Kawamoto-Norstein @ Forum des
Images, Day 3
Sunday, March 25, 2012
On this day I rose early and went
for a stroll around the Eiffel Tower and along the Seine with
Sakadachi-kun (see tumblr). I then hopped on the Métro Line 6 and
headed to the Cinémathèque Française at Bercy.
There was a long queue to get into the Tim Burton Exposition – the one
that first appeared at the MOMA in 2009.
Even though they only allowed so many people in per hour, the exhibition
was still overcrowded and hot. I was
surprised at the number of parents who had brought very young children to the exhibition. I witnessed one young girl’s innocent
childhood being blemished with nightmarish imagery as she stared as if transfixed at a
figure of an infant with nails in it. It
was worth putting up with the crowds to see Johnny Depp’s Edward Scissorhands (1990) costume, as well as a long row of Jack
Skellington heads from The Nightmare
Before Christmas (1993) in a lit display box. Each head had a slightly different expression
on it to give spectators an idea of the process of stop motion.
The regular museum of the Cinémathèque
Française had free admission on this day.
It was smaller than I had expected, knowing what treasures are in the
archives of the Cinémathèque Française, but there were indeed many delightful
things on display. Martin Scorcese has already donated some set pieces from Hugo (2011), but I was much more
impressed to see the original magician’s coat from Georges Méliès’ A Trip
to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune, 1920) in full colour and with hand-embroidered
shapes on it. Some of my favourite things on display at the
museum: a self portrait of Asta Nelson (here it is on flickr,
but it not as vibrantly coloured or as textured in postcard form), Mrs.
Bates' head donated by Alfred Hitchcock
shortly after the release of Psycho
(1960), Mae West’s serpent turban
from Leo Macarey’s Belle of the Nineties (1934), original
poster art from Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko (1937), and Nikolai Cherkasov’s costume from Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (1944-6).
For fans of animation, there are
many wonderful things to discover in the Cinémathèque Française.
On the walls just before one goes upstairs there is original art from Hans Richter’s Rythmus 23 (1923) and Viking
Eggeling’s Symphonie Diagonale
(1924). The Cinémathèque also hold the
collection of the pinscreen animation pioneers Alexandre Alexeieff and his wife Claire Parker. On the upper
level of the museum there are two pinscreens on display. A tableau from 1930 – presumably the one used
for the groundbreaking film Night on Bald
Mountain (Une nuit sur le mont chauve, 1933) and a larger screen from 1943. The large screen
holds approximately 1,140,000 pins and was restored for the Cinémathèque by NFB
pinscreen animator Jacques Drouin. The smaller tableau had the image of Bébé
Nicolas on it – a character invented by Alexeieff to amuse his daughter when
she was young.
There was great excitement at the
Forum des images on Day 3, for Raoul
Servais (official website) had
come from Belgium to see his old friend Yuri
Norstein. I was drinking coffee in
the Forum’s café when he entered and witnessed the warm embrace between the two
men. Norstein was delighted to see
Servais and introduced him to the audience at the screening of Norstein’s early
works and collaborations. It was wonderful
seeing Roman Kachanov’s enchanting The
Mitten (1967) on 35mm. Many of the
films in this
programme did not have subtitles, but this did not bother me because I had
seen the ones with dialogue before. The
highlights of this programme were Ivan
Ivanov-Vano and Norstein’s The Battle
of Kerzhenets (1971) The Seasons
(1969) on 35mm in their full widescreen glory. They were truly a wonder to behold.
In the evening, Ilan Nguyen and Serge Éric Ségura did a long
presentation on the career of Kihachirō
Kawamoto. This included many rare
photographs and video clips of Kawamoto and projects that he worked on
throughout his career. Nguyen teaches
animation at Tokyo University of the Arts and is a well known animation expert
in France. He very kindly gave me
programmes from the Nouvelles Images du
Japon festivals that he assisted in organizing at the Forum des images in past years which have included showcase of the
works of Osamu Tezuka, Yōji Kuri, Isao Takahata, Hayao
Miyazaki, Satoshi Kon, Kōji Yamamura, and many others. The French premiere of Kawamoto’s Winter Days occurred at the 2003
festival. According to his profile
on the website of the French periodical éclipses (revue de cinéma), Ségura
is working on two books: one about the career of Servais and one about
Kawamoto.
The presentation opened with a clip
of Kawamoto singing a Russian song on Japanese TV – which thoroughly delighted
Norstein. The main thrust of the
presentation was to demonstrate the way in which Kawamoto had to wear many
different hats during his life in order to make a living. It is very difficult for independent
animators to make a living on animation alone.
There were photographs from
Kawamoto’s early childhood – many of which were not in the two Japanese books
profiling his life such as those of his mother Fuku
(1891-1940) and his father Kinzaburō. Kawamoto was born and raised in Sendagaya –
the neighbourhood in which he was to live for the rest of his life. His family dealt in porcelain. There was a photograph of Kawamoto’s
paternal grandmother Suzu Kawamoto
(1861-1937) who was a major influence on the path his life was to take:
teaching him how to make dolls and taking him to the theatre with her.
In the chapter I wrote on Kawamoto
for Directory of World Cinema: Japan 2
(ed. John Berra, 2012), I mention the
fact that Kawamoto was a big fan of Hollywood and European film of the 1930s – even making dolls of Greta Garbo and Danielle Darrieux. Nguyen
and Ségura presented a pastel that Kawamoto had made of Swedish film star Zarah Leander next to the original
photograph that he had used for inspiration as well as dolls he made of Audrey Hepburn and Brigitte Bardot.
