently shot
*Intimacies *(*Shinmitsusa, *2012), a feature film about the mounting of a
theatrical play. He tried many cinematic techniques to create a sense of
intimacy, shooting actors frontally and also drawing on the conventions and
techniques of documentary. He ended up feeling like it was a laboratory for
learning lessons on documentary.

For their Tohoku Trilogy films, they created a strategy to *capture
intimacy*—between pairs of people and between the pairs and the
audience—that centered on direct address. In documentary, direct address
involves a person looking directly at the camera, which stands in for us
spectators. The camera, in effect, acts as a conduit between a person “out
there” in the historical world and us. This technique is typical of
broadcast television but relatively unusual in independent documentary.

As Margaret Morse has pointed out, the use of direct address in television
is deeply connected to the flow of power. In television news, the anchor
looks directly at the camera to authoritatively speak to the audience; when
they shift to a reporter on the street it’s often done with a gesture
looking or turning away. As for the reporter they may look at the camera
but always speaks to the anchor in the studio; in contrast, when they
interview regular people, they *never* look at the camera because they are
at the weak end of the power spectrum across from the anchor. The only
other people on television who address the camera/audience are show hosts,
heads of state, and actors in commercials. It’s all about power.

Conventional documentary shares this spectrum of power. The rough
equivalent of the TV anchor would be when directors overlay an all-powerful
“voice-of-God” narration over the image track. When interviews take place,
subjects are powerless. They cannot address us spectators directly, and are
*subjected* to the voice-of-God/director. At the same time, the documentary
does its best to disavow the control the directors impose on every aspect
of the film by positioning its interview subjects as the speakers of pure
truth.

In contrast, the direct address in *Storytellers* and their previous two
films is fundamentally different. Here two people, often friends or
relatives and survivors of the disaster, *speak to each other *in direct
address*. *One survivor communes with another; here the camera stands in
for one or the other person, while we are invited to participate from their
subject positions, join the conversation as it were, and thus the
communion. Sakai and Hamaguchi have crafted a gracious, respectful approach
to documentary that puts its speakers at the center and generously allows
them to talk at their own pace, in their own way, about what they feel is
valuable and important.

The effect of this direct address between two speakers is uncanny at first
and one feels like an interloper, but then it transforms into a *new mode
of listening* in cinema. As we slowly come to watch the film on its own
terms, we take the position of the listener, with the speaker addressing
*us. *Directly. Intimately. It’s quite extraordinary. Indeed, the Tohoku
Trilogy’s stunning use of the human face ranks up there with Dreyer’s *Passion
of Joan of Arc *(*La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc,* 128) and Bergman’s *Persona *
(1966).

I have more to say about this technique, but this requires explaining how
they pulled it off. Usually, spoilers are about plot. The spoiler below is
technical. If you haven’t seen any of the films, go and watch *Storytellers*
 on DAFilms (https://dafilms.com/film/14099-storytellers) and come back to
finish this musing!

To capture intimacy in documentary, one must have intimacy in the first
place. Some filmmakers like Ogawa Shinsuke spend years living with their
subjects. They achieve intimacy through fraternity and friendship, in
effect rubbing out the typical gulf between filmmaker and subject. This
takes time, money and a certain temperament; I suspect Sakai and Hamaguchi
lacked all three.

So their first choice was to have subjects talk to each other, not the
directors, and hold a conversation, tell stories. They do interview the
folklorist Ono Kazuko over the course of  *Storytellers, *but those
interviews take place in moving cars and a bus where everyone is facing the
same direction. Many people, and perhaps most Japanese, are unaccustomed to
looking interlocutors directly in the eye during conversations of any
duration. The directors were highly self-conscious of this, and it led to
the choices they made in not only these face-forward interviews with Ono
but also the storytelling scenes at the heart of the film.

Next, while Sakai and Hamaguchi were new to these people’s lives, Ono has
known the storytellers for decades. Likewise, the conversations in the
first two films were usually between family members or friends. They were
clearly comfortable with each other.  However, they were as uncomfortable
with cameras as anyone. To overcome this, they allowed the people to talk
to each other without cameras present until they thought people were in the
groove of things and would speak honestly. Only then did they bring out the
cameras, deploying them in the conventional camera set-ups of fiction
filmmaking. In two-shots, the subjects face each other, sitting in chairs
in a relatively open space. As their conversation begins, we see them in
the traditional shot-reverse shot figure, photographed at 45-degree angles.
Suddenly, the shot-reverse shots shift to direct address and the experience
of watching and listening utterly transforms.

