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04
Nov
Two weeks to Zipangu Fest…

My, time flies! It’s been a few weeks since Zipangu Fest announced its line-up for its second year’s outing, to be held at the ICA between 18-24 November, and I’ve been so busy I’ve not had a chance to stick any news about it up on this particular site.

Zipangu Fest 2011 design by Michael Lomon

If you want to read the original press releases, you can find them on the press section of our website here, but if you want more basic details about the lineup, you can find the full schedule either on the ICA website or on the Zipangu Fest website.

Basically we’ve divided the programme into four sections, all of which overlap and inter-link in various cunning ways that I’m about to outline: Sounds of Zipangu, Experimental/Animation, Zipangu Retro, and Nuclear Reactions. The first section consists of two European-produced documentaries that look at Japanese avant-garde/experimental music and the traditional, religious and contemporary cultural forces that inform it, with We Don’t Care About Music Anyway… and KanZeOn both looking as good as they sound.

We Don't Care About Music Anyway... (Cédric Dupire & Gaspard Kuentz)

The latter film, which also screened over this summer at Shinsedai in Toronto and EvA in Estonia, provides the inspiration for our opening party, which features an astounding line-up of DJs and performers, not least in the form of tat2mi, the beat-boxing Buddhist monk featured in the film in his first ever London performance. The event, to be held in the ICA’s bar, boasts a live remix of the visuals by Amoeba.Av with director/cinematographer Tim Grabham (aka Cinema Iloobia).

I’ve already posted the flyer for this party just below this entry on my blog, so do feel free to circulate, won’t you!  You can win tickets for our marvellous opening screening and party via this competition on the Japan Centre website.

All of this links rather nicely with another film in this section, Abraxas, about a former punk musician turned Buddhist monk who finds himself drawn back to give just one more performance. Not only is the soundtrack by Yoshihide Ohtomo, a towering figure in Japan’s avant-garde scene who is featured in We Don’t Care About Music Anyway…, but coincidentally the film was shot in the rural Fukushima region devastated by the earthquake and tsunami on 11 March of this year.

Set in Fukushima and featuring a soundtrack by Yoshihide Ohtomo and a starring turn by Suneohair, Naoki Kato's Abraxas.

The earthquake of course can’t help but cast a long shadow over any Japan-related events this year. Zipangu Fest will be doing their bit to raise awareness and hopefully a bit of money to help those affected when we move temporarily out of the ICA on Tuesday 22 Nov for a special charity screening of experimental films at Cafe Oto in Dalston. The two Nippon Re-Read programmes, as announced previously on this website, are part of a touring programme curated by Kinema Nippon (Aily Nash and Nine Yamamoto-Masson) and cover key works in the history of Japanese experimental film from the 1960s to present.

If you’re interested in either experimental film or Japanese cinema, the Nippon Re-Read: Radical Fragments and Abstractions from Japan I & II night on Tues 22 Nov presents a unique chance to watch these works placed within an informative yet fun context at one of London’s funkiest venues (worth visiting for the okonomiyaki and decent bar prices alone). It’s only £5 to get in, although you are free to pay more as all profits will go to the Japan Society Earthquake Relief Fund, and you can also buy advance tickets via WeGotTickets. As if this wasn’t amazing enough value for money in its own right, legendary London-based Japanese psychedelic rockers Bo Ningen will also be in attendance to perform a live soundtrack to Tatsuo Sato’s surreal animated classic Cat Soup from 2001.

Experimental films and a live performance from Bo Ningen at Cafe Oto on 22 Nov

This provides me with two ways to segue back into the other parts of the programme, but I’ll take the Experimental/Anime route. Alongside Abraxas on Saturday we have the Beyond Anime: The Outer Limits programme which, to whet your appetite for Cat Soup, will provide a wonderful and revealing glimpse of the innovation and creativity in Japan’s independent animation scene. This is a truly amazing sample of works covering a wide range of ground, but I’ll say it now, Sayaka Oka’s mesmerising Melting Medama is about the closest thing to a religious epiphany I’ve experienced this year.

