“What Ogawa’s Sundial Carved by a Thousand Years of Notches (and the Yamagata Documentary Film Festival that it inspired) suggests is that new transnational networks must be built, no matter how unprofessional and utopian, in order to wrest at least some of the power away from the core of brokers whose monopoly on world power grows increasingly consolidated by the day. As the nation-state weakens and transnational identities strengthen, will it take amateur groups such as the ones in Magino to resist the tempting and historically repetitive discourse of a transnational Bonaparte?”
Eric Cazdyn1
“The farmers who have appeared in our films, up until now, primarily told stories in response to our questions in interviews; that was the filming method we used. In Sennen kizami no hidokei – Magino-mura monogatari [The Sundial Carved with a Thousand Years of Notches – The Magino Village Story] we didn’t use this form at all. In this film the farmers talk about nothing else than their own matters and, nevertheless, they are sufficiently conscious that every ‘character’ performs a ‘character’.”
Shinsuke Ogawa2
- 1Eric Cazdyn, The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 166.
- 2Shinsuke Ogawa, “Documenting the Heart and Soul of the People Who Tell Stories,” Informationsblatt (Berlin: 17. Internationales Forum des jungen Films, 1987). [Translated by Elias Grootaers, Britt Stuckens, Ingeborg Verplancke.]
