The Japanese media covers American football about as often as it covers American sumo ¡ª seldom to never. Few here play the game and not even a recent scandal involving an illegal tackle by a Nihon University player will change that.
So the upcoming release of ¡°The Big House,¡± Kazuhiro Soda¡¯s incisive, multifaceted documentary on the huge stadium that hosts University of Michigan football games, is something of a surprise. Soda, whose past documentaries have examined the absurdities of the Japanese election system (¡°Campaign,¡± 2007) and the struggles of a Japanese fishing community (¡°Oyster Factory,¡± 2015), confesses that he ¡°didn¡¯t even know the rules of football¡± before he started shooting ¡°The Big House¡± in the fall of 2016.
Soda was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to teach a class on the practice and theory of ¡°direct cinema¡± at the university with professors Markus Nornes and Terri Sarris. As developed by such pioneers as D.A. Pennebaker and Albert and David Maysles in the late 1950s and ¡®60s, and since refined by many filmmakers, Soda included, direct cinema says no to narration, background music, interviews and other practices of the conventional documentary.
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