Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

John Quackenbush  0:00  

March 4, 2017. The Harvard Film Archive, along with the Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies, hosted a workshop titled Shifting Materialities of Film: Projection, Preservation and Research. Participating in the workshop are: Jeremy Rossen, Assistant Curator at the Harvard Film Archive; Go Hirasawa, filmmaker; Alexander Zahlten, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University and Ann Adachi from the Collaborative Cataloguing Japan Initiative. And now, Jeremy Rossen.

Jeremy Rossen  0:40  

–presenting today as part of the workshop which is Shifting Materialities: Film, Projection, Preservation, Research. It’s been organized by Alexander Zahlten. Also presenting will be Go Hirasawa. Some of you were here last night to see his amazing program of—it’s being called “Three Radical Japanese Filmmakers.” So that's an interesting title. And we also have Ann Adachi who’s from the Collaborative Cataloguing Japan Initiative. So this workshop is in relation to Go’s screening last night, and it also ties into the HFA’s new spring calendar, which just came out and we'll be doing a large program of the PIA Festival, Hachimiri Madness!, which is rarely screened Japanese punk films from the 70s and 80s, transferred from eight-millimeter to DCP. So it's a really rare chance to see those, and those screenings start off and begin, I think the first one is on April 21. So please, grab a calendar and read through and don't miss that amazing program.

So I'll start off by introducing Alex Zahlten, who will get the proceedings, and give some more information as well. So thank you.

Alexander Zahlten  2:18  

Yeah, I have to second Jeremy in thanking everyone for coming. I was just experiencing physical pain on the way here, just my face in my hands were just… I’m still warming up. But thank you so much for coming. This is actually a series of events—or part of a series of events—that have been ongoing for quite a while. One and a half years ago, we had an event here on campus on the question of the archive, especially in relationship to film from Japan, where it faces the same fundamental problems, but maybe in an aggravated way, compared to the US context. Many may know that especially early Japanese film is lost to a much larger degree than early say, US film or even early French or German cinema. And still today, for a variety of different reasons, film preservation faces, maybe, a larger host of challenges in the Japanese context than it does in many other ones. And we can talk about that later on when we have a roundtable and of course, open up to questions from everyone.

And last month in Philadelphia, we had an event at the wonderful Slought venue on the same topic, that Ann Adachi organized. And this is a continuation, so there's an attempt to kind of keep a continuity going and keep a momentum going in talking about this and finding different solutions and to both preservation and circulation of Japanese cinema—and especially that portion of Japanese cinema that’s most endangered.

And so I wanted to give you a quick—maybe to start off before we come to Go and Jeremy's presentations—to give a rough outline of a portion of film that in Japan is often subsumed under a very large umbrella called jishu film, which roughly translated means something like “autonomous film.” So, it includes experimental films, it includes home movies, often it also includes a type of film—if it's used in the more narrow sense—that emerged in the 1970s often on eight-millimeter or sometimes on sixteen-millimeter, also kind of creating an alternative film production and distribution circuit that was very, very broad, probably the largest non-commercial film and distribution circuit in the world, I think. I don't know of anything outside of Japan that's quite like it. Hundreds of feature films being made every year on 8-millimeter film that were nationally shown in regular film theaters, but also in city halls and so on, that by the end of the 70s, had developed a very well established circuit. To the degree that very young directors—sometimes eighteen years old—were getting offers from film studios to direct major studio films on the merit of having made a sixteen-minute 8-millimeter film that was successful within that circuit. And I'll show an example of that later on. It's quite extraordinary in the international context.

So this is just to show you kind of the span of three different moments of what's often called jishu film or the broad definition of jishu film. The first clip you see, at the very top is– We can turn the sound down a little bit maybe. Sorry this is a bit loud. This is from the funeral of the famous politician and activist called Yamamoto Seiji shot in 1929 by a group called Prokino, which was a very, very well known leftist film collective. And the baby Pathé camera had just come out in Japan, and they decided to utilize the power of the camera to document certain political events, and screen the films all over the country to give an alternative news perspective of what was going on. Yeah, we'll turn down the light so you can see it a little bit better.

And this funeral was not widely reported. And they wanted to be certain that both his death and the funeral itself would end and the massive turnout at the funeral were being documented and shown. And they had connections to Korea as well, for example, to filmmaking collectors there. So this is kind of an early form of political filmmaking, of course.

The next one is from a film legit. This is the Japanese title: Hatsukuni shirasumera mikoto. But the English title is The First Emperor by a young director called Hara Masato, who was one of the central people in kicking off the boom in 8-millimeter filmmaking in the 1970s. And this was originally an eight-hour film that's screened together with live performances. And he won a big prize at the Sogetsu Art Festival, which was instrumental in introducing experimental film from Europe and the US to Japan in the 60s, and impressed Nagisa Oshima so much that he asked him to be a collaborator on on the film, you might know, called The Man Who Left his Will on Film, one of Oshinma’s well known films of the 1960s. And he went on to create this mammoth project in which he traveled around Japan and kind of talked about Japanese myth and contemporary society, the political situation, and tying that all together in this epic journey that also became immensely successful and gave a lot of directors—or young people—the idea that they too can shoot a film.

And this is a much more recent example from 2005 of a young woman who shot a film about herself and her family. She was sent by her family to live with a kind of cult in the countryside for a period of three or four years when she was a small child, and she can't remember anything that happened during that time. So she goes back to try to recover that memory, talk to her family, understand why they sent her there. And it's a very wrenching, very, very personal film, kind of a document of the family situation and uncovering her own past and of course, the history of her family and their issues. And these three films, I think, also show a very rough trajectory that we might be able to see. You have something like home movies throughout, but you also have political filmmaking at a pretty early point. By the 1970s, it becomes a real kind of pop cinema. These are all cinephiles shooting movies that they see as directly competing with the French New Wave and New American Cinema and so on. While much more recently, maybe there's been a turn to more personal stories, so kind of self-documentation that is often decried by Japanese film critics but has also produced some of the masterworks of recent Japanese cinema.

So the term in English that's often used—an umbrella term—is “amateur film.” Sometimes it's “experimental film,” depending. And there are crossovers. Sometimes there's some other definitions. I wanted to give you an idea of the span of terms that are used in Japanese which has a somewhat different terminology that doesn't exactly map on to the English division. So jishu film which is kind of autonomous cinema; kojin eiga which means kind of individual cinema; jikken eiga which means experimental cinema in the strict sense; hachimiri eiga just means eight-millimeter film or might be, in English, often also just called “small-gauge cinema; kogata eiga: small-gauge; amateur eiga is amateur film, and indie is a much more recent term that you saw the example of the young woman documenting her family story. That generation calls their own films “indies,” which is curious because by now actually all of Japanese cinema is basically independent cinema. The term has somehow lost its meaning, because there are no big studios anymore, and films are all produced by independent production companies and former studios are basically only distributors at this point. But the term indies has then migrated to that kind of area of individual production. So jishu eiga is by far the broadest of these, and often used interchangeably with all of the other terms below it, although it can have more specific meanings as well.

So when I started researching film production by individuals outside of the corporate sphere, I was somewhat surprised to find that there was a burgeoning scene already in the late 1920s. A lot of these are home movies, but not only. A lot of them are experimental films, a lot of them are fake documentaries. I went to a local film archive in Niigata, in Japan, two years ago and saw a number of documentaries that are basically mockumentaries—or fakes—about pearl divers, someone shot a propaganda film for Japanese colonialism…. There's an incredible span of filmmaking going on that is basically just individuals producing these films. And by 1931, you already have three separate monthly magazines devoted just to what we would now often—or at the time was often called “amateur cinema” still. So you can see here already the terms. Two of the magazines call themselves amateur movies, amateur eiga. And the one on the far right is kogata, so small-gauge cinema, right? So you can see which terms are floating around at which point in time.

And of course, this is a rich man's hobby, but these are thick magazines. These are one-hundred pages and more coming out monthly. So there's a sizable crowd of people engaging in these practices and really interested in the techniques of filmmaking and exchanging information about it.

This is the only remaining magazine during wartime that had to eventually shut down because individual filmmaking became very difficult. Film stock was being rationed, partially also confiscated. Some may know that nitrate film, because it was so flammable, was being collected by the Japanese government actually for weaponization, so to make bombs. There was a very famous collector in Kobe in Japan, a legendary kind of shady figure, who claimed to have all these lost masterpieces in his collection and passed away a few years ago. And there were always rumors that his job during the war was the person who was organizing the confiscation of nitrate film for weaponization. And that when the war ended, he had this large stash of films that hadn't been used yet. And he just used that to create this basic stock of his collection. And I'm not sure if that's true. A lot of his claims about having all these lost masterpieces turned out not to be true. The National Film Center has been going through, they haven't found anything very unusual yet. But who knows.

But there was censorship also. So the government in the 1940s was not happy to see private citizens making films. They saw that is potentially dangerous. And so it's really only in the 1950s, when Japan is getting back on its feet economically, that that kind of filmmaking starts spreading again. And the real kind of spark that sets off a major expansion of filmmaking on the individual level is the launch of Super-8 and Single-8. Especially Single-8 Fujica’s counter-technology to Super-8, which they launched in 1965 with a fairly affordable camera. This is a famous TV spot that was aired at the time. (I think this is kind of loud; we might have to turn down the sound for this.)

Okay, so you can already see how it's being advertised as a family medium, as a kind of home moving medium for recording yourself and the nuclear family. What's interesting is that this kicks off kind of a starting avalanche of filmmaking on the individual level, especially among young people, because it's usually then the father or mother that buys a camera for their family use, and then the children, once they're in high school, start using the camera for other purposes. And then the family doesn't need it, sells off the camera to a secondhand shop, and it becomes much more widely available. By the end of the 1960s, you find all these secondhand shops selling, especially Single-8 cameras, and then the real boom in Single-8 filmmaking kicks off. You can see here the difference between the cartridges, between the Super-8 and Single-8 cartridges. This is kind of technical, but it's important to explain why Single-8 was so popular in Japan. While generally Super-8 was seen to offer superior image quality at the time, Single-8 allowed you a lot more options in terms of image, in terms of manipulation of the film. You could rewind it so you could do double exposure effects and all kinds of other technical tricks that weren't possible with Super-8, which had much more standardized usage at the time. So as a kind of medium for creative manipulation, Single-8 was not only cheaper, it also seemed to offer a lot more possibilities for young filmmakers.

This is the film I was talking about earlier, The First Emperor, an eight-hour film originally, then later on several different versions of that appear. But this is kind of a seminal moment in 1973 when a lot of young people see this film all over the country and think “Wow, I can do this too! This is amazing. I want to do something like this.”

Another interesting moment in terms of the media history—just to give you a kind of pointer to where we are in terms of historical context—the student movement in Japan is massive throughout the late 50s, and then again in the late 60s, protesting against the renewal of the Japan American Security Treaty. First ratified in 1916, and renewed in 1917, each time just before that, there's a massive movement with millions of people on the street protesting, not just students, but the student movement is very central to this. By 1972, with the failure of being able to stop the ratification or the renewal of the treaty, and the implosion of the radical Japanese left, the leftist movement in Japan kind of starts to peter out, at least compared to the massive involvement it had earlier. Some may know Asama-Sanso, which is a small town where there was a kind of a vacation house or so that some members of the United Red Army Japanese—one of the left wing terrorist groups—cooped up and took hostages when they were kind of on the verge of being arrested. They were being hunted down, they'd hit out in the mountains in Gunma prefecture for four months. And they were cooped up with hostages. The police surrounded this building, and everything was broadcast on live TV. And this is one of the definitive TV moments in Japanese media history. The police eventually stormed this building with tanks and with water throwers and all kinds of other techniques. And the storming of this vacation house is watched by around 90% of the population live on TV. So that's the apex of television as a live medium. And after this, TV in Japan transitions to becoming a medium that mainly shows recorded shows and movies and TV series and so on and so on. But consider that a year later, after this incident, is the year in which Fujica Single-8 sells the most film cartridges in its history. So this is kind of that apex of TV coming in as a definitive medium. And the apex of the use of Single-8 as a medium for filmmaking are roughly around the same time. And both are seen as signals of the depoliticization and the breakdown of the leftist movement in Japan.

The general narrative—and it's actually more complicated than this—but the general narrative is that after 1972 young people especially were disappointed, disaffected about politics and retreated into consumer culture and into leisure activities. Now, you can see that around this time, it's true that people—and especially young people—start turning to themselves producing media of all kinds. This is a manga journal called COM. And in this issue, from the late 60s, you can see, they have a report on what are called doujinshi, which are amateur-produced—so-called amateur produced—comics. And it's a report on the fact that this is booming all over Japan—that all over Japan, hundreds of small groups are forming, that are producing their own, basically professional level, comic books and distributing them among themselves. And that's happening across different types of media. You have novels written by individuals, you have comics and film as part of this as well. So all of this kind of peer production starts emerging at the same time.

Not everyone is happy about this. So a lot of the critics—and I'm talking about film critics here—are somewhat distrustful of that turn away from politics and towards media production that seems to be depoliticized, that's focusing more on aesthetic enjoyment, on telling your own personal stories, and so on. Who you see here at the top is Matsuda Masao who was one of the most famous leftist film critics at the time, a very influential man, and he himself had helped shoot a film that in a sense is almost also a self-produced, kind of autonomous film in a way. even though many film professionals were involved. And that's the one you see here on the bottom on the left, the film AKA Serial Killer, and some may have seen this here at the Film Archive. The Film Archive helped create a new print of this film. This is sadly the really washed-out version you can find on the internet. But the actual print is absolutely stunning.

And this film is an unusual film. It's based on the story of a young man who was an itinerant worker who had stolen a gun from an American army base and shot several people. So this was a serial killing incident that drew immense attention in Japan and Matsuda Masao and several other filmmakers got together to shoot a film about this young man, but not as a conventional fiction film, but along the lines of what they called “landscape theory.” So their idea was that the changing landscape of Japan in the economic boom time was literally kind of a depiction of the violence that was going on: the social violence, the economic violence, the changing, the dissolving of certain social structures in Japan, and that that landscape, not only reflected that, but re-directed that violence into the individuals that inhabit it. So they went around the country and went to all the places that he had worked as an itinerant worker in factories and small companies and other places, and just filmed the landscape to show the environment that he came out of, and that in their mind, helped push him towards his actions.

So Matsuda was a very political critic, a very political filmmaker, and he was initially shocked at this kind of development towards amateur or quote, unquote, amateur peer production of especially film in this case, but he came around to it. So by the mid 1970s, he wrote several articles defending jishu film. And his idea was that the 70s were a time that called for a reorientation of politics. So the idea that the left held in the 50s and 60s that what you need to do is bring the right message to the masses had failed, in his mind. The idea that this transmission model of media, where you send out the right message, and that people receive that message, and then that changes their consciousness and their action, that that just didn't work. It failed in stopping the Japan American Security Treaty, and many, many other measures that the political movements were opposed to. So for him, actually, jishu film then represented a new model that was based not on say, having a leftist newspaper or leftist TV channel that gives you the right message, but is based on activating people and bringing them into connection and creating new structures, creating self-organizing structures, if you will. And jishu film for him was a good model of that, where you could see all over the country, these networks popping up. People from different kinds, rural areas, big cities, sending films back and forth answering with you know, they saw an interesting film they answered by making their own film in response and circulating that. And Matsuda thought that this was potentially a good model of a new kind of politics.

Okay, here we might have to turn up the sound a little bit. So these are two films. This is what I had talked about earlier. Okay, maybe we can turn it down a little bit, thanks. So these are two versions of Panic in High School. This is a director called Sogo Ishii who some may have heard of. One of the significant directors of the 1980s and 90s and even still shooting film right now. He started shooting jishu film, and his, I think, 16-, 18-minute Panic in High School created a sensation on the jishu film circuit. This was about a young man who enters his high school with a gun, and starts to randomly shoot people and is eventually overpowered and arrested. And this was such a big hit on the jishu film circuit that the major studio Toei offered him to shoot a major film studio version in 35 millimeter and paired him up with a well known, well established other director. And I think Ishii was eighteen or nineteen—or he was eighteen when he shot the the 8-millimeter version, and he was twenty-one when he helped shoot Panic in High School, the 35-millimeter version. He was very disappointed by this experience, because as Japanese film sets work, it's a seniority system. He was the youngest person on the set by far, and of course, in a studio setting, this was a director that knew everyone on set, he knew the lighting people, the cameraman, all the people doing the set design and so on and so on. And they knew they would be working with him in the future, so they looked to the established director for directions. And anything that he said was basically disregarded because they saw him as just this punk kid coming in, and they didn't really like the idea of someone that hadn't gone through years of training to shoot a film anyway. So that was kind of traumatizing to Ishii, and he quickly returned to jishi film production. And only much later than in the mid 80s. re enter commercial film production with a film you might know called Crazy Family, which is really, really important, fascinating film from ‘84 or so that was shown at the Berlin Film Festival and other places.

So quickly, you also have a whole kind of print culture. springing up around jishu film. New Cinema Express is one of the important kind of newsletters that went out. So this is quickly expanding in very interesting ways. In connection with the Hachimiri Madness! retrospective that Jeremy mentioned earlier, that we're showing, I think that kicks off on April 21. So if you have time, definitely come to see these films. They're absolutely fascinating. These are films that are from the archives of the PIA Film Festival, and the PIA Film Festival begins in 1977 and quickly becomes the main forum for jishu film. So this is a film festival focused on showing at the time mainly 8 millimeter films, sometimes 16 millimeter, but basically jishu film production. And the PIA film festival—you can see here this is actually a magazine cover—is founded by a kind of city information magazine kind of like Time Out or something. There's an equivalent called PIA which is kind of the go to information magazine in the 1970s for knowing what's going on culturally in town, I think given any given time and they are very interested specifically in film and they found this film festival and immediately all kinds of famous directors converge to come see films there, to be on the jury, to help select them. Nagisa Oshima was part of this. Many other directors—Francois Truffaut went there and was very impressed with the films he saw. So this becomes, after a while, the major kind of convergence space for jishu film and many, many, if not even most, of the well known major film directors today started in jishu film to some degree, and many of them came through the film festival. So people like Kiyoshi Kurosawa, or again Ishii Sogo, or other major directors, to this day, have passed through this festival. It's become kind of a main supplier for interesting directors to the film festival. I want to show you just a quick clip from a film called Tokyo Cabbage Man. Sorry, there's a sample sign on top of this. This is a film from the early 80s. It's kind of a whimsical, but very interesting piece that's based on Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis. So it's, in this case, someone not waking up as an insect, but he wakes up as a cabbage, and has to deal with that. And he doesn't hole himself up in his room as K does in Kafka’s story. But he goes out and tries to find ways to fit into society as a cabbage and it doesn't really work. The film has a strong punk spirit. I'll show you a short clip. This is also showing in the Hachimiri Madness! series. Maybe we have to turn up the sound a little bit again.

