Shiota Tokitoshi lecture in Munich - a third way

[Mark Nornes]

On Saturday, April 27, 2002, at 12:24  PM, Jasper Sharp wrote:

> 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.

Yes, Midnight Eye is very refreshing for its catholic taste; I hope 
everyone on KineJapan is a regular visitor!

> In any national cinema, the middle ground is still increasingly ignored.

I did make a distinction between, if you want to put it crudely, art and 
cult film. However, I see this as mostly a temporal structure---the 
difference between what used to "stand for" Japanese cinema in the past 
vs. the last 5+ years or so.

I also don't see it as two ends of a spectrum, but simply as possible 
emphases that are, ultimately, in a theoretical sense, unlimited. I 
reject the idea of a middle ground; my own sense of "Japanese cinema" is 
an interconnected complex of possibilities (genres, styles, modes of 
production, media, etc. etc.).

>
> 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.

They all work in concert to produce the _market_ gatekeepers cater to, 
but the relationships between these coordinates and the people who 
populate the system seem to have changed in the past decade, my basic 
point.

> 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!

Interesting, as this suggests that the recent attention to good old/new 
Japanese sex and violence is part of a larger phenomenon.

> 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. ....[his] inpenetrable prose that these 
> films elicited from lofty-minded academic
> writers.

Actually, Desser is one of the most readable scholars of Japanese cinema 
outside of Richie, and also, I might point out, one of the first to take 
the pink film seriously (see Eros Plus Massacre, which was published in 
1988).

> 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....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.

I'm not interested in promoting representatives; I am interested in 
watching and enjoying the widest variety of work (which puts us in 
complete agreement). I would, however, point out that the combination of 
"rubbish" and "jewels" is typical of every national context since the 
first decade of cinema, including the "fabulous 50s" of Japanese cinema.

Markus