From azahlten at fas.harvard.edu Wed May 7 11:51:47 2025 From: azahlten at fas.harvard.edu (Zahlten, Alexander) Date: Wed, 7 May 2025 15:51:47 +0000 Subject: [KineJapan] Planet at 50 Screenings / Yasui Yoshio Visit In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Hello Everyone, If you are in the Boston area on Friday, please do consider dropping by the final screening of the Planet at 50 film series ? celebrating the 50th anniversary of this immensely important archive - at the Harvard Film Archive. Yasui Yoshio, founder of Planet, will be there for an after-screen discussion ? a fantastic opportunity to hear from an incredibly important figure in Japanese film history. The HFA is screening Document of Collision ? The Whiplashed Ones (1969), an experimental documentary by Koh Hiroh, a lesser known (outside of Japan) but very central person to Japanese cinema in the second half of the twentieth century. You can find more information here: https://harvardfilmarchive.org/calendar/document-of-collision-the-whiplashed-ones-2025-05 All best, Alex -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nornes at umich.edu Wed May 7 12:28:24 2025 From: nornes at umich.edu (Markus Nornes) Date: Wed, 7 May 2025 12:28:24 -0400 Subject: [KineJapan] Planet at 50 Screenings / Yasui Yoshio Visit In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Whiplashed Ones is a very cool film. The Blue Group crowd often mentioned it to me as a ?must see? film. Wonderful choice to round out the Planet series. I thought I?d share a short piece of praise I wrote up for the catalog Planet just published for their 50th anniversary. The catalog is fascinating and is evidence of Yasui-san?s place in Japanese cinema and its historiography. Wish I could be there! Markus ================================ Planet and Documentary Memory Any institution that lasts half a century is surely doing something right. This year marks 50 years of activity by the good people at Planet. I first came across Planet in 1990 when I joined the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. As I was planning a program of WWII film in Tokyo, Yasui Yoshio was in Kansai preparing the second of his epic explorations of Japanese documentary history. It is this impressive curation from the 1990s that I would like to concentrate on today; while the venue was an international film festival in the unlikely location of Yamagata, a strength of the festival has?from the beginning?been its balance between its international dimension and an admirable commitment to exploring the history of domestic documentary and cheering on present-day Japanese filmmakers. It is particularly in this latter activity that Planet played a key role. Yamagata International Film Festival started in 1989, and throughout the 1990s Yasui?s retrospectives were a main feature of each festival. They made a substantial contribution to establishing Yamagata as an unusually ambitious and serious site for film curation and viewing. The programs progressed chronologically: 1989: The Dawn of Japanese Documentaries (?1945) 1991: The Post-War Flourishing of the Japanese Documentary (1945-1960) 1993: Japanese Documentaries of the 1960s 1995: Japanese Documentaries of the 1970s 1997: The Pursuit of Japanese Documentary: The 1980s and Beyond The scale of his undertaking is really impressive. Each retrospective was between 35 and 44 films, and ran nearly every day of the festival. Just the logistics of searching for that many films, securing the right to show them, and then shipping them to and from Yamagata was a monumental task. In addition to this, Yasui edited a hefty bilingual catalog for each year. Film festivals are wonderful, but ephemeral. The prints come in from here and there, are shown in a flurry of activity, and when it?s all over there?s nothing left but the memories. But these events left a substantial record in the wake of the screenings. The catalogs are mostly short, eclectic essays by the filmmakers as they look back and contemplate the meaning and impact of their films. The list of authors includes the likes of Oshima Nagisa, Tsuchimoto Noriaki, Teshigawara Hiroshi, Noda Shinkichi, Matsumoto Toshio, Oe Masanori, and dozens of other filmmakers. As these artists pass, these essays become more and more precious with every year of distance from the original events. The nature of these programs should be clear from that list of names. Their works represent the entire spectrum of possibilities for non-fiction film. Yasui-san?s eclectic taste made them well-rounded, comprehensive retrospectives. The films he chose ranged from actualities to travelogues to radical agit-prop to newsreels to government propaganda to ethnographic film to experimental film to straight-ahead television documentary. These programs were presenting a far-reaching and brilliant survey of the history of documentary in Japan. It is no exaggeration to say that few programmers could have accomplished this. But Yasui-san came to the project with decades of experience as a film lover and participant in screening movements, as well as over 15 years of archival collecting at Planet. As a fellow curator, I was always impressed by Yasui-san?s passion and ambition. As a young historian, I felt like I was his student. In those days, I was still a graduate student and systematically working my way through the standard books on Japanese documentary. Those works all provide frameworks for understanding the general history, but what Yasui-san provided at Yamagata was a much more granular and comprehensive vision of the same history. He seemed to have no blind spots and embraced every approach to nonfiction filmmaking. It was all so impressive. Today, it is easy to take this accomplishment for granted. Some of the films he showed are available on video. Some are regularly shown in retrospectives and classrooms. However, back in the 1990s, home video was still a new phenomenon and it generally excluded documentary. Many of the films had been forgotten; all of them were difficult to impossible to actually watch. It could be that almost all of them had not been projected since the time they were originally produced. That he could find prints was itself amazing. Each edition was all very eye-opening. His retrospectives revived our collective memory of Japanese documentary film. But let me end on a personal note. In sum, Yasui-san?s programs, which were conceived and produced at the base called Planet, had an enormous impact on my career?and by extension my life. It was through these riches that I came to know the remarkable history of Japanese documentary. This is just one minuscule aspect of what Planet has made possible in this world. > On May 7, 2025, at 11:51?AM, Zahlten, Alexander via KineJapan wrote: > > Hello Everyone, > > If you are in the Boston area on Friday, please do consider dropping by the final screening of the Planet at 50 film series ? celebrating the 50th anniversary of this immensely important archive - at the Harvard Film Archive. Yasui Yoshio, founder of Planet, will be there for an after-screen discussion ? a fantastic opportunity to hear from an incredibly important figure in Japanese film history. > > The HFA is screening Document of Collision ? The Whiplashed Ones (1969), an experimental documentary by Koh Hiroh, a lesser known (outside of Japan) but very central person to Japanese cinema in the second half of the twentieth century. > > You can find more information here: https://harvardfilmarchive.org/calendar/document-of-collision-the-whiplashed-ones-2025-05 > > All best, > Alex > > > > > _______________________________________________ > KineJapan mailing list > KineJapan at mailman.yale.edu > https://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/kinejapan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jalekseyeva at gmail.com Sun May 11 11:38:20 2025 From: jalekseyeva at gmail.com (Julia Alekseyeva) Date: Sun, 11 May 2025 11:38:20 -0400 Subject: [KineJapan] Newsletter post about Tomonari Nishikawa Message-ID: Hello KineJapaners, On Markus's suggestion, sending along a blog post I wrote about the late filmmaker Tomonari Nishikawa: https://substack.com/@thesoviette/p-163250863 I also know that there are other people on this listserv who have written on his films in their own research, so I encourage everyone to share responses and readings of Tomo's amazing work! Warmly, Julia Alekseyeva -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: