Filmmaking as a Way of life: Tsuchimoto, Ogawa, and Revolutions in Documentary Cinema

Abstract

The post-war period in Japanese cinema must surely rank alongside the most important eras in the history of documentary filmmaking. In spite, or perhaps because, of the demise of the country's commercial film industry, which continued almost unabated throughout the 1960s and 1970s, these years saw the emergence of several figures who would revolutionize the documentary form. In particular, they would significantly change the parameters of what is traditionally thought of as a documentary film, and irrevocably alter and transform perceptions of the roles and responsibilities of the documentary filmmaker. Of these directors, the elder statesmen and key names are Tsuchimoto Noriaki and Ogawa Shinsuke. These filmmakers are held in the highest esteem in Japan and Asia for their groundbreaking work in the 1970s, but for various reasons have not quite achieved comparable visibility or acclaim in the West.

Developments in the Japanese Documentary Mode

“…Some authors have provided a general historical overview of the documentary film (Satō 2010;Kurosawa et al 2010), while others have focused on certain aspects: short documentaries (Yoshihara 2011;Harada 2012;, Iwanami Eiga productions (Kusakabe 1980;Hani 2012;Tsunoda 2015), the variety of nonfiction genres (Takeda 2017), prewar and wartime non-fiction (Okudaira 1986;Kurasawa 1987;Fujii 2001;Hori 2002;Nornes 2003b;Centeno-Martín 2017; Morita 2018) and postwar movements (Nornes 2003a;Centeno-Martín 2020b). In recent years, there has been a growing interest in treating certain documentary makers as auteurs, such as Sakane Tazuko (Ikegawa 2011;McDonald 2007), Tsuchimoto Noriaki (Jesty 2011Bingham 2009;Gerow and Noriaki 2014;Inoue 2018), Ogawa Shinsuke ); Hani Susumu (Briciu 2013;Centeno-Martín 2015), Matsumoto Toshio (Matsumoto and Kenji 2008;Raine 2012), andHara Kazuo (Ruoff andRuoff 1993).…”

Image Pragmatics and Film as a Lived Practice in the Documentary Work of Hani Susumu and Tsuchimoto Noriaki

“…2 Film as a lived practice is a reference to the phrase "eiga wa ikimono no shigoto de aru,", which Tsuchimoto used to title his first book of essays (Tsuchimoto [1974(Tsuchimoto [ ] 2004. I have previously translated the phrase as "film is a work of living things" (Jesty 2011), while Adam Bingham translates it as "filmmaking as a way of life" (Bingham 2009). Tsuchimoto explains the phrase's multiple meanings this way.…”