[KineJapan] Eigei Best and Worst Ten

[Gerow Aaron]

Indeed, Eigei will likely fold given Arai’s health—unless someone buys it up. Howver for a while, there were some young editors that could have taken it in new directions.

If Eigei was the old film world, it was a different old film world. The old film world was the generation of film critics that dominated KineJun until even the 80s and early 90s, who had been active since the 1950s. Even in the 60s, under Ogawa Toru, Eigei was different in bringing in non-professional film critics. In those days, that was people from other arts; today, it is having people who work on the film set write much of the film criticism. Eventually, Eigei came to represent those old film practitioners who were not members of the established film critical world, the major studios, or new critics like Hasumi. 

And those were voices it was wonderful to hear. The Eigei best ten could often be a surprise as you could see a film entered at no. 5 that you had never heard of. But in the last decade, those surprises have become less frequent. On the one hand, the predictable 歪み. On the other hand, the increasingly frequent concordances between the Eigei and KineJun lists. Perhaps that reflected the confusion and contradictions of that old film world, but to me it didn’t have as much of the politics I had expected before. 

Aaron