Reprinted from
the Unesco Courier,
October 2000
http://www.unesco.org/courier/2000_10/uk/doss22.htm
By Brice Pedroletti
Young Japanese producers are stretching tight budgets to produce a wave of often dark films while the big studios, fattened by prosperity, are falling on hard times
The tiny
bar in Tokyoﾕs Shinjuku district has barely changed over the past 50 years.
Its owner keeps a careful eye on the rows of whisky bottles that line the
ancient dive's walls, each bottle bearing the name of a filmmaker from
somewhere across the world.
Every
time one of these illustrious guests passes through Tokyo, they find their
private bottle waiting, intact. For Masaki Tamura, a famous director of
photography who worked with the big names in documentary and fiction films
in the 1970s and 1980s, the bar is a favourite hangout when taking a break
between two shoots. One day in the early 1990s, however, in the middle
of a shoot with a famous director, Tamuraﾕs patience with movie-making
finally broke. ﾒI was sick of the old methods. The approach was too conventional.
I wanted to give up film and I didnﾕt work for the next three years. I
thought it was all over for me.ﾓ
That is until he met Shinji Aoyama and did camera work for his first film,
Helpless.
ﾒDuring the shoot, everybody knew how to do everyone elseﾕs job,ﾓ he says.
ﾒYou had to because the budget was so small. It was a miracle how we managed
to make a three-hour film in cinemascope with so little money.ﾓ
At 61,
with a moustache, shock of grey hair, sensitive face and calm voice of
a character from a Yasujiro Ozu film, Tomura describes his new career as
a conversion. ﾒAt first, I didnﾕt understand the film language these young
people used. The way they worked was new to me. Ideas come from all sides.
Everyone has something to say and we discuss everything together. But I
got used to it and now I speak that language.ﾓ For the past five years,
Tamura has been working exclusively with this young generation, whose creative
energy has given new life to Japanﾕs battered film industry. These
filmmakers are all between 20 and 40 years old, and produce their films
with extremely limited resources in the worldﾕs most expensive city. Some
of them have worked in television, advertising or cartoons, and hold down
several jobs to make ends meet. They tend to focus on social and psychological
themes, like delinquency and mindless crime, which mirror the confusion
and malaise of a generation that has rejected the old ambitions of getting
rich, blind loyalty to oneﾕs employer and social harmony.
Without access to major distribution networks, they make do in a ghetto
of art cinemas where competition is fierce: this new genre can never earn
much money. Financing the productions is also a nightmare, with budgets
ranging from $100,000 to a million dollars. Most do not even have an inter-negative
version (from which copies can be made without damaging the master)ﾑa common
sacrifice made by makers of short films elsewhere. ﾒI often have to go
into debt to get the film started,ﾓ says Shinya Tsukamoto. ﾒYou start shooting
with the crew working for nothing and hoping to get paid later. Then I
show the rushes to video editors to try to get them to invest in the film.ﾓ
Making fantasy films in the tradition of the Frenchman Georges M四i峻,
Tsukamoto is a director, cameraman, set-designer, actor and producer all
rolled into one.
At 40,
he has made six films independently and another two for the big studios.
It took eight months to make Bullet Ballet, his seventh and second-to-last
film, whose street scenes were largely shot clandestinely. Like his first
films, Tetsuo and Tokyo First, Bullet Ballet conveys
the vibrant energy of its director, who depicts the fragile equilibrium
of young people living on the brink of disaster, in a culture of violence
from which there is no return. Just as in the 1970s, when major studios
such as Nikkatsu switched to B movies and the soft porn works on which
many filmmakers cut their teeth, todayﾕs producers have made erotic films
(pinku eiga) and gangster films on budgets even smaller than their
elders. These video or 16mm productions are targetted directly at the video
market.
Kiyoshi
Kurosawa continues to make film noir on 16mm for video, though he infuses
his creations with a surprisingly philosophical dimension. The two major
works of the Revenge II series, Eyes of the Spider and Serpent
Path (1998), were shot one after the other, each in two weeks, with
the same crew and the same actors. The same plot of revenge, however, is
handled very differently in the two cases. ﾒI donﾕt mind shooting like
this,ﾓ he says. ﾒIn fact itﾕs a luxury to be able to make two versions
of the same story.ﾓ Takashi Miike, king of gangster gore films, agrees.
