Shiota Tokitoshi lecture in Munich - a third way

[Jasper Sharp]

>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..

I can see your point Mark, and it depresses me no end looking at the
Midnight Eye website stats seeing that the amount of people who read reviews
of films like Teruo Ishii's Shoguns Joys of Torture far outstrip the readers
of, for example, Night and Fog in Japan or Carmen Comes home. This may in
some measure be down to the demographic that use the internet to find out
about films - predominantly 20-30 year old males, it would appear - but at
the same time, I'm heartened by the fact that articles we have put up, such
as the John Williams interview of the feature on Kurutta Ippeiji, are still
enduringly popular. I actually think that people are far more interested in
reading about the middle ground than you give them credit for, but remember,
there are still very few Japanese films getting distributed abroad nowadays,
and basically people don't want to read about films they have no chance of
seeing.

You mention that "the critical discourse creating the latter is often
pitched as a reaction to the canon", but isn't this in itself echoed in the
films being released outside of Japan? On the one hand, the "highbrow" end
of things, you have the swansongs of former noteworthy directors such as
Oshima and Imamura, and the recent wave of Suncent productions that charge
headlong into the international arena self-consciously touting their
arthouse creditentials - I'm referring to the works of Aoyama Shinji, and
while she's still a hot topic, Kawase Naomi, both of whom, for all their
merits, make few concessions to mainstream audiences. On the other hand,
there's the work of "cult" directors such as Miike Takashi and Tsukamoto
Shinya and the recent discovery of Nikkatsu's Roman Porno.

Isn't this typical of any non-Hollywood releases nowadays though? Take for
example, the European films released in the UK. The European films which
have received the most attention recently, such as Breillat's Romance, and
Hanneke's La Pianiste both represent what can be termed of as "extreme
cinema", whilst the review of Amelie that appeared in Sight & Sound upon its
UK release criticised it for being too mainstream and not having enough
feminist content.

In any national cinema, the middle ground is still increasingly ignored.
Foolishly, I think, if you consider that the top grossing Japanese film in
the US is still Shall We Dance?, a thoroughly accessible mainstream piece
that could be enjoyed by any person of any nationality, and I still see
plenty of films from Japan that could reach out to wider audiences, but they
're just not being given general releases abroad - Shinozaki's Not
Forgotten, for example.

But this is happening because of decisions made at a far higher level than
either the cult or academic writers. The "gatekeepers" in distribution and
the film press seem to be totally out of touch with the general public. As
far as film culture goes, I believe Britain and America are very similar in
the way films are marketed. Hollywood is "mainstream" and subtitled foreign
films have to be "art". Foreign cinema is no longer meant to entertain,
portray or inform. It is meant to "shock", "provoke", "challenge" or to make
use of a hilarious quote by British Film Institute Programmer and Time Out
reviewer, Geoff Andrews, to "reconfigure cinema in its own image". This is
not what most people go to the cinema for!

As the English language increasingly takes a hold on the world, it would
appear that there's an increasing number of native English speakers who no
longer see cinema as a means of a viable means of finding out about another
culture, or if they do, it's only to crystallise existing preconceptions
about a nation. British people think that French films are full of sex, so
only the films that are full of sex get released in Britain. Again, I see
this as distributor led, not market led. The sort of graphic sex and sadism
content found in the extremes of Japanese cinema are not found in other
country's cinema. I'm sure there's a vicarious "can't happen here"
fascination with titles from Japan such as Rapeman, Tokyo Decadence or Guts
of A Virgin. Graphic descriptions of the content of such films are rather
more tangible than an exhaustive description of an Ozu film, in which, at
the end of the day, very little happens. At the end of the day, people,
especially 20-30 year old males, are interested in, if not watching, then at
least reading about sex and sadism.

If cult film writing is seen as a reaction to an old-fashioned academic
discourse, then let us not forget that the films of directors such as Ozu
and Kurosawa were mainstream releases from major companies targetted at the
general public which all fall into the middle ground I mentioned above, a
fact which seems to have escaped most Western writers on the subject. Cult
writers may be "deeply narcissistic in the way it indulges in descriptions
of the excess of the films themselves", but certainly no less narcissistic
than writers such as Desser who indulged in excessive descriptions of the
films' technical style and cultural relevatism over the content of the
individual films themselves. I'll state my position clearly. I would far
rather watch an Ozu film than Miike one, but that's only after having
literally forced myself to watch them having been intimidated for so long by
the inpenetrable prose that these films elicited from lofty-minded academic
writers.

As for which films are "representative" of Japanese culture, well, since I
began English teaching in Japan I've found it amazing that every time I
mention I'm interested in Japanese film, I'm given blank looks of shocked
disbelief by my students. They all know who Kurosawa is, but few of them
have heard of Ozu (there again, I wonder how many English people would
currently recognise the name David Lean), and still fewer of Miike Takashi.
As for the films they quote back at me, I've never heard of them, but then
again, how many big-budget studio releases have been released on the
international market recently? Shochiku and Toho don't seem to be too
interested in releasing films onto the festival circuit. Ultimately, not
even Japanese people go to watch the latest big-budget chambara releases
now, favouring to line up for the next high-concept action movie such as
Pearl Harbour or Black Hawk Down instead. With this in mind, I'm wondering
if any recent strain of  Japanese cinema can be said to be representative of
Japanese culture at present.

Japanese cinema nowadays may be finding itself in somewhat of a quandary as
to which direction it's currently heading, but I personally see that as true
of all non-American produce at the moment. There's a lot of rubbish being
released in Japan at the moment, but at the same time, I still regularly see
stuff that really bowls me over and that I want to write about. If someone
comes to our site looking for information on Versus or Lolita Vibrator
Torture and ends up wondering onto a review of The New God or A Tender
Place, then personally I'm a happy chappy. At least the information is
there.

Jya mata,

Jasper