SHINSEDAI CINEMA FEST WRAP-UP/WIENER WUAST & NAKED OF DEFENSES FILM REVIEWS
Monday, September 21, 2009 at 4:35PM | Elana Steingart Japan is the beautiful, unattainable pop star of Earth's nations. People admire her, desire her, obsess over everything she releases. People with no prior association with Japan will discover an aspect of Japanese culture and become hooked. Anime is a common gateway drug that can ultimately lead to cosplay, introductory Japanese classes, and large quantities of Pocky. Those with perhaps a classier taste might go for the rich tradition of Japanese filmmaking. But either way, to my mom (who left Japan for Canada to get her Ph.D. and settled down here), they are just "weird people". Why do they like Japanese culture so much?
I like to think that I am not one of those weird people. I'm Entitled to obsess over Japanese culture. I've Been There. I have Japanese Heritage. But ultimately, the nostalgic feelings I get when I watch Miyazaki films, or my biased belief that anything manufactured in Japan is superior to anything made anywhere else - I've just fallen under the same pop star spell. And I can't judge anyone else for being fascinated with Japan. Maybe I'm not biased when I say that everything Japanese is better. Maybe it really is Just Better.
I certainly got that feeling at the Shinsedai film festival. This was a showcase of excellent independent cinema that has come out of Japan in the past fifteen years or so. The oldest film was from 1995; most of them were from 2005 forward. "Shinsedai" means "new generation"; from what I could see, most of the directors were under the age of thirty. At the opening gala, the president of Subaru Canada - the primary sponsors of the event - said: everyone knows that Kurosawa films are great. This is our chance to see the hidden gems of Japanese cinema.
My feeling from this weekend has been that, like most everything, Japanese directors just do independent films Better.
But I'm just one of those weird people who obsess over Japanese culture.
The Shinsedai film festival was a three-day event - Friday evening, all day Saturday and Sunday - located at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre. The JCCC is a large building located in the Don Mills/Eglinton area of Toronto, accented with Japanese architectural features: a bit of a hike from downtown, but worth it to afford the huge space. The cultural centre offers many classes in Japanese traditional arts, like ikebana (flower arranging), taiko drumming, origami, and martial arts I'd never even heard of. (I'm considering signing up for kyudo, Japanese archery. That is so wicked cool.) The films were screened in Kobayashi Hall, a 450-seat auditorium with smooth hardwood floors to accommodate dance and other performance arts. It was through their generosity that the Shinsedai festival had such a classy venue.
Reception for the festival at the JCCC.Classy really is the word. At the opening reception, there was an arc of tables set up with plates of artfully arranged sushi and skewers, provided by Sushi Marche on Queen Street East.
There was a cash bar with Asahi beer and ShoChikuBai sake. Everyone got a cup of complimentary sake for the kampai (toast) with all the guests of honour, which included directors, cinematographers, actors and animators from the films we were about to watch.
A lovely gala/mixer for Japanese cinephiles and us "weird people".
All the guests of honour busted open a keg of sake in the Japanese analogue of smashing a bottle against a ship's hull. And at that moment, my camera's battery died. So that's all you get.
I went to the festival every moment that I could spare this weekend, which meant all of Friday evening, and the first and last screenings of the Saturday. Of course, I took my mom to the first screening - I wanted an insider's opinion, so to speak - but she couldn't stay the whole weekend. Luckily, the film she saw with me - Naked of Defenses, or Mubobi in Japanese - was without a doubt the one I would have wanted her to see the most.
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Most of the screenings paired a short film with a feature-length film. Often they shared a theme or a feeling. The first screening paired Naked of Defenses with a five-minute film by Maya Yonesho titled Wiener Wuast.
Wiener Wuast was essentially a brilliant, stop-motion animated, artist's travel blog. Organic abstract forms painted in smooth watercolour swirl on sequences of cards, held up to the camera and flipped by her own thumb and fingers, against out-of-focus backgrounds of the famous sights of Vienna. As themes recur in the animated watercolour paintings, you start to notice patterns in the background images being reflected in the paintings; held up against a building, the cards contain a watercolour grid of windows that flow into other shapes. These patterns become more and more obvious as the film proceeds, either because she is making them more obvious, or because she has trained your eye to recognize them. Even sound effects start to tie in to the shapes and movement on the screen, crunching and clinking to imply textures that complement the background inspiration. I thought it was heartbreakingly pretty, even though I didn't much like the repetitive accordion soundtrack.
Naked of Defenses was the feature filmed screened afterwards, and the one I am very glad to have seen with my mom. This film set the bar high, high, high for the rest of the festival.