Takeshi
Kitano, big brother to this new generation of filmmakers, started out in
a similar fashion. It was too hard being an actor and producer at the same
time, so he went behind the camera. Today his company Office Kitano turns
out a steady stream of independent films, though he makes most of his money
by selling to television.
Never
before has a ﾒnew waveﾓ in Japanese cinema made such a virtue out of necessity.
The current generation has set up its own makeshift network with a freedom
unprecedented in the history of the nationﾕs film industry. The French
ﾒnew waveﾓ of the 1960s had little choice but to depend heavily on big
studio money. So long as the films drew the crowds, independent filmmakers
and the studio bosses always found a way of working together.
But falling attendance rates combined with an economic downturn has dealt
a sharp blow to the Japanese industry. The major distributorsﾑToho, Toei
and Shochikoﾑhave brushed aside the newcomers and made money by filling
their cinemas with foreign films (70 per cent of total revenue), animation
(about 20 such films were made in 1999) or their own productions.
As a result,
the ﾒnew waveﾓ of the 1990s had to set up shop, physically and figuratively,
in a country where training had long been the preserve of big studios.
New film and video schools are springing up like Eiga Bi Gakko, which was
founded two years ago by producer Kenzo Horikoshi. Classes are often taught
by young directors, who submit film proposals as part of the school programme
to produce two films each year. Akihiko Shiota made a couple of erotic
films before his remarkable Moonlight Whispers
in 1999, which follows
three children growing up in a city suburb and cost less than $200,000.
ﾒThe films
are made without any thought of the big studio network,ﾓ says Hirokazu
Kore-Eda, who directed Wonderful Life. Because they owe favours
to no-one, the young directors are totally free to experiment. For Wonderful
Life, Kore-Eda, who was trained in documentary production, sent his
assistants out on a five-month mission to capture on video ﾒthe best memoriesﾓ
of about 500 elderly people. He looked at the rushes, did the casting and
then contacted those he had chosen to appear in the film. Nobuhiro Suwa,
director of M/Other, developed in three feature-length films a very
personal style based on improvisation and lengthy shots, some of which
last over five minutes. H story, his third film, is the story of
the filming of an imaginary re-make of Hiroshima Mon Amour, in which
B斬trice Dalle plays the original star, Emmanuelle Riva.
As for Aoyama, his feature film Eureka deals with a recurrent theme
in 1990s Japanese cinemaﾑthat of a new life, a transition to an alternative
state of existence following a traumatic experience. It shows three people,
a man and two children, who have escaped from a bloody hostage-taking episode
and struggle throughout the film to find their way out of a maze of misfortune.
New outfits upstage the big studios
The technical, stylistic and
narrative maturity of Eureka, made in black and white cinemascope,
stands out among other independent films which, despite all their energy,
sometimes seem laborious productions overly concerned with navel-gazing
and experimentation. It is perhaps no accident that the film was one of
the first produced by Suncent Cinema Works, the new company of Takenori
Sentoh. The 38-year-old producer is seen by many as a pioneer of new Japanese
cinema. In 1992, he joined the pay-TV channel Wowow and gave several beginners
their first break, including Aoyama for Helpless. Since then, Sentoh
has produced more than 35 films for Wowow and others companies, including
some festival favourites of recent years. In 1999, he set up his own production
company, Suncent.
Distribution is still very difficult in Japan, but Sentohﾕs success abroad
and Kitanoﾕs commercial breakthrough have encouraged other centres of independent
film production, including, ironically, the former major distributors Daiei
and Nikkatsu. Some previously occasional partners of the new Japanese cinema
(video editors, advertising agencies and radio and television stations)
are now more involved in co-production, while countless multimedia firms
(Little More, Uplink and Gaga, for example) are encouraging alternative
productions.
Meanwhile the disintegration of the big-studio system is gathering pace.
An almost-bankrupt Shochiku has sold its studios at Ofuna, near Tokyo.
ﾒThis reminds me of the gekokujo,ﾓ says the head of a film school,
referring to 15th and 16th century feudal Japan when the serfs took the
place of the gentry. Sentoh for his part has started hiring banking executives
and others totally alien to the film industry on the condition that they
are true film fanatics. He has always wondered, he says, ﾒif anyone in
the mainstream Japanese movie industry even likes cinema.ﾓ
Brice Pedroletti is a French journalist based in Tokyo.