Jasper sez there's a sea change afoot

[Aaron Gerow]

I would agree there is a shift going on, but it has been going on for  
some years now. I still don't have a complete grasp of it, but it is  
tempting to cite this as the "end" of the period of nineties cinema I  
focus on in my book (whenever that will be done).

Briefly, here are some factors I perceive:

1) With the continued rise of TV and media capital, and shifts in  
audience demographics led by TV and J-pop (basically, young people  
are now watching Japanese films again), entertainment models from TV  
are increasingly dominant and alternative models are no longer  
economically necessary. As I've talked about before, indie cinema was  
an important market in the 90s because with Japanese cinema  
unsuccessful as a whole, indies had to market auteurship and foreign  
festival success as a means of gaining an audience. Now that Japanese  
film as a whole is doing better, the industry probably no longer  
perceives the need to market auteur style or foreign festival  
successes. (I don't have statistics, but it seems like Japanese films  
are having a decreased presence at non-specialized foreign festivals  
in the last few years: one reason is that the TV model films are no  
longer attractive to festivals, but I also wonder whether the  
industry is also just less interested in festivals. Am I wrong?)

2) One can point to generational factors. If 90s indies were fueled  
by the influence of Hasumi, the bubble and its bursting, the Kobe  
quake and Aum, many of these factors have ceased to have a major  
influence. What has replaced this is the influence of TV, anime,  
owarai, and government policies, which at least in Japan have been  
conducive to entertainment cinema. Aoyama and others once talked in  
the 90s about suddenly finding something real to make films about.  
But that seems to be lost, and into this vacuum has entered TV, the  
market, and nationalism.

3) It also just seems that 90s filmmakers have experienced changes  
themselves, as the models they explored in the 90s were thought to  
fail, or prove ineffective. As I talk about in my Kitano book, Kitano  
was forwarded in the early 90s as the champion of a distinct  
oppositional form of cinema. But when he makes the opposite of that  
in films like Kikujiro, the whole premise of an oppositional stance  
breaks down (even though it aims to reinforce Kitano's status as an  
auteur who rises even above auteurist typing).

I am still skeptical about the current economic boom (there are still  
too many films being made and too few spots in the market), so I  
wonder if this can continue forever. What will those films without an  
access point do? Disturbing trends like nationalism may also make  
more Japanese films a lot more insular and ugly. So let's see what  
happens.

Just a few thoughts.

Aaron Gerow
Director of Undergraduate Studies, Film Studies Program
Assistant Professor
Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
Yale University
53 Wall Street, Room 316
PO Box 208363
New Haven, CT 06520-8363
USA
Phone: 1-203-432-7082
Fax: 1-203-432-6764
e-mail: aaron.gerow at yale.edu
site: www.aarongerow.com