「サンガジャパン」心と仏教

「サンガジャパン」Vol３に僕のインタビューが出ています。『精神』と観察映画と仏教について。面白い本ですからおススメです。下に僕のインタビューの一部をご紹介します。
http://bit.ly/9OSoyr

（前略）―観察の状態でも自分の主観が働いている。インタビューまですると余計な自我、欲望のようなものが入るからでしょうか？

想田：そういうことですね。「無作為の作為」という言葉を僕はよく使います。作品を作るわけですから、作為はあります。でもそれは、無作為になることで良いものを作りたいという作為です。

　僕が「観察映画」と呼んでいる方法の特徴は、あらかじめ対象についてリサーチせず、何も知らない状態で飛び込む、そして興味を引かれるものに虚心坦懐にカメラを向けていく。このやり方をするのは、作為＝自我をなるべく取り除きたいからです。というのも、先に情報や知識があると、それらに合うように被写体を誘導したり、「こう発言させたい」などと色々な雑念が出てくるわけです。で、雑念に従って作ってしまうと、作品が自分の貧しい想像の範囲に収まり凡庸になる。自我＝作為を抑えることで、自分という狭苦しい枠組みを突破し、一本突き抜けたいという意識があります。

　では、どうやって自我を抑えるのか。それは「観察」です。僕は「ああしよう、こうしよう」と思う気持ちがでてきたら、目の前にあるものを「よく観察するぞ」という気持ちに切換えます。すると、意識が「今、目の前」におりてきます。よく瞑想で言われる「今、ここ」にいられる。…（後略）

The Japan Times

The Japan Times６月１２日号にも、『精神』の大きな記事が載りました。
ウェッブでも読めます。

The Japan Times (June 12th Issue) ran a big article on MENTAL. It can be read on the web, too.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ff20090612a1.html
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ff20090612i1.html

From despair to somewhere
Kazuhiro Soda's latest film is a fascinating insight into a Japanese mental-health clinic

By MARK SCHILLING

Seishin Rating: (3.5 out of 5)

Director: Kazuhiro Soda
Running time: 135 minutes
Language: Japanese
Opens June 13, 2009

In the United States, doctors prescribe psychotropic drugs as commonly as cold tablets and memorists detail their breakdowns and addictions in best-selling books. In Japan, however, the mentally ill often try to hide their condition from employers, family and friends, while seeking treatment only as a last resort.

They fear, rightly in many cases, the stigma of being labeled "weak," "strange" or "crazy" in a conformist society with a culture of shame. Suicide starts to look like the only, tacitly approved, way out.

Soda, a New York-based documentary filmmaker who has screened "Seishin" at film festivals in Busan, Berlin and elsewhere, picking up several prizes along the way, opens a rare window into their lives, but less as an impassioned advocate than as a fly-on-the-wall observer.

In condensing hundreds of hours of footage shot at a mental-health clinic in Okayama in 2005 and 2007, Soda added no editorializing titles, narration or music. He also let his subjects, as much as possible, speak for themselves, minus the digital masking considered de rigeur for television interviews.

One problem with this minimalistic approach is that we have to piece together even basic information from on-the-fly comments, rather than answers to specific questions. The mysteries of how, when and why Dr. Masatomo Yamamoto, the elderly psychiatrist who is the film's hero, came to run his clinic, which many of his patients regard as a second home, are never quite explained.

Also, Soda's camera can be ruthless in exposing the vulnerabilities, character flaws and even crimes of his subjects. In one chilling scene, a schizophrenic woman confesses to killing her baby in a black fit of frustration — and one wonders at the consequences for her, both social and legal.

But this dedication to showing the bad as well as the good creates more trust between the filmmaker and audience than propagandizing, which can present the mentally ill as saintly victims. True, Soda could have told his story more concisely — his 135-minute film is at least half an hour too long — but by the end I knew his subjects and their world in the raw and in the round, as though I'd spent a few weeks hanging around the clinic.

"Seishin" 's central figure is Yamamoto, now 73, who started the Chorale Okayama clinic in 1997 as a sort of postretirement project. He has since added a milk-delivery and restaurant business, staffed by patients, as well as opening a shelter where patients can stay temporarily. His aim, with the support of a dedicated staff, has been to create a community where the mentally ill can develop the self confidence, survival skills and human connections they need to ease their transition into the larger society.

