Date: Sat, 6 Sep 97
From: Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow
Subject: Takeshi wins at Venice
This was just reported on the TV news:
Kitano Takeshi’s _Hana-bi_ won the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival.
Aaron Gerow
- Yokohama National University
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Date: Sun, 7 Sep 97
From: Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow Subject: More on the Golden Lion (E+J)
Here’s an article in Japanese from the Yomiuri Shinbun online edition about _HANA-BI_’s win at Venice.
…
Date: Sun, 7 Sep 97
From: Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow
Subject: Re: Some Reactions?
Good morning everyone,
I just woke up, got the morning paper (the _Mainichi shinbun_), and there it was: “Director Kitano Takeshi’s _HANA-BI_ wins Grand Prize.” Right on the front page, just below the article on Diana’s funeral.
I wonder whether the press will make as much of a fuss as when _Unagi_ won at Cannes, given that Venice is not as big a festival as Cannes. But it is Takeshi and it is big news, so it was nice to see it on the front page. The _Mainichi_ also ran an article on the _shakai_ page reviewing Takeshi’s directorial career, mentioning the awards at Cannes and Montreal (Ichikawa Jun), and quoting Yamane Sadao, who said “This has been a great year.” He also urged people to have more confidence in Japanese film, given the still reigning opinion that foreign films are better.
Well, we all know the politics of film festivals, but I’d like to ask two things. One, can we now put to rest the opinion still found among foreign viewers that “Japanese film is not as good as it used to be”? And two, does anyone think this and the other prizes this year will change how Japanese view their own cinema? There has been an increase in articles in magazines proclaiming the “rise” of Japanese film. Will Japanese now start going to see their own movies again?
Aaron Gerow
Yokohama National University
Date: Mon, 8 Sep 1997
From: EIJA MARGIT NISKANEN
Subject: Re: Some Reactions?
I am pleased with the attention that Japanese cinema is getting at festivals - I hope this will reflect on the research on Japanese cinema as well, that the research will get more attention. What do you people with experience in this field think?
eija
Date: Wed, 10 Sep 97
From: Bill Thompson
Subject: Re: Some Impressions?
Aaron Gerow wrote: (in reference to Hana-bi’s prize at Venice and other Japanese films which received awards)
>Well, we all know the politics of film festivals, but I’d like to ask two >things. One, can we now put to rest the opinion still found among foreign viewers that “Japanese film is not as good as it used to be”?
I’m certainly glad that these films won their recent prizes. Unfortunately, I feel the answer to this question is no. Why?
When Suo was at the Museum of Modern Art to present Shall We Dansu? at New Directors/New Films this spring, he began his introduction by stating that he thought many people outside Japan had the impression that Japanese comedies were overly heavy and dull, basically that they were quite uninspired. He then went on to say that he agreed with that assessment, and hoped his film would be an exception. Before Shall We Dansu? opened in the US, Miramax sent him around the US, and I imagine he made similar statements to the press in several large cities.
Americans don’t pay much attention to film festival prizes. Also, three awards in one year are nice, but changing impressions requires much more than this. So far films like Unagi and Hana-bi have not received much play outside of Japan, and to really change an impression they need to play widely.
Besides festival and one or two night screenings, what have “foreign viewers” been able to see lately? Let’s look at New York. Shall We Dance? has had a very successful commercial release, and is well on its way to becoming the most popular Japanese film in the US since Tampopo and Ran. However, the only other Japanese offerings to have any sort of a run here this year were a film starring a monster with an iron-shaped head and a revival of Woman in the Dunes, both of which played for two weeks. Last year we were fortunate to be able to see Maborosi, which had a limited but relatively successful run. Also, Tetsuo II and a one-week revival of Seven Samurai; Minbo may have had a very brief opening as well. The “big” film (a run of several weeks) two years was Tokyo Decadence, which certainly didn’t make the impression Aaron desires. Meanwhile, Love Letters and Sonatine have distributors who announced release dates, but then pushed back their releases.
I may have forgotten to include one or two titles, but not enough to contradict my basic point. To change perceptions people need to be able to readily see and be impressed by several titles so they will anxiously anticipate others.
Bill Thompson
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 1997
From: “Mark Schilling”
Subject: Re: Some Impressions?
I agree with Bill Thompson that more Japanese films need to be widely distributed and more grassroots work needs to be done before even cinematically literate Americans become aware that Japan is still making interesting movies. Having said that, I feel that Japanese filmmakers who hope to truly crack the US market must follow Jackie Chan, Ang Lee and John Woo to Hollywood, cast name non-Japanese talent in their films and find a major studio to distribute. Given the provincialism of the average US moviegoer, who gags at the thought of reading subtitles, there just ain’t no other way.
Miramax did a truly excellent job promoting and distributing Shall We Dance and Masayuki Suo did yeoman’s work in selling his film and himself all across the country. The result: an opening weekend that surpassed that of any foreign-language film in recent memory, including Il Postino and New Cinema Paradise. But though Shall We Dance? is warming the hearts of Miramax’s bean counters and seems a good bet to pick up a Best Foreign Film Oscar, it is still being outgrossed by a bomb like Leave It to Beaver in the malls of America. Meanwhile Face/Off has passed the $100 million mark and has established John Woo as an A list director, with all the accompanying recognition and clout.
Is Face/Off a Hong Kong film? No. Is it a John Woo film? Having not see it, I can’t say, but Woo himself, from what I hear, has no plans to return to Hong Kong in disgust after being used and abused by Hollywood. Quite the contrary. He seems to like it there.
What is to stop Takeshi Kitano from making the same leap? He has the talent, the credentials and, from what I understand, the desire. Would the resulting film be Japanese? Perhaps not. But if it succeeds as a Takeshi Kitano film, why should it matter? The record of Japanese directors who shoot films in the US has been, I admit, mostly lamentable. But the time for a breakthrough, I think, is approaching. Otherwise Japanese filmmakers will be forever confined to the margins of the American movie scene.
Mark Schilling
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 97
From: Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow
Subject: Re: Some Impressions?
Bill Thompson gave a thorough and convincing account of how the lack of films in the US (or at least New York) is hampering whatever possibility there is of Japanese films enjoying a revival. As David Desser keeps on telling us, the films need to be seen.
But how is the press treating this in the US? Didn’t _Time_ and _Newsweek_ do articles on the Japanese film Renaissance (or were those articles only in the Asian editions)?
And even if the US still has problems (is LA any different?), I was wondering what some of our European participants could tell us about Europe. After all, these Japanese films are mostly winning at European festivals. Is there more of a Japanese film boom going on in Europe than in the US? The reports here in Japan are that Japanese films are the hottest thing on the European festival circuit. How is the press or the audience treating the new Japanese cinema?
Just curious.
Aaron Gerow
Yokohama National University
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 97
From: Bill Thompson
Subject: Some Impressions
I realized this morning that when I listed the films which had opened in NY last year, I forgot to include Ishii’s Angel Dust belated and brief theatrical premiere. Combining Angel Dust, Tokyo Decadence, and Tetsuo II, one sees three films in a pseudo-genre of pop punk/cyber-punk cinema. This is the largest grouping I can make with the few recent Japanese film releases.
Mark Schilling wrote:
>Miramax did a truly excellent job promoting and distributing Shall We Dance and Masayuki Suo did yeoman’s work in selling his film and himself all across the country. The result: an opening weekend that surpassed that of any foreign-language film in recent memory, including Il Postino and New Cinema Paradise. But though Shall We Dance? is warming the hearts of Miramax’s bean counters and seems a good bet to pick up a Best Foreign Film Oscar, it is still being outgrossed by a bomb like Leave It to Beaver in >the malls of America.
