At the swanky dinner after the recent Bafta awards, a ripple of excitement swept the room when Daniel Day-Lewis walked in. It wasn't only because he is handsome, or that he looks like a walking Egon Schiele drawing. As he doesn't live in London, sightings of DDL at movie blingfests are rare treats these days, so heads turned.
I don't live in London, and come from Ireland, where DDL relocated, but even I felt the allure of someone who has gone to live and think elsewhere. No other art form is better at creating sense of place than cinema, yet its history churns with migrations and émigrés, people making films set in places that they are just getting to know. In the studio era, location shooting was rare. Not a second of Casablanca was shot in Casablanca. Directors who fled the Nazis—Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, Michael Curtiz and so on—often made movies set in their adoptive home, California, but they looked at that home through shadows and scepticism.
For a time after the second world war, realist cinema reversed this profound idea that movie places were landscapes of the mind. You had to go to where your film was set; not to do so was shallow or oldfashioned. John Huston shot much of The African Queen in Congo and Uganda. Soon this hit-and-run approach to production was itself questioned: what could a filmmaker absorb about a place if she or he was only there a few months? Where a filmmaker lived became an issue.
In the coming decades, bolder directors smote such ethical worries like a gnat. The American director Stanley Kubrick, who took up residence in England, was uninterested in the realities of place: the Vietnam scenes in Full Metal Jacket were filmed in and around London. Yet he was such a stickler for the architecture of space that by the end of a movie like The Shining, you almost have a site plan in your head. The Danish director Lars von Trier is similarly inclined to precision-tooling space with his camera while haughtily disregarding location. He's never been to the US, yet he has set three of his films there, shooting them in Sweden or Denmark.
Lofty auteurs like Kubrick and Von Trier (sometimes) get away with floating above questions of mere realism. The most revealing examples of the importance of residency lie outside the Anglo-Saxon world. The once great Mohsen Makhmalbaf has not made a plausible film since he left Iran. The Iranian authorities tried to force his contemporary Jafar Panahi out, yet he stayed and has remained at the height of his creative powers. When I asked Iran's most garlanded filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami, about this, he said "a tree grows best where it's planted." This rule is far from universal. But it's long been a matter of concern for African cinema that a high proportion of its best francophone directors end up in Paris, because that's where the money is. It's an issue of talent retention but, also, indigeneity.
It's not unknown for filmmakers to follow a story for decades—look at Michael Apted's 7-Up series—but Ogawa and his team actually moved in with the farmers. The effect on the movies is remarkable. At first they are shot and cut conventionally, but gradually the editing rhythms become slower. As the filmmakers, mostly city people, settled in, they became absorbed in "village time," and wanted to capture it. Over nearly a decade they became part of the lives they had been depicting. This embedding is explained in part by decades of debate in Japan that took place from 1957 onwards, when anti-Stalinist critic and filmmaker Toshio Matsumoto began writing about the filmmaker's subjectivity, or shutai. Ogawa's collective and the great documentarist Noriaki Tsuchimoto started discussing how their own identities might become more receptive to the outside world—or taisho—that they were trying to capture. Decades of militarism, then occupation and its re-educational newsreels had made them sceptical of films made quickly and by "outsiders." They came to hate the idea of the "outside." Instead, Nornes reports, they talked of "letting the taisho enter the shutai," or becoming "wrapped up in the tasiho."
There is a radical, almost Freudian submissiveness in this idea of getting wrapped up in the real world or letting it enter you. Living in Sanrizuka was Ogawa's way of doing so. When he and his team finally left, in 1977, they moved to another village, Magino, and for another decade made poetic, fine-grained movies about its rice farmers. In an era when embedding has a different meaning, their decade-long engagements are inspiring.
The work of Ogawa and his team is far indeed from that of Daniel Day-Lewis, but there are parallels between his immersive methods and belief in small communities and theirs. Ogawa took the idea of the resident filmmaker as far as it could go. In so doing, he and his collaborators created the Asian documentary sphere, the environmental film—and a string of masterpieces.
