Deep Into The Valley is a meditation on the nature of film, and is especially relevant in these times, where the world talks about an impending unavoidable relinquishment of film, and its replacement with the digital video

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Mise-en-scene: Atsushi Funahashi

Cinematography: Noriyuki Mizuguchi

Lighting : Teruhisa Seki

Starring: Yuki Nomura, Katsuhiro Kato, Mayu Sato, Miyoko Ogawa

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Deep In the Valley remains a unique video, for it cleverly applies the digital medium to scrutinise the nature of the filmic one. It is in this move that director Atsushi Funahashi expresses a belief that video’s inevitable self-sufficiency in the near future would only make it more subservient to film; and the further it escapes from the shadow of film, the larger it will loom. For by choosing an idea which utilises a digital format to pay an ode to the immortality of film, it deems video only as a means to capture the eternality of film, while not being capable of similar eternality itself. It remains a unique piece of filmmaking (and not a film itself), thus, for it cleverly attempts an ambitious application of two different formats: one as the record, and the other as its subject, and attains it.

The subject of his video is an area in Tokyo, known as Yakata. It remains essentially about the efforts of a female member of the Yakata Film Association and a slacker swindler, to collect pieces of film from the elders of the society; mostly to be screened later as documents of another time; thus evoking a sense of nostalgia within the attendees of the screening. There is the mystery, also, of a five story pagoda which was razed down to the ground by a fire in 1957. The video devotes itself, after a point, to the fanatical search of the two protagonists, for a film about the five story pagoda, or one that has captured it. As both of them, thus, carry on with the untangling of the pagoda mystery, documented interviews with people from the area reveal the existence of a book written by Rohan Koda about the fictionalised rebuilding of the pagoda.

Funahashi bases his narrative and aesthetic choices purely on what his contemplation about the nature of film is. At a very preliminary level, the utilisation of old homemade films by the film association from the elders in the area, reveals Funahashi’s belief that film is essentially a document of a period in time. Tradition passes from the old hand to the younger one in terms of a film. The films they pass on to the younger generation, thus, become artefacts of their lives 50 years ago; and thus, their contribution to the formation of the renewed version of tradition.

‘If a tree were to fall in the forest, but no one saw it falling – would it still have fallen?’

This theme about the existence of an object being subject completely to its documentation is interesting, if not wholly original, having been explored before in films such as Night and Fog, Cinema Paradiso and Inglourious Basterds. At its very core, Funahashi’s film is also about scepticism that brews within the members of a younger generation regarding the truthfulness of the history that their elders have passed onto them. They find their immediate history fascinating, but dubious. They are ready to believe in it as fascinating verbal traditions that they will pass down the generations themselves, but not necessarily as what truly happened. Therefore, the two protagonists (the film association girl and the swindler), piqued by the mystery of the pagoda, instead believe in replacing a mere verbal document (as told to them by an elder), by a tangible one ( a photograph, a film), and thus, go around looking for an elusive film about the five story pagoda, in order to subjugate the ambiguity over its existence for once and for all. The conflict between what is ‘said’ and what is ‘shown’ – between a verbal account and a visual one is pronounced even more when residents append photographs with their descriptions, as if to assure conviction in their ‘listeners’. Funahashi seeks to pronounce this conflict even more through the inclusion of inter-titles at specific moments in the film, which provide the viewer with ‘written’ accounts of history. He then proceeds to extol on it visually, and challenges the audience to observe the differences between the written account and the filmic one.

Funahashi claims that film is thus, the definite proof. Anything captured film, has to have existed. It evokes legendary French critic Andre Bazin’s ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ wherein he conveys an idea about the cinema essentially being a mode of preservation of a historical truth, and thus, a means for its immediate user to ‘defeat time’. Therein, Deep in the Valley makes another statement about the permanence of film itself – or its capabilities of immortalisation.