Beaver was the big Hollywood bomb both critically and commercially. Shall We Dance? played in art houses. I would guess that the only malls where it might have played were those with “arty” associations. If it gains a broader release, closer to “the malls of America”, we are talking about dubbing, another nasty word.
>Having said that, I feel that Japanese filmmakers who hope to truly crack the US market must follow Jackie Chan, Ang Lee and John Woo to Hollywood, cast name non-Japanese talent in their films and finda major studio to distribute.
Jackie Chan, John Woo, and Tsui Hark were all top Hong Kong action directors known for strong and innovative styles. Which of today’s newer Japanese directors besides Takeshi Kitano might you see making a foreign leap into Hollywood or, like Oshima, it, elsewhere?
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 1997
From: Alan Makinen
Subject: Re: Some Impressions?
To reiterate what Bill Thompson wrote regarding the visibility of Japanese cinema in the US (and the possibility of increased public interest in the work of contemporary Japanese filmmakers), the situation in Chicago is similar to that of New York. Not enough is shown at the cinemas and little is available on video. I keep pretty close track of what plays here and as I recall over the past year or so the only new-ish Japanese films that have had extended runs have been Maborosi and Angel Dust (which played for maybe one or two weeks) and Tokyo Decadence (which had a regular run and then came back for a while as a midnight show). Right now it’s Gamera and Shall We Dance–the last time I checked Shall We Dance was still playing at an art house downtown as well as at a suburban cinema. There many have been one or two others that I either missed or have forgotten.
I can confirm Mark Schilling’s comment about the priming of the US media and movie-goers that Masayuki Suo did for his film. I believe he made appearances at at least three different venues here–the University of Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and at a commercial cinema–to introduce and discuss the film before it was commercially released.
As to Aaron Gerrow’s question about the Newsweek articles, I haven’t checked the library yet, but I did ask one of my friends here who subscribes to Newsweek to look for those articles. She did not find them.
Apparently they were only in the international or Japanese edition.
Japanese cinema was also under-represented at last year’s Chicago International Film Festival. The only Japanese film shown was Sleeping Man! (I should note however that last year’s festival programming overall was substantially pared down.)
On the shelves of franchise video rental stores here, such as Blockbusters or Hollywood Video, Japanese classics by Kurosawa (several) and Ozu (one or two) and sometimes even Mizoguchi may be found. Tampopo and A Taxing Woman are also in circulation. To find much of anything else, it is necessary to go to Facets (a singular phenomenon) or one of the few video shops that specialize in foreign films. Of Japanese films less than 5 or 6 years old one could then choose from:
- Angel Dust
- Hunter in the Dark
- Minbo
- The Mystery of Rampo
- Okoge
- Tokyo Decadence
- Traffic Jam
Japanese anime seems to be available in abundance, usually through comic book stores rather than at video rental shops.
Older Japanese films do periodically get shown at art houses–the Suzuki and Mizoguchi retrospectives were shown at the Film Center here–but screenings of newer films are very rare, and, like the young directors series playing next month, are very brief–each of those films will be screened only once.
Alan Makinen
Chicago
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 1997
From: EIJA MARGIT NISKANEN
Subject: Re: Some Impressions?
On Thu, 11 Sep 1997, Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow wrote:
>And even if the US still has problems (is LA any different?), I was wondering what some of our European participants could tell us about Europe. After all, these Japanese films are mostly winning at European festivals. Is there more of a Japanese film boom going on in Europe than in the US? The reports here in Japan are that Japanese films are the hottest thing on the European festival circuit. How is the press or the audience treating the new Japanese cinema?
Hi! Being a European and studying now in U.S. I think it is easier to see new Japanese films in Europe. For example 3 Kitano Takeshi films have got commercial distribution in Finland, my home country.
eija
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 1997
From: Abe-Nornes
Subject: Re: Some Impressions?
Interesting that Suo and Chan get mentioned together in this context. Did anyone notice that the advertising (at least here in Ann Arbor) for Shall We Dance used the strategy deployed by marketers for Chan’s latest films? Basically, they attempt to erase race. All foreign sounding names (like credits) get either left off the ads and posters or reduced to such small sizes that they are illegible without magnifying glasses. While they couldn’t avoid Chan’s Chinese face, they inflected it with internationalizing (Americanizing?) slogans like, “World’s greatest action hero.” As for the Shall We Dance ad, I have one sitting on my desk here that is only two pair of feet and no evidence that it’s a foreign film at all!
If you don’t think this is intentional, well, maybe not. However, because I was curious with the Chan pictures I did some hunting. I found that in the posters at the theaters, credits filled with Chinese names were in colors very close to the background of the image. You could hardly see them unless you moved in closely. In Asian-American magazines, they were in very bright colors that stood out prominantly from the background.
More evidence of the previously mentioned provincialism of the American mall crowd.
Markus
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 1997
From: Tommaso Torelli
Subject: Re: Some Impressions?
Hello to all the people in this list,
Even though I have been in the list since July or so, this is my first posting, the reason being that I am merely an amateur of Japanese cinema, certainly not a scholar. I am a physics PhD candidate at the University of Illinois. One of my goals here is to improve my understanding of modern Japanese society, with particular focus on the historical role of women in such a reputedly male-dominated society. Movies are just one of the ways through which the Western-world stereotypes are mostly abated, but rarely confirmed. That’s it for the intro. I look forward more and similarly interesting discussions on this list. Now a couple of replies:
>>But how is the press treating this in the US? Didn’t _Time_ and _Newsweek_ do articles on the Japanese film Renaissance (or were those articles only in the Asian editions)?
In the US edition of Time, an article was published on April 28 (VOL. 149 NO. 17) with the title: “Return to Greatness: Forget the “big audience”. Upstart independent directors, like the old cinematic masters, are making movies with meaning” by Donald Richie. The article is available on the WWW at the URL:
www.pathfinder.com/@@vxijwAQAtAx8Ux@N/time/magazine/1997/int/970428/asia.film.html
>>And even if the US still has problems (is LA any different?), I was wondering what some of our European participants could tell us about Europe. After all, these Japanese films are mostly winning at European festivals. Is there more of a Japanese film boom going on in Europe than in the US? The reports here in Japan are that Japanese films are the hottest thing on the European festival circuit. How is the press or the audience treating the new Japanese cinema?
Up to the time I was living in Italy (summer ‘95) scarce attention had been devoted to Japanese films and film makers, but for prize winning ones and a few others already mentioned. The only attempt to widespread diffusion was made by one of the public TV channels, with a retrospective which mainly focused on Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and Ozu. Needless to say, the movies were all shown after 10.30pm, so I let you imagine how thin was the following it had.
Tommaso Torelli (henceforth Tommaso)
Date: Sat, 13 Sep 1997
From: “Michael J. Raine”
Subject: Re: Some Impressions?
Tommaso wrote:
www.pathfinder.com/@@vxijwAQAtAx8Ux@N/time/magazine/1997/int/970428/asia.fil m.html
Would anyone like to discuss this article? It’s quite clear and points out some of the problems that cinema in Japan faces, as well as some potential solutions. I wonder if it isn’t a bit too optimistic however.
Some of the things I want to know more about: Richie says that the film studios have diversified. this is surely true. Does anyone know of an article (probably in Japanese) that describes the current diversification of the cinema industry. Even better, one that describes that history?
I’m a bit confused about the temporality of the counter-culture in this article. Is it post-68, or was there an active cinema counter-culture back in 1960, when Oshima left Shochiku (in an interview with Shirai Yoshio, Oshima as much as says he jumped before he was pushed).
