The film “Minamata” by Andrew Levitas was first released in May, 2021. For viewers who follow the latest cinema news, it became a long-awaited one, since the release of the film was delayed for a year due to the pandemic. This is a new role for Johnny Depp, this time he’s not playing a pirate, but appears in the image of an ambiguous creative personality.
This is Levitas’ second directorial project. His debut work was the low-budget film Lullaby.
The Minamata main character receives a secret assignment from Life magazine editor Robert Hayes. He has to travel to the Japanese city of Minamata, which has suffered from devastating mercury emissions. They are the result of years of negligence of the Chisso Corporation. Poisoned water leads to terrible diseases of the inhabitants: their limbs grow together, hearing and vision weaken, and some are permanently paralyzed.
Minamata disease was first identified in the city of Minamata, in the southern Kumamoto prefecture in 1956 and was traced to the release of methylmercury in the industrial wastewater of a chemical factory.
The authors of the film chose the background in the spirit of the recent times. At the beginning of 2021, Oscars and similar awards were given to films that reveal egregious social, racial or environmental issues. In this triad of demanded topics, “Minamata” is clearly in the treasury of eco-manifestos with a social background.
This proclamation film could well fit into the 2021 award-winning streak. We have already appreciated the “Nomad Land” about the life of people on the sidelines of American civilization, living in trailers. Or “Judas and the Black Messiah” – about the revolutionary movement of blacks in the United States in the 60s. Both are films about oppressed “people not from the establishment.”
What do we have in Minamata? The challenge to the authors is thrown by the very personality of the protagonist. This is the eminent American photographer William Eugene Smith. His youth fell on the Second World War and reports from the battlefields, and the withering of health and financial debts occurred in the 70s. Eugene nearly died after being wounded during the Battle of Okinawa. He died in 1978 at the age of 59. Eugene is a photographer with a sharply distinguished handwriting, a man who created his own artistic language.
And so Levitas himself notes in an interview that the challenge he faced was to accurately copy and reproduce Eugene’s “language.” By comparing Smith’s original footage with the resulting movie, the director and cameraman managed to speak out just as well.
The film, however, is not only about sheer beauty or ugliness. He raised many issues that are relevant both for the 70s and for our time. And they concern not only environmental protection.
First of all, it’s the role of the mass media and the language of the media. And the figure of a lone journalist in the world of media was analyzed.
The authors showed at the outset how television is stepping on Life magazine, squeezing paper almanacs from the market. Stories on paper, emphasized by visuals, were being replaced by a more primitive picture from the screen.
It is noteworthy that Eugene literally jumped into the last carriage with his journalistic investigation. In 1972, the classic Life magazine closed down, giving way to TV in the market competition.
The second feature that people of our time will already note is the issue of the pictorial language of the photographer. Smith is a man of his era, when the apparatus and prints are expensive, the craft requires a lot of effort, and the photo is not available with one click on the gadget.
One of the character traits that helped Eugene become an Artist is toughness, tenacity and self-control (pretty tainted by alcoholism). And he willingly shares this vital wisdom in the movie. Eugene, at the height of his fame, bargains on an equal footing with a large media tycoon and rejects the corrupt proposals of a Japanese industrialist.
And this is the next feature of the film: the main character is not an angel. At the beginning of the Minamata, it’s not clear what is good and what is evil, as is usually inherent in the Hollywood mainstream. Eugene is not very sympathetic at first – he consumes too much alcohol and amphetamines, he’s cynical and has a load of debts having five children.
The talent of the authors and Depp is that Smith’s “non-angelic” character is shown in development – in a few screen weeks he goes from apathy, obvious symptoms of PTSD and burnout to sympathy and sacrificial struggle.
However, the whole film is not just another “Independence Day” or “Pacific Rim”, where the brave defenders of the Stars and Stripes crumble the aliens. Therefore, Smith is not a soldier without fear and reproach.
In Minamata, the deadly aliens are the industrial civilization itself, a brutal industrial business that doesn’t care about the health of “ordinary fishermen”. In the frame there is an industrial colossus, which, on the example of Japan, grows in breadth and upward, destroying the nature and health of people on its way.
In the film, there are many close-ups of the main antagonist, industrialist, president of the corporation. His eyes are absolutely cold. He’s not only the face of post-war Japan and the “economic miracle”, but also the embodiment of the entire “third wave”, industrial civilization according to sociologist Alvin Toffler.
