Love & Pop

[Mark Schilling]

Aaron, as usual, found something pertinent and thoughtful to add to my
off-the-cuff comments, this time about the ability of Shunji Iwai to
connect to young audiences:

>Iwai might be able revive 
> the industry (though I seriously wonder about that), but frankly its not 
> a cinema that I want.  This is not simply a matter of taste: I don't 
> think Iwai has thought about the cinematic or ideological implications of

> style to the extent other filmmakers have. 

I'm not sure I want Iwai's cinema either -- I found "Swallowtail" more of
an extended music video than a film, whose reverse stereotyping of Asians
in Japan may have been intended as "positive" but impressed me as often
clueless, or outright offensive. Nonetheless, I remember the buzz in the
packed house at the Shibuya screening of "Love Letter" I attended -- and
how it struck me as qualitatively different from that at most other films
by young Japanese directors I had seen (though "buzz" isn't the right word
to describe the subdued, if not actually somnolent, atmosphere at the
screenings of these films).  

That kind of stir and excitement is too seldom found among even dedicated
fans of Japanese films, for whom attending screenings is often like serving
an otaku obsession. ("I got to add that one to my collection"). I am
thinking of my own misspent youth in late sixties to mid-seventies, when I
went to see "2001," "Bonnie and Clyde," "Straw Dogs," "The Godfather" and
"Last Tango in Paris" with a tremendous sense of anticipation and even
anxiety -- as though this might the movie that changes everything and blows
my mind forever! (Well, it had already been blown, but no matter.) Those
films, whatever their respective merits, spoke to me and my generation
directly and urgently, in ways that mainstream Hollywood couldn't -- or
wouldn't. 

As much as I admire the films of Aoyama, Kurosawa, Tsukamoto and others who
are working outside industry conventions, they haven't yet hit the same
kind of nerve with the wider audience, while Iwai, for all his faults, has.
I'm not asking them to imitate Iwai -- a bad idea in any case. I would be
happy, however, if a madly ambitious and talented under-forty were to
forget filling out the application to Taorima and instead knock a million
or so folks (including a few of us outlanders) flat with the brillance and
energy and orginality of his (or her) vision.   

Mark Schilling
schill at gol.com