In his dealing with patients, Yamamoto initially comes across more as the crusty neighborhood sensei (teacher) than the crusading reformer: Doctor-patient conversations are short and drugs are doled out by the fistful. But Yamamoto's methods, such as his habit of tossing his patients' questions back in their faces ("What do think you should you do?") and drawing little diagrams to illustrate his points (a straight line for the stages of life in the West and a circle for the East), have a Zen-like wisdom.

He has not, however, created a happy little utopia — many of his patients are suicidal, socially isolated and living on public assistance. One middle-aged woman tells how, the night before, she ended up in the hospital after overdosing on her medications. She shows her wrists, crisscrossed with scars. Her face tear-strained, she speaks of wanting to die. Several other patients confess to similar thoughts, and after filming was completed, two carried fatally through.

Yamamoto is also no miracle worker, restoring patients to health with a pithy word or two. One, a heavy-set, quick-witted raconteur whose monologues are punctuated by punning gags and party tricks, tells how he had his first breakdown as a high-school student prepping 18 hours a day for his college entrance exams. Instead of answering the questions on his semester tests, he assigned ratings to his teachers, grading them on a scale of 1 to 100. After being tagged as "strange" for this incident, he was referred to Dr. Yamamoto, and has been seeing him for 25 years.

"He's like a god to me," he says. But God can't erase that long-ago trauma or restore the lost time.

What Yamamoto and his staff do provide, though, is a vital lifeline that gives patients the support they need to recover — or simply make it through the day.

But, now, as Soda also shows, the patients are faced with government-mandated cutbacks in services and hikes in payments. They hold meetings and voice their objections, but compared with other, better funded and connected constituencies, they are all but powerless.

"Seishin," which Image Forum theater in Shibuya will screen in an English-subtitled print daily at 6 p.m., and which will later open around the country, ought to be seen by, not only Diet members voting on health-care legislation, but anyone interested in how minds can become sick — and be cured. As Soda so eloquently shows, the mentally ill aren't marginal "others," but like people we see around us every day at work and at home. Even in the mirror.

----

FILM INTERVIEW
Soda takes a pop at taboos

By MIZUHO AOKI
Staff writer

Kazuhiro Soda made his name with his first documentary film "Campaign," which follows the director's former classmate Kazuhiko Yamauchi as he campaigns for a city-council seat in Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture. The film was screened at the Berlin Film Festival in 2007, broadcast on TV in around 200 countries and last month, in May, won the prestigious Peabody Award, which is often referred to as the Pulitzer Prize for radio and broadcasting.

His second feature documentary, "Seishin" ("Mental"), breaks a taboo and opens — as the director puts it — "an invisible curtain" between the so-called "healthy" and "the ill."

The day after he finished filming "Campaign," Soda stepped inside Chorale Okayama, an outpatient mental clinic in Okayama Prefecture, to see the world inside the curtain.

"I went to the clinic as an outsider, met many people, heard many stories and left the place. Then I reconstructed my experience into this film the way audiences can relive the time I had there, as if they visited the clinic themselves" says Soda in an interview with The Japan Times.

The Japan-born N.Y.-based director didn't do any research on the subject beforehand. "That's my policy. I tried to observe the reality as it is, with an open mind," he explains. "I went there with my camera ready to roll, asking each person I met for permission to film them."

The process, however, was not easy. The director notes, "eight or nine people out of 10 said no. But luckily, one or two said yes."

All the people who agreed to be in the film expose themselves with surprising candor. They talk frankly about their personal histories and the reason why they are at the clinic; and some of the stories are shocking.

Soda, who just turned 39, reveals, "There were some scenes that I couldn't make up my mind easily about whether I should use them or not." Among them is a scene where a woman reveals her heart-wrenching past and how she ended up killing her baby.

After long and deep consideration, Soda included the scene. The story could not be excluded from the film if the woman was to be portrayed accurately.

However, when the woman found out that the scene was in the film at a special screening held for the patients and the clinic's staff, she got distracted and said that she can no longer walk down the streets. "Though I expected she may react the way she did, I was stunned. But then one of the patients raised her hand and said, 'I've known you for a long time, but I never knew your real pain, and I'm glad that I learned it now. I also raised kids myself so I know how difficult it can be.' Then many spoke up" recalls the filmmaker, continuing, "The woman finally said she's glad that she's in the film, saying, 'For the past 15 years, I thought if I tell the story, everyone will be my enemy. Just to know that there are some people who understand me is enough for me.' "

Still, Soda is anxious as to whether she can remain like that after the film is released in Japan.

