Beyond the hype

What's so extreme about Japanese cinema? How does a bubble economy influence film production? Why all the buzz, anyway? These and a lot of other questions are answered by Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp authors of the recently published excellent "Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film" and hosts of the highly recommended website Midnight Eye in an extensive interview with MissingImage.

Maybe you could both tell a little bit about your background. How you got to writing on film and when and why midnight eye was founded.

Tom: I started writing on film and working as a freelance film critic in the mid-90s. It began when I was an intern at a TV station and was asked to write copy for the film section of a new programme they were doing, which was aimed at young viewers. After that I started an e-zine with a handful of friends and also began to write for magazines, first in my native Holland, but then also for mags in the UK and US.

The idea for Midnight Eye grew out of our fascination with Japanese film, in particular the new generation of filmmakers that came up in the early and mid 1990s, with films like Tetsuo, Sonatine, After Life, the original Shall We Dance, Gonin and so on. We began developing the site in early 2000, just after a big programme of recent Japanese films at the Rotterdam Film Festival had given us the final spark, and then we went online for the first time in early 2001.

Our new book The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film is in many ways an homage to all these great filmmakers of the 1990s and the way their work inspired us. One of the best things about writing the book was revisiting all these films that made us want to write about Japanese movies in the first place.

Jasper: I’d always been interested in film, primarily as a fan, though I had some part in the organization of the Splatterfest horror festival in London in the early 90s. But during the bulk of the 90s I was working in computing and used this as an excuse to travel around the world, and because of this I became very interested in international cinema, and how it related to the country that produced it. I ended up through this watching a lot of films that weren’t necessarily being released in the UK at the time, and making sure I went to all the international film festivals wherever I was based. My writing stemmed from me wanting to let people know what they were missing.

Anyway, I was working in Amsterdam when I met Tom, and as we both had a keen interest in Japanese cinema at the time, we decided to kick off Midnight Eye together. There wasn’t a lot of good information about Japanese film around then, so I ended up doing a lot of research about the culture and the industry that spawned these works, and it soon developed into an overwhelming passion.

To cut a long story short, I got bored with computing, and ended up moving to Japan as an English teacher, and film was the medium through which I started to learn about the country, and the language. It also proved an ideal gateway through which to meet some very interesting people. I soon realized there were literally thousands of titles that no one had ever heard about. It was during this prolonged stay in Japan that we started working on the book together.

While everybody is talking about Asian Cinema you two are very
specifically talking about the Japanese. What caught your attention so much that you entirly devoted your work to that field?

Tom: I'm not sure if I can define exactly what it was that appealed to me, but I remember seeing one really interesting Japanese film after another in the early and mid 1990s. It seemed as if every movie coming out of Japan at the time was a very unique, idiosyncratic and high-quality piece of work. It didn't matter whether it was a genre movie or an art film, they all seemed to transcend their limitations in their own unique ways. That was a kind of buzz I wasn't getting from any other cinema at the time, Asian or otherwise. And that essentially continued through the decade and into the 2000s, because I'm still hooked. Whereas other films that I loved in the early 90s don't seem so great to me anymore now, those Japanese films of the period still have the same effect on me as they did back then.

Jasper: As I mentioned, I was, indeed still am, interested in cinema from all over the world. I had seen a lot of Japanese films, and was very intrigued by the culture, and this prompted me to move away from my old job to live in the country, which in turn prompted me to watch more and more Japanese films. So this perhaps answers why specifically Japanese film.

Perhaps it is worth remembering that when we first started Midnight Eye, it was before Asian cinema had quite the buzz it has now. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon hadn’t come out yet, and before Shuri and JSA, no one was talking about Korean cinema at all. In Hong Kong the industry was at a bit of a low point. DVD was just becoming established and there were hardly any Japanese titles being released in these early days - a lot of the films we were covering were reviewed from Hong Kong VCDs. There were other sites on the web talking about them, its true, but no mainstream publications really took Asian cinema seriously. Subtitled DVD and the internet seem to have been instrumental in getting more films out to Western audiences, and it has most definitely snowballed from there.

But I have never really seen many similarities between Japanese and other Asian cinemas. Most of the filmmakers we cover in the book cited Hollywood and European directors as influences. I never heard any saying they were influenced by Chinese or Korean or Indian films they saw in their youth.

