FOREST OF PRESSURE: OGAWA SHINSUKE AND POSTWAR JAPANESE DOCUMENTARY

Author:  Abe Mark Nornes

Publisher: University of Minnesota Press

Date of publication:  2007

ISBN:  978-0-8166-4908-2

Reviewed by Freda Freiberg

Mark Nornes has a long-standing commitment to Japanese documentary. He has been a coordinator and programmer of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival for many years and has at the same time been doing extensive research on the history of documentary theory and practice in Japan. His passionate commitment to politically-engaged documentary and his arduous research have been fruitful, so far resulting in two impressive publications. In 2003 he published Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima^[1] and now his second volume takes the story of Japanese documentary up to the end of the twentieth century. As the sub-title indicates, its primary focus is on Ogawa Shinsuke and his production company Ogawa Pro. Ogawa was the dominant personality in postwar documentary practice in Japan and appears to have been a charismatic figure, exerting a powerful influence not only on documentary practice in Japan but also on emerging filmmakers in other East Asian countries – Korea, Taiwan, China and the Philippines. Nornes himself became one of his numerous fans and supporters, after meeting Ogawa in Hawaii in the late 80s and encountering his films for the first time. In this tribute he brings his own partisan fervour and considerable intellectual ingenuity to his explications and analyses of Ogawa’s forbiddingly long films, finding them much to his liking in their politics and aesthetics. However, he does also give some attention to criticisms of Ogawa’s personal failings – a failure to nurture members of his collective, a rather irresponsible attitude to funding concerns, a cavalier attitude to the truth about his own personal history – all of which saddens Nornes…

Ogawa is best known for his Sanrizuka series of films (1968-73) which recorded and supported the protests of farmers and students to the building of Narita airport and their battles with the police and the construction company in desperate attempts to prevent expropriation of land and construction of the runways. He had focused on radical student activity in his earlier films, but in the Sanrizuka series, he moved the students to the sidelines and gave central attention to the role of the farmers in the protest. In the end, he became totally absorbed in the culture of the villagers and, when the protests collapsed, he moved his production company to the village of Magino in Yamagata, where he set about making another series of (quasi-anthropological) films devoted to village culture. In the process, he lost many of his collaborators and supporters, who felt he had turned apolitical. The remaining members of Ogawa Pro lived frugally and collectively in a renovated barn in Magino.

Ogawa Pro was a collective opposed to the hierarchical structures of the film industry and yet Nornes shows that Ogawa remained the boss. He did not give credit to his assistants (despite their passionate commitment and arduous work) and showed respect only to Masaki Tamura, the professional cinematographer who shot many of his films and was not a member of the collective. This is just one area in which there was a discrepancy between theory and practice. Ogawa sought to empower the powerless, to give a voice to ordinary people and to amateurs, to let them tell their own story; but when his non-professional assistants took initiative, he seemed always to interfere, and prevent them from seeing the job through to fruition, taking over himself and dismissing the products of their efforts as worthless. He was much more successful in his efforts to empower the farmers and villagers in Sanrizuka and Yamagata by giving their voice more weight than that of professional experts, in contrast to normal documentary practice, allowing them to tell their own stories and express their own thoughts and feelings in their own language and at their own pace and inviting them to re-enact the experiences of their ancestors with passion and humour. He also used intertitles, voice-over narration and scientific information to enhance their cause. His collaborations with the village communities, the subjects of his films, are not unlike Rolf de Heer’s collaboration with the aboriginal community in the production of his film, Ten Canoes (2006), in which the community co-authored the script, narrated the story in their own language (which was sub-titled) and also re-enacted the experiences of their ancestors. Both Ogawa and de Heer patiently and respectfully spent time getting to know the community and acquiring their friendship before any footage was shot.       

Although Nornes devotes the bulk of his book to the history and productions of Ogawa Pro, he begins and ends the book with discussions of earlier and later documentary filmmakers and their practice, situating Ogawa Pro in the ongoing history of Japanese documentary. (Ogawa died of cancer early in 1992). He also narrates the story of the founding and development of the Yamagata Film Festival. But here too Ogawa has a central role – in founding the festival, in promoting it on film and in encouraging emerging documentary filmmakers in other parts of East Asia.

Nornes celebrates Ogawa’s passionate commitment to documentary practice and bemoans the waning of interest in his work – and the younger generation’s turn to personal documentary and apparent abandonment of politically engaged filmmaking. You could say that the book is suffused in a kind of left pessimism. But to his credit Nornes  tries not to succumb and notes some signs of hope in recent practice.       

^[1] See my lengthy review of this book in Senses of Cinema No 30, 2004. Senses of Cinema is an on-line film journal, and can be accessed at sensesofcinema.com.