The Poem of Hayachine Valley (1982)

aka Ode to Mount Hayachine

Original title: 早池峰の賦

Ostensibly, this long – the version I’ve seen is two and a half hours long but there appears to be a different cut for the Japanese market that adds at least another thirty minutes of material – documentary movie by pioneering, brilliant, female independent documentarian Sumiko Haneda is about the culture surrounding a traditional, devotional folk dance called the kagura as practiced in two villages situated around Mount Hayachine, in Iwate Prefecture (as far as I understand the least modernized part of Japan at the time). It certainly is about the two different versions of the dance the two villages practice, showing long, loving sequences portraying its practice, the way its masks and costumes are prepared (and the important differences between these masks in both villages, and the divergent interpretations they take on), training and education in the dance. Haneko also portrays the way the dance’s meaning to the villagers has shifted over time from religious practice as well as a form of entertainment to a bit of a saleable commodity for people who don’t have many of those.

At the same time, this is also a film about the way traditional Japanese village culture is shifting and changing with the times, containing a degree of sadness and nostalgia for the disappearance of traditional living – as is only right and proper – but – as is just as right and proper - never pretending the past was a perfect place and the influx of modern living is only a destructive force. I believe there’s a reason why Haneda shows a ninety-two year old gentleman early on, sitting and musing at the place where people over sixty-one were – at least according to local lore – left to die in the old times. Tradition, the film suggests without ever actually needing to say it, is wonderful, complicated and yet can also be horrible. The same goes with a more modern way of life.

But – as it is with the lives of the population of these villages – the film is not all about the kagura or a past slowly drifting away, but also the daily life of the people living there, the rhythms of their daily work, all still turning with the changing of the seasons. There’s a meticulous sense of the filmmaking itself shifting with the seasons as well, Haneda changing the calm rhythms of her editing and narration through the year she shows in the film.

As the two English titles suggest, there’s a sense of poetry running through a film that at first glance is just a bit dry and slow, a sense of a less visible but palpable additional quality to it and the quotidian things it shows, a luminescence won through calm and patient observation of human and natural rhythms and their intersections.