Three Nissei Artists Explore the Lost Secrets of The Royal Cinema
Originally published in the November issue of Nikkei Voice, 2011.
When the Chinese theatre, Golden Princess, closed its curtains in the early ’90s, Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) programmer, Colin Geddes, salvaged hundreds of 35mm Hong Kong and Taiwanese films from the downtown cinema’s basement. The films, dating back to the ’60s and through the late ’80s, run the gamut of classic kung fu films and period dramas to cheeseball, feel-good comedy flicks. Geddes preserved and archived the collection for nearly two decades, and recently donated a sizable portion to the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT) on the condition the prints would be given a second life as source materials woven into brand new, original and contemporary artworks.
After two years of collaboration, LIFT and Reel Asian International Film Festival commissioned four Asian-Canadian artists (three of which are Japanese-Canadians), Cindy Mochizuki, SoJin Chun, Daïchi Saïto, and Louise Noguchi, to each create an installation piece from the lost films of the Golden Princess, now renamed as “The Royal Cinema”. As part of the Reel Asian International Film Festival’s special exhibit, “Lost Secrets of The Royal”, the four completed works are on display at the A Space Gallery in downtown Toronto and Blackwood Gallery in Mississauga from Nov. 9 to Dec. 11.
An artist talk event for the exhibit was held on Nov. 12 at the A Space Gallery.
Among the exhibit, Cindy Mochizuki’s Yokai and Other Spirits uses scenes from Happy Ghost 3, a comedy about the ghost of a one-hit wonder whose desperate attempts to meddle with the affairs of the living resulted in hilarity and wacky predicaments.
Through rotoscoping, Mochizuki painstakingly hand-traced the frames from the scene where the protagonist, portrayed by Maggie Cheung, calls home from different phone booths across Hong Kong, before scanning them into a digital format for animation.
“I usually avoid those kinds of laborious things,” Mochizuki laughed as she explained the creative process of Yokai. It was a monumental task that involved a Japanese wood craftsman helping the sansei Japanese-Canadian and Vancouver native to build the booth from scratch.
“I think it’s a bit of a departure (from my other work) because it’s quite humorous … in terms of archive, things around the Japanese community experience carries a weight and responsibility and burden, so this work is more playful,” she said.
The setup of the installation requires the audience to physically interact with the phone placed several feet from the booth. A projection of the animation would then play out on the booth’s translucent glass surface like an ethereal apparition emitting cool blue light. In the background, the song, Crescent Moon, the protagonist’s one-hit single, plays to complement the whole experience.
Meanwhile, Daïchi Saïto’s Never A Foot Too Far, Even — A slightly more ironic work — is a film loop of an inconsequential scene in a kung fu film, where a character continuously traipses through the thick, dense forest without encountering any plot development. Saïto gives viewers a hint of what to expect from the work by making the title a palindrome.
“In this piece, I can see certain relationship with Buddhist philosophy, in certain sense like meditation, you are fixing your attention to one single thing,” Saïto said. “I wanted to bring out this idea of confrontation with the viewer and the image, like when you sit in front of a painting for an extended period of time and it’s the same idea more or less.”
The Montreal-based experimental filmmaker is no stranger to the transcendental. Before immigrating to Canada, Saïto, an Ijusha from Tokyo, studied philosophy in the U.S. and Sanskrit in India.
Using two 16mm film projectors, Saïto overlaps two looped images with two separate visual effects onto one screen, allowing viewers to see one flickering image, but not exactly. Adding more confusion to the disunity, he combines two different composition tracks in the background, creating a rather unsettling and ominous sound that mimics a swarm of angry, charging hornets.
Louise Noguchi’s film, Snake’s Shadow, is also a looped film, linking several key scenes and clichés in kung fu movies into a triptych installation. The sequences and action scenes in each reel are in a constant crescendo but stop short before reaching a conclusion. As Noguchi describes it, the story in these movies is like any mythology occurring in a realm beyond our reach, be it on top of Mount Olympus, or in the arid desert of Snake’s Shadow. As a Nisei Japanese-Canadian, the Toronto artist illustrates the piece with a sense of solemn romanticism and creeping nostalgia.
“I was always interested in the stereotype when I grew up in the 1970s,” Noguchi said. As a teenager, Noguchi was optimistic about Asians coming to the forefront in cinemas due to the popularity of kung fu movies. “But it never really happened,” she said, adding today’s Asian communities might be more reticent about their own identity than they should.
A valid point, perhaps, but given the large turnout at “Lost Secrets of The Royal”, there may be hope yet for a resurgence.