Eureka

[Aaron Gerow]

Mark wrote:

>I agree -- Aoyama's films are too stylistically diverse to be lumped in the
>"minimalist" or any other category. I do feel, though, that he has been
>turning down the emotional temperature in his recent films. By comparison
>with the explosions of freak-out violence in Helpless, Eureka would seem to
>be quite cool indeed. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Well, the first 10 or so minutes of the film is wonderful action cinema.  
Aoyama's gambit--whether you think it works or not is another matter--is 
that the adrenaline/shock from that scene needs three hours to get over 
in the same ways the characters need time to get over their trauma.

>Exactly, but if even a good Japanese film has certain minimalist markers --
>long running time, long cuts,. slow pace, little dialogue, subdued tone --
>it may well run into a stronger critical headwind that it would have a few
>years ago. Such seems to have been the fate of Eureka in the NYT.

That headwind is probably a good thing.  One hates to see things like 
Timeless Melody win awards (like it did at Pusan)--it only encourages 
things.

And most good directors these days are trying to mix styles.  Even Miike 
Takashi, the maestro of the extreme, has a lot of long shot, long takes 
mixed in with his moments of machine gun editing.  Shinozaki's new film 
is stylistically quite different from Okaeri, with action and about 3 or 
4 times the number of cuts.

Markus wrote:

>Frankly, I've felt it
>myself, so that I see something like Barren Illusion and I'm not sure
>whether to throw up my hands and leave the theater or enjoy it as parody.
>Maybe it was conceived as parody, but I've come to the point where I begin
>receiving the films as such (thus the "beach film" comment in my previous
>post). 

Actually, there are parodical elements in that film.  In some ways, it's 
detachment gone to the extreme.  I tend to cite it a lot because it works 
quite well with certain parts of my thesis on recent film, but it is one 
of Kurosawa's less enjoyable films.

>At the same time, the phenom is overdetermined, and while the place of
>foreign festivals and the fickle taste of their programmers cannot be
>dismissed, I think what's ultimately happening is a dynamic we see
>throughout the history of world cinema. These filmmakers---significantly
>many of them are young and represent a "generation"---have settled into
>this minimal, distanced style to set themselves apart from both popular
>cinema and previous generations. In this sense, it is a kind of
>"oppositional" cinema in terms of the way they've formed their identity,
>but few of them fit the bill in the end. For me, this is ultimately why I'm
>losing interest in what some of them are doing....and wait expectantly for
>the newest films of a few directors. 

Markus is citing one of the central problems here.  Yes, minimalism has 
fallen into a rut here in part because of the lure of foreign festivals, 
but we also have to remember that one of the primary forces behind this 
style is movies like Space Travelers, which use everything from editing 
to music to explain every damn thing in the story, use every conceivable 
cliche, and treat the audience like idiots; or like Yamada Yoji and the 
"socially conscious old guard," who foreground an "obvious humanism" that 
definitely doesn't seem so obvious any more.  Many filmmakers pick a 
minimal style precisely because they don't want to make movies like that. 
 Markus is right to question how "oppositional" this is: few think about 
these stylistic issues critically, and many are simply falling into 
another dominant style that is commercially established in the art house 
circuit.  But there is a definite effort to approach the "real" these 
days, and most do not see TV style or the style of their elders as 
approaching reality at all.  They avoid terms like realism (which 
everyone recognizes is a convention) and aim for some kind of "real" 
outside of signification (they use the term real/rearu, or the term 
"jikkan"--which Aoyama in particular is using of late).  I intend to 
pursue Aoyama on this matter in Vienna, but it is nonetheless true that a 
lot of people are increasingly crossing the borders between fiction and 
documentary.

>By the way, Aaron has a piece in an
>upcoming anthology in Positions that discusses this in very interesting
>ways, interesting because he speculates why---of all the possibilities in
>the filmmaker's toolbox---they've chosen minimalism. Perhaps he wants to
>chime in?

I am embarassed to say that the article was rejected: something about 
"insufficient theoretization" (and some of you on the list think I'm too 
theoretical!  That's what I get for trying to cross too many borders!).  
I will try to publish it somewhere more appropriate.

Finally, Michael wrote:

>I am getting a sense that Kore-Eda's Mabarosi is being dismissed (rather
>thoroughly, at that) when it is described as "minimalist". I would personally
>rate it as one of my favorite modern films (Asian or otherwise), am I simply
>showing naivete?

I think I've talked about this film enough, but suffice it to say there 
was a lot of criticism of that film when it came out in Japan, mostly 
focusing on: 1) use of stylistic elements which at that time were not new 
at all; and 2) the construction of a "Japaneseness" which was 
conventional, bought into Western Orientalist views of Japan, and denied 
the individual self.  Even Koreeda himself has taken some of these 
criticisms to heart and speaks of the film now as partially a failure 
(though for him, for different reasons).

Aaron Gerow
Associate Professor
International Student Center
Yokohama National University
79-1 Tokiwadai
Hodogaya-ku, Yokohama 240-8501
JAPAN
E-mail: gerow at ynu.ac.jp
Phone: 81-45-339-3170
Fax: 81-45-339-3171