It’s an exhibition tremendously nostalgic. It is called: Ōmecittà. It takes place from May 1st to 5th in the wonderful Kawakita Film Museum in Kamakura, a place that has hosted the greatest Japanese and foreign directors and actors. The images are by Chantal Stoman. She sent us this text. JJN
“Ōme is an unknown city. Unknown to Japan. Unknown to tourists. I fell upon Ōme by chance. A small town north-east of Tokyo that unfailingly reminds of the most beautiful film scenes of the greatest classic movies.” —Chantal Stoman
In spite of its poetical name, Ōme “the blue plum” is a quiet small town on the outskirts of Tokyo. Far, very far from the red carpet et the glitters of the Cannes Film Festival. Yet, at Ōme, film is everywhere: on the shop fronts, the facades of the buildings, the parking railings, the village is covered by painted wooden panels representing cinema posters. The inhabitants walk among Lawrence of Arabia, East of Eden, La Strada, Casablanca, Bonnie and Clyde… A wonderful journey in a glorious past that unveils the mysterious and cinephile Japan of the 1950s. In the aftermath of WWII, Ōme counted three movie theatres specialised in the projection of national and international art-house films making this town the paradise for Japanese cinephiles. Nevertheless, in the 1970s, with the arrival of television, the movies lost their public and closed the doors leaving, as the only witnesses of that ancient love for film, hundreds of movie posters.
Then, in the 1990s, the retro fashion arrived and the city decided to bring back to life that past by exposing all along the streets around one hundred reproductions of those posters painted by a single local artist, Bankan Kubo. Born in 1941 from a modest family, the child, whose name was still Noboru Kubo, could not afford to go to the movies. He contented himself with looking at the film posters, fascinated. Every time that the programing changed, he retrieved the poster of the previous film and brought it home to copy it. His was such a powerful passion that he changed his name to Bankan, by inversing the letters of the word kanban, which means poster.
In March 2017, dazzled by the unbelievable discovery, I started a photographic project. It is the story of an exceptional relationship with the past, memory and art, but also the story of a decline. Immediately published by the French newspaper Le Monde, I realised the enthusiasm that this work provoked and decided to go back to Ōme to carry on this project.
Ōmecitta is the meeting between a French artist passionate about Japan and cinema, and a dazzling city, a Japanese Cinecittà. Yet, it is also the story of an exaltation for films. Ōmecitta is founded on an absence that creates our imagination and contributes to its transformation. The images taken at Ōme rely on this dialectic between what is made visible and what this visible tells us about absence. Photographing the town of Ōme is going in search of lost time.
On October 30, 2018, a violent typhoon destroyed all the billboards that made up the identity of Ome, therefore making my photos the only testimony of this lost past. The sudden disappearance of the traces of this unique history, of the passion of a small forgotten town for the cinema, made me, the passing foreigner, the ferryman of this memory.
Chantal Stoman
Kawakita Film Museum
2 Chome-2-2-12 Yukinoshita
Kamakura, Kanagawa 248-0005, Japan
https://kamakura-kawakita.org/en/