"She is vulnerable; a little thing can hurt her" worries Soda, adding, "I'm aware that there could be some kind of attack from society. If something happens I'll have to overcome the problem together with her."

After he completed the film, Soda finally had time to sit with the clinic's hero, Dr. Yamamoto.

"I wanted to ask him so many things during the shooting, but I restrained myself from doing that. I knew, if I asked, the film would be about Dr. Yamamoto — the great doctor and his patients who beg him for help — and I didn't want to depict such a cliched picture" explains Soda.

"Dr. Yamamoto told me that the root of mental illness is that the sufferers are lonely and that to be fully cured they need to connect to another person. No matter how advanced the medicine is, in order to recover fully, they need to know that they are not isolated" says Soda. "I believe that one of the reasons why Dr. Yamamoto uses such an old-fashioned Japanese house as his clinic is to make it a most relaxing environment with tatami mats etc. — a place for them to meet others, become friends and make a community."

Interview on Chopsticks NY

A new interview came out on "Chopsticks NY." Here's its web version. Enjoy!

http://www.chopsticksny.com/contents/entertainment/2009/04/01/

An Outsider Eye Inside a Mental Institution

— Interview by Ruth Berdah-Canet

Kazuhiro Soda, Japan born and NY based filmmaker, could very well be the symbol of this daring and talented new generation of filmmakers the documentary industry desperately needs. For his second observational work, his independent spirit brought him behind the closed door of a mental institution in Japan.

- Did the little Kazuhiro Soda always dream about becoming a filmmaker?

No, I wanted to become so many different things. I first wanted to become a baseball player but I grew up and got bored. I then turned my interest on the stars and planets and I even built a telescope. Yet again, I got bored and moved to computers. I programmed video games when I was 12 or 13 years old and sold them to magazines to make a little pocket-money. But, I got bored again! After that, I was really interested in the English language and wanted to become an interpreter, but guess what happened… I got bored! It wasn’t until I was 21 years old that I wanted to become a filmmaker.

- How did you come to the idea of making Mental?

When I entered Tokyo University, I became the editor in chief for the university’s newspaper. It was a left-wing paper and I thought I could change the world by using my pen. I had a lot of responsibilities for the newspaper and worked, worked, and worked. I came to the point where I did not sleep for days, and I found myself unable to do anything. When I tried to write an article, I felt like throwing up. I immediately thought I had a mental problem, so I went to see a psychiatrist on campus who told me “you have the burn-out syndrome,” which made sense to me. I quit the job on the spot and took the first train back to my hometown in Tochigi-ken, and slept for days. I recovered in one week, but I never returned to the paper. This experience really changed my perception on mental illness. I used to think mental patients were like aliens from other planets, and I had nothing to do with them. But in fact, anybody can be mentally ill.

- This inside look into a mental institution takes us behind the stage and excites our curiosity. What did you want to unveil by doing this documentary?

I always felt like there is an invisible curtain which divides “the healthy” and “the ill.” The world of the mentally ill is right there, but people pretend that there’s not such a thing. It’s a big taboo. So, I wanted to get rid of the curtain and see what is going on behind it. Basically, I visited the clinic as an outsider, met with all these people, then left. And what I tried to do was to recreate my experience in the cinematic reality so that the audience could feel as if they visited the clinic themselves. People can have this virtual experience and freely interpret it in their own way. This is the concept of my “observational documentary.” But it doesn’t mean my film is objective. Actually, because I created my film through my own point of view, it’s very subjective. However, because I don’t use any narration, music, or super-imposed titles, the viewers are not forced to see the film in a certain way. My film is open to many different interpretations.

- Recently, documentary films’ popularity has increased. Michael Moore produces almost one documentary per year. Yet they fall into a different category than your work. You seem to make a specific point working harder to avoid giving too much info…

That is true. Moore is a very skillful filmmaker but his documentaries are flat because they are made to convey his message. It is almost like a thesis. He comes up his message first, and then he collects the evidence to prove he’s right. But I am not a teacher or a crusader. I start from the opposite end of the process. I see and observe what is going on and I gradually find my theme, I don’t find my theme until 3-4 months into editing. I want to return to the original idea of documentary filmmaking. My main influence is Frederick Wiseman, who is a champion of “Direct Cinema” documentary. The world is too complex to be described only in black and white. There are no absolute good guys and bad guys. We are all very complicated and this is what fascinates me. I try to depict the world as it is through my point of view.

