Film Fetish

IFFR regulars will know Okuyama Jun'ichi and his cinema very well, as his works have often been presented here – surely making the festival a perfect place for the world premiere of Kaneko Yū's documentary dedicated to the life and art of this supreme master of the Japanese avant-garde.

Like few others, Okuyama has been obsessed by the particular beauty of analogue film, especially small formats, whose potentials he has enjoyed exploring since debuting in 1964 with the 8mm exercise MU. As Ōta Yō wrote: "Okuyama has been trying to make works belonging in a branch of experimental film that is named as 'Structural Films' by P. Adams Sitney. However, Okuyama’s works are far beyond such a definition and incomparably unique in the world." But what does one do when the raw materials get scarcer and scarcer, the screening possibilities ever fewer? Where does an artist like Okuyama go when everything that his life is about seems to vanish?

For some eight years, Kaneko followed Okuyama, observed him making and showing his films, collected printed materials. Maybe Film Fetish is above all an ethnographic work: Kaneko has created a record of a culture not too long anymore in this world.

– Olaf Möller