This was an emotional but softly comedic story about two women connecting in an isolated manufacturing plant, bonding and coming apart and recovering together, over the traumas, tragedies and catharsis of pregnancy and miscarriage.
Somehow I found the long, lingering shots in this film to be the paradigm of Japanese film - although I am certainly no expert. Shots lasted long enough for the eye to fully explore the entire frame and have a moment to appreciate the simple lines and patterns of a plastics moulding factory in the middle of endless geometric rice paddy. To me, this expresses Japan's minimalist aesthetic: that beauty can be found in a single line or curve or circle.
There were a lot of triumphs in this film. I adored the textured sound effects - it was like hearing everything up close. Glorious. There was a wonderful, signature sense of humour in the distinctly Japanese thoroughness as Ritsuko trains Chinatsu on the procedures of working the machines, or the expectant and formal silences between them after information is conveyed. There were great visual gags, like an extremely wide shot of a very pregnant lady running to catch up to another woman further down the road. And somehow the way Ichii frames the characters in the shots conveys deep, deep loneliness in a way that the viewer can not only understand, but feel themselves.
The emotional climax of the film put the whole cinema in tears. I could hear sniffles all around me.
Most importantly, there was an extreme close-up of a snail. This is trademark Japanese establishing shot - like hearing cicadas and seeing a blue sky to establish that it is summer - and it made my heart burst. I have a weird thing for snail close-ups. Have you seen the one in Tonari no Totoro? Everything I know in life comes from Totoro. Anyway.
This film is worth the trouble of seeking out and watching. And when you track it down, watch for the live birth scene. The whole film, you have in the back of your mind - is Sanae Konno actually pregnant, or is she wearing a fake belly? Watch a kid get pulled straight from her vag and into her arms and you'll either think, 'damn that's some serious special effects' or 'OMG that shit is for real!' I was tugging at my mom's elbow like a child, being like, "Is that real?? Is that real??"
My mom had lots to say about this movie when I interviewed her afterwards.
E: So we just watched the movie - what do you think?
M: Well, it's so refreshingly slow-paced. Because there weren't too many words going back and forth, there's so much room for us to digest and appreciate everything, from sound to light to colour to expression, subtlety of each word, how it's pronounced and the meaning of it. We have time to actually put ourselves in their situation. It's so refreshing to me that I can actually relate to every one of those characters in such depth, compared to any other fast-paced action kind of movies where you just have to keep up with the story and not being able to be the people in the story.
E: Speaking of the language, were there any subtleties that you think an English-speaking viewer would have missed?
M: There are occasions when I was actually reading the subtitles. Most of the time I was just listening to the Japanese so I wasn't paying much attention to the actual words [in the subtitles]. Whenever I paid attention, obviously it was like, I would say 70% accuracy or 70% content being transferred to the English words. But I'm thinking if you actually follow only the subtitles, it might have made sense in terms of flow and character development or whatever they did, in that language, but I was totally following the Japanese so...
E: What kinds of nuances were in the language or the tone of voice?
M: When the girl was saying "I'm sorry, I'm sorry", in English it was saying "I'm sorry, I'm sorry" when she was finally told that this character had a miscarriage history and that's why that joke was so painful. There is only one way to translate "gomen nasai", but when you hear it in Japanese words, each time when they say "gomen nasai", it actually resonated a different kind of nuance, which is not easy to explain in English and obviously can't be translated. Or as simple as when, at the earlier part when the main character was supposed to be teaching this new girl, in that conversation there were some "teach me more" or some things that the girl said that weren't translated, just technically at all. So those are some obvious words missing. The nuance of each word like "gomen nasai" - I don't know how much you got by reading English words. When it said, "I'm sorry, I'm really sorry, I'm sorry" - that's all you can write in English! But the girl was saying "gomen nasai, gomen nasai, gomen nasai", that's all that she was saying and each time it's a little bit different.
E: Maybe I'm wrong, but maybe it was like, "I'm sorry for your loss" at first, and then "oh shit I'm sorry for what I did", and then "oh my god I'm really sorry". Was that the way it was different?
M: Basically that's what it was.
Our interview was cut short by an usher asking us to vacate the cinema, but my mom went to the trouble to call me the next day and leave me a voicemail reiterating how she loved the slow pace of the film, and how she was never bored or not immersed for even one moment.
Naked of Defenses was perhaps the high point of the Shinsedai Festival for me, but practically all the movies I saw were a delight. I'll be slowly working through my entire experience and posting my thoughts here at Sharp Objex over the next little while.
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