It was that kind of civilization that gave the world fertilizer, plastic and 35 mm film, which, by a bitter irony of fate, Eugene is using for filming. But this same civilization “presents” the people mercury poisoning, disease and murderous urbanization. And at the end of 2019, by the way, it also presented a pandemic, not the first and not the last in the modern history of mankind. Because in a condition of disturbed balance with nature, we, humanity, will regularly encounter mutations of already known viruses, or tsunamis and storms. And this is natural.
As for “Minamata”, the film perfectly fit into a number of its predecessors. The 2013 documentary Fierce Green Fire, which focuses, among other things, on a similar drama that happened in the United States in the 70s, has a powerful message. There, the residents of the town of Love Canal rebelled against a corporation that was pouring waste into their drinking water. In the same row can be put the documentary “Death by design” and the feature film “The East” (2013).
The film continues the model of several other high-profile American projects dealing with similar corporate malfeasance – right back to Erin Brockovich (2000), with an Oscarwinning Julia Roberts as an intrepid paralegal fighting the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, to Todd Haynes’s Dark Waters (2019), which dealt with chemical company DuPont contaminating the water supply in West Virginia. Even Fahrenheit 11/9, Michael Moore’s 2018 documentary, taps into the poisoning of Flint, Michigan’s water supply.
So much has been filmed about the tactics of eco-movements that the 2011 documentary “If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front” is worth mentioning separately for the emotional message.
The general message of “Minamata” and similar movies is a reproduction of the fierce struggle of “ordinary people” for their rights, sometimes leading to a situational victory. Critics had got mixed feelings about such “manifesto films” and grumble about movie clichés. Anyway, whatever floats your boat.
As the final credits of “Minamata” say, “the corporation of evil” depicted in the film paid compensation to the victims, but did not admit its responsibility and guilt for the fact that dozens of children were born crippled or got sick.
“Reading the story and learning the history of what happened in Minamata, the fact that it even happened at all, was very shocking. The fact it continues is even more shocking. Just as a reader, as someone who is interested, I believed it was a story that needed to be told. Films like this don’t get made every day,” the Hollywood Reporter quotes the words of the lead actor Depp.
The pictures that Smith took in real life and then sent to the editor at the end of 1971 shocked the world. His photo “Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath” became a symbol of eco-problems. It depicts the woman Ryoko bathing her daughter Tomoko in the bathtub. Ryoko was pregnant when the massive mercury poisoning occurred. Her daughter Tomoko was born deaf, blind and paralyzed from the waist down.
The girl’s parents gave permission to shoot their daughter, because they also wanted what happened in Minamata never to happen again.
The photograph became the centerpiece of Eugene Smith’s great photo story published in Life magazine. When the issue was released, the whole world learned about the disaster in Minamata. 20 years after the death of the girl, her parents asked not to publish any more photos so that their Tomoko could “find peace.”
The black and white footage that we see in the film is excerpts from the tapes of the great Japanese documentary filmmaker Noriyaka Tsuchimoto, who shot several devastating films about this tragedy in the 1970s.
Why did the pollution happen?
Japan’s industry was rebuilt after the devastation of 1945 and grew rapidly in the 1960s. As a result, the chemical and heavy industries began to develop rapidly. Intensive industrial activity without regard to the peculiarities of the environment has led to the growth of pollution and damages to human health. The legal system at that time did not prevent the emergence and spread of serious pollution.
The existence of Minamata Disease was officially recognized by the government in 1956. This is a typical environmental pollution problem caused by industrial effluent from chemical plants containing methylmercury. The extent and severity of the damage to health, as well as the destruction of the natural environment as a result of such pollution, have become unprecedented in human history. This marked a turning point for Japan’s recognition of the importance of pollution prevention measures.
However, in the case of Minamata Disease, the delay in taking appropriate action initially led to further spread of damage. Companies responsible for mercury emissions into the environment continue to pay huge amounts of compensation. The government continues to implement measures to combat the effects of environmental pollution.
In subsequent years, more serious environmental protection measures were gradually introduced in Japan, which included the enactment of extensive legislation and the revision of fourteen laws during the so-called 1970 Parliamentary Pollution Meeting.
