Nippon Connection & Shinya Tsukamoto in Frankfurt

The J W Goethe University in Frankfurt is the location of the world's biggest festival of Japanese Cinema, The Nippon Connection, which I recently attended. Founded by three students in 2000, who were frustrated by the sparsity of Japanese films getting distribution in Germany outside of the Berlin Film Festival, the festival has grown from a handful of films to a large and diverse programme around which gravitates an array of Japanese themed cultural events from puppet theater, to a noodle bar and Japanese DJs. This strategy of making the screenings a cultural 'event' has been hugely successful and from its inception the festival has drawn crowds numbering several thousands.

This year the festival also played host to the Kinema Club Japan a prestigious, international network of Japanese Film scholars. A festival that programmes anime and pink films next to works of the political avant garde and big name releases, and which appeals to scholars as much as it does fan boys, The Nippon Connection is about breaking down barriers as much as it about giving the exposure Japanese Cinema deserves to a nation that is traditionally resistant to subtitled films. 'We wanted to put all of these different people in a room together, to force them to interact', says Holger, one of the founders. A brilliant demonstration of grassroots cinephilia in action, the work of Alex, Marion and Holger to found and develop the festival whilst studying full time is nothing short of inspiring. Here are a few brief reflexions on what i saw...

Arch Angels (Issei Oda): A lavish manga adaptation set in a girls school were three friends (hilariously) discover they have superhuman powers and use them to foil a kidnapping operation conducted by the school's corrupt administration. Full of blistering optical effects and playful humour, including a CGI dog that turns out to be the film's wise cracking and intrusive narrator, it entertains from beginning to end.

Look of Love (Yoshiharu Veoka): Impressively shot on 8mm this surreal feature follows the exploits of a small time pimp and his two girls who undergo revelatory experience one night in Tokyo. A voyeuristic man that watches his two nude neighbours, an apartment full of abandoned children and a satellite that gropes one of the prostitutes with long metal tentacles as she floats through space are among the images that pepper this story of self discovery.

The Matsagune Potshot Affair (Nobuhiro Yamashita): Known for his dark humour Nobuhiro serves up the kind of brilliantly composed surreal, ensemble comedy that is one of Japanese cinema's most endearing and interesting genres. In a small provincial town a cop has to help out his brother who, after committing a hit and run, is blackmailed by two dim-witted criminals into helping them retrieve their stash of stolen gold - but what to do with the bullion once it is in their hands? Not to mention the severed head... Sheer comic genius.

Mushishi (Katsuhiro Otomo): Akira director Otomo's latest film after Steamboy is a live action supernatural period drama about a bug master who travels Japan taming the invisible bugs, which swarm through the air like molecules causing all manner of problems to humans. Although peppered with some very nice visual ideas (particularly a scene in which all the words escape from a library and have to be recaptured) the film has serious pacing problems not unlike Steamboy, the final scenes of which descended into lever pulling monotony.

The Prisoner (Adachi Masao): The most enigmatic and controversial film of the festival follows the survivor of a suicide attack on an airport by the Red Army terrorist group, as he is tortured mercilessly by his captors. Visited in his cell by representative from the French and Russian revolutions, he begins to philosophically explore his position. A highly personal, deeply abstract film from Adachi, who was himself involved in the Red Army (he served a prison sentence recently after finally being extradited from Lebanon where he was fighting for the Palestinian cause). Adachi was prevented from visiting the festival by the Japanese embassy but spoke to the audience via a video link.

The Pavillion Salamandre (Masanori Tominaga): A lonely radiologist is drawn into a web of conspiracy surrounding the authenticity of a giant Salamander, fought over by the four sisters of the Kinjiro foundation, charged with the care of this national treasure, and a crime syndicate. Beginning like a postmodern rendering of a Chandleresque detective story, the film rapidly descends into a baffling array of absurdist vignettes and inscrutable plot developments, not least the fact that the radiologist inexplicably turns into a faux Sicilian mobster half way through. It is all tenuously held together by the central figure of Kinjiro the giant Salamander, who passively tolerates the whole affair and periodically stares blankly at the camera in shots reminiscent of Imamura's The Eel.

Key Note lecture by Prof. Inuhiko Yomota, who gave an overview of the depiction of the Chinese in Japanese films made in Manchuria during the occupation. This prolific scholar is one of the first to broach this taboo, controversial topic and has even delivered the lecture in Beijing. The topic was approached with an admirable scholarly detachment. The most fascinating thing was seeing footage of Setsuko Hara, darling of postwar humanist cinema, in slavishly nationalistic roles, a hidden aspect of her career that casts her later performances in a rather more ambivalent light. More research clearly needs to be done here...

Nightmare Detective (Shinya Tsukamoto): The latest film from Tsukamoto, one of the figures responsible for the reemergence of Japanese cinema in the 90s after his groundbreaking 8mm masterpiece Tetsuo: The Iron Man dominated festivals in 1989, initially seems like a more mainstream film. About a gutsy police woman and a psychic who investigate a spate of gruesome suicides caused by a man (Tsukamoto himself) entering the victim's dreams, Tsukamoto however plays around with the tropes and cliches of the J-Horror genre even as he creates something so horrific that it represents a generic high point. The film opens with a man terrorised by the appearance of a girls long hair hanging on his door, a cliche that is quickly revealed to be that of his aborted daughter, at another point the police woman determines she is in a dream when her mobile phone, a standard prop of the Japanese horror film at least since kiyoshi kurosawa's Pulse, melts in her hand. In this way the tropes of the genre are literally dissolved, allowing room for Tsukamoto's own concerns such as the dulled sensation of life caused by our modern, urban, consumer existence (the dreamers all wake up on a busy overpass where they are attacked) and the monster itself, which in its horrific mutations is nothing short of a fleshy version of Tetsuo. Nightmare Detective clearly demonstrates an artist entering a popular genre and reconfiguring its conventions according to his own aesthetic and thematic concerns. I interviewed Tsukamoto (below), footage of which will soon appear on Firecracker.

