Summer in Narita
1968/B&W/16mm/108 min/chinese caption
Director: Ogawa Shinsuke
Directorial Assistants: Jin Kohei, Matsumoto Takeaki, Yoshida Tsukasa
Photography: Otsu Koshiro, Tamura Masaki
Camera Assistant: Otsuka Noboru
Sound: Kubota Yukio Scripter: Kuribayashi Toyohiko
Producers: Kobayashi Hideko, Fuseya Hiroo, Ichiyama Ryuji
Production Manager: Nosaka Haruo
Music: Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 9,”
Hayashi Hikaru’s “The Good Woman of Setzuan”
Production Company: Ogawa Productions
Screen
03/23 9 :00 1 hall
03/26 19:30 3 hall
1968—the year students and workers revolted against established authorities around the world. In Narita, Japan, residents of the farming village Sanrizuka rose up in protest against the New Tokyo International Airport Project, a project that had been decided upon without any respect to local concerns. This film is the first in Ogawa Productions’ eight-year, seven-film Narita series. It was through this series that Ogawa and Ogawa Productions established their method of filming while living with the people they were filming. The camera follows the “Youth Brigade” as they decide to use arms in their struggles against the riot police. Ogawa said about this film: “All the shots were taken from the farmers’ side—we were always amongst them, shooting from their perspective. Even when we were shooting the authorities, we shot everything; face-on and also in contrast to this.”
Without obtaining the consent of the area's farmers, the New Tokyo International Airport Corporation pushed on with the construction of the New Tokyo International Airport at Narita. When the Corporation began surveying the land under the protection of riot police, the farmers and the students supporting them rose up in defiance. The staff participated as a film crew on the front lines of this struggle and, working along with the farmers and students, captured the faces of the oncoming riot police and the Airport Corporation. The film overall faithfully records the concrete action of these scenes of struggle as well as the strategy meetings held by the students and farmers, portraying the conflict as it unfolded step by step. This was the first in the “Sanrizuka” (Narita) series, which would fundamentally change the methodology of Japanese documentary filmmaking of the following decade, the seventies.
Ogawa Shinsuke
Born in Tokyo in 1936. Served as assistant director at Iwanami Productions from 1960, and participated in Ao no Kai with Higashi Yoichi, Iwasa Hisaya, Kuroki Kazuo, and Tsuchimoto Noriaki. Became freelance in 1964 and began producing films independently with Sea of Youth (1966) and A Report from Haneda (1967). Films were supported at workplaces and universities throughout Japan in the midst of the Zenkyoto student movement. Founded Ogawa Productions in 1968 and lived in the farming village of Sanrinzuka while producing the Sanrinzuka series. Continued making films from the viewpoint of farmers. In 1974 moved to Magino in Yamagata Prefecture’s Kaminoyama City, and made A Japanese Village—Furuyashikimura (1982) and Magino Village—A Tale while growing rice and observing life in a farming village. His dedicated work as organizing member of the first YIDFF in 1989 was instrumental to the festival’s success. He passed away on February 7, 1992.
This important film compiles "Magino Story" footage taken by Ogawa for a period of more than ten years after he moved to Magino village. Unique to this film are fictional reenactments of the history of the village in the sections titled “The Tale of Horikiri Goddess” and “The Origins of Itsutsudomoe Shrine”. Ogawa combines all the techniques that were developed in his previous films to simultaneously express multiple layers of time－the temporality of rice growing and of human life, personal life histories, the history of the village, the time of the Gods, and new time created through theatrical reenactment－bring them into a unified whole. The faces of the Magino villagers appear in numerous roles－sometimes as individuals, sometimes as people who carry the history of the village in their memories, sometimes as storytellers reciting myths, and even as members of the crowd in the fictional sequences--transcending time and space. In the end, Ogawa's time coincides with that of the village, and it becomes clear that a new form of time has been created. Sadly, this was Ogawa Shinsuke's last long work. Now, in the 1990s, when most documentary filmmakers have turned toward the “personal”, this film stands as an important example of the opposite pole of filmmaking.
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