I think it is a little misleading to talk about “Asian cinema”. You can’t point out the same intrinsic similarities between Asian cultures as you can in Europe. There hasn’t been quite the same history of freedom of movement or cultural exchanges. Take, for example, Karl Marx or Sigmund Freud moving to London to write their most famous works; Samuel Beckett or Pablo Picasso being drawn to Paris, and in cinema history specifically, the same long history of co-productions between different European nations (though its true, a number of Japanese directors worked in Hong Kong in the 60s).

It takes a bit of traveling around Asia to realize just how special what we have in Europe is, despite the language differences. Even within countries in Asia there are so many different cultures – Somewhere as vast China, for example, now includes the film industries of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing. All of whose industries have had very distinct and different histories from one another since they first began film production. Korea, also, has been wedged between two giants, China and Japan, throughout history, and this has therefore encouraged an incredibly strong sense of culture and national identity. And of course, there’s obviously a huge difference between North and South Korea.

Japan is an island situated even further from the Asian mainland than Britain is from Europe, and, though it is changing a little nowadays, since the war, it has seen itself more as a world player on equal footing with Europe and America than its closer Asian neighbours. More than that, Japan was closed off from interactions with outside world for 300 years, and also, after the war, the Japanese weren’t allowed to travel freely abroad until 1964. So there’s obviously going to be big differences, and only a few similarities, between its culture and its neighbours’.

I guess we’re at the early stages where “Asian cinema” has become a buzzword, where video stores lump everything oriental together under their “martial arts” section and Steven Spielberg can make Memoirs of a Geisha with a Chinese actress in the lead role. Hopefully now that more and more films from this region are coming out, viewers will become more and more conscious of the vast differences in their cultures and histories, not to mention their approaches to cinema.

Cinema from Japan, as Japanese culture is always a little
endangered of being only praised for it's "extremity" in certain
respects. Are the considered extremities making it harder to promote the qualities of japanese contemporary cinema? Are they possibly even just a cultural misunderstanding between the West and Japan?

Tom: It's a disturbing thought that apparently we can only regard a foreign culture through this filter of excess and violence. I personally feel that this says a lot more about us than it does about the Japanese, since it's the West that imposes that filter and decides what gets shown here. But you could just as easily switch it around, choose a few of the more extreme things that come out of Europe and the US and let the Japanese believe that us Westerners are all a bunch of raving maniacs.

Jasper: I guess, failing all else, onscreen sex and violence is one thing that everyone understands. It is true, a lot of the weirder cult stuff like the Guinea Pig films, Naked Blood and Rubber Lover, minor films within Japanese film culture, have been picked up for Western distributors whereas major mainstream releases, for example hospital dramas, melodramas and popular comedies such as the long-running Tsuri Baka Nisshi series are considered not suitable for foreign release. The minor production houses want less money than the major studios for overseas releases, so it’s less or a gamble putting these out, as they already have a guaranteed market. Then these titles end up fuelling a demand for more similar titles, and before long you end up stuck in this Catch 22 situation.

And it is not limited to Japan either. Most of the French films that now come into Britain all feature very strong, or very perverse sex and violence – films such as Irreversible, Catherine Breillat’s movies, or Michel Haneke’s La Pianiste – and are really not reflective of what French people watch.

I do think, to some extent foreign distributors underestimate what people want to see. A film like Shall We Dance, for example, had no extreme content, but its appeal was universal. I’d like to see a lot more films like that being released overseas.

At the same time, the range of Japanese films, and non-English language films in general, being put out on DVD is getting broader all the time, so I am optimistic that as people become more familiar with watching them, the scope of the releases will increase.

I guess it is quite pointless to start a "why did you give him/her a chapter and him/her not" sort of discussion. Nevertheless it is interesting that you included three directors (namely Shohei Immamura, Seijin Suzuki and Fukasaku Kinji) that have been around for a long time. Why do you believe they are important to contemporary japanese cinema despite the fact that they all activly made their contribution to it?

