Japan
Japanese
8mm
B&W
Silent
"In the late 1931 through early 1932, a heated debate developed among several amateur filmmakers in the Kansai region over the question of inserting portions of existing films in an amateur film production. The debate emerged when a 9.5mm amateur production, Otsukai, was disqualified from an amateur film competition sponsored by a Kansai-based newspaper company, Osaka Mainichi Shimbun (Daimai), after the film had once been selected as one of the winners of the contest. As a representative of Daimai, Kitao Ryōnosuke, who was not only a journalist but also a small-gauge filmmaker himself, explained that the film was excluded from the competition because the author, Takeuchi Kichinosuke, did not notify Daimai in advance about the insertion of a portion of an existing work. According to Kitao, even though the use of existing films would not be considered a form of plagiarism, Otsukai violated the competition guideline, which declared that a submitted film “must be one’s own creation.... Takeuchi, after providing the details of how and why he employed part of a film by one of his friends named Tanaka Yoshitsugu, raised a question concerning how to interpret the idea of “one’s own creation.” Drawing upon Soviet filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin’s montage theory, Takeuchi insisted that “one’s own creation” in filmmaking stemmed most fundamentally from montage editing, rather than from other formal or stylistic components including shooting with a camera.” - Noriko Morisue, "Filming the Everyday: History, Theory, and Aesthetics of Amateur Cinema in Interwar and Wartime Japan" (Yale University: PhD Dissertation, 2020): 65-66.
Nippon 8 miri Eiga Kyōkai [8mm Film Association]
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Amateur Cinema