Katsu Kanai Day

 

“I had been challenged by the words of the young Ôshima Nagisa, who declared ‘I won’t accept something as cinema unless it is founded in an absolutely new story and an absolutely new methodology. We cannot be allowed to imitate ourselves.’ While there are some points in common across each of the three films in the Smiling Milky Way Trilogy, I truly did my utmost to distinguish them at both the level of story and method—to maintain their distinct and unique qualities.” — Katsu Kanai

‘Virtually unknown in the West, radical cinema pioneer Katsu Kanai (b. 1936) remains one of the most vital and inventive filmmakers in the history of Japanese underground film. After studying film at the College of Art, Nihon University, Katsu worked briefly in the film industry, joining a major studio company and freelancing as a commercial cinematographer. In 1968, he formed his own production company, Kanai Katsumaru Production and began the “Smiling Milky Way Trilogy” which would include his three undisputed masterpieces, The Deserted Archipelago, Good-bye and The Kingdom. Featuring members of the Underground Theater and the Avant-garde Performance Group, The Deserted Archipelago depicts Kanai’s surrealistic and delusional and visions of postwar Japan. Mixing grotesque and eerily sexualized imagery with searing anti-establishment commentary in the midst of the charged political atmosphere of 1968, Kanai’s radical experiment had an incredible impact on stunned audiences. For his following work, Good-bye, he filmed in a Korea under martial law, confronting the problem of Japanese colonialism and challenging the history of Japanese ancestry—including his own. Portraying strange people who challenge the god Chronos, The Kingdom raised an important new theme for Kanai: the problem of Time. The scale for this film wildly exceeded the standard, low-budget framework of underground and independent films: Kanai shot on 35mm; traveled to Korea and the Galapagos Islands for his locations; and brought highly sophisticated cinematography skills to his chaotic stream of imagery.

‘While working at a news film production company for many years, Kanai created a series of “visual poems”—Dream Running (1987), Grasshopper’s One-Game Match (1988), and We Can Hear Joe’s Poem (1989)—and in 1991 combined them into one work: The Stormy Times. This and the films that followed—Holy Theater and Super Documentary: The Avant-garde Senjutsu—reflect back upon his own filmmaking and personal history and pay poignant tribute to collaborators such as Motoharu Jonouchi, Atsushi Yamatoya and Jushin Sato who had since passed away. Dedicated to constant and intensive imaginative reinvention, Kanai continues to conjure entirely new, surprising visions with little resemblance to previous works. A thorough re-examination of the world of Katsu Kanai is long overdue.’ –- Go Hirasawa

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Katsu Kanai @ IMDb
UNDER THE UNDERGROUND – THE VISIONARY CINEMA OF KANAI KATSU
Katsu Kanai @ MUBI
Katsu Kanai: The Smiling Milky Way
Katsu Kanai, surréaliste nippon
Katsu kanai @ Letterboxd

 

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Extra

The World Of Katsu Kanai 金井勝の世界 (Trailer)

 

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In Conversation: Kanai Katsu and Tamura Masaki

 

Kanai: When I started out the five major commercial companies were having difficulties and Iwanami took the lead and became really influential in documentary production. They were really dynamic. Cameramen like Kanau Mitsuji and Suzuki Tatsuo generated that dynamism and quite a large number of cameramen really shone. Even in fiction film: Kanau went to Ishihara Productions. It seemed like they had something different from regular feature film cameramen.

Tamura: I think it might be related to Iwanami’s photographic technology or equipment. For example, right at that time, the five major film companies were supposed to be coming out with Cinemascope, but the majority of films were still black and white, they used blimps on their NC Mitchell cameras, and they still used a Japanscope lens which wasslightly lower quality than the lens used at Iwanami.

Kanai: At Daiei they would attach an anamorphic lens in front of the master lens in order to make it into Cinemascope. We filmed with both lens together. I used to do that.

Tamura: Quite an acrobatic technique.

Kanai: Right. At the time lights were, as you mentioned before, large and cumbersome and not very strong. And the film ASA was really low, so we used a 2.8 f-stop on the set. We used a crane, f-stop 2.8, and a 100mm lens. Using the anamorphic and the master lens at the same time was a pretty tough job.

Tamura: Acrobatic.

Kanai: With the Mitchell, it’s not single lens reflex, so the cameraman can’t see. Whether it’s in focus is something you deal with at the rushes (laughs). Iwanami’s technique had more to do with sensibility than technology. People at the five majors were stuck in the established way of feature film production. This isn’t very nice but, they weren’t very flexible (laughs).

Tamura: They’re still like that (laughs). Using a telephoto lens with a Mitchell is pretty difficult. Iwanami used an Arriflex with a single lens reflex, so it was pretty easy.

Kanai: With documentaries, if you don’t blaze your own trail as you go along, things just don’t work. Many cameramen are pretty flexible in this way. I think it’s a question of a new sensibility rather than of technology. If the people before you create a new vision, it’s only natural that those who follow will naturally incorporate it. I think what opened things up was Suzuki Tatsuo’s camera on Silence Has No Wings (“Tobenai chinmoku”). It was the apex of the new sensibility of the cameraman. Up to that point I had been doing camera work too, but when I saw that film I thought about quitting. When I thought about chasing after butterflies in a thicket without stirring an inch, I realized that my body just wasn’t built for that. When I returned home that New Year’s and I watched the Bolshoi Circus on TV, I thought guys with that kind of body could have a cameraman’s sense, could become a cameraman and follow those butterflies. My body’s really stiff so I thought I’d better quit and become a director instead (laughs).

Tamura: At the time I thought that Mitchells were special: at Iwanami, we would go and borrow a Mitchell if we ever needed to shoot something like a synchro scene. For a Cinemascope camera, we altered an Eyemo. The excellent lens that I mentioned before was a Japanese Kowa Prominar made for America. That’s what we used at Iwanami: unlike the separate units that you used, ours came in one piece.

Kanai: When they’re all in one piece, they’re heavy and the balance gets thrown off.

Tamura: Heavy and large.

Kanai: When you do a hand-held shot, the front goes like this and the center of gravity is completely different.

Tamura: The Cinemascope camera for hand-held shots had a large lens which is kind of like an adapter, but since the Eyemo is small, if you support the lens then it’s actually quite stable. There were people at Iwanami who took these things into consideration when remodeling the cameras.

Kanai: The success of documentaries is not completely based on the dictum that “Necessity is the mother of invention,” but it is true that, depending on things like where one shoots, one does have to keep inventing ways to shoot or create equipment adaptable to the situation in order to shoot it well. In this way, documentary cameramen are quite different from cameramen who work in commercial film companies.

Tamura: That’s probably true. Come to think of it, this is probably obvious, but the puppets we used for animation were about 15 to 20 centimeters tall: their bones and joints, the sets, the furniture and utensils inside of the rooms in their houses, the scenery – everything had to be made by hand. All by only a couple of people. When all of that was nearly finished, the professionals would come and join in, and filming would begin. That was how it was. So I did all sorts of things like painting and working with wood and metal. I’ve always liked to do these sorts of things, so it was really interesting.

Kanai: After that kind of research, you built a machine to do experiments with fog currents. What was the fog called?

Tamura: In Furuyashikimura, it’s called shirominami or “white south.” Furuyashikimura is a mountain village and cold air always comes over the mountain at the beginning of the summer. It always comes over the same mountain to the south.

Kanai: It was really interesting the way you used dry ice for the experiments. Also, you know I was born as a farmer and raised rice since I was little, so I was surprised at the eroticism of the fertilization scene that was filmed with a microscope. The time we went there, Ogawa said that if it was filmed indoors it wouldn’t be natural. He said it would be filmed in the rice paddies. You used quite a bit of frame-by-frame photography in the rice paddies, I imagine.

Tamura: Talk about the mountain and charcoal making was really interesting but as soon as we entered a long discussion, talk about the past would inevitably reveal discontent about the present. It was because all the young and middle-aged people lived in the city.

Kanai: If you’re going to create a dramatic scene, it needs something more, anything, even the style of someone from north Japan would do. Trying to do everything from old books just turns out unpolished. If you’re going to do that, you might as well shoot it unrefined from the start. It’s a really great idea to use actors but that part needs a little work. It’s tiresome to watch. It’s really too bad that Ogawa’s last work just doesn’t come together.

Tamura: And as a result, it became his last film. At that time Ogawa was limited.

Kanai: For that reason Furuyashikimura . . .

Tamura: Yeah, we heard a lot of stories in Furuyashikimura, too. We thought about getting the villagers to perform in the film, but only afterwards. In Magino Village, people from the village do appear.

Kanai: As an idea, it’s really interesting. The problem is the content and how you film it.

Tamura: On top of that we got real actors to play the roles.

Kanai: No, I think that’s fine. It just needs to be shot with a lot more appeal.

 

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Katsu Kanai’s 7 films

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The Deserted Archipelago (1969)
‘Winner of the Grand Prix at Nyon International Film Festival and selected for Tony Rayns’ “Eiga: 25 Years of Japanese Cinema” programme at Edinburgh International Film Festival in 1984, Katsu Kanai’s debut The Desert Archipelago is the first of the Smiling Milky Way Trilogy and a landmark in experimental narrative cinema. A young man reaches adolescence and escapes the nunnery where he survived a tortured upbringing. Whilst on the run he encounters strange deities including over-sized newborns played by performance artists Zerojigen and his doppelganger which his wounded back has given birth to.’ — Close-Up Cinema

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Good-Bye (1971)
‘The first postwar Japanese film to be shot in South Korea, Katsu Kanai continues his Smiling Milky Way Trilogy with Good-Bye, an exploration of Japan-Korean relations and the roots of the Japanese bloodline. “The film uses surrealism and oneiric imagery as well as the disruptive effects of the performance as happening both to fantasize and to subject to ethnographic scrutiny Japan’s fraught relation to Korea”.’ –- Ryan Cook

Trailer

Watch the entirety here

 

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The Kingdom (1973)
‘Most directors would be setting themselves up for failure had their debut been something as vivid, unique and otherworldly as The Deserted Archipelago. Still, Katsu Kanai shows his imagination truly is that wicked, both crafting poetic and serious pieces while withstanding the weight of such a surreal and profound creative spirit. I think the film description on most of the sites do it close to no justice, and almost misdirtect the point of the film. Sure, it is also about that, but what is tackled here is bigger, something that is as gargantuant as the concept of time itself – or perhaps time’s godhead. Kanai tackles the grand scope of dissecting time, poetry and evolution (both scientific and social terms) with his own approach, an approach even mentioned in the film: one who masters the micro will master the macro. As ambitious as his films are, there can be a profoundness expressed even through small gestures, perhaps a bit trivial and at times joyously inexpert film-making. Even if Kanai were in any way handicapped with low-budgets and fairly quick ways to cinematically portray. that would not be a vice for his truly bizzare yet powerful vision. Whether it’s the images or the plots that are odd, his surrealism is at art’s peak.’ — Miha Konrad

Watch the entirety here

 

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Dream Running (1987)
‘Kanai is a wild and unrestrained, arch visionary, an iconoclast/iconographer, in whose works classic and contemporary art, pop and high culture from his own world and the West mix it up with gusto – Arrabalesque excesses meet up with the focused physicality of Butoh, political issues are articulated in the gaudy vernacular of Manga. The title of one of his most beautiful films says it all: YUME HASHIRU (DREAM RUNNING).’ –- OBERHAUSEN SHORT FILM FESTIVAL

 

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Toki ga fubuku (1991)
‘Three short films of his threaded together in shape of a haiku. Dedicated to the memory of Jonouchi Motoharu, with documentary segments between the shorts detailing their friendship, his influence on his work, his death and funeral. Full of heart and creativity.’ — momoe_nakanishi

Excerpt

 

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Holy Theater (1998)
‘It’s said that people die twice. The first death is a physical one and the second, true death comes when there is no one to remember that person. Katsu Kanai filming animals in his garden and reflecting on the deceased cast members who worked on his film The Kingdom (1973). A soothing contemplation on life that leaves room for Kanai’s childlike sense of humor. Life is a theater, and we are all actors.’ — DungeonSkramz

 

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Super Documentary: The Avant-Garde Senjutsu (2003)
‘As we age, a lot of our bodily functions grow worse for wear, but lurking within me was another being, Katsumaru, who really doesn’t want to live his life as if it were a mere supplement to more youthful days… Super Documentary: The Avant-Garde Senjutsu won a prize at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.’ — MUBI

Watch the entirety here

 

 

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