Move Over Ozu

A recent touring season of contemporary Japanese films on the theme of family, curated by the Japan Foundation and Midnight Eye’s Jasper Sharp, is seeking to show that there is more to modern Japanese film than J-horror and Yakuza flicks, which currently dominate the international distribution channels. The title alludes to classical maestro Yasujiro Ozu, whose films invariably revolved around the trials and tribulations of a family. However what is immediately evident from the varied interpretations of this theme, the six films here are anything but classical.

Hanging Garden (Kûchû Teien, 2005) by Toshiaki Toyada shows how a rootless, falsely happy middle class family tears itself apart through its own policy of honesty. The film centres on Wild Monkeys, a garish love motel replete with kitsch psychedelic décor and a revolving bed, which becomes a centre point for the various family member’s not-so-secret trysts throughout the film. These encounters are then cheerily announced over family birthday gatherings, which invariably turn into occasions for sordid ritual humiliation presided over by the ever-smiling mother Eriko (Kyoko Koizumi), an epitome of false domestic tranquillity; each gathering pushing the family closer to the brink. Hanging Garden certainly demonstrates the uncanny ability many modern Japanese, and more recently Korean, films have of changing tone on a dime, but Toyoda perhaps overplays the horror elements, which threaten to swallow the acerbic humour of many other scenes. It seems that when the façade of the nuclear family implodes, then the fall out is best expressed in the style of Takashi Miike – perhaps the modern family melodrama in Japan is not as divorced from the country’s better known horror cinema as might be expected.

Sway (Yureru, 2006) by female director Miwa Nishikawa, is an exceptionally well-executed study of the relationship between two very different brothers following the traumatic death of Chieko, a girl they both covet, whilst they are visiting a remote beauty spot with a rickety old suspension bridge. But did she fall or was she pushed? And what exactly did Takeru witness? The ensuing courtroom drama seeks out to answer these questions, but only reveals the gulf of jealousy and repressed emotion that lies between the two brothers. A masterpiece of understated drama and shifting perceptions.

Licence to Live (Ningen Gokaku, 1999) is an unconventional film from Japanese horror director Kiyochi Kurosawa. It follows the efforts of Yutaka to reestablish his life and his family after he awakes from a ten year coma, before eventually being crushed to death by a teetering pile of refrigerators in what may be the most arbitrary death i have seen in a Japanese film (and that's saying something). The film's set up and tone is reminiscent of Shohei Imamura's The Eel, about a released murderer rebuilding his life in the company of various eccentrics in a provincial town. Stylistically it is also quite close to Kitano's work, with its deadpan humour, sudden bursts of slapstick and hard cuts between two vastly different tones, however without the magnetic intensity of Kitano around which the fragmented elements can coalesce the film looses some momentum in its latter parts.

This weekend's films give an encouraging impression of Japanese cinema beyond the usual suspect directors. What unites the disparate director’s approaches to their material is not so much the family drama, but how each one has revived this tried and tested genre, the rules of which were established as long ago as Ozu, through an electrical charge of style and narrative flare.

Firecracker TV

Firecracker have recently relaunched their site with the addition of a new feature called Firecracker TV. With it they aim to broadcast hard to find Asian movies over the net on a pay-per-view basis. Their choices are hearteningly eclectic and very interesting. They include a documentary on the Beijing rock scene by Zhang Yang, and a focus on Malaysian and Filipino independent filmmaking, a little known area of cinema that they seem to be leading the way in promoting. Also forthcoming is the award winning Chinese film Nuan and a series of films dedicated to Filipino '70s grindhouse director Bobby A. Suarez. Check out the programme. What's more Firecracker's impeccable design and enthusiasm ensure that this is all presented in as hip a way as possible. We could be witnessing the future of distribution for obscure films, using the net to bypass the biased and conservative mainstream distribution channels. Imagine the next Edward Yang or Apichatpong Weerasethakul available at the click of a button? I encourage everyone to check it out and spread the word!

My review of the Mikio Naruse boxset and of Funeral Parade of Roses are also now online at the site.

Chinese Film takes the Golden Bear

What more proof could you ask of the rise of Chinese cinema than for its films to walk away with the grand prixs of two out of the three most important film festivals in the wolrd; Jia Zhang Ke's Still Life at the Venice Film Festival and, only yesterday, Wang Quanan's Tuya's Marriage at the Berlinale. The film is set on the Mongolian Steppes, where a woman is torn between the hard but traditional way of life of a shepard and the easy, souless life of the encroaching urban centre when her her husband falls ill. The director, who was born in the region, stated that his intention was to record the nomad's traditional way of life before it disappears for ever. The film might make a good companion peice to The Cave of the Yellow Dog.