In actuality, there has been a break. After restarting the conversation
with cameras positioned at 45-degrees, they allowed their subjects to chat
until they were accustomed to being shot. At some point, it would become
necessary to switch tapes or take a break, and they took that opportunity
to explain their new shooting method.

Chairs were moved slightly sideways. Cameras were placed next to each
chair, pointed across at the other person. Now their conversation partner
was seated slightly at the diagonal, and directly across from them was a
camera pointed directly at them.

To make people feel slightly more comfortable, they gave each speaker a bit
of white tape and asked them to draw the eye of the other person. These
eyes were placed on the lens hood of the camera across from them. After
this, the conversation would continue with each person *speaking to their
partner but looking at the camera/eye.*

As an aside, I’ve heard many people invoke Ozu in explaining the Tohoku
Trilogy. The comparison is interesting but all wrong. Hamaguchi and Sakai
shoot their subjects straight on. Ozu had his actors face away from the
camera, but twist their torsos to face the camera. David Bordwell called
this “torquing.” Furthermore, their faces may be full frontal, but their
eyelines never quite meet the axis of the camera lens so they are looking
just off to the side, not at the audience. I once spoke to actor Okada
Mariko about performing for Ozu in *An Autumn Afternoon* (*Sanma no aji,* 1959)
and *Late Autumn *(*Akibiyori,* 1960). She described Ozu directing her to
torque her body with minute precision (see the photo above). When he got
what he liked, he held up a stick with a hand-drawn eye attached to the
tip. Okada would look at the eye while the director waved his wand until
her eyeline hit the exact direction he wanted. She would have to hold that
position and deliver her lines or they’d have to start from scratch. Except
for the hand-drawn eye, this has nothing to do with the technique developed
by Sakai and Hamaguchi.

[image: Storytellers_Ozu.jpeg]

The two arrived at this method through some trial and error, but once they
figured it out the effect was magical. They found that when speakers became
accustomed to speaking to their interlocutor but looking at the camera,
they could say things they might otherwise keep to themselves. Sometimes,
it felt like the camera was capturing a new stage in a couple’s
relationship.

When audiences get over the shock of the conversations in direct address,
the films transform. One experiences a strange intimacy with the speakers,
while simultaneously knowing it’s a specifically cinematic, artificial
experience. The shots are very long, so one has plenty of time to gaze at
the beautiful faces with their every twitch, smile and grimace. This is
both storytelling and testimony, and we are inclined to accept their
utterances as truth as in any documentary. At the same time, one becomes
self-conscious that not everything can be said. There are other stories
hidden in the ones captured by the cameras. This is particularly true of
the first two films, where people reminisce about the horrors of 311.
*Storytellers* is a fit closing to the trilogy, as it is the inverse of the
first two films. *The Sound of Waves* and *Voices from the Waves* capture
true stories while *Storytellers *captures folk tales; but both secret dark
realities deep inside their narratives. The last film invites one to wonder
about the fictions of the first films, while asking what truths compel
people to hand these stories down through generations. It becomes clear
that the first two films are performing a new set of 311 stories that will
echo through new generations.

Around the time *Storytellers* was released, I recall the former Yamagata
Documentary Film Festival Director, Fujioka Asako, wondering aloud how well
the films would work with subtitles.  I recalled this comment while
re-watching the films this week. I find myself agreeing with her, and would
take things a step further: *Storytellers*is all but untranslatable. Of
course, there are English subtitles on the streamed version. But there are
unfortunate, insurmountable problems. First of all, the elderly
storytellers are all speaking in the dialects of Tohoku. I’m actually
grateful for the subtitles, because the original language is extremely hard
to follow for someone trained in the “standard” Japanese of Tokyo.

But the issue is not merely semantic. The musical cadence and sing-song
melodies of the storytellers’ delivery are familiar to anyone who has spent
time with old folk in the north. Unfortunately, the subtitles render
meaning completely transparent and devoid of accent. What’s more, the
subtitles force one to glance up and down the entire film, making it
impossible to truly tune into a storyteller’s very being. That is because
the musical language of the storytellers is inextricable from their
beautiful faces.

[image: Storytellers1.png]
[image: Storytellers2.png]

---

*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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