Finally, the “independents”. How much is this new filmmakers finding ways to make themselves seen outside the system, and how much is this simply a new model of film financing? Hollywood majors have bought most of the US “independents,” so while the term may refer to a marketing niche it’s hard to see that independent film production is so separate from the rest of the industry when it still depends on majors for distribution and exhibition. Market differentiation, and the articulation of an international stratum of non-mainstream cinema distribution (the dream of art cinema way back in the 50s), may be the last best hope of this new cinema (as Oshima himself has said), but it’s hardly a good sign that filmmakers in Japan are turning to wealthy industrialists for production money.
What do others think?
Michael
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 1997
From: Anne McKnight
Subject: Re: Some Impressions?
Hello all,
Following up on Michael’s question about what the word “indies” can signify or smuggle in as a term used by critics or marketers, there are a couple of articles on top of the Time/Newsweek ones worth mentioning on the recent diffusion of Japanese “indies” films in US and other overseas markets.
AERA ARTICLE
The first was in AERA (the Asahi weekly magazine) on July 14, in the midst of the Hase Jun-kun coverage (where the 11-year old kid from Kobe was murdered).
The directors (and it is a director-centered piece) it interviews are: Aoyama Shunji, in the context of his upcoming film “Cold Blood” (Tsumetai chi) which concerns the 1972 Asama-sanso incident; Yaguchi Shinobu, who got his start in the PIA film festival with his film “The Secret Flower-garden” (Himitso no hanazono); and Shinozaki Makoto, of “Okaeri.” With a few blurbs from Iwai Shunji thrown in, these are roughly the same people and narratives as in the Newsweek article I read a few weeks back. The other angles I see that keep cropping up are the film-maker as rugged individualist, and the today’s young people are lost and/or cynical narrative. Also worth noting is that none of them I have read so far has interviewed any women.
The AERA article on Kawase Naomi was actually a spotlight on her distributor, Bitter’s End. This was interesting in its explanations of movie-financing tie-up strategies (TV, etc). The AERA focus on pensive-young-men connects, I think, to the questions about feminism in the Japanese film world thread someone brought up earlier, as well as the thread on cryptic film festival selections of rather lusterless Japanese films (e.g. Imamura’s Unagi, Ichikawa Jun’s “Tokyo Nocturne” [Tokyo yakyoku, Shochiku 1997], easily one of the most treacly & dreary melodramas I have seen in recent memory, with the most aggressively bad soundtrack I have ever, I think, heard). What I’ve noticed fairly consistency is the incredible slim pickings of good parts for actresses in these films. In Unagi, one is offed in the first few sequences of the film; the second attempts suicide, is brought around by the strong silent graces of Yakusho Koji and survives to make him a bento, just like his first wife who turned out to be a bad girl.
Tokyo Nocturne’s heroine Tami is also long-suffering, and hardly gets out of the kitchen of her cafe until the last sequence, when she is seen flying along carefree-like on a bicycle in the countryside, a Hallmark kind of ending. And Beat Takeshi’s wife has just come out of the hospital and is mute, in mourning for the child she lost in an accident and hardly speaks, child-like herself. As Dorothy Parker might have said, a repertoire which extends about from A to B.
I would revel in any exceptions to these tin-types, if anyone can suss them out.
SIGHT & SOUND ARTICLE
The second article is in the September issue of Sight & Sound (available at the National Film Center or tachiyomi at Tower Records, for those in Tokyo). While it actually concerns the issues facing distributors of “indies” movies and independent distributors – which as Michael pointed out may follow 2 quite different lines of financing, promotion, genre, etc. The central issue being, what will happen to small-fry distributors who have long paid their dues in taking risks with “small” films now that the new Labor government has started to kick in more money for arts funding, including lottery money.
This relates to the Japanese “indies” scene in a funny way. One of the issues distributors are trying to deal with is the amount of labor/cost involved in marketing non-English-language productions. Amazingly the categries of small-budget independent film and “film I have never heard of from place that I can’t quite find on the map” seem to be lumped into one. Thus there is a parallel placement of Abbas Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherries (a low-budget feature if I am not mistaken, but please correct if wrong) and Imamura’s Unagi, a Shochiku feature with massive amounts of capital backing it up. That small indies distributors should be losing sleep, worried about bringing Unago to the viewing millions is fairly dispiriting to me.
JISHU-EIGA & DIY (do it yourself)
There is so much interesting stuff going on in the way of narrative and experimental films, not to mention documentary, in Tokyo (sorry, I don’t know much about what’s going on outside of Tokyo, no doubt a symptom of some of the very things I’m talking about, information on de-centralized film scenes quite appreciated…). It seems a shame to short-sell it with Shochiku blockbusters and to go with indies interpreted as *more* rather than indies as a demand for *better.*
It seems that maybe one more term would be useful, which is “jishu-eiga” (self-made film). It seems to me somewhat parallel to the DIY aesthetic of self-financing, getting all your friends to work, developing venues, and self-distributing in music, with which many of the young film-makers are intimately involved in either actually or due to having grown up as “rock shonen” (the rock or punk equivalent of bookworms, I guess…)
Finally, and relating to the recent popularity of Japanese music (largely so-called small-label noise bands like Boredoms, Violent Onsen Geisha, etc as well as DIY types like Haino Keiji etc, the slightly classier Derek Bailey axis, etc) it seems there are huge and amiable numbers of people in their 20s & 30s who are really quite interested in Japanese film purely for the reason that it is an object called “Japanese film.” The great thing is, since they’re used to the music not making sense at all in a “narrative” or melodic way, the door is wide open for all sorts of inventive things to be worked in.
Which is why I think it is a double crying-shame for films like Tokyo yakyoku and Unagi to get such the recognition of the film fest star system. It just seems to shut down a lot of possibilities.
Any more thoughts on “indies”?
amck.
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 97
From: Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow
Subject: Re: Some Impressions?
Michael and Anne have taken the occasion of my query about Japanese film’s reception abroad to ask some broader questions about the Japanese film industry. I’d like to comment on some of what they say.
Michael wrote:
>I’m a bit confused about the temporality of the counter-culture in this article. Is it post-68, or was there an active cinema counter-culture back in 1960, when Oshima left Shochiku (in an interview with Shirai Yoshio, Oshima as much as says he jumped before he was pushed).
At least to Richie, it seems to be the early 1960s, which I think is not unthinkable when you look at the history of Japanese experimental film: Nichidai Eiken beginning in the 1950s and truly radical works like Adachi Masao’s _Sain_ in 1963. There is a lot going on cinematically before 1968, and it was developing into a culture complete with independent distribution, etc.
>Finally, the “independents”. How much is this new filmmakers finding ways to make themselves seen outside the system, and how much is this simply a new model of film financing? Hollywood majors have bought most of the US “independents,” so while the term may refer to a marketing niche it’s hard to see that independent film production is so separate from the rest of the industry when it still depends on majors for distribution and exhibition. Market differentiation, and the articulation of an international stratum of non-mainstream cinema distribution (the dream of art cinema way back in the 50s), may be the last best hope of this new cinema (as Oshima himself has said), but it’s hardly a good sign that filmmakers in Japan are turning to wealthy industrialists for production money.
I always had the impression that the term “independent” does mean more in Japan than it does in Hollywood now because elements of the studio system which created the old independent/studio dichotomy in the US are still around: block booking and an almost monopolistic control of theaters and the distribution system by the majors. One could define an independent film in Japan as anything that is not distributed via block booking through one of the major studio chains. Note that this is not a question of production: now that the major studios barely make movies any more, most of what they distibute are films produced elsewhere. In terms of production, one can call those films “independent,” but they are usually produced by major corporations, television studios, etc., which have the financial backing to get a good distribution deal. “Real” independent films could be considered the ones that have to open in only one theater in Tokyo and then hope to open in a few more around the country. They are in a vastly different economic position than the studios and are in the majority.
