Our 117th update, no less, since we kicked off the site back in 2001, and again, a slightly sex-themed one, with one of the most interesting voices from Japan’s new wave of women director talking about her new film, and a Roland Domenig’s latest installment in his highly informative look at the sex education genre.

There’s also details on a competition we’re running at the end of this post in conjunction with the BFI’s Nagisa Oshima season, which I mentioned a few weeks ago.

Hope you enjoy the read!

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INTERVIEW: Yuki Tanada

Jasper Sharp interviews one of the leading lights of the new generation of Japanese filmmakers, director of such widely praised films as Moon and Cherry and Ain’t No Tomorrows.

(Just to give something of a taster for this year’s Raindance, I can now exclusively reveal that Yuki Tanada’s latest film, Ain’t No Tomorrows, is one of the titles by Japanese Women Directors playing at this year’s Raindance Festival. I hope to get a post out with the full lineup in the coming week.)

FEATURE: A History of Sex Education Films in Japan, Part 3

Our in-depth look continues in part three: the seiten films, in which we run into some very familiar names from Japanese film history. By Roland Domenig.

Midnight Eye Competition – Nagisa Oshima Retrospective Tickets

Starting August 28 and throughout September and October, the BFI Southbank in London will celebrate the astounding films of Japan’s foremost modern master Nagisa Oshima, with a complete retrospective of his films. The director spearheaded Japan’s new wave and in the 60s and 70s was as famous and influential as Godard. Plus a rare opportunity to see a selection of his television work.

As a centrepiece of the season the BFI will release In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no Corrida, 1976), which is considered Oshima’s masterpiece and one of the most erotic films ever made. The political repression in the Japan of 1936 serves as a backdrop to this sensuous exploration of sexual dependency, which is based on Japan’s most infamous sex-crime.

In the Realm of the Senses opens on 28 August at BFI Southbank and selected cinemas nationwide. For more information, visit http://www.bfi.org.uk/whatson/nagisa_oshima.

And now for the competition:

To coincide with its Nagisa Oshima season, the BFI is offering two pairs of tickets to see The Realm of the Senses during its run at the BFI Southbank, which will go to the first two people who can correctly name the first ever film treatment of the Sada Abe Incident – so we want the name of the film, the year, and its director please. Send your answers in to editorial@midnighteye.com.

Obviously, this competition is only open to UK residents, and if you’re not going to be anywhere near London during September, then there’s no point applying, as you’ll only be depriving someone else of the chance to see this film in all its uncut full-screen splendour.

I promised back in my posting about the BFI’s Oshima season that I had some more news about an upcoming season focused on another New Wave director. Well, this is is – a retrospective and symposium on Shohei Imamura that will be hitting the Arnolfini in Bristol at the end of October. The details aren’t up online yet, though a look at the Arnolfini website will give you an idea of just what a cool venue it is – wish I could make it down for the Aelita: Queen of Mars screening… Bristol sure is an exciting place to be a film fan, I sometimes don’t think they know how lucky they are.

This season was organised with Patrick Crogan of UWE university with some assistance from myself and the Arnolfini’s Al Cameron. I’m enclosing the schedule below from the Arnolfini’s own press release, but I should add the proviso that this info may be subject to change – we’re still working on the guests for the symposium, though you can bet I’ll be there.

Here are the details.

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The only Japanese director to twice win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Imamura was a crucial, yet ambiguous, figure in the Japanese new wave. He learned his trade under Yasujiro Ozu, but quickly rejected his sensei’s restraint and quiet eloquence, bringing to his national cinema an anthropological eye and a previously unseen taste for the irreverent. Imamura specialized in earthy, idiosyncratic films featuring persevering, willful heroines. His films were rooted to the verities of Japanese life in extremis, their characters rarely more than an insect’s crawl away from jungle law and pig-sty madness. His remains a unique cinematic voice.

THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA (18)

THU 15 OCT, 7.30pm
Dir. Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1983, 2h 10m, Subtitled

In an isolated mountain region, austere village laws to ensure survival dictate that, despite her good health, matriarch Orin must shortly ascend the sacred summit of Narayama where her soul must be laid to rest like all who turn 70. But before she goes, she has much family business to attend to. One of the greatest Japanese films: a haunting, poignant meditation on human nature, existence and death that won Imamura his first Palme d’Or.