Kind of French New Wave and especially Jacques Rivette, but other kinds of influences as well. But you can find a lot of snapshots of Japanese youth culture from the time and also you get a sense of the kind of energy that this type of filmmaking entailed. So the film festival begins in 1977, and in the 1980s, at some point, they decide they have to start archiving the films that they've been showing, because they're quickly disappearing. And they're, of course, in close contact with jishu filmmakers. And as you know, with an 8-millimeter film, you usually have one copy, you have one print: the original. And since there's a pretty well-established national distribution circuit at this point, that print travels around, and it's scratched up, or it's destroyed, or it's lost. And they hear all these stories from the filmmakers, and they decide “Well, this needs some form of preservation.” So they start looking at actually the forum section of the Berlin Film Festival as a model. They start to make copies of all the films, every film that they have in competition, and keep those in an archive. And they have been trying out different methods. So they tried creating dupes, internegatives. They also tried archiving them on various video formats—U-matic, VHS, eventually on DVD—none of those worked very well. Some of the formats are already totally defunct, and they don't even have players anymore to play them. So right now they've kind of entered this phase of reflecting on how can we preserve these films, even the ones that we have in the archive, but can't really even show anymore, because we don't have the right player for it? So the Hachimiri Madness! project, which showed also at the Hong Kong Film Festival and the Berlin Film Festival, was kind of a tie-up with those festivals—they helped finance it—to transfer some of the major works that they have in their collection, to scan them, digitize them. In this case, they made 2K digital copies. And we can talk about maybe the specifics of that and what the pluses and minuses of that are in the round table. But they eventually also start a scholarship in 1984, which finances one feature film for each person that wins the main prize at the festival. And this again becomes a main launchpad for some of the major film directors working today.

So just in closing, to give you an example of… Maybe we can turn it down a little bit. Give you an example of the influence of jishu film, which is immense. So the entire style of Japanese filmmaking, one can say, is influenced by the biographies of the people, of course, making them. That to a large degree were in some way involved with jishu film in their youth and as young filmmakers. This is just one of the more prominent examples. How many people have seen the film Ring? Can people just raise their hand? Okay, so Ring was, of course, a major horror film in 1998 that changed the face of Asian horror films. So there's a big boom in Asian horror after this. All shot in that kind of style of horror that involves very little bloodshed, but a lot of atmospheric horror and this creepy static horror, if you will.

That style of shooting a horror film comes from a specific jishu film director called Tsuruta Norio. And you see an example of that on top. When the scriptwriter and the filmmaker of Ring got together to plan the film, they both remembered Tsuruta Norio’s films, which were very popular in the jishu film circuit, and that they admired very much and tried to think about how they could translate that kind of style into a big budget, major film. And, of course, that kind of transition from 8 millimeter to the kind of more commercial film circuit, changes some things about the style that they use, but it became a kind of template for horror filmmaking throughout East Asia and Southeast Asia, throughout the 2000s to today, basically, and of course, there are endless American remakes of Ring as well.

Maybe I'll skip this and thank you for listening right now. And we can move on to Hirasawa Go, who will tell us a little bit more specifically about his activities within the preservation and circulation of specifically experimental film, which you could kind of call a subsection maybe of jishu film. Maybe just some short words of introduction.

So as I said, some of you were here yesterday and may have heard this already, but Hirasawa-san is kind of single-handedly responsible for making a whole spectrum of films from Japan, available to audiences outside of Japan in the last fifteen years or so. So if you've seen any kind of political underground experimental films from Japan, in the last fifteen years, it's probably thanks to Hirasawa-san. He wrote a very important book called Underground Japanese Cinema in the early 2000s in Japanese, in which he chronicled a lot of the history of this section of filmmaking and then very quickly went on from being purely a researcher to becoming curator, organizer of film screenings first in Japan, but very quickly all over the world. So he's been involved with many major screenings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Anthology Film Archives, Tate Modern, the Cinematheque française, so many of the major venues in Korea and other places. And he has a specific reason for doing that that I think he'll talk about a little bit right now. So let's give a warm welcome to Hirasawa-san.

[APPLAUSE]

Go Hirasawa  43:32  

Yeah, thank you for your introduction, Alex. And thank you for coming today. First of all, I’d like to say thanks to Haden and Jeremy at the Harvard Film Archive and Alex at the Reischauer Institute.

So, as Alex mentioned, I am a researcher specializing in fields such as Japanese experimental underground and independent films of 1968 and ‘70. At the same time, I often have programs and retrospectives of Japanese film. So, this time as a researcher and programmer, I would like to talk about how I was involved in the restoration and the preservation of film in this area, and how I should be involved in the future. The university I belong to does not have an archive; it functions as an art center. So it is an activity as a researcher and programmer instead of an institutional archive introduction, it will be a bit of a special case, but please listen to one case study.

As Alex has already mentioned, I started to organize a Japan underground program in 2001. And actually in 2000 or so, I was involved in a Masao Adachi retrospective in Tokyo and then continued to help with [programs of] Japanese underground film from 1958 to 1976. And at that time, we collaborated with the Fukuoka Citizen Public Film Library, and then Tokyo Art Cinema, and then Kobe and Osaka [UNKNOWN], and an art museum in Osaka, Planet Plus One, a very important independent archive and theater. At the time, [I] programmed, in total, forty titles and films [from the] 80s or 90s, and other times.

So, it is difficult to see these kinds of films. There was no way to see these kinds of films. It was only by negotiating directly with the filmmaker or their families for creating, for making, screening occasions and digitization. And at that time, we made a new 16 millimeter print of Motoharu Jonouchi‘s Document LSD in the 1960s. It was just a negative, so if we wanted to see the film, we would have to make digital material or print material.

