A
Visit to Ogawa Productions
by Oshige Jun' Ichiro, Director; produced
by Yasui Yoshio
First Run/Icarus Films. Brooklyn, NY,
2001
VHS, col., 62 mins.
Sales, $390.00; rental, $100.00
Distributor’s website: http://www.frif.com.
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University
mosher@svsu.edu
The Japanese film director Nagisa Oshima
(b. 1932) has a wide ranging curiosity
that he has translated into memorable
imagery. In the Realm of the Senses
(1976) explored red-hot erotic obsession
to the point of asphyxiation and mutilation
in a single bordello bedchamber in 1930s
Tokyo. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
(1983) featured a British officer––played
by David Bowie––executed by
burial in tropical sands up to his neck
for the impertinence of kissing the officer
holding his troops captive.
A Visit to Ogawa Productions documents
a 1981 visit by Oshima to the green countryside
of Yamagata, where the filmmaking collective
led by Shinsuke Ogawa (1935-1992) was
immersed in the research and production
of A Japanese Village: Furuyashikimura,
their feature-length documentary on the
seasonal cycle of rice cultivation. After
a brief stroll into the village, greeting
a couple of farmers and curious kids,
Oshima goes indoors and sits down opposite
Ogawa and a couple of his collaborators.
The phrase "talking heads" describes this
film as the conversation takes place in
front of a single camera, usually set
on a single medium shot of the men around
a table. This is a serious hour-long discussion.
It’s about rice, and what Ogawa and
crew have learned that it takes to effectively
grow it, and what it took for the filmmakers
to learn about the slice of society that
grows rice for the Japanese nation. Less
existentially effusive than My Dinner
With Andre, there is none of the visual
novelty of the fictional Oshima movies
recalled above to be found here, just
men talking of the sturdy crafts of food
and responsible documentary cinema production
as the stationary camera rolls.
A Visit to Ogawa Productions is
a document of Oshima picking the mind
of another filmmaker, one who was immersed
in agricultural details. Perhaps the footage
of the conversation was originally intended
to serve Oshima as reference material
for an unmade fiction film set in a rural
rice-farming milieu.