Tom: There were several reasons for including them. First of all, we wanted to indicate that what's going on in Japanese film today didn't start in the 90s or even the 80s, but that it's the result of an ongoing process. We didn't want to draw a line and call one side 'contemporary' and the other side not, because things are slightly more complicated than that. Secondly, these three directors, despite being older than all the others we included, have all made films that have been important for the development of contemporary Japanese film. The Cannes festival Palme d'Or for Imamura's The Eel in 1997 was hugely important for the international appeal of Japanese films. Suzuki made Pistol Opera a few years ago and his Taisho trilogy of the 80s and early 90s are all major films. Fukasaku of course made Battle Royale in 2000, which set the entire world on fire in a way that no Japanese film had managed in a long time.

Jasper: Yes, to reiterate what Tom said, these directors were all important to the landscape of Japanese film during the period we cover. Shohei Imamura’s win at Cannes not only helped renew a global interest in Japanese film, but also to reevaluate his role in it. Though he’d previously won the Palme d’Or also for The Ballad of Narayama in 1982, at the time of writing, his work wasn’t so widely discussed in the West. Also, remember that Imamura helped nurture a new generation of directors such as Takashi Miike because of the private film school he founded.

As for Fukasaku, this was a director who had been around for years, but until Battle Royale, was only really mentioned in passing in other English language books on Japanese film, and there is no doubt that out of any film we ever covered on the website, Battle Royale attracted the most interest and attention.

And again, Seijun Suzuki was another character who we felt had never been given his due in other English language publications, but who was frequently referenced by the new generation of film fans and filmmakers as a major inspiration. Possibly we could have included a few more of these veterans as well, but directors such as Nagisa Oshima or Kon Ichikawa didn’t necessarily arouse the same overseas interest during the 90s and had already done their best work.

In the book you are putting a lot of emphasis on the economic circumstances in which movies are produced. What are the main differences between, say the Hollywood studio production system and the Japanese?

Tom: Economic circumstances are often a bigger influence on the development of a national cinema than creative ones. For example, the introduction of television in the fifties signalled the start of a gradual erosion of the position of the six major studios that made up virtually the entire Japanese film industry at that time. By the late 1970s nearly all the studios had stopped producing films and two of them had even gone bankrupt, so from that point onward other production companies began to play a bigger part. In the 1980s you saw a lot of blockbuster-type films being made along the Hollywood model, directed by former studio A-list directors like Kinji Fukasaku or Kon Ichikawa. The same period also saw the rise of independent, amateur filmmakers working on 8mm, Sogo Ishii for example. Many of these went on to play a major role in the next ten years, directing bigger projects.

Straight-to-video is another great example of economic developments influencing the film industry. There was a major boom in home video ownership in Japan at the late 80s and early 90s, which created a new market for film distribution. Around the same time Japan's bubble economy reached its peak, meaning there was a lot of money floating around. A lot of this was invested in low-budget film production for the video market, which was almost guaranteed a profit back then. So there were a lot of films being made for video and all those projects needed a director, cast and crew, which resulted in an influx of new talent. From that talent base came some of the people who would become the major names of the past fifteen years, including Takashi Miike and Shinji Aoyama.

It's of course impossible to give a summary of developments in the Japanese film industry in two paragraphs, but essentially there have been a lot of changes and shake-ups since the late 1970s, so the recent history of the industry is very fascinating material that hasn't been given that much attention. That was also one of the reasons why we tried to cover a lot of it in the Midnight Eye Guide.

Jasper: The key point is that films get made because there is an audience to see them. What is remarkable about Japanese film is that this audience exists at every level in the industry. The audience for films that were internationally successful as art films, such as the works of Naomi Kawase and Hirokazu Kore’eda were not necessarily the same people who would be watching the straight-to-video films that Kiyoshi Kurosawa or Takashi Miike made their names with in the mid-90s, or who would be going to pink cinemas to follow the career of directors like Takahisa Zeze. And then you have directors such as Yutaka Tsuchiya, who directed the documentary THE NEW GOD, who funded their own productions and basically created their own method of distribution, by booking out public venues to screen their films to people who were interested in what they had to say and publicizing their work via the internet. So this is another method of exhibition that gets overlooked if you are just focusing on what is playing in mainstream cinemas.

A lot of people out there like to claim that Japanese cinema is dead and gone, in books like Alex Kerr’s Dogs and Demons for example. But this is simply not true. How can it be? Japanese film accounted for 37.5% of the box office last year. There are just under 300 films released every year in Japan. Compare this with the UK, where there were only 27 films in production in 2004, and yet few people start complaining that British cinema is dead.

