Shiota Tokitoshi lecture in Munich

[Mark Nornes]

I don't know about Shiota, who I don't hear much talk about and haven't 
to my knowledge read.

However, his talk does reflect a recent bifurcation in the global 
reception of Japanese cinema. A split between a vision of Japanese 
cinema dominated by canonical masters (the K/M/O trio plus a smattering 
of other directors) vs. a focus on pink eiga and yakuza. The writing 
representing the former is familiar to us all. The critical discourse 
creating the latter is often pitched as a reaction to the canon, and is 
deeply narcissistic in the way it indulges in descriptions of the excess 
of the films themselves. If you don't know what I mean, just read any 
text----magazine article, film festival synopsis, KineJapan post---on 
Miike. Especially anything written by Chuck Stephens, bless his soul I 
appreciate everything he writes even though it's begun driving my batty.

Batty because this new discourse consistently poses itself as something 
new (it isn't, since you can trace it back through the postwar pink eiga 
and the prewar blue film) and the true representative of Japanese cinema 
and its culture (it isn't this, either). I believe it has something to 
do with the disintegration of the old gatekeeping framework for the 
international film festival trade route. Imagine Kawakita replaced by 
Chuck Stephens and the Rotterdam FF and you see what I mean. In a sense, 
mainly high art critics and programmers have been displaced by fans of 
one sort or another (yakuza eiga sex and violence, pink eiga sex and 
violence, anime sex and violence, etc. etc.).

This is to say that each respective version of "Japanese cinema" is 
representative less of Japanese cinema than of the peculiar cult that 
makes the choices. What's happening on the ground is far more complex, 
and has probably never been adequately explained (even in Japanese 
language publications?).

Markus


A. M. Nornes
Program in Film and Video Studies
Department of Asian Languages and Cultures
University of Michigan
2512 Frieze Building
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285
Phone: 734-647-2094
FAX: 734-936-1846