Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 No Nukes before Fukushima : Postwar Atomic Cinema and the History of the “Safety Myth”
- 2 Straddling 3/11: The Political Power of Ashes to Honey
- 3 Resistance against the Nuclear Village
- 4 The Power of Interviews
- 5 Learning about Fukushima from the Margins
- 6 The Power of Art in the Post-3/11 World
- Appendix: Interview from “Film Workshop with Director Hamaguchi Ryusuke”
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - The Power of Interviews
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 February 2024
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 No Nukes before Fukushima : Postwar Atomic Cinema and the History of the “Safety Myth”
- 2 Straddling 3/11: The Political Power of Ashes to Honey
- 3 Resistance against the Nuclear Village
- 4 The Power of Interviews
- 5 Learning about Fukushima from the Margins
- 6 The Power of Art in the Post-3/11 World
- Appendix: Interview from “Film Workshop with Director Hamaguchi Ryusuke”
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract: Chapter 4 focuses attention on the “Tohoku Documentary Trilogy” directed by Sakai Ko and Hamaguchi Ryusuke. In documentary cinema, the relationships between subject and object are scrutinized and the scale of production is much smaller compared to fiction film productions. The relationship between who is behind the camera and who is in front naturally becomes noticeable and can be of crucial importance. However, post-3/11 documentary cinema is even more sensitive about where filmmakers position themselves and the distance they put between themselves and their subjects. Under these circumstances, what new ways of filming did they invent? In this chapter, I analyze three films that took an innovative approach to documentary filmmaking through the so-called “Z-shooting” strategy of interviewing.
Keywords: interviews; Tohoku Documentary Trilogy; tsunami; Sendai Mediatheque; Z method
Post-3/11 documentary cinema exhibits an extremely high level of sensitivity to the relationship between filmmakers and their subjects. This was not simply due to political concerns but rather to ethical ones. In the face of victims shattered by devastating sadness after the disaster, filmmakers themselves felt conflicted about where they should stand or how they should behave as the subject of filming. As a result, they had to pause to consider their reasons and motivations for the act of filming itself. Amid such hesitation, what methodologies of filmmaking did post-3/11 filmmakers put into practice? This chapter analyzes the Tohoku Documentary Trilogy (Tohoku kiroku eiga sanbusaku), which consists of The Sound of Waves (Nami no oto, 2011), Voices from the Waves (Nami no koe, 2013), and Storytellers (Utau hito, 2013), and focuses on the directors, Sakai Ko and Hamaguchi Ryusuke, who challenged the boundaries of documentary filmmaking by inventing and executing a new method of interviewing in the films.
A distinct characteristic shared by all three films in the trilogy is that the directors participate onscreen as interviewers and audience members. Without being concerned about the realism typically expected of documentary cinema, which emphasizes objectivity or authenticity, they deliberately push narrativity and fictionality to the forefront, thereby clarifying their stance that their films are not mere recordings of reality but a product of the complicity between the filmmakers and the object being filmed.
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- Information
- Japanese Filmmakers in the Wake of FukushimaPerspectives on Nuclear Disasters, pp. 117 - 144Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2023