“Amid this cinematic spectacle, familiar from previous films but now considerably larger and more violent, something very different is going on. In Peasants of the Second Fortress there are occasional moments when the action of the film grinds to a halt and people simply talk.
“In a similar way to Minamata: The Victims and Their World, this particular film is a contrastive, reflective work that gains by being juxtaposed with what had preceded it.
“In the production diary from the editing, there were many discussions about life and the ethics of filming people who are facing death. For example, on January 2, 1975, there was such a conversation between Tamura and Ogawa.
Kanai Katsu: Then there’s Furuyashikimura, which I really like. What was it like making a documentary after such a long time?
“What Ogawa’s Sundial Carved by a Thousand Years of Notches (and the Yamagata Documentary Film Festival that it inspired) suggests is that new transnational networks must be built, no matter how unprofessional and utopian, in order to wrest at least some of the power away from the core o