- These people in Mental are very engaging, and you have to feel compassionate for them and the social challenges they face. How did you detach and go back to a “normal” life?

When I operate the camera, even if I am listening to everything my subjects say, I am also wondering if I have a good angle, a good light… So, I don’t get too absorbed in the conversations. I was also trying to keep a little distance at all times; even if I was really tempted to become like best friends with them. But it was tougher to do so than when I was making Campaign, my previous documentary, where I was successful at being invisible or “a fly on the wall.” Nobody cared about me. But at the mental clinic, the patients kept talking to me while my camera was rolling. They would not allow me to be invisible. I was puzzled and did not know how to handle it, and if I should include this interaction or not in the movie. But, the essence of the documentary is the relationship between the camera and the subject, so I decided to include my presence in the film.

- You are always on the fringe in the movie between healthy and non-healthy people. The cross-over is so easy.

Yes, and it was OK for me operating the camera, but for my wife who listened to the patients beside me without a camera, it wasn’t. She’s not a filmmaker but she was there to help me out. She was very affected by the experience during the 30 days we shot at the clinic. She became sick and even made an appointment with Dr. Yamamoto (the doctor in Mental)! I was worried as a husband, but a bit excited as a filmmaker. What a bad husband. I tried to shoot her consultation with the doctor, but she refused! I missed possibly the best scene. She’s totally recovered now, though.

- What is your next curiosity?

I am shooting my next movie Theater (working title) which is about a playwright Hirata Oriza and his company Seinendan. I’ve already shot over 300 hours of footage. I don’t know yet what kind of movie it’s going to be, but I will find out during the editing process. When completed, Campaign, Mental, and Theater could be a trilogy. Campaign depicted the core of the Japanese society and the people who represent the social values. Mental is the opposite, it’s about the people at the fringe of the society, the ones who cannot accept the mainstream values. But in Theater, the artists are the subjects. They’re not at the core or the fringe of the society. They’re somewhere in the middle. It will be very interesting to see the three films together side by side.

Review by Anne Thomas

A very nice article by Anne Thomas to compare MENTAL and DEEP IN THE VALLEY, a film by my friend Atsushi Funahashi came out. This is how it starts out:

Japanese cinema at the Berlin Film Festival, which closed on Sunday, was represented by a rich selection that ranged from children’s docu-fiction to hardcore trash. Reporter Anne Thomas was impressed by two films in particular.
"Mental” (“Seishin”), an extremely sensitive documentary by Soda Kazuhiro and “Deep in the Valley” (“Yanaka Boshoku”), a beautifully-shot cross between fiction and documentary by Funahashi Atsushi, both tell the story of communities isolated from the mainstream.

To read the whole article:
http://www2.dw-world.de/southasia/germany/1.234926.1.html

Article on Village Voice

On Village Voice, an article about MoMa's Documetnary Fortnight program just came out. It describes MENTAL very positively (although the screening date is wrong- correct date is Feb 22).

The next series standout is Kazuhiro Soda's Mental (February 20), about the depressed, neurotic, and otherwise paralyzed patrons of a Japanese psychiatric clinic. Hitting hard with a few quick, numbing consultations, Soda then slowly and compassionately circulates among patients and staff. Though the film is noted for breaking Japanese taboo-powered silence about mental illness, I haven't seen many American documentaries as devoted to stalled-out minds. Soda's appreciation for his subjects' desperate resilience and camaraderie is balanced by an unappeasable crank monopolizing the community-center phone at the film's conclusion.

http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-02-11/film/living-ain-t-easy-at-moma-s-documentary-fortnight/

Review on MENTAL

Another great review on MENTAL and other films (by Kevin Lee).
http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/531

Mental (dir. Kazuhiro Soda) – As Neil Young has already indicated, this film may test the patience of some, but for me this observational documentary about a Japanese mental health facility is worthy of the mantle of Soda’s idol Frederick Wiseman. The film extends itself to its subjects, allowing them to express themselves in their own time, making up for the gross neglect paid them in a society where the mentally disabled are kept well from view. This cinematic act of generosity eventually reaps ample rewards as the patients’ oddly lucid musings on the purpose of their lives and their struggles with happiness and compulsive thoughts of suicide lead to a startling universality. If the Berlinale gave awards for the “performances” of documentary subjects, surely one would go to Sugano, a brilliant but fragile ex-social worker who directs his own scenes and whose poetry provides the script for one of the most emotionally affecting scenes of the festival so far.