The festival was remarkably receptive to Asian films this year with China and South Korea very well represented. Highlights include Hong Sang-su's latest Woman on the Beach, Park Chan-wook's surreal sounding I'm a Cyborg but thats OK, about a woman in a mental home who believes herself to be bionic, and Zhang Yang's latest Getting Home, an intriguing sounding comedy/drama about a man trying to get the corpse of his dead friend across China by pretending that he is dead drunk. To cap it all there was even a (much overdue) retrospective of Kihachi Okamoto (of Sword of Doom fame), which made up for the lack of new Japanese films, apart from the latest film from the prolific Yoji Yomada Love and Honour, about a samurai who goes blind and must rely on his wife to support him.

Lets hope that the international sales agents are paying as much attention to the success of Asian cinema as the festival programmers, and that some of these delights get picked up for distribution.

Cinema China Festival Unveiled

I've been dying to make a post about this for weeks now, but have been sworn to secrecy (not that this blog is exactly a hub of activity - I'm going to have to try harder to drum up an audience). This morning, rather yesterday morning as I am writing this past midnight, saw the launch of Cinema China '07, the biggest festival of Chinese cinema ever held in Britain. I have been involved with it for a little under a year now, after meeting the co-director Mark Cousins whilst studying my MSc at Edinburgh University (the other director is my old tutor Dr Dorota Ostrowska). I worked first as a print researcher, then a general researcher and copy editor, and I even helped to compile the clip reel shown during the launch with my housemate, which seemed to go down very well, and included such stylistic audacities as cutting between Spring in a Small Town and In the Mood for Love, with Shigeru Umebayashi's music playing over both.

Over the year it has been a pleasure to see the festival grow from a mere outline to something of such magnitude; 26 films, spanning 80 years and touring 20 UK cities, with special guests including the wonderful Maggie Cheung and the filmmaker Xie Fei, whose rarely seen works chronicle the social problems of modern China with a striking degree of frank realism. For more information on the programme, which spans films from action (One-Armed Swordsman and A Touch of Zen) to melodrama (Love Eterne) and everything in between, visit: http://www.cinemachina.org.uk/

Of course the nature of such an event, supported as it is by the Beijing Film Academy and to be documented by China Central Television (CCTV) for a predicted audience of 20 million(!), might suggest political compromises had to be made. On the contrary, at the heart of the festival is a programme of films chosen with passion and verve within the positively unpolitical spirit of internationalism. It is an act of outreach on a very human, rather than geo-political, level; as Mark Cousins says there is no better way to learn about a country than through its films. That said, the programme is incredibly daring in its selection of films that courageously broach topics such as sexuality and politics. The fact that the film Yellow Earth, the key work of the famous 5th generation directors of the Beijing Film Academy, is being shown for the first time in a generation despite its significance and despite the fact that it is still - I think - banned in China demonstrates the good faith in which everyone has acted. This is not an easy film to track down (I know because at one point I was the one trying to find it - its amazing how such major films can disappear without a trace into the vague matrix of cinematic distribution) and like many of the films on offer (like such classics as the 1940s melodrama Spring in a Small Town or the Hong Kong proto New Wave film The Arch) it is a rare, possibly exceptional, opportunity to see this masterpiece on the big screen.

The festival will serve to construct a tentative cannon in the minds of the British audience and will paint a broad outline of the history of cinema in the three Chinas (Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan), making it an unbeatable and timely introduction to a national cinema that is crying out to be discovered in the West, following the recent successes of films like Hero. By displaying the nation's riches the festival will show how the medium has been innovated by Chinese artists; from the pictorial beauty and brilliant visual storytelling of Zhang Yimou - a focus in the festival - to the devastating atmosphere of ennui and alienation evoked by of Jia Zhang Ke and Tsai Ming-liang, via the sumptuous formalism of Wong Kar-wai, who is surely one of the great poets in cinema and certainly one of its only impressionists. As Mark Cousins maintains "If we have one aim, it is that audiences will get to know the scale and beauty of Chinese language film and, through it, an insight into China and its people."

Of course the most exceptional thing is that Maggie Cheung, one of the most beautiful, multi-talented and fascinating actresses in the world, will be in attendance. Apparently she has even been brushing up on her scots, emailing Mark only yesterday to say 'cannae wait'. Neither can we.

