Category: Publications

Publication compiled and published on the occasion of the film programmes dedicated to Ogawa Shinsuke and Ogawa Pro (CINEMATEK Brussels, 1 April – 5 May 2019) and Tsuchimoto Noriaki (Courtisane Festival Ghent, 3 – 7 April 2019). Both programmes, initiated by Courtisane, would not have been possible without the dedication of Ricardo Matos Cabo.

Ogawa Shinsuke (1935-1992) and Tsuchimoto Noriaki (1928-2008) are considered as the two towering pillars of Japanese documentary film. Both filmmakers forged parallel trajectories through the tumultuous landscape of postwar Japan, during which they developed extraordinary forms of committed cinema which remain unequalled in their dedication and perseverance.

Ogawa and Tsuchimoto were among a number of crucial postwar Japanese filmmakers who emerged from Iwanami Productions, a studio run by the Iwanami publishing house that mostly produced educational and PR films. Heated discussions on cinema and politics amongst these filmmakers led to the creation of an informal group they called the “Ao no kai”, or “Blue Group”. When the group dissolved, Ogawa and Tsuchimoto each went on their own way to make their first important independent films, which took sides with the student protest movement in Japan in the mid to late 1960s.

In the years that followed, their filmmaking approach underwent a profound transformation, which can be described as a movement from “outside” to “inside”. This inward shift, which evolved towards a full implication in the struggles of the people they filmed, reached its most refined and profound development in the Minamata and Sanrizuka Series. While Tsuchimoto committed himself to document the disastrous consequences of the mercury poisoning incident in Minamata, Ogawa recorded with great diligence the struggle by farmers and student protesters to prevent the construction of the Narita International Airport in Sanrizuka.

After the waning of the Sanrizuka protests, Ogawa and his colleagues of Ogawa Productions devoted themselves to an equally ambitious project, relocating to Yamagata Prefecture and beginning a series of films focusing on the rural village of Magino. Living and working with the farmers they filmed, the collective created a unique portrait of a culture and a way of life that are rarely depicted. From his side, Tsuchimoto – and his crew – continued to painstakingly document the effects of the Minamata tragedy on the life of the local fishing communities, while also redirecting their focus towards the dangers of nuclear power and the “theft of the sea” perpetrated by giant business conglomerates.

With the benefit of hindsight, the films of Ogawa and Tsuchimoto reveal themselves as monumental works in progress which remain open to incessant processes of debate and development. They made films that convey a material understanding of the world they document, films not on a subject, but with the subject. The astonishing commitment and persistence invested in their work continues to raise timely and pertinent questions about the responsibility, politics and ethics of documentary
filmmaking in the face of injustice and adversity. In that way, their films still accomplish what they were meant to do in the first place: to cultivate shared spaces of collective thought and struggle.

This publication aims to trace the trajectories of Ogawa Shinsuke and Tsuchimoto Noriaki, who film critic Hasumi Shigehiko respectively called “the filmmaker of the soil” and “the filmmaker of the sea”. The publication has taken the form of a scrapbook which assembles a patchwork of writings, quotes and interviews that we were able to track down and translate, with the help of numerous other “amateurs” who admire and cherish the work of these two filmmakers.

In all its modesty, we dearly hope that this body of texts, most of which are available here for the very first time in English, can serve as a stepping stone to a wider recognition and appreciation of these unique and singular practices of filmmaking which never cease to inspire and actuate.

Stoffel Debuysere, Courtisane
Elias Grootaers, Sabzian

Publication available via Courtisane bookshop

On the occasion of the screening of Die Macht der Gefühle (Alexander Kluge, 1983) at CINEMATEK, organised by Courtisane (17 – 19 DECEMBER, 2018), Sabzian published a selection of texts and excerpts from the accompanying book Die Macht der Gefühle (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1984) in a new Dutch translation. Compiled and introduced by Stoffel Debuysere.

Available on Sabzian.

“Cinema is de publieke hoofdzetel van gevoelens in de twintigste eeuw,” aldus Alexander Kluge in het boek dat dient ter begeleiding van Die Macht der Gefühle (1983), een film die hij zelf beschouwt als een sleutelwerk in zijn voortdurend streven om gevoelens te herdenken in hun complexiteit en capaciteit. Met deze onderneming lijkt Kluge zich in het zog te begeven van Theodor W. Adorno en Max Horkheimer, die in hun Dialektik der Aufklärung (1944) suggereerden dat de instrumentalisering van de rede door de massacultuur een domesticatie van gevoelens met zich meebrengt. Vandaar de noodzaak, in Kluges woorden, “om gevoelens uit hun Babylonische gevangenschap te bevrijden” en ze tegelijk terug te roepen uit hun ballingschap in de louter intieme sfeer, waar ze van hun krachten zijn ontdaan. En waar elders kunnen gevoelens beter tot hun recht worden gebracht dan in cinema, deze bijzondere kunstvorm die zich in de loop van de twintigste eeuw heeft opgewerkt tot een ware “krachtcentrale van gevoelens”?

Vreemd genoeg ontdekte Kluge zijn liefde voor cinema dankzij twee denkers die een niet onbelangrijke rol hebben gespeeld in de kritische traditie die cinema tot vermoeiens toe heeft afgeschreven als een vorm van “opium voor de massa”. Het waren immers Adorno en Horkheimer die Kluge, eertijds werkzaam als juridische adviseur bij de Frankfurter Schule, introduceerden bij Fritz Lang, die hem als assistent aan boord nam bij het maken van Der Tiger von Eschnapur (1959). De kritische theoretici die de jurist wilden ontdoen van zijn affectie voor literatuur door hem naar de verdorven industriële arena van cinema te sturen, voedden onopzettelijk de singulariteit van een kunstenaar die zich van dan af voornam om “cinema te maken zoals het schrijven van boeken” en “boeken te schrijven zoals het maken van cinema”.

Ontsteld door de vernederingen die hij Fritz Lang zag ondergaan in de greep van de filmindustrie, begon Kluge socio-fictionele miniaturen te schrijven die voor het eerst verzameld zouden worden in Lebensläufe (1962). Tegelijk begon hij samen met Peter Schamoni te werken aan wat zijn eerste kortfilm zou worden, Brutalität in Stein (1961), een opgemerkt werkstuk dat een nieuwe aandacht inluidde voor de verhouding van Duitsland met zijn onfrisse verleden, in tegenspraak met de amnesie die karakteristiek was voor “Papas Kino”. Het voorbeeld van de Franse Nouvelle Vague sterkte Kluge in zijn overtuiging dat een nieuwe onafhankelijke cinema noodzakelijk was om een slagvaardige Duitse filmcultuur tot leven te brengen. In 1962 was hij een van de ondertekenaars van het “Oberhausener Manifest” en een van de stichters van het Institut für Filmgestaltung in Ulm, die allebei hebben bijgedragen tot de grondvesting van de zogenaamde “Nieuwe Duitse Cinema”.

In zijn ambitie om alternatieve vormen van filmproductie te vrijwaren en media te verlossen uit de greep van de cultuurindustrie, stichtte Kluge later ook de “Development Company for Television Program” (DCTP), die zich tot op vandaag trots situeert als een “onafhankelijke producent binnen het commerciële televisielandschap”. Sinds 1987 dient DCTP als het platform voor Kluges eigen Kulturmagazine dat bestaande televisieformats approprieert en subverteert. Eerder dan over culturele events te rapporteren met behulp van gestandaardiseerde modellen kiest hij ervoor om “vormen te ontwikkelen die kunnen overleven temidden van deze onmogelijke situatie die elke expressie vernietigt”, vormen die bovendien druk uitvoeren op de “spieren van de verbeelding”.

Kluge positioneert zich als een bondgenoot van de “onderdrukte klassen” van de menselijke zintuigen en kiest ervoor om kwaliteiten aan te spreken zoals nieuwsgierigheid, koppigheid en de honger naar het kijken, luisteren en correleren. Hij contrasteert de “dramaturgie van de onvermijdelijke tragedie”, typerend voor de 19e-eeuwse opera, met een “dramaturgie van Zusammenhang”, gebaseerd op principes van montage, simultaniteit en polyfonie. Dit zoeken naar Zusammenhang staat ook centraal in zijn literaire oeuvre, dat grotendeels werd verzameld in Chronik der Gefühle (2000, recent in het Frans vertaald als Chronique des sentiments). Aan de basis van deze “livre-océan”, zoals Georges Didi-Huberman het werk heeft gedefinieerd, ligt Alexander Kluges decennialange onderneming van “het vertellen van verhalen over hoe gevoelens niet machteloos zijn”. Een onderneming die ongetwijfeld meer aandacht verdient.

Stoffel Debuysere

”The love experience will be reshaped into a relationship that is meant to be between one human being and another, no longer one that flows from man to woman.”

This quote from Rainer Maria Rilke, which adorns the end of Lou n’a pas dit non (1994), encapsulates the essence of Anne-Marie Miéville’s quest, which is driven by a universal, imperishable question: how to live together? The same film illustrates par excellence how her singular trajectory finds its way through art history in all its forms, from the sculpture of the mythical couple of Mars and Venus, which occupies a central place in the film, to an extensive pas de deux from Jean-Claude Gallotta’s Docteur Labus that expresses a broad palette of friction and tension between a man and a woman. Again and again, the possible relationship with another is examined as a constant field of tension between stasis and movement, between silence and speech.

Miéville’s delicate study of the challenges of communication and the trials of love is already central in her first short film, How Can I Love (a Man When I Know He Don’t Want Me) (1983), whose title is extracted from Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones (1954). The theme of Carmen doesn’t accidentally recall Prénom Carmen (1983), a film for which Miéville herself provided the screenplay to Jean-Luc Godard, her companion in life and work since they collaborated on the film that would become Ici et ailleurs (1973-‘76). But whilst Prénom Carmen revolves around the unrequited love of a man for a woman, the roles in How Can I Love are reversed. A reversal, as Alain Bergala has remarked, that changes everything, not in the least as seen in the mise-en-scène that reflects the desire for togetherness as a permanent arena in which men more often than not shield themselves, incapable or unwilling to open up to a possible dialogue.

The figure of the man who has lost his confidence in the potential of discourse returns in Le Livre de Marie (1984-‘85), in which a marital separation is portrayed with remarkable elegance and precision from the perspective of the young daughter, who expresses her resistance to the parental drama with the help of language, music and dance. In Miéville’s first feature length film, Mon cher sujet (1988), the power of word and song is employed by three women of as many generations — grandmother, mother and daughter — to acquire a place in a world where women are expected to share everything while men tend to flee from every commitment to share. Also in her following film, Lou n’a pas dit non, it’s the woman who, by exploring various forms of expression and creation, paves the way for a possible exchange, in a perpetual movement of approach, confrontation and reconciliation.

How to give shape to commonality in difference? In Nous sommes tous encore ici (1996), originally devised for theatre, this question is approached using extracts from the work of Plato and Hannah Arendt that resonate in the life of a couple played by Jean-Luc Godard and Aurore Clément, who unmistakably evokes the presence of Miéville. In Après la réconciliation (2000), Godard and Miéville themselves act as two of the four characters involved in philosophical reflections on the powers and limits of language and the challenge to learn to live together with someone else who will always remain a stranger. Sometimes brutal and confrontational, then tender and comforting, Anne-Marie Miéville’s work continues to trust in “the love we are struggling and toiling to prepare the way for, the love that consists in two solitudes protecting, defining and welcoming one another”. (Rilke)

Compiled on the occasion of a retrospective film programme organized by CINEMATEK and Courtisane (Brussels, 4 – 30 October 2018), this publication aims to provide a summary of the trajectory of Anne-Marie Miéville on the basis of a series of texts and interviews that were produced between 1984 and 2018. The French and English versions of these texts are brought together here for the first time.

Stoffel Debuysere, Courtisane & Gerard-Jan Claes, Sabzian

Publication (EN/FR) available via Courtisane bookshop

“I feel I have one relation with Bresson, another with Ghatak. But there is a wide difference between the two. It is strange that I have a relation with two persons so contrary in disposition. I am often trying to figure out how to strike a chord between the two. I have absorbed both of them.”
– Mani Kaul–

How can one mention Robert Bresson and Ritwik Ghatak in the same breath, let alone blend them into one single cinematic vision? While the films of the first are most often associated with constraint and rigor, those of the latter are generally identified with sensuousness and exuberance. While one aspired to free cinema from the influence of theatre, the other hinged his cinematic endeavors on his experience with the Indian People’s Theatre Association. Yet for all their differences and peculiarities, Bresson’s ascetic studies of penance and grace and Ghatak’s epic tales of displacement and dispossession seem to have at least one thing in common: a profound impatience with the conventions of dramatic plot structure. It is this impatience that has fuelled Mani Kaul’s ambition to pave his own path through the world of cinema, one that has guided him towards the study of other forms of art, notably of the Indian traditions of miniature painting and Dhrupad music. In these traditions, Mani Kaul (1944 – 2011) found something that he wished to transpose to cinema: an abjuration of the notion of convergence that is ubiquitous in the Renaissance period in western art in favor of a logic of dispersion and elaboration, as exemplified by the improvisation upon a single scale in Indian Raag music, able to transform a singular figure into a concert of flowing perceptions.

Perhaps this particular attention towards subtle shifts and unfolding movements can be traced back to Mani Kaul’s childhood. As a young boy growing up in the city of Udaipur in Rajasthan, Kaul was suffering from acute myopia, which for a long time he assumed as a normal mode of vision. When he finally saw the world through his first pair of glasses, he would time and again get up at the crack of dawn to see the city come alive before his eyes in a continuous play of light and colour. Right from his early documentary Forms and Design (1968), which sets up an opposition between the functional tools of the industrial age and the decorative forms from Indian tradition, Kaul made it apparent that he was interested in the possibilities of form over functionality. In his first feature film, Uski Roti (A Day’s Bread, 1970), inspired by a short story by Mohan Rakesh and the paintings of Amrita Sher-Gil, he pared down plot and dialogue to a bare minimum while emphasizing the experience of time and duration and blurring the distinction between the actual and the imagined. In one of Kaul’s subsequent feature films, Duvidha (In Two Minds, 1973), an adaptation of a Rajasthani folk-tale, the colour schemes, the framing and the editing were directly inspired by the classical styles of Kangra and Basouli miniature paintings. With this radical departure from the prevalent cinematic norms, Kaul established himself as one of the protagonists of the so called “New Cinema Movement,” alongside notable colleagues such as Kumar Shahani, John Abraham and K.K. Mahajan, who had also studied with Ritwik Ghatak at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune.

The focus on process rather than product was also central to the work of the Yukt Film Cooperative that was set up by a group of FTII graduates and students in the mid-1970s, in response to the state of emergency that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared across India. Kaul, by then a renowned filmmaker, collaborated on their interpretation of Ghashiram Kotwal (1977), based on a popular Marathi play of the same name, which draws out sharp parallels between that dark period of repression and the authoritarian Peshwa regime that ruled over western India on the eve of European colonization. Although the film might appear like a deviance in Kaul’s trajectory, its mixture of history and mythology, traditional folk forms and complex visual structures brings into focus some of the concerns that are central to his cinematic research. His study of Indian aesthetics, folk art and music would become more prevalent in subsequent poetic documentary features such as Dhrupad (1982), focused on the legendary Dagar family of musicians; Mati Manas (1984), about the ancient tradition of terracotta artisanry and the myths associated with it; and Siddheshwari (1989), an expansive portrait of thumri singer Siddheshwari Devi which amalgamates multiple temporalities, geographies and realities. By that time, Kaul had begun his studies of Dhrupad music with one of the members of the Dagar family, Ustad Zia Moiuddin, and derived a number of cinematic approaches from this musical idiom. As critic Shanta Gokhale has noted: “Classical Indian music is to Mani Kaul the purest artistic search … Just as a good musician has mastered the musical method of construction which saves his delineation of a raga from becoming formless, so a good filmmaker has a firm control over cinematic methods of construction and can therefore allow himself to improvise.”

Towards the end of the 1980s, Kaul found another gateway for his cinematic search in the literature of Dostoyevsky, of whom he adapted A Gentle Creature and The Idiot. Twenty years after Bresson adapted the former into Une femme douce (1969), Kaul made his own version with Nazar (The Gaze, 1989), whose concert of exchanged glances and delicate gestures unfolds like a musical performance sliding from one note to another. In search of even more open-ended working procedures, one of the experiments he attempted in Ahmaq (Idiot, 1992) and continued in subsequent films was to not let the cameraman look through the viewfinder while a shot is being taken. While fine-tuning the process of precise preparation combined with an embrace of the dissonant and the aleatory, Kaul ventured to let his compositions drift ever further away from linearity and unity, allowing for the expression of multiple flows. “A film should not replicate the rhythms of daily life,” he would say, “it should create its own rhythms.” Mani Kaul kept on pursuing his explorations until his untimely death in 2011, leaving behind a wealth of films and writings which unfortunately remain all too invisible to this day. This modest publication, compiled on the occasion of the program Soft Notes on A Sharp Scale — The Rambling Figures of Mani Kaul, produced as part of the Courtisane Festival 2018 (28 March – 1 April), aims to give some insight into the cinematic quest of this visionary filmmaker through a collection of essays and interviews that were written and published between 1974 and 2008. Assembled here for the first time, they offer us some glimpses of the reasoning behind Kaul’s unfading endeavours to “salvage experience.”

Stoffel Debuysere & Arindam Sen (Eds.)

Publication available in Courtisane bookshop

At the turn of this century, Wang Bing entered film history when he boarded a freight train with a small rented DV camera and started filming the snowy landscapes of the industrial district of Tiexi in northeastern China. For the following two years, the former photography and art student documented the decline of the district’s state-owned factories, tirelessly following the remaining workers in the corridors and expanses of the complexes. Out of the three hundred hours of footage, he created the monumental Tiexi qu [West of the Tracks] (2002): a three-part, nine-hour document of China’s transition from state-run to free market economy, and the ensuing desolation of the working class that makes way for an expansion of cheap and precarious labour. From then on out, Wang Bing has continued to chronicle the everyday lives of those who find themselves on the margins of society amidst the vast and rapidly changing landscapes of 21st-century China, unveiling what all too often remains invisible under the guise of its “growth miracle” and its wilful cancellation of historical memory.

Driven by an unceasing desire to film and to discover, Wang Bing never ceases to explore new places and situations, allowing himself to be led by chance encounters. From the Tiexi district, he moved his centre of activity towards the northwestern regions of China. In the Gobi Desert, he worked for several years in secret on Jiabiangou [The Ditch] (2010), his only fiction feature to date, which recounts the struggles to survive in Jiabiangou, one of the labour camps that were in use during Mao Zedong’s Anti-Rightist Movement in the years from 1957 to 1961. More south-west, in the province of Yunnan, he documented the lives of a broken, impoverished farmer’s family in a small mountain village in San zimei [Three Sisters] (2012) and the inmates of a decrepit mental hospital in Feng ai [’Til Madness Do Us Part] (2013), before following refugee families fleeing the ongoing civil war in Myanmar in Ta’ang (2016) and travelling with migrant garment workers to the southeastern city of Huzhou in Ku Qian [Bitter Money] (2016). Within this internal geography, long-term projects are alternated with more modest but no less powerful ones. During the preparations for The Ditch, Wang Bing recorded in barely one take He Fengming’s startling testimony of the persecutions that she and her family endured throughout the Anti-Rightist Movement and the Cultural Revolution. While filming Three Sisters, he met two adolescent boys whose daily experience of ennui and repetition in a cramped factory-owned hut he captured in a handful of fixed long shots. And in the course of documenting Huzhou’s urban world of sleepless sweatshops and labourers, Wang Bing spent a week along the desolate shores of the Yangtze River in order to film the last days of Mrs. Fang before she passed away.

From the brutal conditions of modern-day slavery to the barren vestiges of disappearing histories, from youngsters squandering their time to elderly in the face of death, from the industrious to the recumbent, the striking oppositions and reversals in Wang Bing’s work are also accompanied by a common perseverance: a determination to extricate from the core of exhaustion the ultimate fragments of the possible. Carefully navigating his camera through the encountered spaces, respectfully juggling the balance between distance and proximity, he patiently searches to capture the actuality and capacity of people who could be identified as seeming to experience little more than ‘bare life’. Instead of enclosing those ignored by the radar of History in a confined framework that supposedly befits their miniscule lives, he chooses to give them time to exist, opening up their lifeworld in order to affirm how their bodies, voices and gestures, too, have a story to tell.

Gerard-Jan Claes (Sabzian) and Stoffel Debuysere (Courtisane)

Published on the occasion of the Wang Bing focus program at the Courtisane festival 2018 (March 28 to April 1, 2018)
and the subsequent program at CINEMATEK (April 2 – 5, 2018). An initiative of Courtisane, in collaboration with CIFA
(Chinese Independent Film Archive), KASK / School of Arts and CINEMATEK, with the support of the Department of
Chinese Studies, Ghent University.

Publication compiled, edited and published by Sabzian, Courtisane and CINEMATEK.
Special thanks to Zhang Yaxuan and Camille Bourgeus.

Publication available via Courtisane bookshop