And then, it's not only underground filmmakers; I was also involved with an ATG (Art Theatre Guild) retrospective, as Alex mentioned, in Vienna and then Germany and Korea. Art Theatre Guild is not underground film, but independent film production. So they started to distribute art films around the world. They started to organize their film production in 1968. Nagisa Oshima and Masahiro Shinoda, Shohei Imamura, and Kiju Yoshida were involved with them to make their own independent films not produced by a major company. And so I had done film retrospectives, and at the same time, academic symposiums and publications in English—this time in English and German. The most important thing is to see the film—so [many] people can come out to see the film—but at the same time, it's important to have some publications in the future and these kinds of activities.

And then, I was involved in conferences and screenings of 60s and 70s Japanese film. At that time, not so many scholars were interested in 60s and 70s Japanese film. I also organized [screenings of] Motoharu Jonouchi’s and Zero Dimension/Kato Yoshihiro’s films in New York. And then in the same context, I organized Japanese underground film [screenings] at Harvard Film Archive and then New York University. At that time, Motoharu Jonouchi’s family didn't have a good condition print, so I [arranged] to make a 16 millimeter print and an internegative and the digital materials. Also Gewaltopia Trailer and Mass Collective Bargaining at Nihon University and Shelter Plan. We already screened yesterday night Gewaltopia Trailer and Shinjuku Station.

So it's, for me, discovering through screenings and film research and raising questions about  reception in the history of Japanese film around the world and introducing common titles. Basically, I'm a researcher and critic and at the same time, curator and programmer, and I started to be involved with these kinds of films and tried to extend the historical context around Japanese independent film. But at the same time, it's important [for them] to be shown and to screen these kinds of films. In Japan, of course, in Japanese underground and independent and documentary film, some directors are very famous and very important, but around the world not so much. And so, I try to have screenings at cinematheques and film festivals and universities. When I’m coordinating these kinds of retrospectives and symposiums, [sometimes] I could not reach some important film materials—because of the crisis situation in the film works—for research and screenings. Actually, we can see some major films’ material—for example, of course, Ozu and Kurosawa and Mizoguchi and Oshima Shinoda—but the films of independent filmmakers which are so important in historical context, we cannot [access] because the negative was banished and the print was banished and so there’s no digital material. And so, I recognized that I should start to restore and preserve these kinds of films for having programs and making materials [available] for programming and research. If programmers and curators cannot find screening material, it is difficult to organize the screening of these kinds of films. I tried to make new materials for programs and research. It's not easy to research without material. I tried to make new material for program and research, also new prints and internegatives and digitalization. And, at the same time, I was negotiating with film archives and museums, cultural institutions and universities to receive support for making digital material and new prints. At the same time, I cannot do everything and so I need to make a list of films, a list of works, discoveries of new titles and materials, and also interview the filmmakers, and I think Ann Adachi will [talk about her work] making a list of titles.

And so, I would like to introduce one case study around some of Motoharu Jonouchi’s work. Basically, there’s a preservation negative and a positive in Fukuoka Citizen Public Film Library. Motoharu Jonouchi passed away in the middle of the 1980s. And so his family was keeping his material but also it was not easy to keep negatives and prints, so they donated all the film materials to Fukuoka Citizen Public Film Library organized by Fukuoka City, but they didn’t have the budget for restoration or preservation. And so I started to discuss with Fukuoka and Jonouchi’s family and some institutions for making new material. And so it's a problem of having a budget, and so I organized a screening for me and other researchers and programmers around the world and then I helped to organize these kinds of [screenings in] France, Germany, UK, USA, Korea, etc. [to get] rental fees, and I asked Jonouchi’s family to use these rental fees to make new material. And so, we made some new material. I heard from the Tokyo Photographic Museum in Tokyo, and I programmed “Cinema Movement 1960s” in an exhibition, Quest for Vision. At that time, Motoharu Jonouchi’s new prints and Masanori OE’s newly digitized material and some internegatives. So [in] these kinds of programs and exhibitions, I tried to have digital material and internegatives, so {at least one or the other]. And so I would like to show some digital material: Adachi and Jonouchi and Rikuro Miyai.

At first, I would like to show Gewaltopia Trailer from 1969. I have already shown it yesterday night, so [?only parts?].

[SOUND FROM FILM PLAYING]

So this is a documentary about student movements in 1968. This is a student protest at Tokyo University.

[SOUND FROM FILM PLAYING]

So for example, for this film, we had only a bad-condition negative and one 16 millimeter positive, so I made a 16 millimeter internegative and also digital material for screenings. Recently in 2013 for the exhibition at the Tokyo Photographic Museum, for the artist and director Miyai, we made a soundtrack for the screening because Miyai moved to India in the middle of the 70s and he threw out all his material. His collaborator and his friend [had kept] some material—for example, the Phenomenology of Zeitgeist negative and the positive—so I could access the Phenomenology of Zeitgeist material. But the sound negatives were lost and so we made a sound negative.

[JUST THE FILM PLAYS MOMENTARILY]

Next, I would like to show Galaxy by Masao Adachi,1967.

[FILM PLAYS MOMENTARILY]

Masao Adachi’s Galaxy is a legendary Japanese experimental and avant-garde film. But unfortunately Adachi left Japan. He went from Japan to Palestine to be [UNKNOWN] Japanese Red Army and so of course he wasn't in Japan and he could not keep the materials so I could only find the 16 millimeter positives not the negatives. So we made the negative and then new 16 millimeter prints to get digitalization and then some parts were edited by Adachi himself and the color [corrected] because it was a very bad condition print and so a lot of color was lost.

[SOUND OF FILM PLAYING]

These films are basically four-color, a kind of black and white and some red color and green and blue. And it is difficult to create the same color on prints, so I asked Masao Adachi to help with the digital version to make the same color as the 1967 print. So actually it's not easy to [create] the same color when the print condition is really bad.