(ed. John Berra, 2012), I mention the
fact that Kawamoto was a big fan of Hollywood and European film of the 1930s – even making dolls of Greta Garbo and Danielle Darrieux. Nguyen
and Ségura presented a pastel that Kawamoto had made of Swedish film star Zarah Leander next to the original
photograph that he had used for inspiration as well as dolls he made of Audrey Hepburn and Brigitte Bardot.
For me the highlights of the presentation
were photographs I had never seen before such as Kawamoto on the set of productions at Toho including Senkichi Taniguchi’s Escape at Dawn (1950) and Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Actress (1947). We saw clips of a Horoniga (character with a
beer stein for a head used in advertisements for Asahi Beer in the 1940s and
50s) animated short directed by either Tadasu
Iizawa (1909-94) or Tadahito
Mochinaga (1919-99), as well as the first few minutes of Mochinaga’s Little Black Sambo (1956) – which I
would have loved to have seen in its entirety.
They also had on hand first editions
of the Toppan storybooks, which Shiba Pro later published internationally –
such as the Golden Press Living Storybooks series. I have written about my copy of The Little Tin Soldier (1968) – click
here. There were also clips from
other animation Kawamoto had done for the NHK such as the opening credit
sequence of Okaasan Ishō and Boo Foo Woo (1960-7). There was a series of Asahi Beer commercials
with the slogan “Watashi no biru” (My beer) which were hilarious send-ups of
westerns – Kawamoto had apparently been a huge fan of westerns as a teen, particularly
John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939).
There was one bit of
information that took me totally by surprise: I leaned that
Kawamoto had elaborate tattoos on his back and upper arms. Today in the west it has become quite
commonplace for people to have tattoos, but in Japan such tattoos are
associated with the yakuza. Many sentō (public bath) have signs declaring
that people with tattoos are not welcome to bathe there. Kawamoto had his tattoos done between 1956
and 1963 apparently as a kind of act of rebellion; a way of marking himself as an individual. Ségura and Nguyen even showed us a photograph
of Kawamoto’s tattoos taken from the rear with him only wearing a fundoshi (traditional male underwear). This was followed by a series of
photographs from Kawamoto’s trip to Eastern Europe. I looked at the famous photograph of Kawamoto
with Jiří Trnka (1912-69) with new
eyes. Kawamoto looks very conservative
in his suit: a small, unassuming man in contrast to the hulking form of
Trnka. To think that under that smart suit,
Kawamoto was hiding an elaborate work of tattoo art!
One of the questions that had been niggling
at me for some time was the mystery of Kawamoto’s first feature film: Rennyo and his Mother (1981). This 93 min. puppet animation never plays at
retrospectives of Kawamoto’s career and has never been made available on video
or DVD. They showed a clip from the film
and it looks absolutely stunning. After
the presentation, I asked Nguyen about the availability of the film and he said
that it also screens rarely in Japan as the rights are held by the religious organization
who commissioned it. The scenario for the film was
written by Kaneto Shindō (Kuroneko, Onibaba) and it features voice acting by Kyōko Kishida and Tetsuko
Kuroyanagi. Although it was not a personal project of Kawamoto's, rather a commissioned work to order, I still feel the work is significant and would love to see it some day.
During the overview of the latter
half of Kawamoto’s career there were photographs of him at festivals and other
events around the world. Notable
photographs included one of him with Yuri Norstein at 1985 animation festival
in Varna – which is the occasion on which the two of them became friends, with Jim Henson in 1986, with Břetislav Pojar at Annecy in 1987, in
Shangai in 1987 signing the contact to make To
Shoot Without Shooting (1988), and with Karel Zeman and Nicole
Saloman at Hiroshima in 1987. The
presentation concluded with footage from the Kawamoto memorial service in 2010
which featured a very moving march of the large puppets from his NHK special series
Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
The presentation was followed by
Takashi Namiki’s documentary Living With Puppets: The World of
Kihachirō Kawamoto
(1999) – read my review here.
The weekend concluded with a screening of Kawamoto shorts including a
rare screening of Tadahito Mochinaga’s
Little Black Sambo and the Twins
(1957), for which Kawamoto had crafted puppets.
Read about this film here. I slipped out of the final screening event after this film, for I had seen all the other films many times before.
 |
| with the illustrious Alexis Hunot |
I had a chance on the final day of the
Kawamoto-Norstein event to get to know animation expert Alexis Hunot a bit better. I
am a longtime fan of his blog Zewebanim and
was pleased to find that he is also a fan of this blog. It turns out that the review that I wrote
about Takashi Namiki’s book Animated
People in Photo, struck a personal chord with Alexis because his uncle Jean-Luc Xiberras (April 1, 1941- December
26, 1998) is featured in the book. My
blog post apparently triggered Alexis to track down a copy of the photograph
for his mother. Xiberras was the
director of Annecy from 1982 until his passing in December 1998. It was under Xiberras’ direction that Annecy moved
from being a biennale to an annual event in 1998. There is an
interview with Xiberras from 1997 on AWN as well as a touching homage to
him from 1999 in English
and French
with tributes written by Frédéric Back,
Bruno Edera, and many others.
Alexis Hunot did his studies in
cinema, but his love of animation began when he discovered the works of Back,
Norstein, and Jan Švankmajer at
Annecy 1987 where he worked as an assistant.
He teaches at Gobelins and has a monthly radio programme with Florentine Grelier about animation with
called Bulles de rêves. You can see a video of him giving a lecture here, and here
is the interview he did with Yuri Norstein.
Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012
FIRST ENTRY IN THIS SERIES: Kawamoto-Norstein @ Forum des Images, Day 1
