As I mentioned in my last post, I went to Ghent in Belgium at the beginning of April to participate in the Courtisane Festival 2019. The Festival was holding a mini-retrospective of the documentaries of Tsuchimoto Noriaki and I was invited to give a talk, entitled “Tsuchimoto Noriaki, Minamata, and Japanese Documentary," and introduce a couple of his films. It was a wonderful festival—small but focused—and I was thrilled to see that most of the Tsuchimoto films were practically sold out. It was also a pleasure to see Paolo Rocha’s A Ilha de Moraes (1984), an intriguing documentary by the Portuguese director about the Portuguese writer and diplomat Wenceslau de Moraes, who ended up living the last portion of his life in Japan.
Courtisane also produced a catalog of the Tsuchimoto retrospective, in collaboration with Cinematek in Brussels, which did an Ogawa Shinsuke retro. I contributed an essay to Of Sea and Soil: The Cinema of Tsuchimoto Noriaki and Ogawa Shinsuke entitled “Tsuchimoto Noriaki and Environment in Documentary Film,” which attempts to consider how Tsuchimoto’s environmentalism is based not simply in his film content but also his film form.
The catalog is particularly useful for providing English translations of crucial writings and interviews by Ogawa and Tsuchimoto, as well as additional essays by Markus Nornes, Serge Daney, and John Gianvito.
Quite fortunately, Courtisane posts its catalogs online, so here I have embedded the catalog:
Unfortunately, they don’t allow you to download it. If you have troubles reading it on this site, you can try to go to the source here.