Such independents frankly don’t have money and, unless they have their own distribution company, get little money back at the box office (independent producers get on average 25% of the box office). I personally can’t blame them if they get money from industrialists (is this a comment about Oguri?) or from anyone else who can give them money. It is damn hard to make a film in Japan, and comments about economic purity are rather unrealistic.
Anne wrote:
>It seems that maybe one more term would be useful, which is “jishu-eiga” (self-made film). It seems to me somewhat parallel to the DIY aesthetic of self-financing, getting all your friends to work, developing venues, and self-distributing in music, with which many of the young film-makers are intimately involved in either actually or due to having grown up as “rock shonen” (the rock or punk equivalent of bookworms, I guess…)
This can be a useful term in trying to define “independent,” but I think we should avoid being romantic here. Remember that _jishu eiga_ is a very old notion, going back to the 1960s (and even further, if you include the 1950s old left indies). There was a certain political valence to the term then and in the 1970s which it simply does not have right now in most cases. Since the social meaning of the term has changed, I think we do have to ask ourself what the importance of _jishu eiga_ is in the 1990s. It is all nice and good to say that _jishu eiga_ allows for a “freedom of expression” due to the fact that it not tied into “economic considerations” or distributor deals, but this does not imply the “political freedom” it once did (given the apolitical nature of most contemporary film). _Jishu eiga_ has been a very important training ground for most of the young directors working today and is valubale to the extent that there has been few other avenues by which people can start making films (the studio asst. director system is not what it used to be and film schools are still limited). _Jishu eiga_ has also occasioned many interesting films that could not have been produced otherwise. But I strongly question the notion that this is the way “good filmmakers” (filmmakers we support) should continue making films up until they die.
We may object when a filmmaker starts making films with bigger budgets, saying that they have sold out, but I think we should avoid applying the conception of “selling out” formed in the US to Japan. In a system where they independents have a much harder time than the independents do in the US, I personally can’t blame independent producers for doing all they can to get money.
Remember that two other important training grounds for young filmmakers are very much commercially oriented: pink film and V-cinema. I consider these just as valuable as the realm of _jishu eiga_.
Most of the Japanese studios are creatively bankrupt: heck, Shochiku and Toho can’t stop making Tora-san clones and monster movies. But there have been changes, mostly due to the rise of the young filmmakers and the independents. Shochiku has started the Cinema Japanesque project and Toho the YES project. One can intepret those as efforts by the studios to “buy up” the independents just as Hollywood did, and this is worth researching, but that is not the whole story. First, both projects have produced excellent films which would not have seen the light of day otherwise (CJ: Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s _Cure_, or YES: Hashiguchi Ryosuke’s _Like Grains of Sand_). They also represent the fact the studios are finally opening up to change in the industry. Cinema Japanesque is also an alternative to what is one of the worst aspects of the contemporary distribution system: the absence of medium size chains (in Japan, you either release your film in one theater (with a few more to follow), or 150, with nothing in between). The CJ chain allows films to open in 10 to 20 theaters simultaneously across the country, a definite plus for many films that don’t belong in 150 theaters (a reason many of the majors shied away from distributing more difficult indie productions).
CJ films, by the way, are not backed by “massive amounts of capital.” The budgets are small: about 100,000,000 yen on average. And the distribution budgets not much different (_Unagi_ was an exception due to the Cannes prize).
I will certainly continue to be sympathetic to _jishu eiga_ when compared to the latest Yamada Yoji Tora-san clone. But to unquestioningly support _jishu eiga_ and criticize the better funded indies is not only myopic, it simply reproduces the current distribution structure (major vs. indie) that is the problem in the first place. The structure of the industry is very problematic and demands a lot of hard thinking, but as viewers, we can’t complain when indie kings like Kurosawa Kiyoshi are getting decent distribution. The industry needs diversification (not the simple studio/indie binary). Whether or not the current changes will effect that is a matter of concern. But simply valorizing _jishu eiga_ is itself a very old tactic that has seen its day.
A few corrections:
>Aoyama Shunji, in the context of his upcoming film “Cold Blood” (Tsumetai chi) which concerns the 1972 Asama-sanso incident
The English title of Aoyama Shinji’s new film is _An Obsession_ and it has little to do in the end with the 1972 Asama-sanso incident (there are hints about it, but the plot is about a cop who loses his gun to a nihilistic drug addict youth. Kind of _Stray Dog_ for the 1990s). A good film, by the way, but not Aoyama’s best.
>Yaguchi Shinobu, who got his start in the PIA film festival with his film “The Secret Flower-garden” (Himitso no hanazono)
For those of you abroad, the English title is _My Secret Cache_.
Anne noted:
>Also worth noting is that none of them I have read so far has interviewed any women.
The printed press may be amiss, but NHK has been featuring Kawase right and left. She’s been on TV more than these directors combined.
>The AERA focus on pensive-young-men connects, I think, to the questions about feminism in the Japanese film world thread someone brought up earlier, as well as the thread on cryptic film festival selections of rather lusterless Japanese films (e.g. Imamura’s Unagi, Ichikawa Jun’s “Tokyo Nocturne” [Tokyo yakyoku, Shochiku 1997], easily one of the most treacly & dreary melodramas I have seen in recent memory, with the most aggressively bad soundtrack I have ever, I think, heard). What I’ve noticed fairly consistency is the incredible slim pickings of good parts for actresses in these films. In Unagi, one is offed in the first few sequences of the film; the second attempts suicide, is brought around by the strong silent graces of Yakusho Koji and survives to make him a bento, just like his first wife who turned out to be a bad girl.
Tokyo Nocturne’s heroine Tami is also long-suffering, and hardly gets out of the kitchen of her cafe until the last sequence, when she is seen flying along carefree-like on a bicycle in the countryside, a Hallmark kind of ending. And Beat Takeshi’s wife has just come out of the hospital and is mute, in mourning for the child she lost in an accident and hardly speaks, child-like herself. As Dorothy Parker might have said, a repertoire which extends about from A to B.
I would revel in any exceptions to these tin-types, if anyone can suss them out.
This is a very interesting point and worth pursuing. Why, for instance, are so many of the women in the films of indie directors (_Duo_, _BeRLin_, _Okaeri_, etc.) mentally unstable? The turn towards the mental is a prominent feature of 1990s film, but why does it often have to do with women? In an age of unstable identities, does the prospect of comforting a mentally unstable woman (the projection of that instability) provide the male subject with some hope of stability? I want to ask Shinozaki this when I go with him to the States next week.
Note that _Cure_ is one of the few films to center most of this mental instability in men. Again, there is an unstable woman (Yakusho Koji’s wife), but she in some ways becomes the projection of his own instability (his fantasy of her suicide). This is definitely a problematic film worth lots of analysis.
>The great thing is, since they’re used to the music not making sense at all in a “narrative” or melodic way, the door is wide open for all sorts of inventive things to be worked in.
I did not understand this point, Anne. Could you explain it?
>Which is why I think it is a double crying-shame for films like Tokyo yakyoku and Unagi to get such the recognition of the film fest star system. It just seems to shut down a lot of possibilities.
Yes, it does. But I don’t think we should close down the possibilities of _Cure_ and _Like Gains of Sand_, either. And we should remember that it was the film fests that recognized Hashiguchi, Kawase, Shinozaki, etc. before many of the older, established critics in Japan did.
Aaron Gerow
YNU
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 1997
From: “Michael J. Raine”
Subject: Re: Some Impressions?
Aaron wrote:
>Michael wrote:
>>I’m a bit confused about the temporality of the counter-culture in this article. Is it post-68, or was there an active cinema counter-culture back in 1960, when Oshima left Shochiku (in an interview with Shirai Yoshio, Oshima as much as says he jumped before he was pushed).
