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REDISCOVERY
The view from the street
Tsuchimoto Noriaki's films are immersed in the language, perceptions and environment of his subjects, says Chris Fujiwara
On the Road: A Document/ Minamata: The Victims and Their World
Tsuchimoto Noriaki; Japan 1964/71; Zakka Films/Region-free; 54/120 minutes; Aspect Ratio 4:3; Features: liner notes with essay by Abé Mark Nornes and film commentaries by Mizuno Sachiko
"To record the reality in front of me as truthfully as I could was the only way I could define myself," said Tsuchimoto Noriaki (1928-2008), one of Japan's greatest documentary filmmakers. The remark reveals not modesty so much as a tremendous integrity. Tsuchimoto's cinema embodies a search for a point of view capable of representing the point of view of his subjects, and an immersion of the filmmaker's subjectivity in the contradictions of his material.
A left-wing political activist in his university years, Tsuchimoto later joined a public-relations film production company, where his fellow directors included Hani Susumu and Ogawa Shinsuke. 'On the Road: A Document' (1964) was a breakthrough film - a study of the frustrations and worries of Tokyo taxi drivers as seen from the streets. Constantly imaginative and vigorous in depicting movement but never fetishising it in a facile or celebratory way, 'On the Road' has the working-class speed and grimness of an early-1930s...