[KineJapan] Olympics Films: Side A, B & +

[Gerow Aaron]

Thanks Markus for writing up your thoughts. I’ve been meaning to do that but have been too busy. 

We saw Side A in a theater (where it is only showing once a day—and only about 12 people showed up) and then Side B at the FCCJ with Kawase doing a press conference afterwards. I agree that Side A was better than expected and Side B is a mess. But my thoughts on Side A are that it works best as a conventional sports documentary—it delivers what one wants in the end—but fails in its efforts to be different. One of its major efforts is to present the sports without the focus on who won, and often refuses to even tell us who medalled. That is fine, but it becomes trite when the film then ends with the Coubertin quote about the point of sports is taking part not winning. So even there, the film becomes a documentary or propaganda for the Olympics. One can also note that all you have to do is buy the pamphlet and all the explanation the film refrains from providing is offered in print. I was also intrigued by the use of sound, but did not find it that original, since there are plenty of sports docs which try to bring us onto the field by cutting out the sound of the stands and focus only on the sound of the athletes. Like with the close-ups, there are a lot of things that are tried that fail to become a strategy. So the inclusion of her 8mm images just becomes a signature, not an aesthetic. 

Side B just tries to do too much and does not have the themes such as gender and motherhood that help unite Side A. The themes of children and the future are too trite and abstract to work. One thing that comes to the fore to try to unite the film is Kawase’s voice. There are again her signature 8mm images, but for the first time we hear her speaking off frame with the interviewees. She even sings the ending song over the credits. In the FCCJ press conference, I asked her about this and she gave a weird answer that that is not her voice, at least in documentary terms. What did she mean by that? Having known her for decades, I can say it clearly is her voice. Does she mean that she added her voice in postproduction? If so, that is problematic. One of the potentially good sides of the films is that the credits list a couple dozen “co-directors.” It is problematic then that despite that fact, Kawase still inserts herself as the constructing singular subjectivity of the film (and in her answer to my question, she did emphasize inserting her subjectivity as a way of deviating from previous Olympics docs). One imagines she may have put her voice over the voices of other co-directors in post production. That erases the collaboration, the others in the film. Again, her answer was odd, so I am not sure what was done there. 

It would be easy to complain about what both Sides do with opposition to the Olympics. In the end, the only named voices are given a few minutes in Side B, with only Miyamoto Amon clearly saying no to the Olympics. But none of these voices go into detail about reasons for opposing. So most of the opposition just appears as demonstrators with placards—and all the demonstrators' faces are blurred out. (This might have been done for legal reasons, but no one else in the film is blurred out, even passersby on the streets; the result is to make the demonstrators seem less than human or even criminal). There is a scene where Bach is confronted by a demonstrator who yells to stop the Olympics. Bach asks her to stop yelling and offers to talk, but that person just keeps yelling. He gives up, complains that the protestors can’t be talked to, and walks away. I can’t help but think that is Kawase’s attitude in the end.

If Side A avoided the nationalism, Side B is nationalistic to the core by default. Apart from Bach and the occasional scenes of South Sudan athletes stuck in Japan, it is virtually all Japanese. Yes, the film is dealing with those behind the scenes, but there were plenty of non-Japanese involved in the planning and execution that the film does not show. It is telling that in Kawase’s conversation with a boy, the only topic is Japanese medals. Side B is ultimately about Japan.  Overall, one can argue that Kawase just got too close to the organizers, including even Mori (she can be sympathetic towards him). There is no sympathy for average Japanese bothered by the Olympics or the protestors. There is thus a fundamental lack of bringing in other voices, whether that is considered objectivity or not.

I was still intrigued by the Side A and Side B concept, primarily as a way of recognizing the complexity and contradictions behind the Olympics: that it has two or more sides that can often be incompatible. Each film I think contains a side A and side B within it as well. But I don’t think Kawase was able to assume a position in which she really could take in such contradictions and incompatibilities.

I look forward to hearing Markus’s other thoughts.


Aaron Gerow
Alfred W. Griswold Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Film and Media Studies
Chair, East Asian Languages and Literatures
Yale University
320 York Street, Room 108
PO Box 208201
New Haven, CT 06520-8201
USA
Phone: 1-203-432-7082
Fax: 1-203-432-6729
e-mail: aaron.gerow at yale.edu <mailto:aaron.gerow at yale.edu>
website: www.aarongerow.com





















-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/kinejapan/attachments/20220626/4a5b5795/attachment-0001.html>