"Jikken," a documentary, will be screening in New York City as part of Cityvisions. The documentary is in fulfillment of the requirements for a MFA degree in Media Communication Arts from City College of New York. The film will be shown at the Clearview Cinemas on 62nd and Broadway at 7:00PM on June 1, 2005. The admission cost is $5.00.
"Jikken" translates as experiment in the Japanese language. In this documentary, the silent 1926 Japanese film, "Kurutta ippeiji" "A Page of Madness" is interpreted by the Aono Jikken Ensemble, a Seattle WA based musical group through their rehearsals and performances of their composed score. The film is also interpreted through two film scholars: Dr. Aaron Gerow of Yale University and Dr. William Gardner of Swarthmore College. Through the interweaving of the music and the academics words, this documentary attempts to introduce an obscure movie that most people have never heard about into one that people want to discover.
About the Aono Jikken Ensemble:
The Aono Jikken Ensemble, founded in 1997, explores new sights and sounds in experimental music and performance-based art. Their main areas of endeavor are creating innovative new performance works for the stage and composing-performing new live scores for classic Asian silent films. Their previous work includes the multi-media performance Komori-uta (Lullaby); the dance-theatre piece Drift; the CD recording A Page of Madness; and new silent film scores for Yasujiro Ozu`s 1934 masterpiece A Story of Floating Weeds (Ukigusa Monogatari); and the 1932 Chinese martial arts adventure Swordswoman of Huangjiang (Huangjiang Nuxia). They have presented their work at the Seattle International Film Festival, Vancouver International Jazz Festival, On The Boards, Seattle Asian Art Museum and Northwest Asian American Theatre among others. AJE`s featured musicians are William Satake Blauvelt, Susie Kozawa, Yoko Murao, Michael Shannon and Esther Sugai, with guest artists Stan Shikuma and Marcia Takamura.
Doug is the writer, director and editor of this documentary. He is a Hawaii born and raised filmmaker. His films have played in Seattle WA, Portland OR, Mill Valley CA, Santa Monica CA, San Diego CA, Salt Lake City UT, Houston TX, Ann Arbor MI, Chicago IL, New York NY and Boston MA. His work has also been a part of the Short Attention Span Film and Video and Pixelvision traveling showcases.
Doug’s work is a personal reflection of what is currently going on in his life. His pieces have both documentary and animated elements. He considers film and video to be just another medium much like the watercolors,crayons and Chinese brush and ink that he creates his drawings. He likes to draw or paint images, scan and composite them into his videos.
Producer: Seunghan Sung
Seunghan worked as a media coordinator in a commercial production company
in Korea. He came to US in 2000 and started to produce and direct commercials and short films.
Cinematographer and editor: Heath Allen
Heath was born in Independence, Missouri and grew up in Kansas City. At the age of 14 he was choosen by the city of Independence to represent them as a
student cultural ambassador to their sister city, Higashimurayama, Japan. Thus began Heath's fascination with Japanese culture, especially music and film. While attending the University of Missouri, Columbia Heath worked as a deejay at the college radio station hosting a show called atrocity exhibition where he played experimental music, including manyJapanese noise artists popular at the time. Recently, Heath has been directing his current short film, Cranked Up, based on the black bloc anarchist movement and shooting a documentary about Ben Morea, a 60's radical, along with other projects in development.
Production notes:
One of the production obstacles this documentary had to overcome to create this work was that the Aono Jikken Ensemble performed their score to “A Page of Madness” in the best way to screen the film,a darkened room. What was ideal for the projection of celluloid was a nightmare for the video cameras used to document the musicians performing. Bill says in the documentary: We want the audience to watch the screen, not us.
The filmmakers employed various tricks to overcome and also take advantage of the low light situations. The illumination of the screen provided many beautiful shots of the musicians silhouetted against the screen. Both the at home and technical rehearsals were videotaped with lighting. However there is a certain magic that is present in a performance before a live audience. A live performance had to be captured on tape. The 3 chip Canon XL 1 and Panasonic AG DVX 100A were almost useless under normal theater lighting conditions. The one chip Sony digital 8 camera came to the rescue. This consumer camera has a lowlight setting that allows the camera to capture an image in almost no light conditions. The tradeoff is that the image is sepia or green toned in color and is very grainy. The resulting video footage was desaturated of color to present many of the black and white scenes contained in the film.
The film’s look was also achieved through the use of several video formats: Pixelvision, a toy camera no longer made by Fisher Price that generates a grainy black and white surveillance camera like image, hi 8 video, miniDV and 24P miniDV. In addition to the fine cinematography of Heath Allen, the director of photography, the talents of three fine artists, Irene H. Kuniyuki, Leslie Thyagarajan and Robin Loor were utilized. With an artistic eye, these artists captured unique visions that when edited with the cinematographer’s work created a multi vision work.
The documentary:
I took piano lessons for six years and to this day, I still can’t play the piano. I love music and take my iPod loaded with 300 of my favorite compact discs almost everywhere I go. I am also fascinated with sound and film, particularly the work of foley artists. On my first film, I and the film’s composer/sound mixer recorded all the foley work ourselves. I was drawn to the work of the Aono Jikken Ensemble because the music they create for silent films is like foley sound. It is synchronized precisely with the picture onscreen. The ensemble’s leader, Bill Blauvelt is a former filmmaker and film curator: He founded the Seattle Asian American Film Festival and worked on that for many years prior to creating the ensemble.
As a filmmaker, I am naturally a film enthusiast. For a period of five years, I saw over 200 movies a year in a movie theater. The documentary, “Jikken” has allowed me to combine several of my interests, sound in film, film history and music.
