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

[Markus Nornes]

I also saw an indie doc at the new theater in Shimokitazawa. There were
more spectators than at either of the Kawase showings. (Very nice theater,
by the way.)

The film is Tokyo Olympics 2017: Kasumigaoka Public Apartments
(東京オリンピック2017 都営霞ヶ丘アパート ).
https://tokyo2017film.com

These were some danchi built at the time of the first Tokyo Olympics, and
were destroyed as part of the redevelopment plan around the national
stadium. Everyone living there, many old people who had a tight knit
community, were kicked out. This film documents a few of them.

It's a rather strange film for the way it lets some fascinating things
slide and leaves a few crazy questions lingering in one's mind. Here's an
example: a main character has only one arm, and has both a drum set sitting
in a corner of his apartment. It goes entirely uncommented on, let alone
played. Whaaaaat!?!?!  There's also a neon-colored trombone......

The film follows a few people as they pack up and move out, sharing their
feelings and a bit of their history. It's well-done, but the film is
frustrating for its strange thinness or passivity. This spot is deeply
connected to major historical episodes in modern Japan, including
Manchuria, WWII (there were initially barracks there), the 1964 Olympics
and urban renewal, and the 2020 Olympics. The filmmakers skip or skim over
all of that. This shouldn't have been difficult. Here is a fascinating
essay/oral history by Mori Mayumi and Jordan Sand on the apartments.

https://www.academia.edu/46603728/Kasumigaoka_Apartments_The_People_Evicted_Twice_for_the_Tokyo_Olympics

Also, although the film falls into a venerable tradition of Asian
expropriation documentaries—most notably Ogawa Pro's Sanrizuka Series and
Kim Dongwon's *Sanggye-Dong Olympic* (
https://www.ji-hlava.com/filmy/olympiada-v-sanggyedong), Aoyama's
documentary is strange for its lack of outrage. It's almost bizarre.

It's of a piece with another recent documentary about expropriation, Danchi
Woman (https://impleo.co.jp/distribution/danchi.html). Both skim the
surface of what's going on to make a portrait of "cute old people." In
Aoyama's case, the prioritization of cuteness leads to his penultimate
scene, where the one-armed drummer ports his baggage out of his apartment,
down the stairs and into a rickshaw.....with no help from the filmmaker,
who shoots the entire thing without lifting a finger. It says everything
about his relationship to his subject.

Another missed opportunity, but hardly the fiasco of Side B.

Markus



---

*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*




On Sun, Jun 26, 2022 at 2:12 PM Markus Nornes <nornes at umich.edu> wrote:

> So Side B:
>
> Yes, quite the mess. As Aaron points out, it's completely centered on
> Japan.
>
> There are South Sudan refugees practicing in Western Japan, but it's only
> to celebrate Japanese hospitality.
>
> Bach shows up a lot, but it's only because she's clearly loving being on
> the inside and at the center.
>
> That's the main theme, if there is one. Being in the thick of things, but
> not in control of her own positionality. The lack of self-awareness is
> really striking (and so fitting that she writes and sings the song
> bookending Fujii Kaze's Kimi-ga-yo at the beginning of Side A.
>
> I found the idea of Side B enticing. Olympics are always scandalous, and
> this one was particularly bad. Plus, there was the pandemic that made the
> event unique. Here was someone with access to the inside of what had to be
> one tough decision after another. There's a bit of that, of course, but
> it's mostly a celebration of leadership.
>
> Mori's an awful person and clearly hates women; his stupid comments are
> actually well-covered here, but white washed. He is at the center of
> everything and comes off as a cute old man. She actually manages that.
>
> Bach is also awful. But here he gets to smile a lot, give vacuous speeches
> about our common humanity blah blah blah. He even gets to show off his
> fencing with a little boy. He and Mori are quite a _team_.
>
> As Aaron pointed out, Bach also comes off as this nice guy who tries to
> reach out to the protestors. It's a terribly irresponsible scene. Bach
> leaves Tokyo City Hall with the mayor, and there are protestors with the
> usual megaphone. He goes out to talk to them, repeatedly asking her to put
> down the megaphone so they could talk. She doesn't, because she surely has
> no idea what he's saying. And so he gives up, turns his back and leaves
> them in the dust.
>
> Had Side B actually said _anything_ about the anti-Olympics arguments,
> that would have been OK. But there is, incredibly, nothing. Nothing
> explaining the protests. Nothing on the patent waste of money, the new
> danger of Covid, etc. etc. etc. Instead, you only see the occasional crowd
> of protesters, mostly from the distance and with all faces blurred out. As
> Aaron pointed out, the many scenes of crowds around the stadia or lining
> the roads to see the torch running never use such self-censorship. Only the
> protestors, who come up as obnoxious background noise to be ignored. It
> treats them as criminals. If there was some stupid, hypocritical legal
> argument against showing their faces, this hardly prevented Kawase from
> actually interviewing people who were against the games and providing the
> true Side B. Instead, we get an exasperating montage of interviews from
> various metripoles—Paris, Beijing, New York—where foreigners forcefully
> call for the Olympics to go on...as if there are no foreigners (like me)
> who see the Olympics as radically wasteful, corrupt and serving mainly
> nationalist and authoritarian politics around the world.
>
> OK, so it's a PR film bankrolled by the Olympics. But that's no excuse.
> This is going to look like gloating, but I couldn't help comparing her
> films to The Big House. We always said we focussed on everything BUT the
> game—Side B, as it were. We did show our million dollar salaried coach
> being interviewed, but we cut his answer off in mid-sentence to show the
> African American workers washing dishes in the kitchen down the hall.
> (Imagine what Side B would have been like had Soda Kazuhiro directed it!)
> There's no such clever editing in Side B.
>
> On the contrary, one of the most annoying aspects of Side B is the
> exclusive focus on those in power. Aside from a stray volunteer or nurse,
> every athlete we meet is the sport's "daihyo"—a word that appears under
> nearly every name, unless it's a coach or head chef or a "riji." It's like
> a visual mantra: daihyo, daihyo, daihyo, daihyo. It's an exclusive focus on
> those in power, a celebration of insider status.
>
> Here I cannot help thinking that the recent revelations of Kawase's power
> harassment are important context for understanding Side B—just as they are
> new context for the early documentaries that transforms her treatment of
> her great-Aunt in the documentaries from contentiousness to something
> uncomfortably close to abuse. Kawase is attracted to power. It's not
> fascistic in its politics, but it's definitely attracted to the powerful
> and dismissive of everyone else—unless, as with the South Sudanese runners,
> they are useful to putting power on display. One lowly bureacrat calls
> himself a kuroko, which is exactly how everyone outside the center is
> treated in this film.
>
> Even massive historical tragedies are reduced to props propping up the
> essentially awesomeness of the people in power. There is a coach whose
> hometown was wiped out by the tsunami in 311. We see a torch ceremony on
> Okinawa's zamami, which lost half of its population in 1945 when the
> Americans invaded and the Japanese soldiers forced the Okinawans who didn't
> flee into the woods to die with them. Likewise, Bach visits Hiroshima and
> tears up at the museum. It doesn't seem to occur to Kawase to make
> something of the fact that the teams of America and its allies were about
> to land again. It's only a opportunity to bind Okinawa to the national
> project and provide yet another stage to humanize Bach.
>
> Where the powerful stumble, their sins are absolved by (presumed) good
> intentions or vacuous humanist rhetoric about sports. Or simply brushed
> away, as Bach does when he meets Mori in the aftermath of his sexist
> comments. Many scandals are merely gestured to, particularly the ones
> leading to the purging of artists or the junking of Zaha's stadium design.
> None of them are explained or explored. The expropriation of the danchi in
> the stadium area is ignored. The exploding budgets—so typical of the
> Olympics—merit hardly a mention.
>
> Side B is a messy missed opportunity, to put it politely. It's really hard
> to fathom why it was made in the first place. I'm curious about this FCCJ
> press conference. Were there no critical responses to such a problematic
> film?
>
> Markus
>
> PS: I watched B on opening day. As with Side A, it was virtually a private
> screening. There were more spectators at the mini-theater screening of an
> indie doc on the danchi expropriations, which I'll write about next.
>
>
> On Sun, Jun 26, 2022 at 11:58 AM Gerow Aaron via KineJapan <
> kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu> wrote:
>
>> 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
>> website: www.aarongerow.com
>>
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>
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