Carte Blanche Session: Radical Film Network
Sanrizuka in Action. Researching the Archives of Ogawa Productions
Held on 22 jun 2024
The Museo Reina Sofía extends a carte-blanche invitation to members of the Radical Film Network, made up of historians and theorists from political and independent cinema, to put together a film programme of their choice in the Museo. In response, those in the network have selected fragments of films from the Sanrizuka documentary series made by Ogawa Productions, a seminal, non-fictional film collective from Japan that was founded in 1968 by film-maker Shinsuke Ogawa (1935–1992), a pre-eminent figure in Japanese cinema. With a commitment to independent, collective and political film-making, the group filmed the first political and social upheavals in Japan, for instance the student protests and the Sanrizuka agricultural community’s struggles, which form the nucleus of this session.
From 1968 to 1977, the writer and film-maker Fukuda Katsuhiko (1943–1998) and Ogawa Productions documented the Sanrizuka farmers’ and their allies’ resistance movement as they protested about the destruction of their villages and land caused by the construction of Narita International Airport, the main aerial gateway to Japan and a project imposed by the government at the time. The struggle extended across a number of decades and, therefore, was one of the biggest social opposition movements in Japan, one that still echoes today and reverberates through other contemporary land defence struggles and movements. During this process, members of Ogawa Productions lived in the region of Sanrizuka, in the town of Heta, situated at the heart of the conflict, and would make seven films, all told, about the conflict, documenting core aspects of the farmers’ lives.
This presentation focuses on the audiovisual collection of Narita International Airport and the archives of the Community Historical Museum, which conserve the memory of decades-long land struggles against the construction of this infrastructure. The screenings are complemented by a conversation with researcher Aikawa Yoichi and the film programmer Ricardo Matos Cabo on the history and potential use of these images.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Related links
Archivos del cine radical / Archives of Radical Cinema (Radical Film Network and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
Participants
Aikawa Yoichi is a film archivist, historian and lecturer at Japan’s Nagano University. He was born in Shibayama, where Ogawa Productions produced their series of Sanrizuka films. His main areas of research are Japanese contemporary history and historical sociology and, alongside different researchers and archivists from different fields, he organises, conserves and researches the bulk of materials left by Ogawa Productions and ex-member Fukuda Katsuhiko, who was one of his research mentors.
Ricardo Matos Cabo is an independent film programmer and researcher. His work focuses on the history of documentary film, the intersection of film, archive and the history of social movements, with a contemporary approach to post-war Japanese documentaries and the history of film pedagogy. He has recently organised, among other events, retrospectives on the work of Ogawa Productions, Tsuchimoto Noriaki and Sumiko Haneda, and together with Lucía Salas co-edited the book El cine de Peter Nestler. Se acercan otros tiempos (Caniche Editorial, 2023). He is currently a professor at the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (Donostia-San Sebastián).
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
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Miriam Martín and Ana Useros