The most inspiring thing about the Japanese film industry is that these directors who grew up watching films in the 80s actually had the odds stacked against them if they wanted to become filmmakers in their own countries. Because they were so driven to make films any way they could, they used whatever opportunity or avenue available. A lot of filmmakers can not support themselves making features, so they find other ways of paying the rent – TV ads or porn videos for example – and therefore a lot of the films we talk about are a real labour of love.

But if you compare it with Britain, there’s not really the same grassroots level of fan support, nor the venues to screen lower-budgeted indie work, nor support from the local movie press. There’s this “Can’t do” philosophy in England, and probably throughout much of Europe nowadays, in which no one even thinks of becoming a film director, because really the only means of distribution is through the big mainstream multiplex theatres, which are block-booked full of Hollywood movies.

In England, we make quite a few glossy, relatively big budget films like NOTTING HILL or BILLY ELLIOT, which are aimed at making their money at the American box office, but there’s no opportunity for anyone to start at the bottom rungs of the filmmaking ladder and make lower budgeted, more adventurous works that can get screened and make it to local audiences. But Japanese films seem to find enough local audience support at every single level of the industry to make them viable, all the way from self-financed documentaries and experimental student films, to the highest production value mainstream film. It is truly something to envy.

Do you think that recent buzz does have any consequences on the future development of Japanese cinema?

Tom: For better or worse, foreign interest will have an effect on the industry. Hopefully the extra money that comes in now from remake rights and foreign sales will be put to good use and the interest from abroad will be a lasting thing and not a fad. But funnily enough, if the past year's crop of titles is anything to go by, there's no indication of films being made to cater to foreign tastes, what with the market share of sentimental tearjerkers having so dramatically risen in 2004.

Jasper: But I wonder how significant the foreign interest actually is, because the amount these films make from foreign sales must be quite negligible, and it seems production companies are still very much focused on the domestic market.The only new trend I can really see is that recently there’ve been films like JUON, remade in the US by the same director as THE GRUDGE, whose whole raison d’etre seemed to be that it was made to be remade, a sort of calling card to Hollywood by its producer and director. I am not against remakes per se. Some are more interesting than the originals, some are not. At least it does draw attention back to the original, and reminds people that there are some great films coming out of Japan.

Is there something genuinly Japanese about the movies you are
discussing that you appreciate? A common denominator, a theme that runs through all of them ?

Tom: I don't think that looking for 'Japaneseness' is all that interesting. We put quite a lot of emphasis in the book on treating Japanese films within the context of world cinema instead of regarding them as existing in a vacuum, which is not the case for Japan, just as it isn't the case for any other national cinema. Influences run back and forth between the US and Japan, for example, and many Japanese filmmakers found inspiration in European films. You can certainly point to recurring themes shared by certain filmmakers, but in the end they are all idiosyncratic individuals who do their own thing, so a single theme for an entire nation of filmmakers is as unlikely to exist in Japan as anywhere else.

Jasper: At the same time, obviously these films were made in Japan by Japanese directors for Japanese audiences, and actually, the more you learn about the situations under which they are developed, the more interesting and rewarding it is to watch these films.

To name but a few of the more socially minded directors in the book, Shinji Aoyama’s films are very relevant to what went on in society after the collapse of the bubble economy, the death of the Emperor, the breakdown of the family system, and coping with the aftermath of two major national traumas that happened very quickly after one another - the Kobe Earthquake, and the Tokyo subway gas attacks by the Aum cult. Aoyama’s films reference a lot of these issues, and also deal with themes such as the nature of national identity, dis-communication and alienation in a society that has developed technologically at an alarming rate, and the nature of masculinity in a society in which most men are trapped to their desks in white collar jobs.

Akihiko Shiota is very much focused on the young generation and how it is influenced by the one that precedes it, especially given that much of the new generation in Japan is made up of the orphans of the bubble economy, kids that grew up effectively without a father figure as their dads were tied down to their jobs all the time.

And Naomi Kawase bases herself in Nara, far away from Tokyo, and tackles subjects such as the depopulation of Japan’s rural areas, and the relationship between the Japanese people and their landscape.

We might say these films deal with specifically Japanese issues, but at the same time, I think a lot of the scenarios and ideas they do present us with are also very much relevant, to varying degrees, to most countries.