With A Prelude, you’re pursuing the work you began in Japan with of girls (FID 2023) on the dialogue between contemporary voices and Japanese feminist figures of the past—in this case actress and director Tanaka Kinuyo and writer and poet Fumiko Hayashi. What prompted this new project?
In the process of making of girls I discovered that Fumiko Hayashi not only has a very interesting feminist writing practice, she also voluntarily spent time in Indonesia as part of the “Pen Brigade” during the Japanese occupation there. These facts don’t exclude each other of course, but it does feel strange or unfortunate when a class conscious feminist voice seems uncritical of the repressive military regime, which was brutally expanding Japanese dominance in Asia. I then felt like looking into various women artists in that period coming from the three nations who were in conflict over the territory of the large Indonesian Archipelago: the Dutch who were loosing their long held colony, which the Japanese invaded in ’42, and the Indonesians in the end phase of their struggle for independence. I am currently working on a longer film project which takes as a departure point this triangle and three female authors from that time period who resisted dominant patriarchal and nationalist politics, and connecting this to contemporary collective movements waging a similar struggle. This project focusses on transnational solidarity from a queer feminist perspective. A Prelude is literally a prelude towards that work in progress, and at the same time it was a center piece for a large exhibition I was making for an art centre in the south of Japan called Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media: YCAM. Working with the curator there, Leonhard Bartolomeus, who is Indonesian, we titled the exhibition “Dance Floor as Study Room” and I could also spatially explore the idea of the dance floor as a political space and space of resistance, which is another clear trope in A Prelude.
The film’s locations and the struggles that took place there are also the subject of the film. A club in Tokyo, another set at Narita airport, and the tunnel leading to it. Could you tell us about them?
As much as I wanted to bring into view some amazing female artists who were struggling for their place in a male dominated art world at the time, I wanted to link them to a contemporary queer feminist movement. Starting with the queer and femme oriented Waifu party and its back story—which we learn about in the film—I found it extremely exciting that the female collective that organises Waifu, and its sex-positive counterpart Slick party, is committed to organise their raves at locations of resistance and protest. The earliest Waifu parties took place at Aoyama Hachi and Kinone Pension at Narita Airport became the host for two issues of Slick. Especially Kinone is sensational: squeezed between the runways it is a house of activists from the decades long fight against the construction of the airport, widely known as the Sanrizuka struggles. The group just didn’t give up their ground and the airport had to be built around it.
We see a small group of people—academics, activists, artists, performers…—circulating and chatting, some of whom were already present in of girls. How did you go about casting them?
We basically continued the conversation which was started with the filming of girls and the public programming around my solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo in 2022. At that time I had looked for queer feminist movements, reading groups and individuals to share space and resource of my exhibition, and got to know the beautiful people I made of girls with. I just felt it was worth to continue working with the same exciting and interesting individuals, who also had connected to each other in various new ways since that time.
They discuss personal experiences, artistic references and events in contemporary Japanese history. How did you work out the content of these discussions?
It was part of the conversations we were already having. Maybe with the addition of the films by Kinuyo Tanaka, which I had come across in the meantime and just loved to bring into the mix.
The film is based on recorded conversations between these people. How do you organize the shooting in relation to these dialogues? Are they partly improvised?
All conversations in the film are improvised, or maybe it might be called “authentic”: they took place during filming, which is the way I have been developing my films for a long time. The shoot actually generates these conversations, they are not rehearsed or recorded before. There is preparation where we familiarise ourselves with each other’s knowledge and I set up the scenes accordingly.
The camera moves slowly, seeming to glide from one conversation to the next. Could you tell us about the image work?
I am always interested in connections and overlap between seemingly disconnected issues. In this case I thought that if the camera keeps moving smoothly and continuously the idea of these connections would come within the image as well. Even if I cut quite brutally between the different locations and scenes.
At one point in the film, this recording set-up is broken by the intrusion of a sequence in which Andromeda and aliwen replay a scene from Kinuyo Tanaka’s film Girls of the Night in lipsync. Why this choice?
Kinuyo Tanaka’s film called Onna Bakari no Yoru in Japanese, which quite literally means something like: “night of just women” has generally been titled internationally: Girls of the Night and is sometimes referred to as Girls of Dark (which I particularly like as a phrase) is a master piece. As a 1961 film by a pioneer female director, talking about sex work in a far from moralistic way and about womanhood in its various and contradictory forms, is already remarkable. But that it is done within a the form of a classic and very accomplished melodrama in the style of the Japanese studio cinema of the 1950-’60 is so unusual, I really wanted to have it entering the work in one way or another. Especially this scene, which I read as a brilliant entering of Marxist analysis by the sex worker protagonist who has been beaten up by her female colleagues at the factory where she was given work to “return to the decent world”. An interesting fact perhaps is that Kenji Mizoguchi—whom Kinuyo Tanaka dated at some point in her life—made a film in 1948 in which Kinuyo stars as the main character, called Women of the Night, which has a very different moral and politics.
Andromeda, who is an amazing drag performer as well as a publisher and community organiser, expressed the desire to perform a scene of the film as a drag act—to lipsync it—and we just thought we’d try it out. Drag is anyway based on melodrama, which came up in the conversations we had. Already prominent in of girls, I knew aliwen as a very convincing performer for the screen. Now it turned out that besides being an accomplished photographer, a writer, curator, and currently doing her PHD in Cultural Studies at Waseda—a prestigious university in Tokyo—she was also interested in drag. I found it just fun when the two of them mentioned their admiration for Girls of the Night whilst on the way towards the location at the airport, that then they would be suddenly be seen acting it out themselves. After which we meet them having a very personal conversation at Kinone Pension, about drag…
Interview by Louise Martin Papasian
