[KineJapan] History of admissions tickets for doc films in Tokyo

Sat Sep 23 07:07:46 EDT 2023

Rather a side-point to your interesting discussion, but Iwonder whether Haneda’s positioning of charging for her documentaries asdistinct from before is connected to industry sponsorship and complimentarytickets.
Kumai Kei’s fictionalized feature on another large dam construction – Kurobeno taiyō, 1968 – has a very ponderous start, where all the suits of thecompanies (acted by very recognizable faces) physically dish out the contracts.We shouldn’t assume, though, that this was quite the audience-killer it seems. Duringthis section, one of the suits remarks that [a huge number – one million ?]people will be working on the contracts throughout the country. Someone hassurely written on attachment to company in the post-war period largelyreplacing attachment to country. Alex Zahlten even uses the film as an exampleof Kurobe no taiyō squeezing the exhibition market by its being heldover. At any rate, it brings up the matter of complimentary tickets for familiesin the sponsoring companies – something that would be absent from Haneda’saudience for independent films, I think.
Roger

    On Saturday, 23 September 2023 at 02:13:39 BST, matteoB via KineJapan <kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu> wrote:  

 no problem
yes, that's me
Matteo
Il giorno sab 23 set 2023 alle ore 09:35 Anne via KineJapan <kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu> ha scritto:

Thank you. This is super helpful! Thanks also for the translations, on line! Are you the person who lives near the "usuzumi no Sakura" tree?
Anne 
On Fri, Sep 22, 2023, 16:50 matteoB via KineJapan <kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu> wrote:

Dear Anne,
In the conversation and essay on Haneda published in 私のシネマライフ, Takano states that the screening (自主上映) of Usuzumi no sakura was the first time when the ticket for a documentary was charged the same amount of money as a 劇映画
I hope it helps
Matteo

On Sat, 23 Sep 2023, 08:30 Anne via KineJapan, <kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu> wrote:

Thanks, this is very helpful.  The essay is 1977, and Iwanami is still on the verge of being Haneda's employer, so I do imagine her context is that milieu. 
Iwanami Hall only opened in 1968, so it is possible that in 1971 she was mostly referring to its screenings? I wonder if looking back at Iwanami’s “Tomo” magazine could clear up some patterns about actual ticket prices, or rental fees, since it was the Hall itself that published it. To see if only established figures like Tsuchimoto with substantial audiences charged money, if tickets were given away, to and by whom, how much regular audiences actually paid, where Iwanami sat in the whole landscape. Related, how exceptional was this case of charging admission, and how exceptional was Takano Etsuko’s advocacy around it? Takano’s role as a programmer/advocate might actually be as important here...
Haneda calls the screening a “one-woman show,” which is hard not to read as a statement of some sort, a bit like Saito Minako’s 『紅一点論』。The next anecdote in the essay flashes forward to her being written up (at last) by a major newspaper, and landing an essay in a textbook. She’s clearly on her way up and out, and into more inspiring working conditions (based on piecing things together from her other writings). The nature of the “flex” or historical claim—or whatever rhetorical genre this is, naming a turning point in the industry and not only her life—is what I am trying to figure out…

There is some wiggle room in Haneda’s writing, e.g. “it was the general sentiment that documentaries don’t attract many people and so it was not part of the thinking (論外)” …i.e. it’s not inconceivable that money is taken (admissions charged) on some occasions, but I think she’s talking about tendencies, not absolutes, out of the event of her screening. But she does credit her film with turning the tide…
It’s a tricky context, as first-person writing, as Haneda is self-reporting, of course, and positions herself as an outsider (not a “social documentarist” like Tsuchimoto)…Calling it a “one-woman show” which tends to reproduce all the isolation of critical conversations she was never part of, but also to redeem the isolation by this flash of recognition. 
I find it harder to assess these first-person accounts, in many ways, by the female filmmakers, because the gaps can be big and blurry, between empirical reality, perception at the time, perception later, and critical takes by people who are not the main subject. When memoir is most of what there is, the points of reference can be hard to suss out, as opposed to easily identifiable “ronsō,” debates, responses in taidans, and so on…
Female filmmakers are rare presences in public discourse in the heady dialectically-oriented, clashing 60s, but in their memoirs they write frequently about some pretty bad stuff—e.g. not being allowed to go on the production team for dam films because “there are no bathrooms.” I am pretty sure I have read that more than once, and will have to dig it up. Always the bathrooms!

On Sep 22, 2023, at 3:15 PM, Gerow Aaron via KineJapan <kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu> wrote:
This probably needs some provisos. Maybe she’s talking about indie documentaries after the 1960s, because documentaries had been enjoying theatrical releases since before the war. That was true even of Iwanami Eiga, where Haneda was working, which enjoyed big theatrical success with films like Sakuma Dam in the 1950s. Even one of Tsuchimoto’s TV docs was apparently given a theatrical release in the late 60s. I’d have to dig into the archive, but it seems Tsuchimoto’s own documentaries could have theatrical releases starting with Minamata Ikki in 1973. 
Aaron

9/22/23 午後4:53、Anne via KineJapan <kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu>のメール:
Greetings~
I’ve been reading occasional essays by Haneda Sumiko, and came across an interesting historical claim. It’s in an essay Haneda published on a chirashi for her Hōryūji film from 1971. It’s more about her slightly later film, Usuzumi no sakura.
The historical note comes from the way that Haneda frames a screening of Usuzumi at Iwanami Hall, which happened with the support of Tsuchimoto Noriaki and Uno Chiyo (the fiction-writer who also wrote a novel about the same tree, published slightly earlier, and put Haneda in her novel, in a small cameo). Haneda writes that at that time, because documentary films didn’t tend to attract people, filmmakers basically crowd-sourced by collecting funds through “kompa.” But Takano Etsuko encouraged her to charge for tickets, basically saying “why would you let yourself work for free?” Haneda ended up charging 800円 for tickets, and the hall was packed, she writes. She says that basically (“it would not be excessive to say…”) the screening set a new precedent for doc films charging admissions. It also establishes a certain narrative of freelance legitimacy on her part, apart from Iwanami. Seven years later, an essay she wrote on Usuzumi would be anthologized in Kokugo textbooks; she would go freelance after this film and form her own company.
Does this turning point ring any bells for those familiar with screening and exhibition practices in that era—in particular, the act of charging rather than seeking contributions for documentaries?
Thanks for any info or anecdotes!
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