Masanori Ōe & Newsreel
Masanori Ōe, Head Games, 1967, 10min, film transferred to video
Featuring the digitization projects that were part of the Community of Images exhibition, we are pleased to share with our online members selected works and moving image materials that were on view during the show. Courtesy of the artist himself, this January we are thrilled to present three films by Masanori Ōe that were shown together in the exhibition.
A filmmaker, writer, translator and environmental and wellbeing advocate, Ōe began his filmmaking career after moving to New York in 1965. He immediately took interest in the psychedelic scene, visiting a show by Timothy Leary also attended by Allen Ginsburg and Richard Alpert (Baba Ram Dass). Ōe would spend the years 1965-68 in New York where he worked and resided with the members of Third World Studios, from which the politically engaged collective Newsreel emerged in 1967: a group of filmmakers, photographers, and media artists who worked within and across mediums to provide alternative news coverage to world events and anti-establishment movements of the time. Enmeshed in the hippie movement, Ōe also observed the dynamics within it between white hippies, yippies, and radical communities of color from his perspective as a Japanese immigrant. Upon his return to Japan in 1968, Ōe collaborated with performance troupe Zero Jigen before turning away from filmmaking toward translation, New Age philosophy and later, organic farming.
Ōe collaborated with Marvin Fishman to produce several films under Newsreel, including No Game, a document of the 100,000-strong anti-Vietnam War march at the Pentagon in October 1967, Head Game, a document of the “Be-In” in Central Park which focused on personal empowerment, communal living, ecological awareness and higher consciousness with the aid of psychedelic drugs, and Great Society, the originally six-channel collage of footage reworked from American mass media. These three works were shown in Gallery D of the Community of Images show at Philadelphia Art Alliance, illustrating Ōe’s contribution to socially conscious, countercultural filmmaking in the US.
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Program
Masanori Ōe, Head Games, 1967, 10min, film transferred to video
Head Games blithely follows soap bubbles blown by the wind in Central Park, opposing the objectivity of recording an event with a more subjective and psychological approach. The first of several documentaries made in collaboration with fellow filmmaker Marvin Fishman, the filmmakers capture a peaceful 1967 hippie ‘Be-In’ against the Vietnam War, which took place in Central Park. The tumultuousness of the period is reflected in the film’s dizzying camerawork, which often spins around in frantic circles, or moves in on the protestors in uncomfortable close-ups.
Masanori Ōe, No Game, 1967, 17min, film transferred to video
Marvin Fishman, Masanori Ōe, and Jonathan Chernoble documented a march of 100,000 people on Washington to end the war in Vietnam in October 1967. The film captures the march as well as the occupation of the Pentagon grounds, and incorporates footage taken from planes of bombings over Vietnam. The film was perhaps Ōe’s most widely seen work at the time and was later screened at a Democratic convention in Grant Park in 1968.
Masanori Ōe, Great Society, 1968, 18 min, six-screen 16mm films transferred to single-channel video
The aesthetic and thematic culmination of Ōe’s time in New York, Great Society is a stylized document of some of America’s major political and social events in the 1960s. Originally intended to be a multi-channel projection using 6 projectors, the aesthetic approach here is more intricate than Ōe’s works up to this point. Commissioned by CBS, Ōe and Fishman spent time meticulously combing through countless hours of archive footage; which one can appreciate through the film’s constant stream of contrasting perspectives and images. Likewise, its soundtrack, switching between popular contemporary bands like Jefferson Airplane and The Byrds, and dissonant, high-pitched distortion, reflects the unpredictable and constantly shifting atmosphere of the era.
Masanori Ōe (b. 1942) is a filmmaker, writer and translator. Moving to New York in his early twenties between 1965-68, he got involved in the Third World Studios together with Stan Vanderbeek and Jonas Mekas. Joining Marvin Fishman at Studio M2, Ōe began filming protest activities as part of the Newsreel Collective. He participated in USCO’s psychedelic shows and translated his psychedelic experiences into his films Between the Frames (1967) and Salome’s Children (1968). Together with Yukihisa Isobe, he participated in the exhibition Some More Beginnings by E.A.T. at the Brooklyn Museum in 1968. His work in psychedelic culture and political activism came together in Great Society (1967), co-directed by Marvin Fishman, a six-screen collage of newsreel footage from the television broadcast company CBS who commissioned them to make it. Upon returning to Japan, he co-founded Newsreel Japan with filmmaker Masato Hara and photographers Takuma Nakahira and Kenji Kanesaka. They joined members of the collective Zero Jigen and others to halt the 1969 edition of Tokyo Film Art Festival at Sogetsu Art Centre on the grounds that the film festival’s competition format encouraged a hierarchy among films, an act that was met with controversy. He followed the collective Zero Jigen to shoot their film White Hare of Inaba (1970). He translated The Tibetan Book of the Dead, published in Japanese by Kodansha in 1974, and wrote extensively on his LSD experiences. He helped to found one of the first health-food stores in Japan and became an organic farmer. His works have recently been presented at Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern and Tokyo Photographic Art Museum.
Related
As part of the Japanese Expanded Cinema research thread, CCJ partners Go Hirasawa and Hiroko Tasaka interviewed filmmaker Masanori Ōe in 2017. Hiroko Tasaka organized the exhibition Japanese Expanded Cinema Revisited at Tokyo Photographic Art Museum in 2017, which included Oe’s Loop Siki No.1 / No.2 / No.3 (1966). Go Hirasawa was the curatorial adviser in the exhibition.
Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s - 1970s
Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s-1970s is an exhibition of experimental moving images created by Japanese artists in the U.S. during the 1960s and 70s, an area that has fallen in the fissure between American and Japanese archival priorities. Following JASGP's Re:imagining Recovery Project and its mission to support and engage diverse audiences through Japanese arts and culture in collaboration with local organizations, this project aims to discover, preserve, and present film and video works and performance footage by Japanese filmmakers and artists to the wider public.
This exhibition ran at Philadelphia Art Alliance from June 14 - August 9, 2024.
The project and its online programming is generously supported by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage & the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Toshiba International Foundation and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts’ Preserving Diverse Cultures grant.
As the first step in Collaborative Cataloging Japan’s engagement and research with Japanese expanded cinema, CCJ is pleased to invite filmmaker Masanori Oe and curator Go Hirasawa from Japan to present Mr. Oe’s films in the 1960s to audiences in Philadelphia. Incorporating experiments with the materiality of film and using multiple projections, Mr. Oe’s newsreel documentary works reveal the artistic and political directions and conditions under which artists and filmmakers made their work.