Uncle's Paradise (Shinji Imaoka): The first of two pinku (or Softcore porn) films shown at the festival revealed a world of narrative experimentation on the margins of the mainstream film industry crying out for wider discovery. When Haruo's uncle Takashi invites himself to stay his life suddenly gets more than a little strange. Terrified of falling asleep, because he suffers the recurring dream of making love to a dead woman, Takashi spends the film drinking coffee and finding distractions by seducing every woman at hand, including his nephew's own girlfriend, who Haruo discovers has had the pleasure of his Uncle's company when he finds his signature on her back in green marker. The film also initially sets up a love triangle between Haruo, his girlfriend and his work colleague, which is prematurely terminated when the latter is arbitrarily dispatched by a giant and very fake looking giant spider. Having denied any possibility of a conventional narrative trajectory, making the whole thing quite a liberating experience, the film then follows Haruo's descent into the underworld, depicted as a seemingly insipid love motel curated by Yamada king of the underworld in which the unfortunate inhabitants are fellatioed until they bleed, to rescue his uncle after he is bitten by a poisonous snake whilst masturbating by a temple. As if it all didn't sound strange enough Haruo is guided on his journey by a giant squid, which represents some kind of vague sexual symbol. As this synopsis suggests the Pinku genre, which allows an easy point of entry into filmmaking, respectable budgets and a relatively large amount of freedom beyond the obligatory number of sex scenes, has created a breeding ground of auteurist experimentation, which is absolutely unthinkable in the adult industries of most other countries. The director here even undercuts the required scenes of simulated sex with some brilliantly wry, offbeat humour, and the whole thing is so wonderfully ridiculous that you entirely forget that the film is supposed to be pornographic. The lead actress Mutsuo Yoshioka obviously hadn't, however, when she told the audience at the beginning of the screening that 'I hope you enjoy my body.' Such a generous person...

Noriko's Dinner Table (Sion Sono): Something of a prequel to the director's Suicide Club, Noriko's Dinner Table even incorporates footage from that film's depiction of 54 Japanese schoolgirls committing mass suicide by leaping hand in hand onto the subway tracks. In this rather more complex film the narrative is concerned with two sisters who join a society on the internet and then leave home to stay with their virtual friends in Tokyo, only to discover that the website is a front for a kind of emotional prostitution ring in which lonely men can temporarily rent a family. thus leaving their real family for a virtual one, the girls gradually loose their identities by taking on so many roles (which can even include being the passive victims of murder if the clients so wish), so that when their father finally tracks them down they have completely forgotten him. Initially only able to approach his daughters by partaking in this illusion, the father finally snaps and and murders the girl's bodyguards before sitting down with his daughters to eat amidst the bodies, bloodstained but determined to start over. All in all the film is a very interesting philosophical exploration of identity and how easily it can be transformed by our roles in society, however it suffers from being over long and messy. Although the numerous scenes that enforce the innocent naivety of the girls in the opening half are necessary to the effect of the film's bloody climax, there are far too many of them and the twee soundtrack melody quickly becomes annoying.

Indispensable Eight (various): Part of the festival's retrospective of rare avant garde Japanese short films, this programme of experimental shorts on super 8mm by such renowned talents as Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Pulse, Cure) and Nobuhiko Obayashi (Hausu), sought to demonstrate the continued importance of this threatened medium for Japanese directors. This was particularly the case for Shinya Tsukamoto, who learnt his craft with a series of insanely innovative shorts throughout the 70s and 80s before finally breaking through with the pinnacle of his 8mm work Tetsuo: The Iron Man, about a metal fetishist and a salary man who begin to mutate into grotesque fusions of flesh and metal after being involved in a car crash. Tsukamoto still speaks fondly of the special 'flavour' of 8mm. There was a screening of an unfortunately short extract of his 40min short The Adventure of Denchu Kozo, about a boy born with an electrical pole sticking out of his back, who, after being shunned by society, travels to the future where robot vampires are taking over the world. Despite the length of the clip it was clear that the film is a work of tactile and visceral genius, which pushes the medium to its limits in terms of composition and special effects (Tsukamoto animates wires bursting from a woman's guts and consuming her after she is bitten using stop motion) - he received a round of applause for the film's plot.

Nikkomihoppy (Toshiro Enomoto): The festival's second Pinku film is a surprisingly poignant story of lost love, only somewhat disrupted by the obligatory sex scenes. After his girlfriend leaves him for an older man, Chiyohara goes on a trip to find his first love, who, he discovers from her best friend, has has been killed in a car accident only the week before. A simple comparison of this film with Uncle's Paradise demonstrates the startling range of approaches to this genre, which confounds western conception of porn consisting of plotless rendezvous between mustachioed boiler mechanics and frustrated nurses. When the film's male lead, present at the screening, was asked if he will continue to act in Pink films he rather surprisingly commented 'only if i get over the embarrassment of being naked. Quite a considerable hurdle given the demands f the genre.

Although its obviously stupidly reductive to attempt to identify a thread in such an eclectic mixture of films, its interesting to note that the spectre of realism that always hovers on the radars of western film criticism is largely absent from the films of the festival, with even such a politically engaged and autobiographical work as The Prisoner turning to dreamlike abstraction to express its themes. On top of this many films such as Paprika, Ten Nights of Dream, Nightmare Detective and Faces of a Fig Tree dealt directly with the theme of dreams and fantasy. This anti-realism in contemporary Japanese cinema is as fascinatingly pervasive as realism was in the humanist and New Wave movements in post-war film.