04: Odoriko
On Yoichiro Okutani's Odoriko (2020), and on simple, patient observation.
“My job is to sell dreams, not reality.”
At first glance, Yoichiro Okutani’s Odoriko (2020) may not seem too appealing. As an observational film about striptease theatre made by a male director, it has the potential to be leery, and while the film is certainly voyeuristic, it is so in an unexpected way. Okutani adopts a gaze that, while fixed firmly on the performers, has almost no interest in their performances. From the film’s first shot to the last, the women in Odoriko are regularly seen naked, but they are very rarely shown on stage. Instead, Okutani is interested in what goes on backstage. Following a touring performance group travelling between a number of clubs across Japan, he fastidiously tracks the minor actions that occur before and after the striptease itself, showing the one thing the patrons of these places can never see: the interior lives of those who transform themselves when they step out from behind the curtains onto the stage.
The film’s first shot seems designed to establish this off-kilter perspective, starkly displaying full-frontal nudity in a way that throws the viewer off. Tilted at an odd dutch angle, a camera mounted at the top of a stairwell records a woman wearing only heels descending the stairs. A fuzzy, low-grade frame captured using the same mini DV camera that is used for the film’s duration, it is not a titillating image, looking more like a setup for a horror film than for the observational documentary that follows. In one interview, Okutani has said that it is up to the audience to decide whether or not there is ”a sense of voyeurism” in this film, but with this peculiar opening shot, he seems to be unsettling his audience’s expectations about what sort of film this will be, whilst also naturalising nudity and showing that the bodies seen here will largely not be sexualised. These are women who are used to being naked, and who are at work, and as such, they will be mostly without clothes.
In the next scene, heard from the dressing room, an on-stage announcer states that “photography of any kind is forbidden” in this venue, audio that Okutani seems to include to affirm the privilege he has been granted in filming these performers, but also as a way of signalling the rarefied form of striptease the film is about, as well as some of the tensions that are at play. The odoriko of the title is an old-fashioned form of strip theatre in which elaborated choreographed routines involving costumed dance would be combined with comedy acts (in their heyday, Takashi Kitano could be seen performing in these clubs), drama, or films. Popular in Japan’s post-war period, the practice is now much more niche, as over the subsequent decades, entertainment options have broadened and pornography has become increasingly easily and readily available. (As one dancer says: “they don’t want the real sauce more anymore, they want MSG.”) Despite being supported by a loyal, if increasingly perilously elderly following, odoriko is in continual decline. This is the point at which Okutani’s film begins. Acting as a documentation of a dying art, his film details the day-to-day working life of the remaining touring practitioners of “odoriko” and the threatened spaces in which the last few dedicated denizens come to see them dance.
After a period spent convincing the performers that his project would not sensationalise their practice with “juicy tabloid-style reporting,” Okutani filmed for four years, and the trust that he has gained from his participants is integral to the success of the film. Featuring static, square compositions in dressing rooms, dining spaces, and hallways, punctuated by exterior shots showing the various club facades by night, Odoriko consists mostly of footage recorded with a fixed-camera positioned within the corner of rooms, out of obvious sight of the performers being seen. When described, this sounds fairly scoptophilic, like a hidden-camera television trap intended to catch the participants unaware, but somehow it works well in context. Rather than having a voyeuristic effect, what is instead achieved is an ordinary, unsensational form of intimacy, through which the performers reveal themselves through routine gestures (such as changing outfits, applying makeup, or prepping meals and sharing them) and through language (talking between themselves, or sometimes to the filmmaker off-camera, providing snippeted details of their lives). “Don’t film me like this,” says one dancer, sitting nude at her dressing table and making a rare reference to the presence of the filmmaker. “I haven’t put on my makeup yet.” These candid scenes circumvent the need for Okutani to record any direct interviews or push his participants towards speaking unnaturally, making each minor revelation seem somehow more sublime.
A fairly ordinary film both stylistically and conceptually, where Odoriko excels is in its rigidity. Each composition, despite mostly showing scattered possessions and messy dressing room environments over an array of tight frames and fuzzy close-ups, is rigorously considered and carefully composed. Okutani places his camera in positions that are both unobtrusive to the women he is recording and aesthetically pleasing to a viewer who is bearing witness to extended takes showing the most ordinary behaviours. “I hardly ever asked them to do anything for the camera”, Okutani said in that same interview, showing the value of patience and persistent observation in a time where many filmmakers may find it easier and more pleasing to fabricate the incident they are hoping to witness, or repeat something they missed or failed to capture as desired. Explaining his method further, Okutani said that the shoot for Odoriko felt like that of a “fiction-movie,” and that he used “many takes of the same scene, waiting for things to happen over and over again, changing angles and choosing the best take from the many I made.”
His choices are interesting as the film is pleasingly mundane. Showing many of the same rote behaviours in differing locations as the performers move along the tour, narrative details emerge through slyly observed chatter between dancers or solo mirror-side confessions as talk turns to how the odoriko first started dancing, what their family think of their work, or where their precarious career could go next. Systems of relations between the women emerge as new entrants talk excitedly about receiving guidance from elder dancers, and those who have been around longer talk about their influences, citing various odoriko icons of the past. Apart from a scene in which a caretaker sweeps an empty stage, men are mostly heard but not seen, talked of only as “fans” who bring gifts or buy polaroids, or as a non-specific mass of audience members who keep the operation afloat. Instead of foregrounding the position (and perspective) of the punter, Okutani, as the strange sole male invisible interlocutor in these spaces, creates a sense of a world populated only by women, seemingly performing almost entirely for themselves.
Over repeated takes, biographical details emerge as talking points are repeated, creating a sense of the central tension that drives the film’s thrust. As well as an interest in bodies and movement—Okutani has said that prior to this long-gestating film’s creation, he was planning a boxing film, and much of his thinking about how best to depict that subject transferred over here—Odoriko is concerned with the push and pull between modernity and tradition. Almost making art for art’s sake, the performers see that the times are changing and are well aware that their audience isn’t. “This is not a lifelong occupation,” one of the older dancers says, before adding that “it is hard to know when to quit.” This idea appears to be what draws Okutani in, a filmmaker with an interest in an art form that he also describes himself as a fan of. It seems that in odoriko, which sees a small set of committed practitioners create something for a select, equally dedicated audience, Okutani may see a parallel to the sort of niche-interest, stylistically retrograde fly-on-the-wall documentary cinema he is interested in making. There is hope, however. Both practices persist. After one of the performances, a charmingly jauntily choreographed, J-pop-soundtracked striptease that Okutani includes in full for some reason, a club-owner announces to the dancers and the small crowd in attendance that “thanks to the efforts of everyone here, this club will go on for five months more.” In this film, which depicts an old-fashioned, disappearing practice using an outdated camera and a formal approach that is somewhat out of mode, there are no revelations and no innovations, just solid, attentive observation. However small, there will always be an audience for something simple, done well with commitment and care.
Yoichiro Okutani’s Odoriko (2021) screened at IDFA 2020 and Cinéma du Réel 2021. There is not much information online about Yoichiro Okutani, but a short bio can be found here. He seems to have made two features prior to this one (Children of Soleil (2011) and Nippon no Misemonoyasan (2012)). To receive more articles like this, do subscribe to nonlinearities. The writing in this newsletter will always be free-to-read, but donations are very welcome.