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Dance of death
| One of the earliest cases of environmental pollution, the Minamata Bay incident, is the subject of a documentary by Vietnamese filmmaker, Jun Nuguyen-Hatsushiba. RUPALI GHOSH comments. |
The opening underwater scene ... reliving Minamata's tragedy.
TOKYO'S Mizuma art gallery, more functional workspace than subdued lighting and piped music, is far from hip. Located on the second floor of a run-down high rise, the gallery has earned quite a reputation for showing contemporary artworks of substance, like the recently screened documentary by Jun Nuguyen-Hatsushiba.
The film, titled "Memorial to Minamata — A Love Story", is a feelingly put together documentary on the mercury poisoning of two fishing villages near Minamata, a small city facing the Shiranui Sea on the western coast of the island of Kyushu in Japan. The poisoning, which occurred through the 1950s and killed over 2,000 people, came to be known as one of the world's earliest and most tragic cases of environmental pollution.
Born of a Vietnamese father and Japanese mother, artist-filmmaker Jun Nuguyen-Hatsushiba believes that "the Minamata poisoning has become an almost symbolic representation of man's abuse of the environment." Another instance of a `sort of Minamata' was the use of the Agent Orange defoliant by US marines during the Vietnam War on the forests of that country.
At the Mizuma gallery, the screening of "Memorial to Minamata" was the central exhibit for most of last month. The documentary was played out on a large screen that had been set up in the centre of the gallery; to one side of the room was a black-board and viewers were requested to "put down their thoughts on what Minamata means to them". One comment existentially asked: "Capitalism is bad. What is bad?"
Jun Nuguyen-Hatsushiba believes "ignoring issues because they are other people's problems is bad". The film, a 20-minute short, which goes by the complete, rather cryptic title of "Memorial Project Minamata: Neither Either nor Neither — A Love Story" opens with a haunting underwater sequence that eerily re-lives the macabre dance of death of the Minamata victims.
In early 1953, these wild `gyrations' were first observed in affected cats in the two fishing villages. They were quickly followed by an agonising death. In May 1956, a local doctor reported the existence of "a peculiar disease" with symptoms such as brain damage, paralysis, and loss of hearing, speech and sight, which had already claimed several hundred lives.
Then an investigation into the cause of the disease began and an attempt to treat those afflicted by it was started. Before this, the ill people were believed to be mad and ostracised by the frightened villagers.
It would be several years before the Chisso company, Minamata's primary source of income, would claim responsibility for the disease caused by the waste organic mercury dumped into the waters of the Minamata Bay.
Jun Nuguyen-Hatsushiba's film captures the deadly gyrations in a sequence shot entirely underwater in the Minamata Bay. "The video is site-specific...with the cooperation of the authorities from the Minamata prefecture and the Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, the shooting took place in the local sea," he says.
The filmmaker cleverly uses the metaphor of dance, with its fatal connotations, in different ways. "In another sequence, shot inside a discotheque, the death dance becomes the dance of `callousness and commercialism'." The bouncing strobe lights, dense smoke rings and MTV music come together powerfully to depict the filmmaker's sense of "a certain unfeelingness that exists in all of us".
For Jun Nuguyen-Hatsushiba, Minamata continues to be a "living issue" not only because compensation, and equally importantly an apology from those responsible, was so long in coming; but also because there are still several hundred children of Minamata victims struggling to come to terms with their legacy of sorrow.
One such child, Sugimoto Eiko — who had once been afflicted by the disease and was one of the many victims to file a lawsuit for compensation — writes in her testimony on the disease: "It's precisely because I was tormented that I am the person you see today. Now I like Minamata. It is here that I would like to die. Minamata is blessed with mountains, rivers, and the sea. It's because I love Minamata, and because I don't want others to experience what I had to endure, and because I don't want to see the return of the cruel side of our village that I tell my story to others."
Jun Nuguyen-Hatsushiba would probably agree with Sugimoto. For like Sugimoto, this artist-filmmaker is also driven by the desire to tell a story like it is.
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