Shiota Tokitoshi lecture in Munich

[M Arnold]

Mark Nornes <amnornes at umich.edu> wrote:

>However, his talk does reflect a recent bifurcation in the global reception 
>of Japanese cinema.

A couple of weeks ago I was with a few friends discussing the same problem 
over drinks in Shinjuku.  I'm sometimes bothered by the reception of 
Japanese film among foreign audiences.  It's almost a self-fulfilling 
prophecy, the cliche people always mumble about Japan itself--deeply 
traditional culture and cutting-edge modernity existing separately at the 
same time.  Sometimes films that don't really fit in either group get stuck 
with one or the other anyway, and it's frustrating because I notice how my 
own viewing plays right into this.  If I were asked to think of a 
contemporary Japanese film that hasn't been or can't be described as a new 
Ozu, a new 'cult' movement or a post-modern work of art, other than a few 
documentaries I probably couldn't think of anything.  I don't have the 
impression that this is such a recent split though.  For me this paradigm 
seems to be a manifestation of the same kind of stereotypes that have 
haunted western-Japanese relations for years and years.  Japan has to be 
anything but normal.  If I remember correctly some of the recent film 
reviews by Mark Schilling that I've read have been interesting because they 
deal with more run-of-the-mill material that an average viewer in Japan 
might go see, but the only problem there is that I don't think I'd be 
interested in watching the majority of them.  Well, even back in the states 
I'd go to the theater to see a David Lynch movie, but probably not Steven 
Soderberg or Michael Bay.

Jasper suggests that Ozu and Kurosawa were the middle-ground directors 
marketed at a general audience, but I think that as the years have gone by 
their relationship to that audience has changed somewhat (it's mostly 
evaporated in Japan, it seems), and when spectators and scholars now take 
out the pen and paper they might think up comments that don't have much in 
common with the "model viewer" of the past.  Maybe the word I want is 
"fetish."  As far as our experience of viewing them is concerned I'm not 
sure that they do represent that middle ground.

>What's happening on the ground is far more complex

What is happening on the ground?  I like to think of myself as pounding that 
pavement as much as possible in my free time, trying to keep myself aware of 
what's happening now in "Japanese film," but when it comes down to it I 
can't really say, and sometimes I'm left in the wake because all the trendy 
new movies get released at foreign film festivals but don't even make it 
here to Tokyo.  I wonder about that often--what is happening in Japanese 
film now?

I hope you all are enjoying the holiday.  It seems that every ten minutes a 
new loudspeaker truck comes rattling by the apartment here... right now I'm 
listening to the third one since I started writing this message.  If any of 
you are stuck in Tokyo for the vacation and want to get a coffee or see a 
film, please send me a message!  I'll be in Tokyo until the end of Golden 
Week and I always enjoy meeting other list members.

Michael Arnold

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