>At least to Richie, it seems to be the early 1960s, which I think is not unthinkable when you look at the history of Japanese experimental film: Nichidai Eiken beginning in the 1950s and truly radical works like Adachi Masao’s _Sain_ in 1963. There is a lot going on cinematically before 1968, and it was developing into a culture complete with independent distribution, etc.
Richie was part of this “counterculture” and there are even chirashi from screenings of his own films that discuss it. But I’m not sure that Richie is talking about developments in the small world of independent/experimental film production when he writes the following paragraph:
Japan’s new independent films are quite different from the greats of the old masters. When directors such as Nagisa Oshima broke with the studio system in the early ’60s, the reasons were overtly political. The newcomers wanted to express both themselves and the counterculture flourishing at the time. The films of the ’60s were informed by the example of the Nouvelle Vague, a French political movement inspired by the polemics of the great director Jean-Luc Godard, for whom cinema was politics. In sympathy with the social unrest that so ruffled authority everywhere from 1968 on, Japanese directors of the era formed a loosely organized but highly critical movement that attacked the Establishment head-on. Oshima and a host of others joined poets, playwrights, writers and choreographers in a short-lived, drop-out-join-in counterculture that culminated in both student riots and some of Japan’s most thoughtful political cinema.
So the counter-culture is “short-lived” but also seems to extend, as a _political_ alternative throughout the 1960s. So what I’m interested in is the possibility that there really was a “political” counterculture (say, coming out of Anpo) that “flourished” in the early 1960s and had a specifically cinema-related aspect.
>>Finally, the “independents”. How much is this new filmmakers finding ways to make themselves seen outside the system, and how much is this simply a new model of film financing? Hollywood majors have bought most of the US “independents,” so while the term may refer to a marketing niche it’s hard to see that independent film production is so separate from the rest of the industry when it still depends on majors for distribution and exhibition. Market differentiation, and the articulation of an international stratum of non-mainstream cinema distribution (the dream of art cinema way back in the 50s), may be the last best hope of this new cinema (as Oshima himself has said), but it’s hardly a good sign that filmmakers in Japan are turning to wealthy industrialists for production money.
>I always had the impression that the term “independent” does mean more in Japan than it does in Hollywood now because elements of the studio system which created the old independent/studio dichotomy in the US are still around: block booking and an almost monopolistic control of theaters and the distribution system by the majors. One could define an independent film in Japan as anything that is not distributed via block booking through one of the major studio chains. Note that this is not a question of production: now that the major studios barely make movies any more, most of what they distibute are films produced elsewhere. In terms of production, one can call those films “independent,” but they are usually produced by major corporations, television studios, etc., which have the financial backing to get a good distribution deal. “Real” independent films could be considered the ones that have to open in only one theater in Tokyo and then hope to open in a few more around the country. They are in a vastly different economic position than the studios and are in the majority.
>Such independents frankly don’t have money and, unless they have their own distribution company, get little money back at the box office (independent producers get on average 25% of the box office). I personally can’t blame them if they get money from industrialists (is this a comment about Oguri?) or from anyone else who can give them money. IIt is damn hard to make a film in Japan, and comments about economic purity are rather unrealistic.
I don’t think you’re getting my point here. Your definition of “real” independent is quite different from Richie’s, who counts Shall we Dance, Okaeri, and Maboroshi. All have these have benefitted (at some point along their production and post-production history) from tie-ups with the major players in Japanese cinema. So the question is not preserving the distinction between mainstream and independent (my point is the opposite) but that celebrating because major film companies make fewer films and “independent” films win prizes mistakes a shift in film financing strategies for the victory of filmmaker as rugged individualist (as Anne says). It’s not a question of “blaming” Oguri for taking money from an industrialist as pointing out that this is not a stable economic base for an alternative film culture. That alternative depends precisely (as I wrote) on accepting a place within the spectacle-dominated mainstream distribution apparatus, inventing “cinema japanesque” style brand-names for both domestic and foreign consumption.
In the rest of your message you go on to point out ways in which independent film production in Japan is becoming more and more like the sub-contracted independent production in the USA. So why do you think that independent means more in Japan than in the US?
Michael
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 97
From: Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow
Subject: Re: Some Impressions?
Michael did make a lot of important points I would like to comment on.
Michael wrote:
>So the counter-culture is “short-lived” but also seems to extend, as a _political_ alternative throughout the 1960s. So what I’m interested in is the possibility that there really was a “political” counterculture (say, coming out of Anpo) that “flourished” in the early 1960s and had a specifically cinema-related aspect.
This is an important topic. Do you want to expand on it? I personally think there was a “political” counterculture, one based on experimental film (Adachi, Matsumoto, et al.) or the writings of Matsumoto Toshio or Oshima, that “flourished” in the early 1960s and had a specifically cinema-related aspect. We can debate what “flourished” means, but many of the issues that did dominate post-68 film culture were introduced in the early 1960s. Unfortunately, I’ve never developed this into a major thesis: this is only my impression from what I’ve read and seen. I’d like to entertain different opinions.
>Your definition of “real” >independent is quite different from Richie’s, who counts Shall we Dance, Okaeri, and Maboroshi. All have these have benefitted (at some point along their production and post-production history) from tie-ups with the major players in Japanese cinema.
How is this the case with _Okaeri_? Of the three films, Shinozaki’s is definitely the one that had the least support from “the major players” (who are you referring to here, anyway?). Heck, the film can’t even get released on video. We have to preserve distinctions here. _Maboroshi no hikari’s_ case is also quite different from _Shall We Dance’s_.
There is a definite problem with the definition of independent here. Richie’s is problematic and so, I think, is any that centralizes _jishu eiga_. One of the reason’s I posed a definition in relation to distribution is precisely to point out the problem in referring to _Shall We Dance_ as independent. But even that is becoming less tenable with the creation of Cinema Japanesque, et al.
>So the question is not preserving the >distinction between mainstream and independent (my point is the opposite) but that celebrating because major film companies make fewer films and “independent” films win prizes mistakes a shift in film financing strategies for the victory of filmmaker as rugged individualist (as Anne says). It’s not a question of “blaming” Oguri for taking money from an industrialist as pointing out that this is not a stable economic base for an alternative film culture. That alternative depends precisely (as I wrote) on accepting a place within the spectacle-dominated mainstream distribution apparatus, inventing “cinema japanesque” style brand-names for both domestic and foreign consumption.
You point out extremely well the ironies Richie does not see. But you certainly were not specific in first post about “accepting a place within the spectacle-dominated mainstream distribution apparatus, inventing ‘cinema japanesque’ style brand-names for both domestic and foreign consumption.” At best, you spoke of, and I quote,
>Hollywood majors have bought most of the US “independents,” so while the term may refer to a marketing niche it’s hard to see that independent film production is so separate from the rest of the industry when it still depends on majors for distribution and exhibition.
This may be the case with Hollywood, but it is not applicable to Japan–not yet. That you must realize. The situation is changing, as I pointed out (with the creation of Cinema Japanesque, et al.), but it is very important to maintain these distinctions when discussion the specific problems the Japanese industry is facing now. Right now, there are still the issues of block booking, maeuri, studio run distribution arms, etc., that do make it meaningful, at least temporarily, to discuss the specific problems non-studio producers have in producing and distibuting films.
You seem to speak as if having independents accept a place within the spectacle-dominated mainstream cinematic apparatus is the basis for an alternative cinema (an interesting, if not ironic point), but what I am wondering about is the possibility of an industry which cannot be easily considered as having a “mainstream cinematic apparatus.” This is certainly a pipe dream, but I do want to emphasize an industrial differentiation which undermines the old notions of mainstream/alternative. That, I believe, must involve a kind of industrial hybridity which involves both stable and unstable modes of financing stemming from a variety of different sources, as well as a variety of modes of production.
