Kashima Paradise

Like a firebrand slicing through the stagnant waters of a dreary, flaccid night, Kashima Paradise ignited the sparks of a militant cinema that was only just opening its eyes. Quickly hailed as a landmark of political filmmaking, its flames spread widely—even reaching Québec, where its co-director, Bénie Deswarte, would later settle. If its searing images of the uprising of the dispossessed farmers of Sanrizuka against the construction of Narita Airport—a modern-day peasant revolt—played a major role in its impact, much was owed as well to its overall form.

For, immersed in the life of the small village of Takei (450 inhabitants), also facing expropriation by the sprawling Mitsubishi keiretsu conglomerate, the filmmakers chose time as their weapon in this struggle against Japan’s ruling class. “That thing which most of us lack, especially filmmakers,” as Chris Marker wrote about the film, for which he penned the commentary. “Time to work, and also, and above all, time not to work. Time to speak, to listen, and above all to remain silent. Time to film and not to film, to understand and not to understand, to marvel and to wait beyond marveling, time to live.”

Indeed, although their approach was militant, it was rooted first and foremost in the spirit of cinéma direct, in which living—at length—with the people one films is the guarantee of authenticity through the meeting of subjectivities. There is, in fact, a certain kinship with the patient closeness of Georges Rouquier in Farrebique, who also appears in Kashima Paradise as narrator. Following a practice that would now be called “participatory,” Le Masson and Deswarte even regularly screened their rushes for the assembled farmers.

Thus, in sketching the portrait of a Japanese society that sings the praises of unbridled modernism while still transfixed by feudalism and misogyny, the film opposes the living fabric of daily life to the immutable order of things: that which is governed by Japan’s inflexible social hierarchies and, in particular, by giri, at once a code of honor and a social obligation. “To escape it is impossible. You exist only through the group; outside the group, you are not free—you are orphans,” says the voice-over. In this sense, the film is an invitation to disorder, for as Brecht wryly remarked in his Dialogues of Exiles: “Nowadays, there is order above all where there is nothing.

Richard Brouillette
Filmmaker, producer, chicken farmer, and accountant