Magino Village – A Tale / The Sundial Carved with a Thousand Years of Notches, the epic documentary created by Ogawa Production in 1986 - and the culmination of the years spent by the collective living, farming, and filming in a small hamlet in Yamagata Prefecture¹ - opens and ends with time-lapse images of the Sun rising and setting. The peculiarity of these images is that what moves on screen is not only the Sun, it is also the horizon. The camera is focused and fixed on the Sun, following its path. According to Ogawa Shinsuke himself, these scenes were added only in the spring of 1985 after members of the group started to ask themselves how to put an order to all of the material filmed in all their years spent in Yamagata. The idea was to use images at the very beginning of the film that could clearly express the collective's feelings about the film, and about their experiences in Magino Village.

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To film these crucial scenes, Ogawa and his group enlisted the help of Yamazaki Hiroshi; the photographer and experimental filmmaker from Japan, who at that time had already captured several astonishing long exposure photos of the Sun. and had also made experimental shorts centered around the Sun. While Yamazaki's work in photography is well-known both in Japan and abroad, his contribution to filmmaking is still awaiting rediscovery and a proper assessment within the broader context of the history of experimental cinema².

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Born in Nagano Prefecture in 1946, Yamazaki Hiroshi became a freelance photographer after dropping out of Nihon University, where he studied in the Department of Arts. Drawn to photography from an early age as a high school student, he began capturing photographs of airplanes—a collection now unfortunately lost. Concurrently, alongside his interest in images, Yamazaki started to develop an interest in music, particularly Jazz - a passion he had cultivated throughout his whole life that influenced his visual works - and even ended up working at a jazz café named Bizarre in Shinjuku, Tokyo. While still a university student, his friend Hagiwara Sakumi, a cinematographer and director, introduced Yamazaki toTenjō Sajiki, the theater troupe co-founded by Terayama Shūji, where he got a job as a stage director. This experience, but also the artistic milieu of Tokyo in the late 1960s, provided the opportunity to meet with graphic designers, photographers, directors, and artists, such as Yokoo Tadanori, Narahara Ikkō, Awazu Kiyoshi, and Sugiura Kohēi.  During the same years, Yamazaki also crossed paths with Adachi Masao, and Wakamatsu Production, from which he often received leftover film stocks. In 1971, Yamazaki provided the photos for an interview with Adachi published in the magazine Bijutsu Techō, and in the same year, worked as a set photographer for Shinoda Masahiro's Silence. On this occasion, Yamazaki had the chance to meet renowned cinematographer Miyagawa Kazuo. After avidly reading photography magazines such as Provoke, Film Art, or Camera Mainichi, and crystallizing his methodology and approach to photography, he held his first solo exhibition in 1974 called ''Observation'' at Galleria Grafica in Tokyo. In the following decades, exhibitions featuring his work were held both in Japan and abroad, including showcases at the New York Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography.

Although in the late 1960s, Yamazaki achieved some success by photographing artists and their events such as multidisciplinary artist Akasegawa Genpei, the wrapping installations by Christo, dancers such as the great Butoh dancer Hijikata Tatsumi, as well as a multitude of other performers; he soon felt that this wasn't the path he wanted to pursue. His goal in photography was not to search for subjects, but for things that would not exist without his relationship with the camera. Due to artistic differences and despite his deep respect for the Japanese polymath, after working for Terayama for a year and a half, he distanced himself from Tenjō Sajiki.
 

Gradually, Yamazaki developed his own artistic sensibility in photography. Central to this approach were the concepts of what he has called on several occasions ''photographic and optical incidents'' (shashin teki to kōgaku teki na jiken). He chose seemingly anodyne landscapes, the sea, or the view from his home window, not because they were inherently beautiful or the coastlines were intriguing, but because they lacked distinctive features and didn't demand an active selection of what to shoot. Whether through a window or in front of the sea, there was nothing extraordinary to capture. However, while the camera shutter was open, certain optical or photographic ''incidents'', that is to say, accidental events captured by the photographic apparatus caused by the weather, light, or simply the passing of time, might have occurred, and thus determined the result. To achieve this, his interest moved towards exploring the boundaries and inherent qualities of the medium, more than what was in front of the camera. In Yamazaki's own words: ''Method = expression = concept. It is best when methodology, expression, and verbalized concept stand on the same ground''.

This approach transferred naturally into his filmmaking, as exemplified in some of Yamazaki's earliest films. For instance, in his 1973 short, A Story, a six-minute work shot in 16mm and composed of multiple exposures of Shibuya's streets, each image is captured from a different angle, and as the film progresses, the overlapping becomes more chaotic, to the point that the city on screen ends up collapsing onto itself. According to Yamazaki, this experiment was done to express the act of filming itself and was influenced by Bill Evans' ''Conversation with Myself'' (1963), an album in which the Jazz musician recorded and overdubbed three piano tracks by himself. Overdubbing was at that time a new technology that had not been explored in all its potential.
 

An exhibition of his photos and films, held in Tokyo in 2009, was aptly titled ''Moving Photos! Static Films!!'' capturing not only the perpetual dialogue between still and moving images but also his commitment to challenging conventional definitions of photography and filmmaking, as we will see later when analyzing his most important film. Before delving into some of his films centered around the Sun, it is important to briefly describe the photographic collection that is more in conversation with his short movies, Heliography (1978). The collection takes its title, literally “to draw with light”, from the name Nicéphore Niépce gave to one of his inventions, an early form of photography, in 1826. The Heliography series— he started to work on it in January 1978 in the Bōsō and Izu peninsulas—is an important point in Yamazaki's career, not so much because of the novelty of the subject, but on the contrary, because it crystallized Yamazaki's decade-long photographic engagement with the Sun. The images of the star, often captured above the ocean using very long exposure techniques, are to this day breathtaking. The outcome resembles abstract or non-figurative paintings³, almost as if the Sun itself painted the sky with brushstrokes. Time condenses and transforms into space, with horizontal lines paralleling the horizon, and comet-like beams of light traversing the dark sky.