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Paper short abstract

I examine Haneda’s cinematic language as director, scriptwriter and editor in Akiko: Portrait of a Dancer (1985). I show how Haneda allowed Akiko Kanda to have a voice in this documentary, while conveying through the editing of sound and image a sympathetic yet critical approach to her reality.

Paper long abstract

Haneda’s authorial voice has often been described as sympathetic yet critical. Prestigious programmer Takano Etsuko, for instance, described it as a “sharp but warm gaze”. This paper seeks to unpack Haneda’s cinematic language as director, scriptwriter and editor of documentary films to identify what specific elements and strategies may convey this sense of sympathy combined with a critical approach. To this purpose, I analyse the sound, mise-en-scène and editing of her documentary Akiko: Portrait of a Dancer (Akiko, aru dansā no shōzō, 1985), an intimate portrayal of dancer and choreographer Akiko Kanda, who gave her entire life to the art of dancing while heavily relying on others to take care of her. While the film is dominated by Akiko’s voice over, I argue that Haneda’s cinematography and editing convey sympathy and respect for Akiko, but also critically depict the impact of her indomitable passion for dancing. The result is a cinematic conversation between director and film subject. It is only through a relationship based on trust—which Haneda considered essential to documentary filmmaking—that the director was able to convey Akiko’s voice and her own “sharp but warm gaze”. Evidence of this trust is the second film that Haneda will make of Akiko in 2012, documenting the terminal illness of this charismatic dancer full of contradictions. This paper showcases the rich cinematic language of Haneda Sumiko. Ultimately, it proposes an analytical framework for the study of documentary cinema that allows us to trace a director’s approach to authorship and to their relationship with their films’ subjects in the cinematic language of their work.