Summer in Narita
Japan/1986/Japanese/Color/16mm/222 min/
Production Company: Ogawa
Productions Producer: Fuseya Hiroo
Director: Ogawa Shinsuke
Music: Togashi Masahiko
Photography: Tamura Masaki
Lighting: Sato Yuzuru
Sound: Kubota Yukio, Kikuchi Nobuyuki
Art Director: Tatsumi Shiro, Mikado Sadatoshi
Cast: Hijikata Tatsumi, Miyashita Junko, Tamura Takahiro, Kawarazaki Choichiro, Ishibashi Renji, Shimada Shogo.
Screen
03/22 14 :00 1 hall
03/24 14: 00 2 hall
Thirteen years in the making, this is Ogawa Productions’ masterpiece. Few films—anywhere, anytime—have rendered history with such complexity. Oral traditions that have circulated in Magino Village for generations are related through storytelling, butoh dance, and fictional recreations. The latter mixes famous actors with the villagers, who take the roles of their own ancestors. The filmmakers go so far as to explore the furthest reaches of Magino’s history in an archeological dig out in the rice fields. This kind of science adds a perspective that somehow avoids feeling like a cold demystification of the folkloric and spiritual dimensions of village life. The scientific microscopy of rice flowers inspires speechless awe, and when university professors suddenly burst out of the bushes to explain the likely origins of a story, they only end up confirming the reality of Magino’s living history. The entirety of this superbly complex film is clocked by the rhythm of the harvest seasons and the sun’s arc across the vast Yamagata sky.
Abé Mark Nornes
—from the YIDFF ’99 official catalog
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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