>In the rest of your message you go on to point out ways in which independent film production in Japan is becoming more and more like the sub-contracted independent production in the USA. So why do you think that independent means more in Japan than in the US?
You missed my point. As I said above, it means–or increasinly I should say “meant”–more in terms of an industry structure where majors still have a dominant, monopolistic power. But as both you and I said, this is rapidly changing given transformations both in the majors and in how independents do business. So it is the case that the term “independent” itself becomes problematic. This was exactly my point. But I think a provisional and strategic usage of the term is still important within a rapidly changing situation where power is still on the side of the three major studios and their corporate partners. At the same time, we have to avoid any romantic notions, ones still espoused by Richie, of the good indies vs. the bad majors. It is all much more complicated than that, which I think you, Anne, and I can all agree on.
Aaron Gerow
YNU
Date: Tue, 16 Sep 97
From: Sarah Elizabeth Teasley(GENDER)
Subject: Re: Some Impressions?
>In the rest of your message you go on to point out ways in which independent film production in Japan is becoming more and more like the sub-contracted independent production in the USA. So why do you think that independent means more in Japan than in the US?
It might be interesting here to look at parallels in the Japanese popular music industry, where “indies” refers as much to a sound and style aesthetic (the Shibuya-kei of Pizzicato Five, Cornelius and a slew of photographers) as to specific modes of production and distribution, where “indies” gods like Cornelius emphasize in interviews (Tokyo Journal, Aug. 1997) that their labels are affiliated to major industry labels (and hence not truly “independent”), and where the word “indie” itself is perhaps used most often by marketers trying to sell product to a self-consciously hip and fashionable crowd of young urbanites. North American “indie rock” and “indie pop” too have a fairly definable sound (college radio), sometimes develop distribution agreements with major labels after start-up, appear on MTV in special “indie” slots, have an extremely strong market strategy based on cult musicians, label recognition and “difference” to mainstream music and have definitely been co-opted as youth-oriented marketing slogans by wily label execs. Yet while I may simply be caught up in the romance of resistance it offers, North American “indie” music still seems more rough-edged, low-budget and plainly messy to me than its nominal Japanese twin. And where North American “indie” labels and musicians fight to maintain their image as the “rugged individualists” of the previous film discussion, Japanese “indie” artists seem to want to pop that image as hard as they can.
So I’m not sure after all whether you can say that Pizzicato Five = Unagi and have it over with, and the real question for both music and film may be, as I believe Aaron is suggesting, where and how the lines delimiting “indie” and “independent” are drawn in the first place. Or, more precisely, how big you can get and still keep within them.
Sarah Teasley
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997
From: Birgit Kellner
Subject: Indies, music & film
Joseph Murphy wrote:
>There’s a panel proposal for the 1998 AAS conference on contemporary Japanese popular music. I wonder if they’ll get this far into it.
>By the way, site managers, sorry for getting off the subject of film, but I think several of these responses have pushed for a cross-fertilization between the independent film and music scenes in Japan, and I would like to hear a little more about that.
Perhaps this, together with Aaron Gerow’s reminder of how some recent Japanese “independent” films have only become recognized in Japan after having been on the film-fest circuit, is the right time for the following question: Is good press, popularity and circulation abroad relevant for the independent status of either Japanese film or pop-music at home? One could pursue this question along two axes, firstly, whether reception abroad significantly influences the economic situation of the work or artist in question in Japan, secondly, whether the fact that a particular filmmaker/pop-musician has been well-received abroad influences the image their work has for the general Japanese audience.
As far as my knowledge of the music-scene is concerned, there seems to be little of such influence on the image-side, at least as far as more experimental bands such as the Boredoms, Merzbow or the Ruins are concerned. I also can’t recall having seen any fliers for their concerts where they were praised as “now internationally known” or “recently played in New York”, but then, I live in the province.
I would certainly like to know more about any “cross-fertilization” between independent film and music scenes here. The only (not particularly interesting) example that springs to my mind is the Yen Town Band, and Chara, whose promotion seems to be almost exclusively based on their presence in Iwai Shunji’s _Swallowtail Butterfly_. Would anybody know whether any other, preferably “more independent” Japanese bands have been involved in (feature or animation) filmmaking recently? This strikes me as particularly interesting on the background that so many European and American films nowadays rely on the vast storehouse of pop past & present for their soundtrack (Quentin Tarantino’s plundering through the ages, Trainspotting, Angus, Romeo & Juliet, etc.) - any noticeable parallels in Japan?
Birgit Kellner
Department for Indian Philosophy
Hiroshima University
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 1997
From: Joseph Murphy
Subject: Re: Indies, music & film
Birgit Kellner wrote:
>I would certainly like to know more about any “cross-fertilization” between independent film and music scenes here. The only (not particularly interesting) example that springs to my mind is the Yen Town Band, and Chara, whose promotion seems to be almost exclusively based on their presence in Iwai Shunji’s _Swallowtail Butterfly_. Would anybody know whether any other, preferably “more independent” Japanese bands have been involved in (feature or animation) filmmaking recently?
Well, rather than a transposition of the trendy-drama/million-seller pop-group marketing strategy to the “rugged” world of independents, I understood the suggestion about the Tokyo scene to be that filmmakers and musicians ran to a degree in the same social circles and drew on each other’s formal strategies, etc., even if they kept their art separate and did not collaborate, or alternately evinced a similar sort of “low resolution” (in the narrative and technical sense) sensibility in their work by virtue of being immersed in Tokyo suburban culture.
Maybe it goes back to what Anne wrote:
>it seems there are huge and amiable >numbers of people in their 20s & 30s who are really quite interested in Japanese film purely for the reason that it is an object called “Japanese film.” The great thing is, since they’re used to the music not making sense at all in a “narrative” or melodic way, the door is wide open for all sorts of inventive things to be worked in.
I’m very interested in what you said here, Anne, can you keep going with it? Are the “huge and amiable numbers” to be understood as young people in Tokyo in general as a kind of collective urban dreamworld, or as the set of potential filmmakers? How about the formal parallel between narrative and melody, about people being used to music not making sense? That’s extremely interesting and suggests an affinity at the level of sensibilities. I got a similar sense in watching a fairly comprehensive PIA Film Festival retrospective last summer in Tokyo (very self-consciously billed as “independents,” in katakana), that fairly traditional narrative setups were continually bumped off track and that filmmakers allowed them to devolve without resolution. Of course, to bring it back to nationalism, this may just be repeating the “novel without plot” debates of the 1920’s.
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997
From: “Mark Schilling”
Subject: Re: Indies, music & film
A few observations on indie films in Japan:
1) The definition of “independent film” has become so vague as to be almost useless. If size of budget is a criteria, then nearly all films made in Japan, with the exception of a handful of effects shows, are “independent” by Hollywood standards. Non-effects films with big name talent and big company money behind them rarely cost more than Y500 million to make, which at current exchange rates amounts to $4.2 million. The budget of most films, even by name directors, are far lower.
Other, perhaps more useful, criteria are sources of funding and release patterns. Generally, if major distributors, TV networks, ad agencies and publishers are putting up the money and the Big Three (Shochiku, Toho, Toei) are releasing in their hoga chains, the filmmakers are no longer “independent”; i.e., they must place the needs of the mass audience and the interests of their corporate sponsors first, their creative vision second. Often the film itself is merely a link in a multimedia chain that empasses books, manga, computer games, TV shows, you name it.