The influence of media and movies
Levitas himself speaks describes his film that way: “The world does not belong to corporations and governments. He belongs to all of us – individuals and communities. I didn’t aspire to make political films. And Minamata is by no means a political film. Because, in my opinion, clean water, clean air, life in a world free from pollution are basic human rights. These are not political issues, not discussion topics. “
“We had already seen photos of people with Minamata disease so we were prepared for what we found there, but what affected us just as much was the courageous fight that the victims were putting up against the company and the government,” Aileen Mioko Smith, Eugene’ ex-wife, explained for DW after the movie release.
The Smiths lived in Minamata for two years, crafting a long-form photo essay on the disease and its impact on the local community. The essay was published in 1975, around a quarter of the images were taken by Aileen. Some of the most evocative images are of parents caring for their physically handicapped children.
Smith’s works were included in the 1975 album Minamata. The book received worldwide recognition.
Eugene was badly beaten by members of the Chisso union who were acting as bodyguards when activists attempted to speak with the leaders of the union to ask why they were protecting the company. After the beating, Smith sustained injuries that left him with limited vision in one eye.
Victims still seeking restitution
Nearly half a century later, victims of the mercury poisoning are still trying to obtain full restitution from the national government, although 2,265 people, 1,784 of whom died, have been formally recognized as victims of the disease. In 2004, Chisso also paid compensation totalling $86 million (€70.7 million).
“There are 10 ongoing lawsuits against the prefectural government in Kumamoto and the national government. These are people who were toddlers 50 years ago when they were exposed to this pollution. They have gone through the lower courts and some of these cases are now before the Supreme Court, but I do not think we will have a final decision before the end of this year”, said Aileen Smith.
“The government has always refused to carry out a full epidemiological study of the impact of the poisoning, and that can only be because they do not want to know,” Smith added. “So these are people who have lived with this their whole lives, and they are still fighting.”
Now 70, Smith lives in Kyoto and remains active in campaigns. Most recently, much of her energies have been directed against Japan’s nuclear energy program, particularly in the aftermath of the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant in 2011.
What’s next?
If in films such as “Battle in Seattle” the social problems of the insurgent people crushing the ranks of the police are presented abstractly and schematically, then “Minamata” shows that the enemy is no longer at the gates, but among us and has taken us by the throat. In the 70s such activists as the Japanese in the picture were nicknamed the NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) movements, mocking that they are only concerned about the destruction of nature in their home corner, and not global problems. But these people do not deserve sarcasm. The were forced to save the lives of their children, crippled by mercury waste.
“Minamata” perfectly conveys that the rights to health and a clean environment must be knocked out by force and mass protests. The Japanese mafia members, the notorious yakuza, who broke the fingers of a foreign photographer, worked against peaceful activists. And, behind the scenes, there was a whole mass of indifferent fellow citizens working at the same plant that destroys health. And this is another revealed problem – on any protest there is an indifferent side and a side actively empathizing with the problem. In addition, as the episode with the offer of a bribe shows, a lot of people are bribed.
Visual language
And, finally, what the film will be remembered by even viewers far from eco-activism is its powerful visuals. This is a balanced work, where even the repulsive spectacles of crippled people are presented with respect and not deliberately. You can see the beauty of the terrible, when a mother bathes her daughter, disfigured by mercury. You’re watching the moves of the photographer’s hands helping the image show up on photographic paper. Archival footage of experiments on animals and mutilated people also appear. All this could be elements of a horror movie, but here you understand that horror is not an aim for the authors.
With his photographs, Smith caused a global scandal and influenced the politics of an entire corporation. Albeit temporarily, but one battle in the war was won by the injured Japanese. And after that, humanity was awaited by Chernobyl, Bhopal and Fukushima, as symbolically shown in the credits.
And after Smith came new prominent figures of photography. The era of computerization has shown that not everyone with a smartphone is a photo artist, just like not everyone with a music program on a PC is a composer. Eugene’s example and the scene of him teaching a crippled boy his craft is the embodiment of the commonplace truth that the Vision doesn’t depend on how perfect the technique is in your hands.
The main character of “Minamata” has reached the level when the main thing in the photo is the message and the story embedded in the frame, and not the technical perfection of the print. I hope that in our time there are enough people who are able to convey the Message with the help of Vision. Whether it’s about eco-issues or social inequality. And then art will continue to change the world.
