“Daido Moriyama”, a film portrait about the old master of street photography.
One of the most beautiful film titles is still: “Throw away your books and take to the streets.” That was the name of a fascinating experimental fictional film about a twofold escape in Japan in 1970: that of a boy from traditional structures and that of images from the barriers of the Modern. The books that his director Shuji Terayama would hardly have thrown away include the numbers of the photo magazine “Provoke”, the photographic counterpart of the cinematic agitprop that went a long way in Japan than anywhere else in the world – his ideologies for it but was able to convey it in rough poetry and sometimes even wordlessly.
No “Provoke” photographer is more famous today than Daido Moriyama, about whom a documentary film portrait is now coming to the cinema. How the now 83-year-old freed his medium from the false gloss of technical and formal routines can only be compared with Bob Dylan’s contribution to the US song and Jean-Luc Godard’s renewal of the cinema.
It is all the more surprising how impartial filmmaker Gen Iwama encounters this master who attacked everything masterly. His admiration is not articulated in the professorial attitude of an elaborate artist portrait, instead he is full of sympathy with the innocent and submissive fan culture. His camera patiently joins the fans in many scenes. Never before has a film documented so many autograph sessions.
It is structured with silent film subtitles that sound a bit as if Peter Handke had written them with childlike wisdom for Wim Wenders: “What could photography be? / He brooded and brooded / Until one day he was no longer able to take photos. “
You have to get involved with this supposed naivety. Moriyama answers them with an intimacy that is seldom experienced in photographers. He lets the filmmaker accompany him on camera trips through Tokyo and even allows the booty of his small digital camera to be cut into the scenes. He says little about his way of working, but instead leads the film team to a beach, where he used to meet his beloved colleague Takuma Nakahira fifty years earlier. “We always had photo magazines and books with us, so we swam out onto the rocks and then discussed it. Of course we found almost everything terrible. “
Elicited memories
The outer framework is the work on a new edition of his early work “Japan – A Photo Theater”. The countdown to the presentation at the Paris Photo exhibition that runs through the film is also one of the more naive elements of the film. But the idea fulfills its documentary purpose: again and again, the reunion with his sometimes iconic street photos elicits one or the other memory from the artist.
“Images are not ideological in themselves,” says the manifesto of the first “Provoke” issue. “They cannot represent the totality of an idea, nor are they interchangeable like words. Its immovable materiality – reality, cut out by the camera – is rather the dark side of language ”.
Founded in 1968 by the poet-photographers Takuma Nakahira and Yutaka Takanashi and the authors Takahiko Okada and Koji Taki as an experimental platform, the magazine, published in book form, reflects the political upheavals of those years in the form of radical attacks on the visible surface. The cinematic emulsion also had to fear for its integrity. Warholesque disaster finds meet lyrically hushed nudes, war scenes and impressions of the big city.
Perhaps the most radical of Daido Moriyama’s around 150 photo volumes is “A Farewell to Photography” from 1972: Found images merge with empty film strips, close-up shots of faces line up on high-rise facades, fleeting files on corpse finds.
For his urban momentary photography, he preferred coarse-grained 35mm film, which was not particularly popular with magazine editors at first. So he became his own layouter – and had a lasting influence on the design of underground magazines and photo books. Unlimited freedom still speaks today from his pictures. There is nothing that wants to be something other than what one sees. How deep its gray appears, how picturesque is its rough security.
To this day, Moriyama has not lost the sharpness of the underground perspective and even in digital format it defies all false chic. This friendly, inconspicuous film understood this very well and saves it all the pathos that is usually misunderstood in film portraits as an expression of the veneration of artists.
Daido Moriyama – The Past is Always New – The Future is Always Nostalgic. Dokumentarfilm Japan 2019. Regie: Gen Iwama. 110 Min.