2) The exceptions to the above rule are growing, as more media companies realize that Japanese movies, particularly Japanese movies by young, hip directors, are becoming popular again with the same under-25 trendies who have driven the local pop music and fashion industries to such incredible heights. Young directors who might have had to scrape and struggle to get their films made ten years ago, are finding it much easier to get funding and, if their films do well, get wider releases and bigger budgets. Shunji Iwai is perhaps the most obvious example of this phenomenon, soaring from “independent” obscurity to mass media stardom on the success of “Love Letter” and “Swallowtail Butterfly.” Is he still an “independent director”? Was Spike Lee after he hit with “Do the Right Thing”? A question to which I have no clearcut answer, though to strict constructionists, for whom commerial success is an automatic disqualifier for “independent” status, the answer would, in both cases, be “no.”
Among the companies backing “indie” films are Pia, Ace Pictures, Wowow, Toho, Shochiku and, most recently, Pony Canyon and Hakuhodo, which are financing the PeacH project of “Swallow Butterfly” producer Shinya Kawai. Their numbers will no doubt grow as the digital satellite TV platforms come on line with more than 300 channels, many of which will be devoted to movies.
3) Music is a tremendously important element in the success of both “independent” and mainstream films. In announcing a new Japanese film, producers usually put the the ongaku tanto near the head of the list, together with the names of the director and main cast. Also, among the tarento kantoku of the past decade are more than a few pop singers and composers, including Southen All Stars’ Keisuke Kuwata (Inamura Jane) and Kome Kome Club’s Tatsuya Ishii (Kappa). Pop stars have also starred and performed in several recent films, including Masayoshi Yamazaki in “Tsuki to Kyabetsu” and Ryoko Hirosue in “20 Seiki Nostalgia” (though Ms. Hirosue is more of a model and TV drama tarento than singer, as the film makes obvious).
Another illustration of the importance of music to Japanese movies. Why do you think audiences here sit patiently to the end of the credit crawl? To read the names of the caterer and best boy? They are, of course, listening to the tema songu. After the show, more than a few run out to buy the CD. This linkage between movies and music can only become stronger.
Mark Schilling
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997
From: Anne McKnight
Subject: Re: Indies, music & film
Hello,
To clarify and respond to Joe’s question, the part of the youth audience I was referring to as smitten with narrative opacity, learning the coordinates of a set of musical objects at the same time as ones coded with the traces of cultural alterity ( for lack of a better term), was US audiences, actually, not Tokyo. For instance, those who picked up the Boredoms when they hooked up and toured on the Lollapalooza rock&roll/grunge circuit a couple of years back. It hadn’t actually occurred to me that Tokyo audiences would be intrigued by that particular kind of self-referentiality of naming itself both objects and subjects of “Japanese film,” but it would be interesting to unpack that. Especially given the current crises in historiography like the “textbook problem” of revisionist history, and the pedagogy of a film like the recent Mononoke Hime, with its representation of Muromachi multiculturalism and exiled communities…Hmm.
In dishing out a musical example about illegibility, I was trying to respond to the part of this thread that is quite conscious of the role played by people who are both officially in the “industry” and those on the fringes as “knowledge workers” of some sort, in the possible re-scripting of symbolic worlds which include both capital and desire (to consume, produce, interpret).
The discussion began by taking up the weekly magazine pieces from Time & Newsweek, essentially tracking the bringing into discourse to a “popular” (yeah, a provisionally flung-out term here which would have to be hashed out…) audience of a lot of terms that allow people to get some kind of traction on what “Japanese film” is or might be in the age following the fade-out of the “great masters,” as I believe the narrative often goes. In other words, what is at stake in the side-by-side development of international recognition and international transmission in circuits of capital.
So I got to wondering about how enthusiastic youth audiences got traction on what they were hearing. I also got to wondering, if everything is “new,” what is the place of an avant-garde, other than breathlessly trying to be more newly new than street fashion, or how do we also re-think the notion of an “avant-garde”? Thus the jishu-eiga, which I think I was using in a different way than the genealogy of 50s and 60s films Aaron filled out. This way is perhaps specific to the 90s or the part of the 90s that I know. I was thinking of directors like Yamaziki Mikio and Yamada ***, (sorry I forget his first name) who are happiest when working with small constituencies, where they can control the means of production and distribution. (Not unlike riot grrrls, but without the gender consciousness!) I don’t see this relation to tethering conditions of labor and representation as “romantic,” but as trying to work in a different, perhaps oblique angle, with conditions it seems like you have to reckon with when making things & getting people to see them. It’s possible that jishu-eiga is undergoing re-signification as a category, and I wanted to leave room critically for that, and for things that frankly are going on “out there” that I don’t know about, and/or that may be impossible to systematize in the critical rubrics/discourses with which we often operate. Obviously, this small-scale operation ain’t for everyone, but I think it’s possible some people currently making films don’t really care about the star system of distribution, and might be quite content to work with small, labor-intensive audiences.
Anyway these jishu-eiga I was perhaps cryptically referring to tend not to be so keen on narrative. Correct me if I’m wrong, but with respect to “indies” film, they still shoot “stories” don’t they?
The cropping up of Japanese underground music, in its versions from “noise” to improv klezmer, to hard-core, struck me as an extremely active place to look in thinking about how differnt kinds of legibility (of the object and of the discourse) are or are not operating. Partly because of the fact that Japanese underground music has been picked up largely by a youth market (perhaps due to college radio & tours of college towns, tho no doubt there are other reasons) which mingles genres in a fell swoop. Which is to say, not picked up by the more segmented markets of people who listen to free jazz, improv stuff like Haino (please see Yegulalp Serdar’s succinct description a couple days back), and who I think tend to be older in Tokyo (I dunno about the rest of Japan) and perhaps in the US & elsewhere too.
I’m guessing that Joe M’s bringing up of the novel without plot debates (between Tanizaki & Akutagawa) of the 20s, is a reminder to keep off of a rhetorical move which is, now that I think about it, not unlike Noel Burch’s. Which is to oppose the formal traditions and composition of Japanese film to what he thinks of as the hegemony of classical Hollywood cinema & cinematic narrative. The reading to avoid would thus celebrate anything which is not a three-minute pop song because it would seem to represent some kind of categorical and redemptive space of otherness or utopia through its formal structures (the notorious romance of resistance). Is this a fair representation?Å@Hmm, the “movie without plots” debate, whe re could we take that…? If we were to speculate around this argument, I think it would be pretty important to leave room for how 90s nationalism vis-a-vis internationalization, is different from 20s or 30s nationalism, and the roles nationalism(s) did or didn’t play with respect to cultural production. (As a side note, Murakami Ryu does take this discourse of unifying form, content and political revolution, of a very sinister sort, in interesting directions in his novels about image-fascism.)
OK, check, back to the Boredoms. One thing that struck me about the unlikeliness of future Boredoms stardom, was a link between music consumption and other kinds of labor (or lack of it). Which is, listening to the Boredoms, or any other group which places vistas of distance between what goes in the amp and what comes out of it, takes a lot of work. One example might be any free jazz-based icon, such as Abe Kaoru (*the lived-fast, played-gorgeously, died-young saxaphonist hero depicted in WAKAMATSU Koji’s 1995 adaptation of *Endless Waltz*. He was played by MACHIDA Koh, formerly Machida Mastuzo, leader of the legendary Osaka punk band Inu, and recent candidate for the Akutagawa-sho, how’s that for cross-over?!?). Finding the stuff, listening to it, keeping up with information, listening again. Maybe I’m describing a dynamic which is pertinent to any kind of fan, but this use of time and labor itself, as something which attempts to re-signify an economy of the way it spends its time critically, seems to me quite interesting. It’s also interesting to me to hear accounts of people who used to be habitues of jazz kissa & film in the 60s, how these allocations of time & influence stack up on one another.
These questions about formalism, capital and spectatorial desire all made me want to sit down with a copy of Dick Hebdidge’s Subculture (very confident about the possibility of a liberatory spectatorial politics with respect to musical youth in London, the ways that skinheads/rockers and reggae fans use music as strategies for getting through daily life and/or politics). And the real cranky stuff that Adorno wrote about jazz, and how it is always already sold-out due to collaborating with the culture industry.
