Jasper sez there's a sea change afoot

[Mark Nornes]

Among the new contributions to Midnight Eye, Jasper Sharp makes a  
general observation about the state of Japanese cinema after this  
season's Nippon Connection:

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, Nippon Connection is THE  
premier event anywhere in the world to get a good idea of what is  
going on within Japan's vibrant film culture in any one year, and on  
the basis of the selection this time round, it seems there's a big sea  
change afoot in Japanese cinema at the moment - although whether this  
will be reflected by the titles distributors choose to release  
overseas is another matter entirely. Clearly one of the most evident  
trends over the past few years has been a move away from the pessimism  
and navel-gazing of the more auteur-driven works that proliferated  
across festivals worldwide at the turn of the millennium, and the  
violence, perversion and gore that many mistakenly identify with  
Japanese film.

A large proportion of the films screened in Frankfurt this year were  
by first time directors, and the emphasis overall seemed to be set far  
more squarely on providing solid entertainment and good clean fun.  
Criticisms of Japanese films as being self-indulgent, poorly  
structured and overlong hardly seemed appropriate for titles such as  
Hideyuki Hirayama's Three for the Road, Daihachi Yoshida's Funuke Show  
Some Love You Losers!, and Dog in a Sidecar, the latest by the  
criminally underrated Kichitaro Negishi. On the other side of the  
coin, there's been much talk over the past few years of a general  
retreat away from political subject matter in Japanese cinema. The  
tide certainly seems to have turned if this year's program was  
anything to go by, with a notorious talking point provided by the  
documentary Yasukuni, directed by the Tokyo-based Chinese director Li  
Yang and, if you haven't been following, already the subject of huge  
public and parliamentary debate in Japan, having been pulled from most  
cinemas following threats from rightwing groups. There was also the US- 
Japan collaboration Tokko: The Wings of Defeat (Risa Morimoto / Linda  
Hoaglund) about Kamikaze pilots, and Koji Wakamatsu's 3-hour+ epic  
United Red Army, which can easily lay claim as the crowning moment of  
an already astonishing 45-year filmmaking career. And if all this  
wasn't already enough, there were several sublime first works from the  
indie sector made by directors still in their early 20s, including  
Hiroki Iwabuchi's A Permanent Part-Timer in Distress, Ryo Nakajima's  
This World of Ours and Yasutomo Chikuma's Now, I...



I'm left slightly puzzled, and wonder if Jasper could explain this a  
little better. I'm still not sure what he means, but I always  
appreciate Jasper's take on things and so I'm intrigued.

Does anyone else sense this?

Markus
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