Aaron Gerow's Blog, page 7

TOKYO FILMeX 2017 and the Independent Cinema Guild

Fall is the main film festival season in Japan (see my reports on this year's YIDFF and TIFF editions��here, here, and here), but not all festivals are the same. Yamagata, of course, focuses on documentary (though the definition of documentary is flexible enough to allow for a wide variety of films), and the Tokyo Film Festival aims at being the Japanese edition of Cannes.

TIFF doesn���t succeed at that, which is why festivals such as Tokyo Filmex have stepped in to fill��some of the gaps. Filmex is much smaller in comparison to TIFF, but it purposely avoids the big commercial films that TIFF is happy to show, concentrating instead on mostly independent films. Asia is largely the focus, and only a choice few Japanese films get shown. One exception has been the retrospective section. If the Tokyo Film Festival has largely abandoned the role a major festival has in celebrating the history of cinema, by eliminating or stripping down its retrospective sidebar, Filmex took it over and did wonderful series on lesser known masters such as Uchida Tomu, Okamoto Kihachi, and Kawashima Yuzo (I penned a piece on Kawashima for their catalog). In recent years, it has even started Tokyo Talents, which aims to help young Asian filmmakers develop their projects; the International Critics Forum, a��workshop for budding film critics; as well as seminars in translation and other aspects of film.��

Tokyo International Film Festival 2017: Japanese Films

In my last report (a little bit too long ago), I talked about my��experience serving on the ratings panel at the 2017 Tokyo International Film Festival for the Asahi newspaper. Because I had to watch all��fifteen Competition films I had much less time to view new Japanese movies than I hoped.��Nevertheless, I did catch a number of interesting films, although the average level of the Japanese product I saw was disappointingly not that high.

First, there were two Japanese films in the Competition: Zeze Takahisa���s��The Lowlife and Ooku Akiko���s Tremble All You Want, both of which produced complex but quite��different reactions in me. With a background in pink film, Zeze was in some ways returning to familiar territory with a film about the AV porn industry, but The Lowlife focused on the actresses, having been based on AV actress Mana Sakura���s novel. Its boldest, yet clearly most controversial challenge, was the decision not to pursue the question of why these women appear in AV. I��could agree with that, since the question itself is problematic, since it frequently revolves around social prejudices against sexuality that are not equally applied to men: people will obsess over why a woman appears in AV, but not over why a man does.��Zeze instead focuses on the relationships of the women, with delicate��portrayals that in the end emphasize female connections in the family.��I ultimately liked the film, though some colleagues hated it and considered it no better than an AV film. I instead thought it consciously deviated from��both AV and pink, in terms of narrative (the only spontaneous off-set sex in the film is a failure) and camera style (using shallow focus against the pan focus of AV), but I did recognize that with at least one woman (the older��married woman Ayako), there was the danger that the hinted motivations hewed a bit too closely to the MILF genre in porn.

Tokyo International Film Festival 2017 and the Asahi ���Katte ni Grand Prix��� Award

As with YIDFF 2017, this was my first Tokyo International Film Festival in eight years. I have never been that much of a fan of the TIFF, and often criticized it back when I was writing for the Daily Yomiuri (even my report in 2009 was largely critical). The TIFF was too close to the industry to have a truly independent selection, was becoming more of a contents market, and has largely abandoned its Japanese retro section, even though that should be a major role of supposedly the largest film event in Japan. Its insistence on being in the same category as Cannes and Venice means its competition will only show world premieres, even though most of the major films have been taken by more famous festivals. Still, its Asian section is well done (programmed by Ishizaka Kenji, who was on the Nihon eiga wa ikite iru editorial board with me), and the Japan Splash sidebar can occasionally introduce a good,��unknown new Japanese film.

The TIFF 2017, which was its 30th edition, ended up being an opportunity to see the festival in a new light. It��didn���t start off well when the festival rejected my press application, even though I applied on the same conditions as the last time (the TIFF does not accredit film academics, like the YIDFF or FILMeX do). But at the last��minute, Ishitobi��Noriki of the Asahi Shinbun contacted me about participating in their ratings panel. The�����hoshitorihyo" is something they started last year: a panel of five experts watches all the films in the TIFF Competition, rates them, and writes short reviews, which appear on the online version of the Asahi (you can see them here; click on the film to see the reviews). The new results are uploaded every day during the festival. This year the panel was Hata Sahoko (a film critic and the person who bought Godard���s Breathless for Japan���and thought up its great Japanese title: Katte ni shiyagare), Sugino Kiki (a film director and actress), Koga Futoshi (a film programmer and professor at Nihon University), Ishitobi, and myself.��

Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2017

Even though I once worked for the YIDFF, this year���s festival was my first since 2009, so my first impression one of nostalgia. Seeing the same old places, meeting old friends, drinking at Komian, basking in the intellectual atmosphere of the festival. This year���s festival had many great moments, but I also felt the YIDFF also needs to look back a bit more at the past.