[SOUND OF FILM PLAYING]

I have already mentioned the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. At the same time, I coordinated an Art Theatre Guild retrospective and underground film retrospective and new series in 2011 and 2012. For the screenings, I helped make a new 16 millimeter print of Motoharu Jonouchi’s film and get it digitized. For these retrospectives, we made a new digital master, for example, for the film program at the MoMA theater, Art Theatre Guild and the Japanese Underground Cinema 1960 - 1986. At the same time, MoMA had an exhibition about Japanese new avant-garde art and for the exhibition, I made a new digital master of an [?Oshima?] project Adachi used to be involved with. We had Japanese underground film streaming and screening for the project, so we made some new digital master material.

Basically, I introduced experimental and independent film. At the same time I was also involved with Koji Wakamatsu’s film restoration—his Japanese soft-core pink film. He’s a very important filmmaker. I coordinated a DVD for an international symposium at [UNKNOWN] University and at the same time, a DVD release on the program. For the DVD release, I tried to find some negatives because pink film was made by very low-budget production companies and so many negatives were banished. Wakamatsu himself had kept some, but not all. I heard about two negatives in Germany. I tried to find a 35 millimeter internegative of Secrets Behind the Wall, 1965. (Harvard Film Archive showed this film ten years ago.) I asked the owner to send the internegative to Japan to make the new prints and a new digital master for the DVD release.

And in this context, I coordinated a Koji Wakamatsu retrospective at the Cinematheque française. At that time Cinematheque française had a collection for the retrospective, so I suggested they make two new prints. And same thing at the Cinematheque française for the Masao Adachi retrospective. For Masao Adachi, unfortunately, basically only 35 millimeter or 16 millimeter positives exist—not the negatives—so it was difficult to show [his films] on print and digital material. So for the Cinematheque retrospective, we made a new 35 millimeter print and digitization. Ideally, a print screening is best, but it is not easy to make all of the internegatives and the new prints. So we made some new prints and digital material. And the Masao Adachi retrospectives continued in Mexico City and here at the Harvard Film Archive and other film festivals. And then for the retrospective, there were new 35 millimeter prints of, for example, AKA Serial Killer. Alex has already mentioned, Harvard Film Archive has the collection and so we can show new 35 millimeter prints and DCP—Rotterdam Film Festival made a DCP with English subtitles. And it’s experimental film and expanded cinema and therefore for the program we made some new digital masters. At the same time, the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju,  South Korea tried to [start] an East Asian experimental film collection, so they supported the restoration of Masao Adachi’s Galaxy. With the support of ACC, we could restore the 16 millimeter print of Galaxy ‘67 and we had a symposium and workshop about how to preserve and how to restore East Asian experimental film with Anthology Film Archives and here—so also Haden Guest from the Harvard Film Archive—and Rotterdam Film Festival and me and some researchers from Hong Kong and Korea.

And not only Adachi, but also [the films of] Motoharu Jonouchi, Masanori OE and Katsu Kanai, they supported making new 16 millimeter prints, internegatives and digitization.

Of course, the important thing is to see the film, but the situation around Japanese experimental and underground film is not so good. In Japan, some cultural film institutions exist, but basically, they are not involved with that. So we [focus on] experimental and underground film. It's not easy to reach the filmmaker and their family, because we cannot contact some people. And so we don't know how to contact a rights holder and the filmmaker about. But in the Japanese film historical context, underground and experimental and independent film is so important. I think if we research or have a program, we have to make new material and we have to protect the material itself for screening and for researching these kinds of films from the 60s and 70s. Thank you.

Alexander Zahlten  1:15:44  

Thank you very much. I have to actually also do something that I forgot at the beginning because my brain was still somewhat frozen from the arctic temperatures outside. I do have to really thank the Harvard Film Archive for organizing the screening yesterday and the upcoming screenings in the Hachimiri Madness! series, and of course, also for making this event, this workshop, possible. Both Haden Guest and Jeremy Rossen have been instrumental in that. And we have to thank the Reischauer Institute here, who made it possible for us to invite both Hirasawa Go and Ann Adachi here to speak here today.

So to introduce Ann Adachi who is also active in too many ways to describe it in a nutshell, but Ann has worked in many different capacities in film archiving and screenings as well. She was active at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) and helped launch their website that many of you may know called Post. She's currently executive director of the Collaborative Cataloguing Japan Project, which is a project that she will talk about a little bit more now, but on the very basic level, it tries to coordinate different parties interested in the preservation and screening, circulation of, and research of experimental film from Japan. And I heard that you just received a sizable grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation, so congratulations about that. And please join me in welcoming Ann Adachi.

[APPLAUSE]

Ann Adachi  1:17:37  

Thank you, Alex, for the lovely introduction and organizing this panel and inviting me. Yeah, I'd like to address this panel by introducing some of the strategies and visions we're implementing in our activities. Our organization, which is a 501(c) nonprofit, was founded a couple years ago to support the preservation, documentation and dissemination of Japanese experimental moving image. We focus on works created around the 1950s through the ‘80s, including experimental films, video art, documentation, and performances, as well as archival footage, independently produced documentaries and experimental animation. This narrow focus allows us to keep the project within our reach as a very small nonprofit, as you can see, [with] one staff [member].

The background behind organizing this nonprofit was a realization that a formal archive dedicated to or including experimental moving image in Japan was very rare, and that this history seemed to not have a firm documentation at independent or public institutions. Through speaking to curators, scholars, artists, and archivists, it appeared that a large portion of this history was mostly uncatalogued, or not formally recorded. In some cases, even at museums, their collection holdings weren't recorded. I think there's more robust conversations about moving image archiving in Japan today, but still, a formal association for moving image preservation doesn't exist yet, especially for discussing video preservation, and managing the video digitization. So it seemed that the digitization projects that were already happening were very inconsistent in terms of the archival and sustainable file formats. So coming out of these observations, were some to-do's that seemed helpful and we're working to preserve these works. One is, rather than aiming to create a brick and mortar archive which is cost prohibitive, or expect a large institution to collect, we could work collaboratively with independent archivists and scholars to gather metadata information about the works and to strategize preservation projects together. At the very least working as a collaborative group will allow the documentation process to move faster, and it will incorporate in-depth expertise since the partners have been researching a certain genre or a period for many years. Next was creating a priority list of works to preserve based on urgency, the need for copies to be made and exhibition projects and available budgets. Third is to raise awareness of archiving best practices. As I said, there's already a lot of research and regular meetings about media archiving in Japan, but I think there is a benefit to incorporating an international exchange, so it's not just about the technical how-to’s, but the creation of personal and interested institutional networks will lead to the development of cutting edge practices and a more open dialogue. And lastly, providing access to this information mainly through a digital archive that allows internal users to maintain the metadata information, and also for the external users as a go-to resource.

