Minamata: a tragédia exposta no documentário de Noriaki Tsuchimoto e nas fotografias de William Eugene Smith

Abstract

This film review focuses on Andrew Levina’s movie Minamata (2020), a biographical drama film about photographer William Eugene Smith known for his photos of World War II front lines. Invited by Life Magazine’s editor, Smith leaves his almost total reclusion and travels to Minamata in Japan to photograph and document the lives of residents devastated by mercury poisoning and industrial waste thrown into the waters by the Chisso Corporation. The Minamata environmental disaster, as the tragedy became known, was also registered by documentary filmmaker Noriaki Tsuchimoto over 35 years of his life. Considering the theme’s relevance, the importance of Eugene Smith to photojournalism and Noriaki Tsuchimoto’s documentaries, I use Levina’s film as a pretext to discuss artists who through their art documented and reported to the world a tragedy as or more devastating than the wars broadcast daily by the media.