Blow Up Hideki (1975): The portrait of the artist as a young man
Blow Up Hideki (1975) is what happens when somebody makes Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1959) but it’s about an ambitious nationwide concert tour for the biggest teen idol in Japan instead of about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. Like Jazz the film blends moody atmospheric shots with concert footage to create something of a multimedia collage, giving you the feel of what it must have been like to be in the middle of everything that summer rather than a nuts and bolts look at the inner workings of the tour. I’m not sure what the reaction was at the time--whether it was seen as too mundane or too experimental--but watching now, in 2021, it’s a wonderful time capsule of the era and a very enjoyable film.
Idol (and musician) concert films and tour documentaries have become ubiquitous in recent years and they tend to fall into a handful of categories. There’s the straight ahead concert film, which attempts to capture what was on stage, on film. The Talking Heads Stop Making Sense is a good example of the best of that genre. But with how cheap video is now and how reliable a money maker concert DVDs are, they tend to be more utilitarian and less artistic these days. Then there’s the gross exploitation films like One Direction: This Is Us, the junk food of the genre, intended for quick consumption and will give you a stomach ache if you revisit it too often. There’s also the (unintentionally?) revealing films where the overwhelming sadness and ennui of the artist chokes everything in frame (even I could only watch Kwon Ji Yong: Act III Motte once). My favorites, though, tend to be the nuts and bolts tour documentaries included as bonus material in just about every concert film these days. Hours of footage of the artists running soundcheck, talking over plans, rehearsing with the band, the chaos backstage.
Blow Up Hideki is none of these.
The film starts out by grounding us in a time and place: Japan, summer, 1975. Sailboats on the water, kids playing on the beach, pastoral farm scenes. It’s a time of peace and prosperity. We get our first glimpse of Hideki confidently climbing up a lush green ski jump in (I believe) Sapporo. Dressed in a bright red polo shirt and jeans, he draws your eye against the monotonous background. We hear him in voice over, with all the wisdom of his 20 years, speaking about his outlook on life and on performing. 「人を喜ばせなければいけないでなくて、僕たちの場合は一緒に喜びたい、そういう気持ちでやっていきたい。」(“For us, it’s not about making people happy but about creating happiness together. That’s how I want to do things.”)
Hideki’s 1975 nationwide tour was extremely ambitious. It opened with a festival at the foot of Mt. Fuji and then traveled around the country for the next month and a half before ending up at the since torn down Osaka Stadium… with a couple of bonus days tacked on in Okinawa because, hey, they deserve to see Hideki way down south too!
These large summer festivals and stadium concerts are standard now but to mount something like this in 1975 was really breaking new ground. There had been the One Step Festival held in Fukushima in August the previous year but this was different. This wasn’t just a performance; he was going to attempt stage craft that hadn’t been seen before on this scale. Sound and video equipment, like the video screens that acts like U2 and NSYNC used in the late 1990s and early 2000s for their ambitious spectacle tours, was decades away. Hideki and his team faced the very real problem of how to create a show that would reach every person in that audience of 30,000 fans in the shadow of Mt. Fuji. The solution was ingenious--not only would he have a thrust stage allowing him to push into the crowd but would also use a combination of helicopters (a Hideki trademark since his bold entrance swinging on a rope ladder at his 1974 fan meeting) and construction crane gondolas that would suspend him 35 meters in the air, flying above the audience like the winged goddess Nike. And then all of these contraptions had to be wired for sound recording and playback so Hideki could hear the band on the main stage and the band and audience could hear him.
We get a few glimpses of the planning and rehearsal stages but then swiftly move along to the construction of the sets and excited fans riding on the bus (joyfully singing 青春に賭けよう) before diving right into the concert. And much like Jazz on a Summer’s Day the camera delights in capturing the faces in the crowd--my favorites was the grinning security guard holding back the press of the crowd, seemingly delighted at the ridiculous situation he found himself in.
From here we move to the indoor concerts and a mix of stage footage, shots of Hideki meandering around various locations, and interviews with fans (“What do you like about Hideki? His long legs.”) There’s a charming interlude where we see Hideki visit his old elementary school in Hiroshima and swing from some monkey bars, letting himself be a kid again for a few minutes.
And then we’re at Osaka Stadium for the finale. The bookend performance to the Mt. Fuji festival, except this one takes place at night and the audience sparkles with the fans’ light sticks.
What lingers on in the memory after watching the film is what a good friend of mine calls “the gap.” The gap between “Action Hideki” on stage and the humble, soft-spoken man off of it. Throughout the film we see him work for the “一緒に喜びたい” (wanting to be happy together) through song after song, city after city. One gets the feeling that if it was humanly possible to have personally greeted every single fan in every single audience, he would have done so and gladly. It’s really very sweet. Hideki dressed with Nike’s wings, suspended 35 meters in the air, holding a red flare not for his own aggrandizement but that so that everybody can see him and know he’s there.
But the thing about teen idol hysteria is that it doesn’t always match with the quality of the music (as the Bay City Rollers would amply demonstrate in a couple of years). Looking back can be dangerous. The girls who told the interviewer that they loved Hideki’s sparkling eyes and long legs weren’t necessarily listening to his records for his amazing vocal chops. That said, it was the fact that Hideki did have such musical talent and that he did put out such amazing records that we still remember him so fondly today.
Looking back at the era through Blow Up Hideki, the hysteria seems… justified. Of course he sparked screaming riots the second he stepped on stage, did you hear him nail that entrance in 至上の愛??? The man is a genius!
What Blow Up Hideki captures for us is a snapshot in time. Lazy summer days punctuated by the pure ecstasy of the concert stage. Teen girls deeply in love with sparkling eyes and long legs. The power and emotion in Hideki’s voice reaching us around the world, nearly 50 years later.