So our programs are organized in three main areas, which are documentation and preservation, for which we organize collections to surveys at artists’ studios, plan preservation projects, organize workshops and international exchanges with moving image archivists in Japan and the States. Second, is creating access to this research and to information about works that are under our concern. And thirdly, public events—which we mainly organize in the United States—as a way for us to promote the history in the works through exhibitions, screenings and symposia.

Maybe I'll go to the next slide to explain. We have a vision that the three initiatives are interrelated and mutually supporting. The documentation and preservation is the archival component serving to maintain the objects and the record of the objects so that further interpretations can be made. The interpretations through exhibitions and symposia screenings, help attract new audiences to this history, cultivating more support to document and preserve. Access in the form of web platforms as well as physical, educational DVDs also allow us to widen the audiences to an international community of not just university faculty and students but also to the general public.

So in practice last November, we organized a collection survey and professional exchange program. We partnered with New York University's Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAPP) program. And we invited Professor Mona Jimenez and Laurie Duke from the program to conduct survey research workshops and to get to know their counterparts in Japan. One big project during our five days was this three-day collection survey at artist Takahiro Imamura’s studio. Here, our goal was to locate and assess the highest quality version of artists’ work. The artist produced well over 140 works, including film, video installation performance, and CD-ROMs, and he's made many transfers over the years for each work. So in rough terms, there's many versions of many works, and it's a huge challenge to keep track of what that is and where they are, and what the superior generation of each work is. So our method was collecting thorough metadata for the films. We wanted to also do video works, certainly, but we only had three days, so we were limited by time this time. We may go back. We assigned unique identifiers with the labels and collected information written on the can and on the reel, the condition of the films and the cans, whether there are masters, camera originals, duplicates and other basic metadata. We recorded where everything is and a map of the studio and shelves. And we also counted everything in the collection, and we shelved some things. And we identified each work's mastering format we found. We used an authority list that already existed from a 1999 exhibition catalog that was done for his retrospective at the Jeu de paume in Paris. It might be hard to see here, but for each work, we noted higher quality versions that existed. So this chart will help to identify, or guess at least, what might be the highest quality version of each work. And in the notes section, we noted the condition of some of them. And of course, we also have the catalog metadata besides this chart.

In the report that I'm compiling now, we have outlined the risks in the collection as well as the recommendations. One of the important issues I'd like to address in the future is his digital files, which are currently used for exhibitions and online streaming and were probably made from DVD files. From the quality of these files that I can see, I can say that they definitely need new digitization that is made from the best format. Otherwise, I believe his work is in risk of being represented very poorly as these versions are circulated in screenings and exhibitions. And I think Mr. Imamura could use some support in doing this digitization project. We also would like to move the metadata that we collected into a robust digital system. We use an Excel spreadsheet, but we would like to move it to a digital system so that the data doesn't get lost and it can be maintained in the future.

Other than this collection survey, we partnered with Nihon University to organize a presentation with Professor Jimenez and Akira Tochigi who is the head curator of the National Film Center. Professor Jimenez outlined the history in the U.S. of how alternative moving image centers and artists came together in the ‘70s to voice the need for support of preservation to which the NEA and other institutions responded with grants and established the National Center for Video and Film Preservation. And these meetings among the alternative media art community eventually turned into the formation of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, which is the largest Association for media preservation in the U.S. These meetings also led to the establishment of programs like the New York University's Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program.

We also organized the same day a community archiving workshop led by Mona Jimenez. This attracted twenty-five participants to learn about the cataloging method of community archiving workshops started by Mona Jimenez, and we borrowed a small portion of the artist Ko Nakajima’s collection, and Professor Jimenez taught how an independent organization or individuals with no previous media archiving experience might catalog their collection.

We also organized a closed-door workshop at the Mori Art Museum in which Laurie Duke, graduate of the MIA program and currently head of operations at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, gave a lecture on current American museum practices for digital asset management. She gave examples from institutions like MoMA and Smithsonian. Mori is just starting to think about implementing a digital repository, so it was a great way for the staff at Mori to learn about the practices in the States. We had some discussions and also, of course, social meetings were an important part of this trip. Here in the picture at the bottom right, you see staff from the Film Center with Mona Jimenez and Laurie Duke. And we also met with the staff at the Mori.

So far, in the two-year life of CCJ, we've done numerous public events in the U.S. Thank you to Go Hirasawa; he's been really leading the public events portion of our program, and our first collection survey last November and professional exchange program. So we're now in the stage of considering an appropriate digital platform that would allow us to maintain the metadata that we'll be collecting, as well as this digital platform we hope to serve as a portal for various collections that hold Japanese experimental moving image so that this legacy is visible from a single entry point for a wider audience internationally. And it's going to demand many working group meetings and fundraising, but that is where we would like to head.

We recently received a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation, as Alex mentioned, to do research on Japanese expanded cinema of the 1960s and 70s with co-researchers Go and Julian Ross. We would like to do a collection survey and accomplish some preservation projects, and interviews, as well as an exhibition at the end. We're also interested in starting a distribution service, perhaps by partnering with existing distributors. In the past couple years as I've been hosting the public public events screenings, I've been hearing from university faculty wanting to show the works in their classrooms, so I think it will be a good resource to have if we can get some money to produce some DVDs or perhaps do online streaming as well. So lastly, I just wanted to come back to this idea of the nutrients mutually supporting initiatives. I'm hoping this vision will prove right in the next years to come. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

Alexander Zahlten  1:31:36  

Thank you very much. I think both Go and Ann’s presentations show very well the kind of concept behind it. At the workshop we had in Philadelphia last month, you put it under the motto that the best form of preservation is to project the films. The best form of preservation is projection. And that's kind of, I think, one of the working models. So I think Jeremy Rossen needs no introduction, the assistant curator at the Harvard Film Archive responsible for many of the wonderful screenings we see here every week. So I'll just hand it over to you to introduce us to some of the Film Archive’s preservation projects.

