Yamagata Rough Cut!
A “rough cut” refers to a provisional version of a film or video work, edited but still incomplete. Removing the fixed notion of “film” as a finished whole, the purpose of Yamagata Rough Cut! is to create a space to watch, hear, experience, and discuss short “rough cut” footage. The program attempts to discover the possibility of a dialogue transcending standpoints, genres, and borders through screening this raw footage. We bring together people with a variety of relationships to film—filmmakers, audiences, critics, and researchers. They interact across roles, and experience together a collection of the world’s unruly, unpolished visual fragments.
Rebuilding our thinking from perception
The world is currently in a state of upheaval. Our daily reflections on that world cannot remain unaffected by the media that deliver one-sided reports on war and unchecked globalization, or the swirl of noise on social media. And most of it comes to us as images through a screen. Faced with information that has swelled into something monstrous and complex, how can we reclaim our freedom to think? It might be the process of reestablishing thought anew from individual perception.
Yamagata Rough Cut! is a space where unfinished films (rough cuts) are screened, and all festival participants—transcending positions and borders—engage in free dialogue. This program, which began in 2011 during the year of the Great East Japan Earthquake, has valued dialogue as much as watching. This is an attempt to focus on what we feel from the images projected before us, and to gradually put into words what we thought and considered about those feelings. It is an attempt to seize free thought in time as it flows slowly by.
The screening takes place twice—before and after the dialogue. Through the experience of how perception can dramatically change after dialogue, we hope participants will feel the inherent power of engaging with moving images.