David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde screening in Moscow

I forgot to give an update on the screening of David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde which took place on the 7th April 2018 at the Museum of Chuseyev in Moscow as part of the Sogetsu Ikebana exhibition marking the 90th anniversary of the founding of the school by Sofu Teshigahara. There was a mad scramble to get the translation and subtitles in Russian finished before the screening. The text is quite philosophical and technical in places so that held up the translation a bit.  Most of it I was able to complete myself up to a point but then it all had to be checked and corrected and then put up over the original film. We managed to get something pretty much decent ready in time with one or two problems here and there but no one seemed to notice. 

As always a screening is nerve wracking experience and this was no exception. Also it is the first time I have screened one of my films in Russian to  a Russian audience. David Burliuk is unique because not only is he the “Father” of Russian futurism but he left Russia and spent 2 years in Japan up until 1922 before finally emigrating to America where he lived for the rest of his life with his family.

 
At the end of the film there was a long question and answer session about the film and about our journey to the island of Ogasawara, also known as the Bonin Islands,where we filmed. Burliuk spent several months on the islands during his stay in Japan. There is a book I wrote about our visit and the islands themselves – Journey to Ogasawara.

The film was warmly received  and there was strong interest in the other films in the series about the Russian Avant-garde as well as requests for an updated Russian translation of the book Journey to Ogasawara.

Japan Philosophical Landscapes – Release

Have been working constantly on the old film Japan Philosophical Landscapes film. Have made a new version in a different format and finally I managed to get an edited version which works. Certainly it is good enough to put up on Amazon Video Direct which I think is the perfect platform for this film. I never thought it would work on DVD. However I have since revised that opinion and I might release a DVD version as well. The Amazon video direct spot is perfect as it can be viewed as part of the Amazon Prime service which doesn’t entail buying the film although the film earns money for the amount of hours it is viewed.  I have completed the closed captions. In many ways I have changed my attitude towards the film. I took it much too seriously and therefore feared criticism. Now I have an easier relationship to it and do not think of it as a real heavy laden piece of work but something much of an experiment – looser and adapted for the internet, concentrating more on the story rather  than the preciseness of the images. Some things have worked well, better than I expected. The film fits within the overall project Japan Philosophical landscapes which includes the film Tokyo Journey and David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde as well as the book Journey to Ogasawara. The film can be downloaded here: Japan Philosophical Landscapes

Tokyo Journey and Closed Captions on Amazon Video Direct

The short film Tokyo Journey is now available for download on Amazon Video Direct. View the clip here. Download it here. In due course a DVD will be available as well. Before it could become available on Amazon Video Direct it was necessary to provide Closed Captioning even though there is no dialogue in the film.

Closed captions is something that defeated me in getting my films ready and published on Amazon Video Direct. I use an Amazon company called Create Space to market my films on DVD and the Internet. Now DVDs are becoming more difficult to sell on the internet and downloaded films are becoming more important. In 2016 all my films (all eight of them) were migrated to The Amazon Direct Video Service so that they could only be downloaded and sold directly through Amazon. The criteria for publishing is quite specific and somewhat strict. One of the criteria are closed captions for the those whose hearing is impaired or are deaf. Closed captions are like sub titles. 

Closed captioning (CC) and subtitling are both processes of displaying text on a television, video screen, or other visual display to provide additional or interpretive information. Both are typically used as a transcription of the audio portion of a program as it occurs (either verbatim or in edited form), sometimes including descriptions of non-speech elements.

This can be quite tricky but there is a way of doing it which can minimise the pain. Most non linear video editing programmed have a closed captioning facility. Go into the closed captioning facility and add the captions according to where the dialogue or text is located in the film. Once you have finished you render your film to which ever format you want and then save and export a srt. file which stored the textual data which can be used and matched by amazon when it is upload to your dashboard on Amazon Video Direct.

The editing programme I use is Vegas Video Pro. The process is as follows. Find the point in the timeline you wish to insert text into. Click on Insert and then command and the menu comes up. In the command box chose 608CC1. Then type your text in the comment box and press OK. Then repeat for all the other text you wish to insert as a closed caption. Rememeber also to change the Timecode format to Time and Frames.

To export the srt. film click on tools, scripting and chose export closed captioning for Youtube option

The process is different for Adobe Premier and other programmes but the priciples are similar.

Tokyo Journey – New film release

The new film about Tokyo is finally released from Michael Craig and Copernicus Films:

 A short film about Tokyo and its unseen character. I don’t really know how to explain but if you spend a long time in Tokyo you start to feel the hidden world which lies beneath the electric and neon façade. Traces of a dream world or forgotten world which belies the ultra modern appearance of Tokyo and which seems to be a continuance of some other parallel world existing in the past but in some way eternal and forever present. Noh dramas give a whiff of this other world and how it can creep up on you. Usually the waki, an itinerant monk, old man or traveler meets a local person whom he questions about the the history of the area. As the conversation continues the waki draws out the shite’s story it gradually becomes clear that the shite is the ghost of a historical figure who is still clinging to this world either through desire for revenge or anger,or a desire for love. The ghost often asks the waki to pray for them to be released so they can be reborn in the Amida Buddha’s western paradise. The swirling neon dream world of Tokyo with its episodic visual context opposed to the spatial coordinates that we are normally used to in most cities, disrupt the senses which feast on the abundance of light which subvert structure and the visual plane.

