Ryusuke Hamaguchi: Survive, they say

Shot between 2011-2012, the four films (The Sound of the Waves, Voices from the Waves: Shinchimachi, Voices from the Waves: Kesennuma, Storytellers) are driven by the power of the testimonies the filmmakers gathered while travelling along the Sanriku Coast between Miyako (Iwate prefecture) in the North and Shinchi (Fukushima prefecture) in the South. All four films are composed of a series of interviews between two people: duos of sisters, spouses, friends, colleagues, neighbours, or one of the two filmmakers and a person affected by the disaster. Each person’s account of their experience of March 11 is integrated into a more general discussion about life after the disaster, about what really matters to each subject. Each of these interviews has its moments of great darkness but each builds towards a form of comfort that begins with mutual respect. And the striking form of listening in these four films, made possible by the cinematographic device developed by Sakai and Hamaguchi, has remained one of the hallmarks of the latter’s cinema. 

To enable the interviewees to listen to each other and free up the viewer’s attention for these exchanges, Hamaguchi and Sakai developed a form of mise en scène (almost a scenography) for the interviews that the filmmakers then repeated identically, filming three, sometimes four hours of interviews and retaining between 15 – 30 minutes of them. The exchanges are introduced by a few cutaway shots of the filmmakers criss-crossing the region in their car, superimposed with an image of a map. These shots make it possible to situate the intimate space – a space for listening and speaking (kiki-gatari), as the filmmakers put it – created by each interview within the geography of the disaster. The interview then unfolds in two stages. At the beginning, each interviewee introduces themselves. ‘We wanted to highlight the artificiality of the situation,’ explains Hamaguchi. After all, as soon as the camera starts rolling, everyone is playing a role: ‘When an individual faces the camera to tell a story, that individual has already started acting’ (Hamaguchi again). During the first part of the interview, the interviewees face each other and are filmed at 270 degrees, with the shoulder of the interviewee in the foreground. This allows conversations to emerge. 

Later on, the speakers are filmed in close-up. A drawing representing the person they are talking to has been affixed to the camera. In this second configuration, the impression the viewer has of a face-to-face discussion is, in fact, artificial. The two people are actually sitting next to each other. The gaze of the camera induces more intimate and weighty words, while producing the fiction of a face-to-face encounter. The shot-reverse shot offers a brief let-up in the sometimes-intense expression of pain. It allows us to welcome and hold this pain. In the masterclass he gave at the ENS in Lyon in 2018, Hamaguchi explained that these films had taught him ‘the power of listening’: ‘When one person takes interest in another, listening generates an incredible energy that allows us to see and hear things we didn’t expect’. He also explained that to capture ‘what people hide within themselves’, as Cassavetes, Bresson or Ozu do, and to make a work of ‘cinematographic realisation’ (enshutsu), you have to expose yourself – to ‘offer something to the interviewee, something equivalent to what they are offering.’

The final instalment in the trilogy, Storytellers, reveals the underlying theme of the first three films: the spoken word and a space for authentic communication – the reciprocal ‘space for listening’. Here, this means that stories are stripped of tragedy, as we delve into the oral traditions of tales and legends from Tohoku, following Mrs Ono’s list of stories. It’s easy to see why the interviews in the first three films deal with language as a means of survival in the aftermath of the disaster, and why each interview conveys a unique vision of language as a form of human life. Such is the case with the moving exchange with the young librarian from Shinchi (in Voices from the Waves: Shinchimachi), who confides her discomfort with words, and how much other survivors struggle to speak.

Following an aftershock from the earthquake that almost interrupts the interview, once the sun has returned to the library where the filmed conversation is taking place – and thanks to the encouraging words of her interviewer – the young woman finally conveys her ‘joy of talking’ to the filmmaker and overcomes her inexpressiveness. Then there’s the resident of Minamisanriku who recounts the 11 March, the day she was supposed to meet up with her friend, who was swept away by the tsunami. She talks about the importance of friendship to her, the books they both read, and about the opportunity to talk, to be listened to and understood. These little miracles of documentary speech in each of the four films in the ‘Tohoku trilogy’ are made possible by the device put in place by the directors, which, through its artificiality, liberates voices.

