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To the Japs: South Korean A-Bomb Survivors Speak Out

In 1971, while the Japanese prime minister Sato Eisaku was visiting South Korea to attend a party for President Park Chung-hee, a group of eight South Korean hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) took a direct petition to the Japanese embassy. The South Korean hibakusha were detained by South Korean authorities for the duration of the prime minister’s visit. This film follows the lives of these eight people. That same year, Son Chin-tu, a hibakusha who had entered Japan illegally and was being held at the Omura Detention Center, filed his so-called “Hibakusha Certificate Lawsuit,” demanding Japanese residency and medical treatment.

To the Japs: South Korean A-Bomb Survivors Speak Out

NR 1971
気分を変えて?

Director Inudo's first film, influenced by Masato Hara's "Ballad of Sadness Colored by Strangeness," Kazuki Omori's "Flying Saucer" series, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "School Days. A film about the breakup of the group and another film shot on the same day. In the summer of 1978, a boy who is too absorbed in the stage and the movies gets his first menstrual period, and by making a film called "Change Your Mood," he changes his mood and gets through his period. The power of showing the film as being about something familiar and then lifting it up to a fictional structure and putting everything that the filmmaker feels about the time period in which he lives into it is overwhelming. The power of this film is overwhelming to the viewer.

気分を変えて?

NR 1978
Behind

The film begins with a morning scene in an apartment, which one might expect to be a drama about a college student living with a man and a woman, but the style takes a turn when the man and the woman, who had left for school one step ahead of the others, suddenly return home by train. What lies behind, what has passed, passes by with an indifferent face. The author's method of daring to focus on the behind is not only to tell the story through the image of the protagonist, but also through the people in the image, or through the author's own image. It is told not only through the image of the protagonist, but also through the people in the image, or through the artist's own image.

Behind

NR 1979
Shining Breeze

In Kō-Fū, Touch Me transformed everyday snapshots into a world of intense luminosity by applying frame-by-frame optical processing using an optical printer he made himself. Kō-Fū translates as “Shining Breeze” and refers to “a scene of rice fields just after a typhoon has gone, when it is still windy and the leaves of rice are waving in the stream of wind with raindrops which are shining by reflecting the sunlight." The repetitive, flickering images and minimalist music create a psychedelic trip effect in this film, which is made up of short, high-contrast black-and-white footage processed through precise frame-by-frame optical processing.

Shining Breeze

NR 1977
Wedding Ceremony of the Ainus

The documentary is a record of a marriage ceremony that took place in April 1971 and was performed in accordance with Ainu traditions at the request of the young bride. There were two hurdles to overcome in the realization of the ceremony: first, a group of Ainu had to be convinced, who were against a revival of the tradition. Secondly, there were only a few members of the community who knew the details of the ceremony at all, since most of them had already been celebrating a wedding in their own style for over 80 years.

Wedding Ceremony of the Ainus

NR 1971
The Recognition Construction IV: Recognition Construction in Film

Originally shot on 16mm film and presented at Maki Gallery, this work primarily focuses on traffic traveling up and down the major traffic artery Omotesandō in Tokyo. Prefaced by the Wittgenstein quotation included below, the image focuses on the vanishing point—aligning it with the top of the frame in wide shots—and movements of vehicles up and down the boulevard. While the film's first half presents a stationary shot, the second half follows individual cars and motorbikes, zooming in to frame them at a consistent size even as they advance toward and recede from the camera.

The Recognition Construction IV: Recognition Construction in Film

NR 1975
養護学校はあかんねん!

This is a documentary in which the camera's gaze is surrounded by a consciousness of staring, and this consciousness brings about a clear stance in approaching the subject. The distance between the able-bodied and the disabled is made clearer here by depicting it from the side of the disabled, and the film's title, "Why are schools for the disabled wrong? The title of the film, "Why are schools for the disabled wrong? This straightforward attempt at the most basic of documentary filmmaking, how to bring the subject to oneself, succeeds in capturing the full power of film itself, not just within the genre of documentary. The film is a success.

養護学校はあかんねん!

NR 1979
My Life

This work was started in 1967 as a documentation of Nakajima’s life. The footage was edited into a single piece for the first time in 1974, in time to show the work to the curator Barbara London, who was visiting Japan. Generations of his family were lost and gained that year, with Nakajima's mother passing away, and then his child was born. The piece is an installation with two monitors; the left presents his mother and himself, and the right, his child and himself. Nakajima continues to work on the sequels of "My Life" with his grandchild.

My Life

NR 1976
Alchemy

The camera slowly zooms, in over a long period of time, on the light of the sun reflected in the mirror of a bicycle parked at the construction site. To this is added a slowly evolving flicker effect derived from negative-positive reversals, progressively dismantling the distance from the subject. Nakai created a masking film with a calculated pattern of black and white frames into which he inserted positive and negative images and made a print out of two separate rolls of film. The original projection speed was 16 frames per second, but the sound is separate from the open-roll tape rather than burned in, so it can also be screened at 24fps. Also, the original sound consisted of the friction noise of rubbing steel, but in 2019 a new version of the sound was created featuring the friction noise of glass. Two versions of the film exist: 24:15 mins at 24 fps and 40 mins at 16 fps.

Alchemy

NR 1971