Mikio Naruse

There has been a distinct lack of blogging from me recently, so what better way to restart than to draw your attention to a great new release from my favourite DVD label Eureka! Their first box set of films by the legendary, but under-exposed Mikio Naruse, a contemporary of Ozu and Mizoguchi, constitutes a rare event indeed. The three films, all masterpieces of understated melodrama, Repast, The Sound of the Mountain and Flowing, are accompanied by commentaries and a 200 page book of insightful essays. This release heralds a retrospective, currently touring the greater cities of the western world, and due to arrive at London's NFT in the first half of this year (the rumour is something like 25 films out of the director's eighty odd). The three films explore the status of women in postwar Japanese society with a great sensitivity. Naruse's style is breathtaking: rooted in complex psychology and powerful, but never excessive, emotions, characters interact within an editing system of astonishing visual economy, which captures the poetic rhythms of everyday life and infuses every encounter with a subtle network of glances and meanings arising from under the surface of things. Repast follows the uncertainty of a wife trapped in an unfulfilled marriage, Sound of the Mountain the friendship between an old man and his daughter in law as a result of her philandering husband, and Flowing the everyday, unromanticised lives of the women of a geisha house teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. Naruse's view is pessimistic, yet incredibly empathetic, and he handles his material with a rare ad complex emotional subtlety.

You can find out more at http://www.eurekavideo.co.uk/moc/catalogue/repast/ and i will hopefully have a review online fairly soon at www.firecracker-magazine.com

I recently spent new year in Paris, where i found an exceptional video rental store just on the intersection of Boulevard St Michel (by the Jardins du Luxemburg) and the Rue Abbe D'Eppe called Videosphere, which has a great selection of Asian films, including the odd rare gem.

Party Without Honour or Humanity

Took time out from the busy schedule of Japanese films to throw a birthday party for my housemate Alexander's 25th birthday, although the theme was, none-the-less, Yakuza and i had to nip out for two hours just as it was getting off the ground to see School of the Holy Beast. There were red lightbulbs, a TV in the hall playing Yakuza films, Sake, and various Japanese snacks, although it turned out I was the only one dressed for the part with my overly ornate 70s shirt, suit and sunglasses. A list has been made of those who did not show up. The Yakuza do not easily forget. Fingers will be lost...

Wild Japan Day 7 - The School of the Holy Beast

I'd heard the name of Norifumi Suzuki's notorious 'nunsploitation' film spoken in hushed tones by cult film enthusiasts for a while, but nothing could prepare me for the experience of seeing The School of the Holy Beast on the big screen for the first time. It is quite simply jaw dropping in every respect. For one thing its almost impossible to make a more provocative film about Christianity, although Jasper Sharp's cautionary note regarding Japan's tiny and oft persecuted Christian community gives the film a very different shade then if it had been made in, say, Italy where the subject matter would carry a more relevant and politicised charge. But then I'm not sure that this makes the film necessarily conservative.

The film centres on Maya, a liberated woman of the sixties who joins St Clore's convent in order to discover the fate of her mother. The nun's are all lined up, like a military parade, and as Maya is introduced to them, the camera emphasises the rigidity of the life there by tracking between the lines of grim faces. The film is full of such striking compositions, which along with the sumptuous colour photography demonstrates the director's aesthetic talent, and the film's surprisingly high production values (the sexploitation film in the ailing film industry of the seventies wasn't merely a subgenre, but the bread and butter genre for studios like Toei and Nikkatsu, the latter of which moved its output exclusively to this area).

One of the film's alternative titles is 'The Transgressor', and this applies as much to the film's formal and generic transitions than it does to its protagonists. Beginning as a sex comedy with ample scenes of titilation, most notably the sequence in which Maya sneaks her over-sexed boyfriend and his sidekick into the nunnery to pleasure the frigid mother superior in her sleep, the film lurches into the horror genre, becoming increasingly dark in tone. Revelations are made concerning the death of Maya's mother, tortured to death at the hands of the Mother Superior after she was inpregnated by the priest Father Kukinuma, who bares the scars of Nagasaki on his back in the director's excurision into that most horrific of Japan's recent experiences. History seems to be repeating after another nun is found to be with child and is tried as a witch (she is forced to drink a bucket of salt water, then a crucifix is placed between her legs and the nuns form a circle around her, waiting for her to soil the lord and thus demonstrate her guilt). Such transitions also occur in individual scenes, such as the one in which Maya is punished by being whipped naked with rose stems whilst bound by thorned vines; starting in a fairly disturbing and sordid vein, it becomes increasingly poetic and beautiful with an impressionistic flurry of rose buds and tossed hair.

School of the Holy Beast takes the theme of sexuality in the convent, the subject of Michael Powell's excellent Black Narcissus and takes it to an extreme that is almost unthinkable in its capacity to shock. The truly astonishing thing is that whilst from the title and synopsis little would suggest a film of any depth, the end result is, somehow, utterly beautiful and sophisticated.