Abé Mark Nornes,
Forest of Pressure – Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary.
University of Minnesota Press, 2007
ISBN: 0 8166 4908 1
US$25.00 (pb)
317pp
(Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press)
Abé Mark Nornes has become, with the publication of this book, an author with a considerable range, with a recent book on film translation – the book Cinema Babel , reviewed elsewhere on this site – and two books on Japanese documentary film – a subject in which there have been massive blind-spots in the standard volumes on international documentary film. Nornes’ (his name should pronounced with two syllables) first book on documentary, Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima, delivered an extremely knowledgeable survey of its history up to 1945, weaving some theoretically informed sections with very readable, descriptive passages from a clearly confessed vantage point. As long-time co-ordinator of Yamagata International Film Festival, before taking up a Michigan professorship, he is uniquely equipped to write on the subject.
In Forest of Pressure, Nornes picks up the story where he left it, delivering a post-war historical survey in his opening chapter. But the book is really striking for its double individuality. It centres on one extraordinary film-maker, Ogawa Shinsuke: his films, the journey he took as his art evolved, and the journeys on which he led his film-making collective, his supporters, his financial contributors and his disciples, of whom Nornes numbered himself. Nornes, in trying to put his finger on what was so different about this collective, points out that no one ever left, except in the middle of the night, and says:
This hints at how Ogawa Pro was no ordinary film production company. The inability of these core members to abandon the group intimates the degree to which Ogawa entered into the core of their existence. Their experience working with Ogawa left all of them with powerfully complicated memories, especially in the context of the movement’s failure. Although I was not a member of Ogawa Pro, I came to know him well enough to sympathize with the contradictory feelings of the former members.
The fact that Nornes does not mention, except as an aside much later, that none of the Ogawa Pro members were paid a salary, also speaks volumes of the extraordinary commitment of its members.
Around the individual figure of Ogawa, Nornes has grafted his own individual fusion of critical history of the movements in which Ogawa was so crucial, with admiring description of an oeuvre of outstanding documentaries. There are more than a few critical dyads examined in Forest of Pressure, but the first-mentioned, and most enduring one, is between filmmaker subject: shutai, and object: taisho. This recurring theme allows Nornes to tuck in and out of his own declared subjectivity – highly appropriate, given the similar stance of Ogawa – and into his critical surveys and discourses.
Ogawa Shinsuke developed his skills, and started to gather followers during the hey-day of New Left filmmaking and protest in the 1960s. The battles around the construction of Tokyo’s Narita airport – the battles were by no means figurative – were a rallying point for groups from a wide spectrum of the left. Ogawa Pro believed that honest films could only be made if the collective lived amongst the villagers who were fighting for their communal way of life. The resistance, and the filmmaking, went on for years. But, as Nornes points out, if you asked an Ogawa Pro member about its “film movement”, he or she will assume you were talking about the screenings, not the film. Their films have hardly, if ever, been shown in commercial cinemas. A network for rural and college exhibition was developed and this brought a steady stream of volunteers and money to the filmmaking collective. Alas, many of the larger sums raised were called ‘loans’, without Ogawa ever having any possible mechanism to repay them. Apparently, although Nornes is not specific on this point, there was no strong pressure for repayment of these loans until his death – another indicator of charismatic leadership.
One of the mysteries in reading the book is that although Nornes, and all Ogawa Pro’s members say it was a collective, all of the important artistic and strategic decisions were made by Ogawa alone, notably the decision later in the seventies, to leave the village of the airport battle and move, lock, stock and barrel, to a quiet rice-growing village in the North of Japan. But the result of that decision was that an amazing series of irreplaceable films were made in a historical moment that can never be repeated.
Also strangely, despite Ogawa being described as ‘the master of the one-way conversation’, and a proponent of political engagement, I am left with very little idea of Ogawa’s political views – did he ever even confess to having changed his opinions?
This is a book that is to be bought for its authoritative stance but could get left largely unread on the shelf for a while. This is for a very good reason – the main body of it deserves to be read in conjunction with a viewing of at least one of Ogawa’s films, which might require the reader to go on something of a personal pilgrimage (although there have been recent seasons at Sheffield and Cologne). But we are not looking here at a book on a filmmaker that all readers will be familiar with, so the reviewer has to try and give some idea of what kind of films Ogawa Pro made – even though Nornes only arrives at any description though repeated passes.
Ogawa Pro’s films are dedicated to the object of interest in an extraordinarily attentive way – anti-romantic films with romantic heroes. It is easier to say what they are not: “Nothing could be further from the hit-and-run exploitation of television news, or the vast majority of the world’s documentarists for that matter.” Most of them are long – two hours is normal and some are over three. With virtually no music, they feel about as far from Wagner as it is possible to be. Yet, even in the early Report from Haneda, there is a “shifting attention to surface, process and detail”.
Occasionally, passages needed a second reading before the meaning was clear, and I was unable to parse the paragraph on Iwanami Productions on page 125. Generally, though, the writing has a strong subjective immediacy, such as when Nornes talks of Ogawa Pro’s only urban film.
Dokkoi! Songs from the Bottom is an unblinking portrait of a space repressed from the Japan of the high-growth economy and is one of the collective’s most powerful films. This was a place that breaks human beings. The songs Ogawa pro committed to film testify to the resilience of the men and women inhabiting Kotobukicho. But their sheer will to live is suspended in the precarious delicacy of their bodies.
Dokkoi, incidentally was a film Ogawa put together after its original director departed without trace.
The last chapter is called ‘After Ogawa’ and records Ogawa’s remarkable achievements in founding the Yamagata International Film Festival which has been instrumental in furthering Asian documentary-making and exhibition. Nornes takes the opportunity to return the focus to other documentary makers and also to recall a remark made several times by individuals in the book – that ‘something happened’ to Japanese documentary-making at the start of the seventies that took the fire out of political consciousness and seems to have left current generation Japanese filmmakers almost completely averse to any political awareness.
Nornes ends with a postscript around a film by Barbara Hammer called Devotion. The recent Ogawa season at Sheffield DocFest actually changed their schedule at a late point to reposition this film at the end, at least partly because its critique was felt to be so devastating as to undermine an appreciative viewing of Ogawa’s films. Nornes examines the problems uncovered, and created, by Hammer, from a standpoint in which he has not shrunk from describing the less flattering aspects of the collective’s socialisation, including the deeply regressive treatment of women and the neglect of male parenting. So Nornes is in a valid position to say that
In the end, Hammer is not an observer; in her trying production process, she became so immersed in the post-Ogawa tangle of personal relationships that she got too far in to pull out clean.
But the reader of Forest of Pressure can choose their own way through the book, and does not have to and, I think, should not, finish on this negative point. As screenings of these films become accessible, this book will persuade film-goers to look again at the art of this flawed man but inspirational artist.
Roger Macy,
England.