What eyes are made for - Sayaka Oku's Melting Medama, part of the Beyond Anime programme

On a similar tack is the Enter the Cosmos programme of three works by that maestro of cinematic abstraction, Takashi Makino. His recent film Still in Cosmos will be screened as part of Tuesday’s Nippon Re-Read earthquake appeal night, but here’s a unique chance to immerse yourself in the full experience, with Makino himself there to introduce the films. Linking back to the Sounds of Zipangu section, Makino’s films are collaborations with some of the the foremost international talents of noise and soundscape music, including Jim O’Rourke and Machinefabriek. Another connection is that both Makino and KanZeOn’s Tim Grabham have served some time under the Quay Brothers, an influence that will become all the more clear when you see the Death of Phonebook animation made by Tim (under his customary handle of Cinema Iloobia), the honorary gaijin included in the Beyond Anime section.

Shasyo, one of several of Ryu Furusawa's films included in the Beyond Anime section

On the other side of the Sounds of Zipangu musical spectrum lies the sickly sweet strains of J-pop teeny band Momoiro Clover, as featured in Koji Shiraishi’s hilariously cruel J-horror mockumentary Shirome. Watch the tribe of teen songstresses agree to sell their souls for fame and fortune, and remember, nothing about their performance is faked for the camera!

Horror also lies at the heart of one of our Zipangu Retro screenings, and I am absolutely delighted that we have managed to make this come together, in partnership with the National Film Centre of Tokyo and the Japan Visualmedia Translation Academy. Never seen before in the UK, the 1938 supernatural chiller Ghost Cat and the Mysterious Shamisen is going to shake up a few preconceptions about the development of the horror around the world during is early decades, revealing that the genre was alive and kicking in Japan long before the films of Nobuo Nakagawa for Shintoho in the 1950s. Pioneering director Ushihara went to Hollywood to study filmmaking under Charlie Chaplin in the 1920s, so it is no surprise that he kept more than one eye on other developments in American cinema throughout his career. Personally I think that with its well-deployed arsenal of kaleidoscopic lenses, double-exposures and slow-mo sequences, in the expressionistic stakes Ghost Cat is easily abreast of, if not ahead of the Universal horrors of the period. Zipangu Fest have especially arranged to get this film subtitled and available for English speaking audiences, so make sure you don’t miss it while it is screening over here – the film gets its UK premiere ahead of Zipangu Fest at Leeds International Film Festival on Tues 8 and Thurs 10 Nov, and will be playing in Bradford in December and Newcastle in March. More details as they come, but if anyone out there reading this is also interested in showing this rare gem anywhere else, then drop me a line!

Vintage chills in our UK premiere of Ghost Cat and the Mysterious Shamisen

And our second Zipangu Retro screening takes us into our final section, Nuclear Reactions. Lucky Dragon No. 5 is a little-seen work by a pretty well-known director, Kaneto Shindo. One of the most important figures in the history of independent cinema in Japan, Shindo is primarily known in the West for his two horror films Onibaba and Kuroneko (another film about a ghostly black cat!), but also for a number of films on the subject of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and the director’s own birthplace of Hiroshima, beginning with the first fictional work from Japan on the subject, Children of Hiroshima (1952) right up to his latest film Postcard (2011), realised at the age of 98. I have no idea when was the last time this film was shown in the United Kingdom, if ever, but suffice it to say, you probably won’t get another chance to see it soon. The film is a docudrama based on a real life incident in which the crew of a fishing trawler were caught in the vicinity of American atomic bomb testing in the Pacific during the 1950s. The incident is pretty well-known today, if only because it inspired the original Godzilla.

Shinpei Takeda's poignant documentary road trip, Hiroshima Nagasaki Download.

Lest we forget, the legacy of the atomic bomb is the subject of our second film in the Nuclear Reactions section, with Hiroshi Nagasaki Download detailing a road-trip by the Mexican-based Japanese artist Shinpei Takeda, who will be coming as a guest of Zipangu Fest to introduce his film, as he and his college friend embark on a road trip across North America to interview a number of the survivors of this tragedy who have now made their homes outside of Japan.