These miracles are also the result of the kindness and gentleness of the two directors/interviewers. Their commitment to the victims is one of the elements that links this trilogy to the Japanese tradition of protest documentary, in which the filmmaker works alongside the victims and inside the image in order to make their voices heard, and against their own self-censorship and the authorities’ efforts at denial. Tsuchimoto Noriaki, for example, filmed a series of films with the victims of Minamata between 1971 and 1975 to inform and educate people living in the area around the Chisso pollution plant about a disease, and to help sufferers gain recognition of their victim status. Documentary filmmaking brings about a process of recognition on the part of the victims, which is achieved primarily through the spoken word. The filmmaker takes on the role of sound recordist in order to conduct the interviews with the victims themselves. What these exchanges have in common is that they reveal to the filmmaker the links that people have forged with their environment: relationships based on work, culture, care and the sea, for example, in the case of the fishermen of Minamata and Aomori.

These four films also form a network of connections with Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s narrative work, which has won awards at the major Western festivals: the Berlinale (Silver Bear for Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy in 2015), Cannes (Screenplay Prize for Drive My Car in 2021), Venice (Golden Lion for Evil Does Not Exist in 2023). The ghosts that crop up in the conversations and tales of the Tohoku trilogy are a continuation of the exploration of loss that lies at the heart of his fictions, in the form of the doubling of and the persistent presence of a missing person in the heroine’s mind in Asako I & II (2018), and The Depths (2010). While the filmmakers explain that they wanted to “make the voices of the dead heard” in their Tohoku trilogy, the dramas, on the other hand, convey the feeling of loss with the kind of disturbing strangeness that mobilises the fantastical. In Heaven Is Still Far Away (2016), a young otaku is possessed by a dead girl who appears and speaks to him. The girl’s older sister makes a documentary interviewing people who knew her younger sister. In a beautiful scene, the young boy converses with the dead girl in front of the camera, gradually leading the two sisters to an exchange beyond the grave. Here Hamaguchi makes a documentary breach into fiction to show how cinema can make the living and the dead communicate, and in so doing extends the documentary endeavour of the Tohoku trilogy.

It’s as if this trilogy of films, seminal and matricial within Hamaguchi’s body of work, has been brewing for a long decade, for the amount of time it took for him to think through the environmental concerns that burst forth in a fine, complex and powerful way in his recent ‘ecological trilogy’, which responds, years later, to the Tohoku trilogy. Walden (2022) and the diptych Evil Does Not Exist/Gift (2023) interrogate the legacy of transcendentalist ecocriticism (Emerson and Thoreau), using the cinematic medium to transform our perceptions of what links us to others, to the living and to our world. With Walden, Hamaguchi surprised fans of his urban dramas by opting for an experimental form (a two-minute still shot of the surface of a pond reflecting pine trees, with Jane Wyman’s voice from Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows quoting Thoreau), and then by using his cinema in service of the music of Eiko Ishibashi and her dissonant strings in the wide-ranging drama Evil Doesn’t Exist, and Gift. Indeed, Hamaguchi continues to dig deeper into this vein of his cinema, which has its origins in his ‘Tohoku trilogy’, inviting us to reclaim our ability to listen and observe, to better connect with the living and the dead.

Élise Domenach

Elise Domenach is a professor of film studies and image and sound aesthetics at the ENS Louis-Lumière, and a film critic for Esprit and Positif. A film philosopher specialising in Asian eco-cinema, she is the author of two books on the cinema of Fukushima: Fukushima in Film. Voices from the Japanese Cinema (UTCP Booklet, Tokyo, 2015) and Le Paradigme Fukushima au cinéma. Ce que voir veut dire (2011-2013), Mimesis, Sesto San Giovanni, 2021).