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Noriaki Tsuchimoto

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Noriaki Tsuchimoto (土本典昭, Tsuchimoto Noriaki) (11 December 1928, Gifu Prefecture, Japan - 24 June 2008) was a Japanese documentary film director known for his films on Minamata disease and examinations of the effects of modernization on Asia. Tsuchimoto and Shinsuke Ogawa have been called the "two figures tower over the landscape of Japanese documentary."

Early years

Tsuchimoto was born in Gifu Prefecture, but raised in Tokyo. Angered by the emperor system that led Japan into war, he participated in radical student groups like Zengakuren when he entered Waseda University and joined the Japanese Communist Party. For a time he was even involved in the JCP's plan for armed revolt in the mountains and also was arrested for participating in protests. Expelled from Waseda in 1953, he could initially only find work at the Japan-China Friendship Society until he ran into Keiji Yoshino, a filmmaker and executive at Iwanami Productions (Iwanami Eiga), a branch of Iwanami Shoten devoted to making educational and public relations (PR) documentaries. Inspired by Susumu Hani's film Children of the Classroom, he accepted Yoshino's offer to join Iwanami in 1956.

Iwanami era

Tsuchimoto was only an employee at Iwanami Productions for a year (after that, he worked there as a hired freelancer), but he made films alongside other important directors such as Hani, Shinsuke Ogawa, Kazuo Kuroki, and Yōichi Higashi, and cameramen like Jun'ichi Segawa, Tatsuo Suzuki, and Masaki Tamura. The works he made were primarily sponsored by Japanese corporations celebrating their achievements in a period of high economic growth, but the intellectually liberal Iwanami was "a hot bed of experimentation," in the words of film scholar Mark Nornes; a place where, according to Tsuchimoto, people wanted to do "their own individual shots that could only be done in images not in words." Tsuchimoto's most famous work for Iwanami was An Engineer's Assistant (1963), a film made for Japan National Rail about train engineers working hard to keep on time.

Conflicts with sponsors and the company inevitably resulted, and it was in particular one controversy over two of Tsuchimoto's contribution to a series of documentaries on Japan's prefectures that led the Iwanami filmmakers to form the "Blue Group" (Ao no Kai), an informal organization in which members discussed eachother's films and advocated for a new documentary. Many in the Blue Group later left Iwanami to begin producing documentaries independently.

One other film Tsuchimoto directed during this period was On the Road: A Document (1963), a film commissioned by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police to promote traffic safety in the year before the Tokyo Olympics. Tsuchimoto, however, worked with a cab driver's union to produce a strong condemnation of urban Japan seen through the eyes of a taxi driver. The film won several awards, but the Police refused to show it and it remained on the shelf for years.

Independent filmmaking

Tsuchimoto was one of the first of the Iwanami-related directors to go independent. In 1965, he began a documentary for television on an exchange student who was under threat of being deported back to Malaysia, despite the fact it was likely he would be punished for his political activities. The network withdrew when problems arose with the Malaysian government, but Tsuchimoto decided to make the film, Exchange Student Chua Swee Lin, anyway. Gathering donations, he placed his camera firmly on the student's side and eventually prevented the deportation. In Nornes's words, "This is a move that started a movement rather than represented it," and became a model for later committed independent documentary.

He made documentaries about the student movement while beginning his most famous work, a series of documentaries about the mercury poisoning incident in Minamata, Japan.

Filmography

References

  1. ^ Nornes, Abé Mark (2011). "Noriaki Tsuchimoto and the Reverse View Documentary". The Documentaries of Noriaki Tsuchimoto. Zakka Films. pp. 2–4.
  2. ^ "Noriaki Tsuchimoto: film-maker". The Times. 12 July 2008. Retrieved 3 May 2011.
  3. ^ Yasuo, Yoshio (3). "Documentarists of Japan, No. 7: Tsuchimoto Noriaki". Documentary Box (8). {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  4. ^ Nornes, Abé Mark (2007). Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-4907-5.

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