I had some obligations, especially helping my wife a little at the Daily Bulletin (I penned a short piece for them looking back on its history, since I worked there during the 1993 festival). So I couldn���t see everything I wanted to. I saw a few non-Japanese films, and was particularly impressed with John Gianvito���s Wake (Subic) (which shows some significant influence from��Tsuchimoto Noriaki���s work) and Raoul Peck���s I Am Not Your Negro, but I focused mostly on Japanese films. Unfortunately, there weren���t many that thrilled me.

Possibly the most interesting were Yamashiro Chikako���s works, The Beginning of Creation/A Child and A Woman of the Butcher Shop, which were showing in New Asian Currents (which I programmed back in 1995). Both were originally installation pieces and would be hard to call documentary under a traditional definition (Yamashiro-san told me this was in fact the first time her works had been shown in a movie theater). The first was a record of Kawaguchi Takeo���s effort to literally draw out and emulate Ohno Kazuo���s dance; the second a more narrative exposition of gender and occupation in Okinawa (I have to keep this in mind if I ever update my article on representations of Okinawa). While both exhibit a strong, and often political concern for the body, if not also a desire to return to origins (the sea, the same cave in both), the two are also very aware of mediation, to the point of thinking about the materiality of digital video.

Early Cinema in Asia and One Print in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

One of the favorites among the articles I have written is�����One Print in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,��� a piece I wrote for the��online peer-reviewed film journal Screening the Past. In it I tried to come to grips with one of the oddities that tends to define early cinema in Japan: the fact that for much of the silent period, film studios only produced one print of the movies they made, even though they had technology to produce many more. In a play on one of the translations of the title of Walter Benjamin���s famous essay,�����The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,�����I was asking why the Japanese film world seemed to be shunning the definition of cinema as an art of mechanical reproduction.

The article was also an opportunity for me to engage in various methodologies. Basically, this was an exercise in industrial history, but I��put forward and tested various hypotheses about the reasons for this practice, starting with the economic, but then proceeding to issues of��society, politics, and culture. It was a way to start thinking about the material versus cultural determinations of Japanese cinema���or our inability to separate them. It also provided me with an early opportunity to talk about the culture of�����mixture��� I elaborated on in Visions of Japanese Modernity, and which Miriam Silverberg described in different terms in Erotic Grotesque��Nonsense. While I��don���t think it is one of my best essays, it was one I enjoyed writing and still think is important.

When You Appear on Wikipedia

I noticed this a few weeks ago, but it seems there is now an article about me on the English language Wikipedia. Here is the original and here is a screenshot:

Having dabbled a bit on Wikipedia, I know there are notability standards for whether some person (or thing) gets an article, so I feel a bit honored that someone thought me notable enough. (No, I did not write it myself!) Looking at the history, I can see there was actually a bit of a squabble over notability when it first appeared, but that seems to have settled down. (You never know, though, whether someone will still not nominate it for deletion.) I also see that someone first created it a couple of years ago and it languished in the Draft space on Wikipedia for a long time, so it was clearly not a shoo-in on the encyclopedia.��

As with anything written about me, I am somewhat embarrassed about the��whole thing and don���t really want to read it. But it does seem they get a few things wrong. I don���t still contribute to the Eigei Best Ten and I long ago ceased writing reviews for the Daily Yomiuri (which no longer exists, by the way, at least��under that name). Yet it does seem someone does know my work enough to offer a decent description of Visions of Japanese Modernity.

Japan, TV Dramas and Film Theory

This post is just a personal note.

As some of you know, I am now in Japan. That���s not unusual, because I spend every summer in this country. But this time I will be here for a year, the first full year I will spend in Japan since 2009-2010. I have taken��advantage of one term of��earned leave from Yale and combined it with a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (see my page here) to give me twelve months (plus a bit more) in Japan to do research and writing. It will also be nice to experience Japanese falls, and springs, and Oshogatsu. I���ll also do a little traveling to Kansai and other spots.