Interestingly enough, however, Funahashi refuses to be the mere spectator to this fantastic search for the five story pagoda film, instead going a far step beyond and simultaneously, making the film himself. There exists, thus, an evocation of Abbas Kiarostami’s meta-cinema, wherein the film and its subject exist in a constantly interactive state, each threatening to overwhelm each other, instead of the subject merely being subservient to its recorder. He creates a distinction between the film about the protagonists’ search for the film about the five story pagoda, and the film he is making about the five story pagoda, through a transition he achieves between two aesthetic approaches – that of the film and the documentary.

While he shoots the protagonists roaming around the city looking for the film, his aesthetic is distinctly inspired by Hou-Hsian Hsien’s still life filmmaking, wherein the camera stands static, absorbing each inch of the space and not artificially influencing the working of the world, or the perceptions of the audience of it. With the documentary, however, he adopts a conventional approach, by beginning his scenes with shots of inanimate objects being narrated over by the subject of his interview, before cutting to the shot of the interviewee himself. The conventional approach sets to enhance the distinction between docu and fiction. Essentially, also, his documentary consists mostly of verbal accounts again. But they are verbal records captured on film. Does that lend them more credibility by the virtue of their immutability?

The docu-fiction approach has been applied before in films, as recently as District 9, but he uses it cleverly to deem himself not an objective detached witness of a generation’s travails, but a member of it, by sharing their curiosity about the existence of the five story pagoda – only claiming a superior advantage over all the other members of his generation because of the virtue of his status as a filmmaker himself – thus enabling him to simultaneously conduct the search and create an object that consummates it. The question, however, remains : Isn’t the film about the pagoda meant to be a historical document, one made in another time? Does its creation as we go (thus, in the present era by Funahashi himself) defeat its historical purpose? Therein lies Funahashi’s point about the process of making a film (nevermind he’s shooting digital) being an act of the creation of a certain history itself (by the virtue of being able to record a moment in time). Therefore, even as his protagonists look for a piece of history, he cannot quite overlook the fact that he is creating that history as he goes. For while he might not be able to capture the pagoda itself, he contemplates on the tropes of a documentary form – the vaux-pop, eyewitness accounts, interviews – being the sources through which the pagoda exists still; for if not for them, it wouldn’t exist at all – thus in a manner, capturing the existence of the pagoda (and its essence), if not the pagoda itself.

“We would run around the pagoda. All we children would always be playing around it. The pagoda was like our favourite play area” says one elder, thus letting the pagoda ‘exist’. By the act of recording this account with his camera, Funahashi lets the elder exist.

In the third narrative track within the film, Funahashi adapts Rohan Koda’s novel about the fictional rebuilding of the pagoda by an ambitious young artist named Jubei ( played by Yuki Nomura, who also plays the swindler in the modern era), set fifty years or so ago, after it was razed down to the ground. Funahashi directly intertwines this literal rebuilding of the pagoda with the modern day search of the two protagonists for the lost pagoda film – thus, in a manner, equating the act of acquiring a film with the reconstruction of its subject’s existence. He achieves this through cross-cutting between the two eras – as soon as the mysterious film is attained in the modern era (through a mythical old man), the construction of the pagoda is completed in the film based on the fictionalised novel.

In the following scene, as members of the Yakata film association play the film in the projector in marvellous close-ups to check the old film for glitches, they find it absolved of any such errors and thus, fit for a public screening. This scene is immediately followed by a wide-pan of the city skyline where the burning pagoda exists. Thus, by filming the fictional novel about the reconstruction of the pagoda – Funahashi proposes, also, that while film is capable of documentation of history, it is also, of its replacement.

Transition between two eras, as between other things – aesthetical approach, films that we watch (his film and the film), colour and grayscale (a subversive representation of the past as being colour-marked gray and so on), remains a consistent theme throughout the film. As in the director’s own words during the introduction of the film, “The film is about a link between the present, past and the future.” As we see later, that link is film.

Tags: Atsushi Funahashi, Deep in the Valley, Independent film, Japanese Cinema

Posted By Anuj | Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 | Filed under Film Festivals, News, Reviews