Jeremy Rossen  1:32:19  

Sure. Alright, so yeah, thanks for Alex and Ann and Go. It's been great just being an observer in this and listening to your great presentations. So I'll be brief, because we're gonna have a little break coming up soon, but there's a few things I wanted to go through, and then I have quite a few things queued up in the projection room, because as everyone has hinted at, the exciting part is being able to watch film. And so I can talk about the HFA’s archive and collection for hours and hours, but I think we should also take advantage of being in a cinema. Gor me, that means also going through the archive of things and showing them, so I've quite a few things picked out, but I think I'll scale that back, and so we'll show a few things before the break, and then we'll talk about him later.

So I kind of just took Alex's key points that he laid out in the framework of this talk here and how that relates to what we do here at the Harvard Film Archive. The Harvard Film Archive is a cinematheque, and it's also an archive. So we're similar in many ways to other sister organizations like the Pacific Film Archive and Berkeley or Anthology Film Archives in that we have a collection of films that we collect, and we also have a cinematheque where we screen films. So here at the Harvard Film Archive, we have a cinematheque, which was established in the 70s. We also have a collection of films that we collect. The collection started out as a teaching collection, so we acquire things not to put them away and collect in an archive and never be seen, but during the week this is a classroom. So Monday through Friday, we show films and I think it's very important to show films the way they're meant to be seen, so in their original formats. That means showing them on 35 millimeter, 16 and from time to time, Super-8 millimeter. So, with being a cinematheque and an archive, there's lots of different aspects that go into not only things that we decide to archive, but the things we decide to screen here at the cinematheque, so a lot of the collection we screen here, but many things are through distributors or through other curators.

So just going into the beginning… The constant challenges that we're constantly facing are time funding, time relating to issues of—we’re working against the clock here. Primarily at the HFA, we do film-to-film preservation and archiving, so that means taking film elements and making new prints of that material. So we're going against a ticking clock in that there's a limited time frame right now to create new film prints. Film labs are going under, film stocks are disappearing, so we're trying to do as much film-to-film preservation as we can right now. Film-to-film preservation has been our primary focus, and it's the most stable format for moving image work that was created on film, but however, I'll touch on this in a little bit. We're going more into the digital cinema world in that a lot of the venues in the world now aren't able to screen film on film, so we're dealing with that, and I'll go into more detail on that in a minute. So we also, like many archives, deal with issues of access versus preservation. So creating access to the work is done through a variety of ways: through our website, which is in a dire need of– We'll be redoing our website. The HFA website is about ten to fifteen years old; it doesn't accurately represent the cinematheque or the archive, so we're working with various people right now to begin this long process of redesigning the website so it accurately reflects what we do and also provides more access to the types of materials that we have here at the Film Archive. And then it's creating access to researchers that come here. Many of the things that we have are unique elements, and so lots of times, the access to the work isn't always possible, or it's not possible in its original format. So we've been trying to do more digitization, not for preservation, but for access purposes only. And so we've also been slowly putting some of those things online through our Vimeo account for researchers that aren't able to make it here to the HFA.

So, as Ann said in her speech earlier, the three areas that we focus on—or three of the main areas—are curation, preservation and research. And those are all kind of intertwined; it's a very holistic strategy. Each one kind of affects the other. And so we try to be consistent with how we deal with all aspects of those areas.

This was my initial wish list of things I could show to you all. I guess going back to the Japanese collection here at HFA is rather large. We have over 30,000 film elements currently in the Film Archive, and there's a large collection of Japanese material, whether it's experimental, documentary, feature Film, and so we're hoping to expand that exponentially in the near future. So we'll see how things go. So stay tuned because there's some exciting things in development as we speak. We have in our collection material from the Brandon Film Library that we acquired. Some of it is print and pre-print material. We have brand new Oshima prints that were created in collaboration with the Reischauer So we have quite a wealth of Japanese material here at the archive, which is, I should add, all available to everybody here in the theater. So talk to me afterwards, and I can explain to you how that can be made available to you.

So I wanted to first start off with showing a print instead of continue talking, because we'll talk more a lot more later in more detail about this. But the first thing that we'll see is a 16-millimeter print of Wild Night in El Reno, which is a film-to-film preservation that we did here at the Archive in 2011. George Kuchar, who some of you have heard of or seen his work, was a legendary filmmaker along with his twin brother, Mike. They grew up in Brooklyn, and they made their own kind of unique Hollywoodesque-style films. George went on to teach at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1971 to 2011, when he passed away, so he taught for forty years, and he made a lot of films in collaboration with students there, but he also was obsessed with the weather. And, starting in the 70s, he would make a yearly pilgrimage to Oklahoma to like what they call the Tornado Alley. And so this is one of his earlier works, kind of the seed that planted what he would call his Weather Diaries. And so he would go there every year and film during this time, so we're gonna start with that.

©Harvard Film Archive

As media theorist Georges Didi-Huberman puts it, “The archive is burning.” This workshop addresses the immense shifts taking place in the way moving images from Japan are preserved and presented. It explores the consequences they have for film as an art and as an object of research.

The workshop will focus on the stress points of the preservation and accessibility of film from Japan. At different junctures in history, the Japanese film industry, arguably the largest film producer in the world, has only been able to preserve a fraction of its heritage. While Japan’s experimental and non-corporate film production has been formative in world cinema, it faces even larger challenges in terms of preservation and circulation.

What does the shift to digital storage, projection, and video streaming mean for these – historically, artistically – immensely valuable works? What are the conceptual and very concrete challenges curators, researchers, and audiences face in keeping this immensely influential body of work accessible and relevant?

To speak to these questions the workshop assembles some of the central figures involved in the curation, preservation and research of film from Japan:

Ann Adachi (Collaborative Cataloging Japan Initiative)
Haden Guest (Director, Harvard Film Archive)
Go Hirasawa (Curator, Researcher, Meiji Gakuin University)
Alexander Zahlten (Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard)

The workshop will be held in conjunction with a screening of recently restored, digital versions of Japanese experimental films from the 1960s. In addition to the Three Radical Japanese Filmmakers show, the HFA will also present a six-part retrospective of newly digitized 8mm films from the PIA Film Festival archives, Hachimiri Madness! Japanese Independents from the Punk Years in April and May.