It seems the false-consciousness debate about the transcendence of form has been kicking around as long as Marxism & capitalism have been kicking at each other, and as long as people have been slagging each other about “real” punk in the pages of Melody Maker. This seems to leave a pretty long trail of pressures to produce “the political,” and all the kinds of performance anxieties that would ride along in that unenviable task. Sometimes I think the pressure to make films “mean” politically, where politics is an identifiable referent of a 60s or 70s “jiken” or “toso,” makes it hard to read the ways the films might be “political” in other more oblique ways, or the way in which “political” might be a term with some blind spots of its own that would be interesting to think through.
To respond to a question about information and context of the musician I cited, so far as what I’ve come across, the best writing in English I have come across on Japanese underground music comes in 2 forms: 1, the archival, or collections of stuff and information which is more about collecting and presenting than analysing. If you go down to your local weirdo video store & look at the ‘zines, chances are a bunch of the ones on music will feature some story by a band member who writes about on “my cool friends from Japan who passed through Buffalo on their nation-wide tour.” The magazine *Ongaku otaku*, put out in SF, billing itself I believe as about “independent” music. It tends to be a large collection of short reviews, very useful for getting your ears and hands on things. 2) is more analytical/meditative stuff. Rather than the US music press, which seems to recycle the same old stuff from what I’ve read lately, more the British x-music press seems interested in putting in the legwork necessary to do good reporting. (Again, a question of labor). Examples include Resonance (an excellent special issue a couple years back, put out by the London Experimental Musicians’ Collective) . More notably, which is to say regularly, The Wire and Straight No Chaser, along more jazz-based angles, do cover the “Japanese scene”. The latest The Wire had a couple of interesting things, along the lines of “bringing things into discourse,” (the attempt to talk about jazz kissa in an article about Masaki Batoh of Ghost was particularly humorous) and they consistently review Japanese stuff in their review section. A lot of this is DIY; its route of distribution might best be described as “over the transom.” A lot of really lovely things fall into those pages, often contextualized in Euro-American improv and experimental vocabularies. With respect to film, The Wire did a weird little piece on Japanese film music recently, which I could only read as a bit of critical melancholy for the days when Japanese studio films actually *had* good music; the hero was Takemitsu Toru, natch.
I don’t know why contemporary film soundtracks don’t seem to stand out, or why it hasn’t been an element of the film that recent indies directors have really gone to town on. (Clarification: In my earlier post, I wasn’t so much suggesting that people who make music & film are connected by common modes of hanging out, or actual human contact, but that they by virtue of having common modes of engagement with modes of mechanical reproduction – record-buying, radio, etc. I could give “empirical” source on this but this is probably a level of detail that would only serve as ballast to an already long post…) The upshot being my surprise at the lameness of contemporary soundtracks & sound in general in film.
Anyway I’ll end on a note about sound-tracks, circling back to Birgit Kellner’s comment on “Quentin Tarantino’s plundering through the ages.” It seemed to me that rather than the hoohah about Tarantino’s screenwriting genius, his real knack was to pick up the delirious noir of the west coast surf sound, and use it to punctuate his drama, in such a way that a theatre-viewing experience became theatricalized in a very idiosyncratic way, tapping into fantasy-symbolic structures that the visuals alone might not have allowed. It struck me that somebody could do something really weird & interesting with whoever the enka equivalent of Link Wray/whatever dark surf/rockabilly sound pleases you, and make a very acoustically interesting film.
Anyway, the discussion of crossover indies seems like a huge ball of very interesting wax, or worms, to me. Perhaps one way to re-frame it in such a way that is more explicitly pertinent to a discussion of straight-up film, would be to talk about what’s at stake for a discussion/critique of nationalism(s) or imperialism(s) in terms of cinematic representation, in this day-and-age of the 90s. Working on postwar fiction, primarily with an author (Nakagami) who throws the entire family romance structure of nuclear family & family-as-nation-state-metonym to the wind, the possibilities of how these discourses may or may not emerge, flummox me all the time.
amck.
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997
From: Yegulalp Serdar
Subject: RE: Indies, music & film
I think most of the sense of what make a given director “independent”, both Japanese and otherwise, is more attitudes and perception than many other things. It’s also generally used as an index of how they got started, what route they chose to take, etc. – but what’s the opposite of “independent”, and how would you classify it?
The best general rule seems to be: any director who got their start in filmmaking outside the confines of the studio system. The Japanese studio systems used to be some of the most hierarchical and rigid places to try and get behind a camera; today, I don’t know if it’s the same in *corporate* filmmaking (maybe that was the distinction I was looking for) – but judging from the messages, it’s certainly become easier to pick up a camera, spend a few thousand, and get noticed, because channels exist to bring such achievments attention now, whereas they didn’t before….
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997
From: Alan Makinen
To: KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
Subject: Re: Indies, music & film
Joseph Murphy wrote:
>Can you situate these groups on the U. S. popular culture landscape that you and Anne obviously know very well? I mean vis a vis Shonen Knife, who are known even to casual observers of the scene. Are they getting airplay on college radio, or would you have to find out about them through more esoteric outlets? Would mainstream publications like Rolling Stone or Spin or Wired mention them, or would you have to go to more specialized magazines? If I referred to them in class, would my students likely have heard of them (let’s say they’re just medium cool)?
I discussed these questions with one of my friends who writes about music for the Chicago press and who keeps up with Rolling Stone and Spin. We agreed that the Japanese music groups who’ve gotten the most US media notice would be Cibo Matto, Pizzicato Five (who, by the way, performed at Metro last Saturday), and Shonen Knife. Noise projects like the Boredoms and Merzbow definitely have a more select appeal, although you can find their CDs at big stores like Tower and Crow’s Nest in Chicago; the Bordeoms are carried by Reprise, after all. I’d say the ineffable Haino Keiji would likely be unknown to “medium cool” students; but even his CDs are to be found out there in the import bins and at specialty CD shops.
Anne McKnight wrote:
>The great thing is, since they’re used to the music not making sense at all in a “narrative” or melodic way, the door is wide open for all sorts of inventive things to be worked in.
I would agree that the Boredoms are quite good at making a different kind of musical sense; I think some of their work might be better thought of as sound art. Has anyone seen what, if anything, the Boredoms have done in the realm of music videos–or concert/performance films? Any evidence that their approach to music and sound has been carried over into the film and video?
>If you go down to your local weirdo video store & look at the ‘zines, chances are a bunch of the ones on music will feature some story by a band member who writes about on “my cool friends from Japan who passed through Buffalo on their nation-wide tour.” The magazine *Ongaku otaku*, put out in SF, billing itself I believe as about “independent” music. It tends to be a large collection of short reviews, very useful for getting your ears and hands on things.
Another California magazine along similar lines is Giant Robot, published by Eric Nakamura. I’d expect GR would seek to elude being defined, but for the purposes here I’ll venture this description: Giant Robot attempts to cover popular culture from a trans-cultural and pan-East Asian perspective; it has a DIY feel and an attitude that is rooted in punk; lots of short music and zine reviews; summer issue features an interviews with Tsui Hark and Cibo Matto. Also, GR was a sponsor of Asian American Showcase, a music, film, and art event held in Chicago this past spring. The Giant Robot web site: .
Alan Makinen
Chicago, IL 60657
Date: Fri, 19 Sep 1997
From: Joseph Murphy
Subject: Re: Indies, music & film
>Correct me if I’m wrong, but with respect to “indies” film, they still shoot “stories” don’t they?
Right, that’s why I was having trouble placing your potential for “all sorts of inventive things” in a U. S. context, and assumed you meant Japan.