Artist Highlight: Motoharu Jonouchi
Ann Adachi-Tasch
CCJ Core Researcher Go Hirasawa and Co-curator, Co-editor of our upcoming projects on Japanese Expanded Cinema researched recently found film footages related to Motoharu Jonouchi’s works Document 6.15 and Hi Red Center Shelter Plan.
The findings will be presented at CCJ’s exhibition, More Than Cinema: Motoharu Jonouchi and Keiichi Tanaami, opening on March 6th, 2020.
Document 6.15 (1961, 16mm transferred to digital, b/w, silent + newly found related footages on digital) was a commission by the All-Japan Federation of Students’ Self-Governing Associations (Zengakuren) for a memorial service marking one year since the start of anti-Security Treaty demonstrations, and the death of Michiko Kanba, a female University of Tokyo student killed during a demonstration in June, 1960. Instead of producing a film document of the protest movement, Jonouchi and colleagues sought a cinematic and political experiment as a one-time-only event, to incite a major fracas. In addition to footage of the struggle, news footage, reenactments of violence by police and the rightists were inserted, as well as alternating still photographs of Kanba’s face and devil paintings were projected. The soundtrack, comprised of voices of the politically conflicting Zengakuren and Japanese Communist Party, simultaneously played on the left and right channels, as well as the original music “Song of the Devil.” There were also elements of a happening, with objects suspended and balloons inflated in front of the screen, and the sound of the venue itself broadcasted. Hirasawa found cut negatives that may have been part of the original screening. By digitizing these footages that are not included in the published work Document 6.15, Hirasawa aims to reimagine the original context in which the work was presented.
Hi Red Center Shelter Plan (1964, 16mm, b/w, silent, + newly found related footages on digital) is known as a rare document of a performance organized by the collective Hi Red Center wherein the weight and proportions of key cultural figures–such as Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, and Yasunao Tone–are diligently measured, as a parody of the private bomb shelter constructions prompted by Cold War fears. Jonouchi and other VAN members documented this multifaceted, interdisciplinary event, with photographs of Hi Red Center’s works prior to the Shelter Plan, the event itself, and footage of a shelter which was inserted into the rest of the film. Presented first in 1966 as evidence to support Hi Red Center member Genpei Akasegawa in his 1000-Yen-Note Trial (in which he was trialed for elaborately copying and distributing a 1,000-yen bill), then as film performance entitled VAN DOCUMENT during the second Lunami Film Gallery in 1967, the work reflects Jonouchi’s endeavor to bear witness to this strange, unfamiliar event with a film responding to Hi Red Center’s experiment in kind, rather than simply making an ordinary documentary. With techniques of repetition, he sought to recreate the one-off nature of the Shelter Plan event, or to create a new one-off event, while intervening in the medium of film-art as something to be appreciated and consumed by audiences.
In conjunction with this research, Hirasawa wrote the following essay (available in Japanese and in English). In addition, as part of CCJ’s forthcoming publication, Japanese Expanded Cinema and Intermedia: Critical Texts of the 1960s (Archive Books Berlin, April 2020), we translated Jonouchi’s writing, “Silver Screen, Die!—Preface to an Essay on a Lemniscate” (1968).
Motoharu Jonouchi (b. 1935, Ibaraki Prefecture–1986, Tokyo) entered Nihon University Fine Art Department. He was actively involved in the establishment of Nihon University Film Study Club and directed The Record of N (1959), which documented the damage caused by the Isewan Typhoon (Typhoon Vera), and embodies qualities seen in the theoretic juncture of the avant-garde and documentary filmmaking, highly considered by experimental filmmakers at the time. Around this time Jonouchi and Kanbara established VAN Film Science Research Center, another forum for collaborative creation of films where he worked with figures of different genres including Hiroshi Teshigahara, Shusaku Arakawa, Sho Kazakura, Genpei Akasegawa, Takehisa Kosugi, and others.
Representative image from: Motoharu Jonouchi, Shinjuku Station, 1974, 16mm, b/w, 14 min.