The Nuclear Reactions section is our attempt to remember the potentially lethal destructive power of atomic energy, whether used militarily or to provide our energy needs, with a series of four films produced in a country that has suffered the most from its misuse. The nuclear power debate in Britain seems to have already died down in the wake of the catastrophe at the Fukushima power plant, a power plant that politicians repeatedly told the Japanese public was completely safe. In Japan, Hitomi Kamanaka has made several films that have attempted to delve beneath the claims of the politicians long before the disaster, and her findings in the two films that we are screening at the festival, are both chilling and yet also provide hope for those who are prepared to engage with the issues more fully. With the director travelling to Sellafield in the first of these two films to investigate a radiation leak that already seems to have been forgotten by the British media and public, the films offer little in the way of cold comfort for those still convinced by the “can’t happen here” argument.

So what do you do with nuclear waste? Hitomi Kamanaka's Rokkasho Rhapsody provides a chilling answer.

So there’s a guide through our programme for this year’s Zipangu Fest. No doubt there are even more links between the films if you look for them, and we really hope this years festival succeeds in fulfilling our goal of bringing people together to enjoy these films, and to talk about them and other related matters. I’m certainly looking forward to it myself!

Almost forgot too, just a few days before the festival, me and Julian Ross will be at the Horse Hospital near Russell Sq at the invitation of Electric Sheep magazine for An Evening of Subversive Japanese Cinema. Electric Sheep and Strange Attractor will present a screening of Koji Wakamatsu’s anarcho-pinku Sex Jack (1970) to tie-in with their recent book publication The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology, while Julian and I will be there to provide some cultural background to the film as well as another screening of one of the top hits from last year’s Zipangu Fest, Naoyuki Niiya’s ero-guro kami-shibai animation Man-eater Mountain.

Yumehiro Imanari's highly entertaining documentary short The Student Wrestler, playing alongside Hiroshima Nagasaki Download

In the meantime, here’s a link to an interview I did with Zoe Baxter on her Lucky Cat show on Resonance FM last Saturday (29 October), in which I talk a lot more about the films and a few other things besides.

Parts of Zipangu Fest’s programme will be touring to the Bradford Media Museum on 10-12 December, and the Star and Shadow Cinema in Newcastle in January.

More news as it comes, and again, if there are any venues out there in the UK that are interested in hosting parts of the Zipangu Fest programme, then do drop us a line.

And in the meantime, you can sign up to our press list, our Facebook page and our Twitter feed.

Posted at 15:52 on 04 November 2011 Filed under news.
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24
Sep
Experimental Japanese Film at Zipangu Fest in November

ZIPANGU FEST TO HOST FILMS BY STAR OF JAPAN’S CONTEMPORARY EXPERIMENTAL SCENE TAKASHI MAKINO, AND OTHERS

Takashi Makino's Still in Cosmos (2009, screened as part of the earthquake benefit night at Cafe Oto on 22 November

November screenings at London’s ICA and Café Oto of Takashi Makino’s films, featuring soundtracks by Jim O’Rourke and Machinefabriek

Four films by the leading light of Japan’s contemporary experimental scene, Takashi Makino, will be screened at this year’s Zipangu Fest (18-24 November 2011). Three of Makino’s abstract visual odysseys – with soundtracks by avant garde musicians Jim O’Rourke and Machinefabriek – will be shown at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts on Saturday 19 November as part of a programme entitled Enter the Cosmos, while the fourth will be screened at Zipangu Fest’s benefit night for the Japan disaster fund to be held at Café Oto in Dalston on 22 November.

Come and enjoy a fine spectrum of experimental moving image works from Japan, for a good cause! The benefit night at Café Oto in Dalston (18-22 Ashwin St, London E8 3DL) – Nippon Re-read Radical Fragments and Abstractions from Japan I and II – will also include experimental works from the late 1960s by Takahiko Iimura and Toshio Matsumoto, as well as recent films by Tomonari Nishikawa and Shiho Kano. Organised by Zipangu Fest’s Julian Ross, the programme was curated by Aily Nash and Nine Eglantine Yamamoto-Masson of Kinema Nippon.

