The Glorious Age of Japanese Documentary Film

A

Minamata: The Victims and their World
1971/B & W/35mm/167min/

Production Company: Higashi Productions
Producer: Takagi Ryutaro
Director, Editor: Tsuchimoto Noriaki
Photography: Otsu Koshiro
Sound: Kubota Yukio
Camera Assistant: Ichinose Masafumi
Assistant Director: Hori Suguru
Editor: Sekizawa Takako
Sound Editor: Asanuma Yukikazu

Screen
03/22 19 :30 2 hall
03/25 9:00 1 hall

By the seventies, environmental problems resulting from the high growth economies of the 50s and 60s had become widely recognized. One of the most devastating of these was the organic mercury poisoning created by the Chisso Corporation in Minamata, Kyushu. There, we follow the lives of 29 households who suffered mercury poisoning, as well as the growing movement to support their cause. To accompany the cool narration by Tsuchimoto himself, the images discover a human view of the world in which the patients, more than being victims, are both patients and regular people, workers and fishermen.
The first film in the Minamata series, it marked Tsuchimoto’s shift in interest away from a constructivist style to one committed to showing the world view of the subject. While a condensed 120 minute version was made later, the original 167 minute version will be shown here.
—from the YIDFF ’95 official catalog

TSUCHIMOTO Noriaki

Born in 1928 in Gifu Prefecture and moved to Tokyo in his third year of grade school. In 1946, he entered Waseda University and joined the Communist Party. In 1952, aiming bring about armed revolt, he went as a member of Mountain Village Underground Activists to Mt. Ogawa but got arrested. He joined the Japan/China Friendship Society in 1954. Through the introduction of his neighbor, Yoshino Seiji, a member of the board at Iwanami Productions, he entered the company in 1956, but turned freelance in 1957 and worked mainly on Hani Susumu’s films. In 1961, he helped establish the “Ao no Kai” with members of the production and technical staff. Initially producing television documentaries, his maiden effort as a director was An Engineer’s Assistant (“Aru kikan joshi”, 1962). After that he did Document: On the Road (“Dokyumento rojo”, 1963) and Chua Swee Lin, Exchange Student (“Ryugakusei Chua Sui Riwn”, 1965), opening up his own documentary world. His Pre-Partisan (“Paruchizan zenshi”, 1969) for Ogawa Productions faced the end of the student movement, and with Minamata: The Victims and Their World (“Minamata: Kanjasan to sono sekai”, 1971), he made the first in a long series of films dealing with Minamata. Works like his Afghan Spring (“Yomigaeru karezu”, 1989 screened at YIDFF '89) continued to make statements on behalf of the weak. For an exhibition called the “Minamata-Tokyo Exhibition”, he spent a year in Minamata collecting the photographs of deceased victims, which record was compiled in his most recent video, Minamata Diary -- Visiting Resurrected Souls (2004). He has also self-produced videos Traces -- The Kabul Museum 1988 (2003), a precious record of the Afghanistan museum that was later destroyed in the war. Another Afghanistan -- Kabul Diary 1985 (2003) also is recompiled from his footage from 1985. His recent publications include Nevertheless, Okhotsk Sea of Fate (Kage Shobo).