The Cityscape of Tokyo is a text-scape a kind of anti landscape. The city, a symbol which stands for something but also has its own intrinsic meaning- an hieroglyph We live in the age of light and nowhere is light, luminosity, a feature of the urban landscape as it is in Tokyo – it flows around and through the city like a liquid radiance.

The Quintessential city of light and its neon landscape casts a luminous dome across the night sky turning dark night into a phosphorescent panorama. This urban phenomena of the night  reminds us of the ancients of Japan who feared the darkness and longed for the dawn, for the comfort of clear light, for the sun goddess Amaterasu to remain.The film which is in post production will form a journey through the streets and known regions of Tokyo revealing anomalies which occur at boundaries which separate the apparent from the real and the interface between the sentient world and a hidden non sentient world. Its a phenomenon which occurs everywhere in Japanese literature. Murakami in Kafka on the Shore explains that the Tale of the Genji is filled with living spirits which could sometimes travel through space often unbeknownst to themselves.

 The world of the grotesque is the darkness inside us, what could be called our subconscious which was obvious to people and gave a focus for their fears. Until the invention of electric light the world was in darkness, the physical darkness and the darkness of our souls were mixed together with no boundary between them. In their past living spirits of literature such as Ueda Akinari who wrote “Tales of Darkness and Moonlight” living spirits were both a grotesque phenomenon and a natural condition of the human heart and people of that time were unable to conceive of these two things as being separate. However the darkness in the outside world has vanished but the darkness in our heart remains just as before. It remains sunken in our subconscious and as Murakami points out that estrangement can create a deep contradiction or confusion inside us.

J-FEST Moscow 2011. Festival of Contemporary Japanese Culture

J-FEST was a festival of Contemporary  Japanese culture held in Moscow at the Central House of Artists. It was designed to showcase or present Japanese culture with an emphasis on youth and young people with the accent on phenomena like manga and anime, cosplay etc. The event was held in the House of Artists in the centre of Moscow. I wanted to the film the event partly out of curiosity and partly to collect material for the Japan-Philosophical Landscapes project and maybe get an interview or two with some of the main participants and speakers at the event. We arrived an hour or two after the event had started and I was surprised by how many people had turned up. Several hundred people were milling around the foyer and in the various exhibition points where events were being held.

A fashion show was just ending in the DNK hall with fashions from the Harajuku area of Tokyo. Outside in the foyer young Russians dressed in various costumes of manga and anime style were thronging around the two floors where the event was taking place. On one side of the foyer a whole wall had been given over to Kyoto Seiko Universtity  with a video instalation dedicated on the theme of the recent earthquake and a mural being painted by students from the university.

The costumes were various but mostly on the themes of maids, cosplay, anime and manga with a strong influence of gothic but generally recognisable as derived from the  street fashions of Harajuku.

At the press conference the panel consisted of the architect Takayuki Suzuki and May J the singer who heads the show J-Melo on NHK . J-Melo is a cult musical TV show Japanese TV channel NHK. It is broadcast in 180 countries and regions, and finally made ​​it to Moscow.  May J.  is of Japanese, Iranian, Turkish, Russian, Spanish and English extraction.

It was strange to see these symbols and emblems of Japanese culture being played out in Moscow but one way of understanding this phenomena is with reference to Takamasa Sakurai was also on the panal. A journalist and a media content producer – he is convinced that the world will certainly have a “kawaii revolution.” He is convinced that due to the popularity of their pop culture, Japan could become a diplomatic mediator between different countries. In recent years, Sakurai-san has been an active lecturer in various countries.

The next day of the festival I managed to secure an interview with Takayuki Suzuki

Suzuki-sensei is trying to reconcile  modern building and new forms of the 21st century with traditional Japanese ideas of beauty. Thus, in their universitybuilding,  which he designed,  he tried to include as much as possible, “the sky” which “need students to dream.”
    In his lecture he spoke  about contemporary Japanese landscapes from the perspective of Japanese culture.
    Takayuki Suzuki: “Situated in the Far East, modern Japan is one of the centers of world culture and therefore for understanding the future we need to talk about the features of Japanese culture, characteristic of the Japanese urban landscape and everyday life of Japanese youth”.

After his interview I am hoping to use some of the material for the project Japan Philosophical Landscapes. His work and ideas may form the nexus between traditional and contemporary understandings of landscape and pinch  together these two major themes in the film.

Japan – Philosophical Landscapes – First part released

The last few days have been a process of clearing away old obstacles and barriers in order to proceed with a several new projects. A few years ago we spent a fair amount of time in Japan shooting material for a couple of films which I have been working on and editing. The work on this project was interrupted by the Stanislavsky film “Stanislavsky and the Russian Theatre” which is now complete. After revisiting the Japanese project it is re-emerging as web documentary called “Japan – Philosophical Landscapes”. More information about it can be found here. Also the first part has been uploaded to the internet (see below).

 

At the same time a new site is being constructed to accommodate the Fairground Booth Project and discussions are taking place as to how best proceed in organising the logistics of the film and its corresponding documentary projects “Carnival and the Russian Theatre” and “Vahktangov and the Russian Theatre”. Once the site is up and running details will be released.