The films in this two-part programme range from late 60s to contemporary works. Although varying greatly in their formal and aesthetic concerns, the works all rigorously reexamine the everyday through their respective experiments and innovations in their medium.

Abstractions of the mundane are seen in the graphic films in Programme I, which deal directly with the materiality of their medium rather than focusing on a visual referent. In White Calligraphy Re-Read (1967), Takahiko Iimura activates the Japanese characters of the Kojiki, the earliest Japanese historical chronicle, by deconstructing text into its constitutive graphic ciphers. These works, including Lika (2007) by Stom Sogo, and Still in Cosmos (2009) by Takashi Makino, direct the attention of the viewer to the pictorial, emphasizing more painterly concerns, digital and celluloid textures, the visceral correlation of sound and image, and of flatness versus representational depth.

Sixties split-screen psychedia in Toshio Matsumoto's For the Damaged Right Eye (1969)

The works in Programme II offer a poetic investigation into the fragmentary experience of the quotidian by eschewing narrative and rendering cultural images and references to unveil the uncanny within the familiar. Tomonari Nishikawa’s in-camera manipulation of bustling metro hubs in Shibuya-Tokyo and Tokyo-Ebisu (2010), as well as Shiho Kano’s pensive meditations on quintessential Japanese subjects form a counterpoint to Toshio Matsumoto’s split-screen filmic hallucination of the late-60s underground, For the Damaged Right Eye (1969).

Tomonari Nishikawa's Tokyo-Ebisu (2010)

Doors open at 7.30pm. An admission fee of £5 will be charged on the door, and all proceeds the benefit night will go towards Japan disaster relief, via Japanisch-Deutsches Zentrum Berlin.

More details of the event can be found at http://zipangufest.com/events/2011/nippon-re-read-radical-fragments-and-abstractions-from-japan-i-ii.

*** We hope to have an added something extra special for the night, to be announced shortly ***

Posted at 16:32 on 24 September 2011 Filed under news.
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06
May
Latest from the areas affected by the Tohoku Earthquake

With all the excitement over the death of Osama Bin Laden, the UN’s military intervention in Libya and other news related to the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings, the Royal Wedding in Britain and the recent blow to any possibility of electoral reform to our antiquated democratic system, and of course, last weekend’s Nippon Connection, it seems that the ongoing situation in the north of Japan has well and truly slipped off the international news radar.

I’m not going to attempt to broach any of these other subjects above, but it dawned on me that I haven’t been posting any of Ian Thomas Ash’s latest videos from the area recently. Admittedly, his own updates have been fewer and further between recently, but in the absence of any other news coverage over here, they’re getting increasingly more interesting and relevant.

Here, then, are two of Ian’s recent updates. The first, in which he travels to the affected city of Ishishinomaki, is about a month old now, and we actually screened it at the Zipangu Fest charity fundraiser before the various animations by CALF. The second, just uploaded yesterday, sees Ian visiting the town of Minamisoma, first entering the evacuation zone 20-30 km from the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant.

There’s actually been a number of further videos posted by Ian over the past month, and the In the Radiation Zone: The Children of Minamisoma City video is being uploaded in further instalments, so I strongly recommend you visit Ian’s Youtube channel Documenting Ian if you want to take a look at some of the ones I’ve not put on this website. Ian has also been contributing a number of entries to his blog detailing what’s been going on behind the scenes while he’s been shooting his video bulletins.

Here seems a good time to mention, before we watch the videos, the amazing job done by the Nippon Connection team with their Help Japan! project, with a great party last Saturday and profits from the screenings earning a lot of money for the cause. Details about this in German can be found here.

And finally, if you want to make a donation to the Japan Society Tohoku Earthquake Relief Fund here in the UK, follow this link here.


Ishinomaki City, after the tsunami, 27 March 2011


In the Radiation Zone: The Children of Minamisoma City, Part 1, 5 May 2011

Posted at 15:31 on 06 May 2011 Filed under news.
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