Wrestling with the past is something filmmakers often undertake. In Now is the Past – My Father, Java & the Phantom Films, 2nd generation documentarian Shin-ichi Ise confronted his father’s past as a propaganda filmmaker for the Japanese occupying forces in Java during WWII. Shin-ichi brought along his son as cameraman and daughter as narrator, making this film a true family reckoning.
Early in the film while visiting the gravesite of his father, Shin-ichi presents the idea that films are epitaphs and he’s seeking out the works of his father to connect to understand him. The propaganda films, many known as phantom films because they disappeared after the war when the Dutch government regained control of Java, are what he seeks. While his journey eventually takes him to the Netherlands, where he finds many of them cataloged and preserved there, he starts his journey in Java.
Shin-ichi’s father, Chounosuke Ise, wrote in his diary before the war that he just wanted to make one film worth showing the world. During the war as part of the “Cultural Front,” the propaganda team in Java Chounosuke contributed some of the 130 films they made in the 3.5 years of the occupation. The studio they used still holds relics of the equipment they used. It’s a working studio in Jakarta, so it was a little odd that in one room he found an old film canister with film that could be his father’s work. It seemed staged, as I can’t imagine leaving any reels, even cuttings/rejects from the editing stage sitting around after all these years.
However, the most striking thing at the studio was a piece of art on the outside. A relief depicting a Japanese soldier bayoneting a slave labourer (the wing was built by Indonesians forced to work as slave labourers) and the relief depicts that in horrifying brutality. It lingers with you long after the film moves on from that moment and colours all the interviews he does with people of Java.
While you can understand Shin-ichi’s pursuit as a filmmaker and a son pursuing the truth about his father’s past, you are introduced early to the fact that it was a traumatizing time for many in Java. The relief depicted it. You didn’t need to hear people recall how they were hit and called stupid by Japanese soldiers, how the grandparents would hide the little girls (now elders themselves) from them because they were scary, or because they might rape them. However, Shin-ichi kept going around and showing people the propaganda films made by his father, likely bringing up past traumas, and it rarely added anything to his narrative. I wish he stuck to more structured interviews, like the ones with the journalist and director, because you knew they were prepared for it and less find people on the street interviews. However, he did include footage of a woman saying she didn’t want to talk about that time so he never hid that the topic wasn’t a comfortable one for some which he could have as he had control of the footage.
The most interesting connection Shin-ichi made in the film was with a gentleman in the Netherlands who brought him into the film archives whose grandfather fought in Indonesia during WWII. Both of their ancestors fought (and that’s what Chounosuke did by making propaganda) in the war on opposite sides, in the same area, and neither ancestor liked to speak of their time in the war. Now their decedents are trying to reconcile/connect with the past of their forefathers by looking into and preserving accounts/films (epitaphs) of that time.
Chounosuke was a very talented filmmaker, making him a very skilled propagandist. He was so good at it one of his propaganda films, an educational film about malaria, you don’t realize it is a propaganda film until the end with the football player smooshing and kicking mosquito caricatures of Churchill and Roosevelt. It’s such an effective piece of propaganda that within Shin-ichi’s documentary it’s introduced as not being a propaganda film. The film shows so much craft and artistry, from the shot composition, the use of animation, to the macro shots of mosquitos hatching; he was a very skilled filmmaker. That said, from the work shown within this documentary, I’m not sure if he was a good documentarian. After the war, he made “Judgment of the Century,” which employed similar techniques to some of his war propaganda films, only this one was Japan’s former Prime Minister Tojo and others being sentenced for their war crimes. The apparent ease at flipping the switch to presenting the previous virtues as failings make him more of a filmmaker for hire than a documentarian.
Shin-ichi, who spent much of his life hating his father, who was not a presence in his life after his parents divorced, makes a case that he is a better documentarian because he has a voice and answers he seeks in his work. Now is the Past – My Father, Java & the Phantom Films had its International Premiere at IDFA.