The main plan is to finish my book on the history of Japanese film theory. I���ve done a lot of research, as well as presented aspects of it on multiple occasions (here,��here, here, here, here, here, here, etc.), but there is��still research that needs to be done in Japan. I also need the time to write it all up.��

So even though I will be in Japan, I will mostly be in libraries or at home writing. But I do intend to go out once��in a while to watch movies and attend special events. I will definitely be at the Yamagata Film Festival, and will try to attend others festivals like Tokyo FilmEx. I may also give a talk here and there.��

Media Theory in Japan, Television, and the Forgetting of Film

I have a piece out in new anthology from Duke entitled Media Theory in Japan. It is edited by Alex Zahlten of Harvard and Marc Sternberg of Concordia, and is based in an intense workshop that took place at Harvard in November 2013. Their project parallels mine: if I have been endeavoring to bring to light the history of film theory in Japan, they have been doing the same for media theory. One sign that the two intersect is the fact that they chose one of the pieces I selected for the�����Decentering Theory��� special issue to include in their anthology: Kitada Akihiro great essay on Nakai Masakazu���s theory of media.

The Duke anthology includes essays by��Yuriko Furuhata, Takeshi Kadobayashi, Marilyn Ivy, Miryam Sas, Tomiko Yoda,��Ryoko��Misono (sadly, a posthumous contribution), Anne McKnight, Fabian Sch��fer, Keisuke Kitano, and Tom Looser on such topics as the Tange Lab, Azuma Hiroki, McLuhan in Japan, Nancy Seki, Rokudenashiko, Kobayashi Hideo, and the Kyoto School.��

My contribution was placed at the beginning, in part because it questions the concept of new media through a historical analysis of some early theories of television in Japan. If,��as Lev Manovich as argued, new media often repeat older media, my essay considers how new media theory can repeat that of older media. Focusing on one of the groundbreaking moments in development of television theory in Japan���the 1958 issue of Shis�� devoted to the new medium���and in particular the ideas of its central figure, the sociologist Shimizu Ikutar��, I note how claims about television���s unique relation to the everyday forgot similar claims about cinema���s relation to the mundane made decades before by Gonda Yasunosuke and others. I argue that such forgetting functioned in part to repress the historical politics of the everyday, or more specifically, the history of media���s relationship with the everyday. In the end, the debate over the everyday was not just about which media was closer to the everyday or what constituted the mediated everyday, but also about the relation of theory to the everyday���the everydayness of theory.

Matsumoto Toshio dies at age 85

Matsumoto Toshio (������������), a major figure in postwar Japanese cinema and film theory, passed away on 12 April 2017 at the age of 85.��This is a great shock to me, not only because of his immense contributions to Japanese film and image culture, but also because of all the help he provided for my career.

Matsumoto-san is of course well known for his work as a feature film director, with Funeral Parade of Roses��(the photo at the right is of him in the film) and Dogura Magura being two of his most famous works. He started out in documentary, however, joining Shin Riken after studying aesthetics at the University of Tokyo. It was through documentary that I first��came to know him. In 1993, the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival did a retrospective of Japanese documentaries of the 1960s, curated by Yasui Yoshio of Planet, which featured four of Matsumoto-san���s films: Nishijin (1961), The Song of Stones (1963), Mothers (1967), and For My Crushed Right Eye (1968). One of my first tasks for the YIDFF was translating much of the retro catalog, so I first read Matsumoto before seeing his works. While Mothers was the least interesting of the four, his exploration of the image���from the still photographs of The Song of Stones to the��multi-projector��For My Crushed Right Eye���stood out amid the documentary of the time.��

Nakadai Tatsuya Interview on FilmStruck

This is just a short post, but I wanted to let you know that an on-camera interview I did for Criterion with the actor Nakadai Tatsuya is now being shown on Criterion���s streaming service, FilmStruck. We invited Nakadai-san to Yale last fall for a truly wonderful event, but he spent good amount of time in New York City before and after Yale. It was about a week after his Yale visit that I went down to NYC to do the interview at the Criterion office. My task was to ask Nakadai-san about his experiences with working with five directors whose films Criterion handles: Kurosawa Akira, Kobayashi Masaki, Naruse Mikio, Okamoto Kihachi, and Teshigahara Hiroshi. I���m not that experienced at these things, but Nakadai-san was full of wonderful stories and the Criterion crew made it (including me) look good.

You have to subscribe to FilmStruck to see it in full, but you can see a��snippet featuring Nakadai-san talking about the famous duel��at the end of Kurosawa's��Sanjuro��here on the Criterion site.