Bueno chicos, ya tenemos aquí el segundo documental de
Hani, especialmente dedicado a
cora, que sé le hace mucha ilusión
. Lo comparto con el
título en inglés.
Como ahora no tengo tiempo de extenderme dejo algunos comentarios en inglés:
...Hani Susumu contributed documentaries that set the film world off-balance. These were the kind of seismographic film events that Bazin describes, where the river of cinema begins carving new routes after the equilibrium of their bed is upset. Although Hani is best known for feature films like Bad Boys (Furyo shonen, 1961), He and She (Kare to kanojo, 1963), and Nanami: The Inferno of First Love (Hatsukoi: Jigokuhen, 1968), he started his film career with documentaries that decisively revealed the conventional rigidity of the dominant style. He made his first film in 1954, and it was entitled Children of the Classroom (Kyoshitsu no kodomotachi). This was a Monbusho-funded education film designed for people who were interested in becoming teachers. The initial idea was to make a documentary in the usual fictive educational film manner, using a child actor to play a problem student. However, this presented an extremely difficult role for a child so Hani began to consider using a real school and real children. Everyone thought it was impossible, but he went to a school to find out. In the first half hour of observation, his presence agitated the students, but after two or three hours, they forgot about him.
Audiences were stunned by the spontaneity captured in Children of the Classroom. Close to direct cinema, which it predates, this was actually much smarter filmmaking. While American filmmakers like Richard Leacock and the Maysles brothers initially clothed their work in the rhetoric of objectivity, Hani used observation to approach the subjectivities of the individuals he filmed. This is the decisive difference between the postwar conception of documentary in Japan and that of the Euro-American traditions. It was this core difference that Tsuchimoto and Ogawa would elaborate in their subsequent work, and which was embodied in Hani’s first films.
For example, Hani’s sequel, Children Who Draw (E o kaku kodomotachi, 1955), simply shows children interacting in an art class. As we begin to recognize different personalities, Hani cuts to the paintings they are in the process of creating. This jump from apparently objective, observed phenomenon to vivid representations of the children’s inner worlds is accompanied by an astounding shift from black and white to brilliant color. Far from the stodgy realism of his contemporaries, Hani’s films won international awards and were distributed across Japan through Toho Studio.
Extraído de la reciente retrospectiva de
Hani en el
Harvard Film Archive:
Children Who Draw explores the delicate chemistry of school children interacting in an art class through a constant juxtaposition of observational black-and-white portraits of the young children with lyrical passages shot in vivid color exploring their imaginative and expressive paintings. Experimenting with color as an intimate expression of the children’s inner worlds, a tool for deeper psychological investigation, Hani allows his camera to roam freely across the drawings, “de-framing’” and enagaging the artwork in a manner reminiscent of Alain Resnais’s Guernica (1950). Although originally intended as an educational study of children’s psychology, Children Who Draw became a surprise hit thanks to wide distribution in Japan by Toho and Nikkatsu studios. Print courtesy the Japan Foundation