INTENTIONS OF MURDER (CTBA)

FRI 16 OCT, 7.30pm
Dir. Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1964, 2h 25m, Subtitled

Bold, expansive and intriguing, this tale of a low-caste household drudge who runs off with the burglar who breaks into her house and assaults her, marks the most complete consolidation of the themes that inform Imamura’s initial cycle of features in the late 50s and early 60s. Beautifully photographed and technically perfect, a faultlessly constructed model of sophistication.

PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS (CTBA)

SAT 17 OCT, 6.45pm
Dir. Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1961, 1h 17m, Subtitled

A cruelly comic movie, set in Yokosuka, a coastal city dominated by vice and a U.S. military base, where gangs kill each other over the right to control the black market in US Army food scraps — here, Imamura emerges as Japan’s incarnation of Buñuel, omnisciently satiric and utterly cynical. Irreverent and unabashedly human: a defining self-portrait of Japan in the post-war moment.

BLACK RAIN (PG)

SAT 17 OCT, 8.30pm
Dir. Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1989, 2h 3m, Subtitled

A deeply affecting study of the uncalculated tragedy of nuclear holocaust, as a couple try to marry off their niece after Hiroshima. In contrast to Imamura’s usual subversively bawdy cinema, this is a spare and tonally muted masterpiece of dignity and human resilience, its carefully composed monochrome reminding us that Imamura began his career as an assistant to Ozu.

PROFOUND DESIRE OF THE GODS

SUN 18 OCT, 2.30pm
Dir. Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1968, 2h 52m, Subtitled

A crystallization of Imamura’s ideas, transported to an island so secluded its inhabitants have evolved into animalistic, incestuous nutcases. Into this hothouse, full of superstition and hungry wildlife, comes a mainland civil engineer, looking for a fresh water source so a factory can be built. A hair-raising, richly imagined epic, filthy with unforgettable images and, by its end, beautifully mysterious.

THE INSECT WOMAN (CTBA)

SUN 18 OCT, 6.30pm
Dir. Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1963, 2h 3m, Subtitled

A beetle labouring up a tiny mound opens the film, symbol of a woman named Tomé’s slow rise through poverty, servitude, and exploitation to become one of Tokyo’s top brothel-keepers, in a time of profound national change under the repressive influence of a patriarchal society. This objective yet sympathetic portrait of Imamura’s archetype – the sensual, primal, and strong-willed heroine – celebrates the resilient soul of a marginalized national identity.

PIGS, EELS & INSECTS: SYMPOSIUM

SAT 17 OCT, 10am – 5pm, £5/£3

A one day event bringing together experts including Professor Tadao Sato of the Japan Academy of Moving Images, to explore and celebrate the career of Shohei Imamura. The panel will examine his incisive insights into the lives, loves and experiences of everyday people in post-war Japan. His characters move in a fascinating zone between documentary and fiction, navigating between private desires and public duty, tradition and modernity, and local and westernizing forces. Mark Bould, Reader in Film Studies at UWE, and Jasper Sharp, editor of Midnight Eye, are among the symposium presenters.

DOUBLE BILL

SUN 8 NOV, 2.30pm

THE EEL (18)
Dir. Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1997, 1h 57m, Subtitled

This quirky, surreal and affecting film, following the attempts of a convicted murderer to reintegrate himself into normal life – with the help of his eel friend – after a prison sentence for murdering his philandering wife, won Imamura his second Palme d’Or. A flash of quiet brilliance that resonates long after the images have faded from the screen.

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VENGEANCE IS MINE (18)
Dir. Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1979, 2h 20m, Subtitled

Based on the true story of a cold-blooded sociopath, this morally-ambivalent story unfolds using the killer’s confessions and reconstructed testimonies to retrace his past in an attempt to discover what made this monster. Exploring the problems inherent with reconstructing real-life events within a fictional format, Imamura once again proves himself ahead of the game.

SEASON PASS: ALL FILMS & SYMPOSIUM: £20/£15
SCREENINGS: £6/£4.50
SYMPOSIUM: £5/£3

With generous support from The Japan Foundation, The Daiwa Foundation and UWE Film Studies Research Group. Film prints supplied by the Japan Foundation.

Well, I am back at home now after a joyous weekend at the inaugural Shinsedai Festival, and I must say, the experience was wholeheartedly a positive one. I know I promised to do daily updates during the fest, but with so much crammed into such a short time, this sort of fell by the wayside, and after wrestling with jetlag and getting back to the huge pile of things that urgently needed attending to back in London, it’s only now that I’ve had time to post my thoughts.

It’s always pretty tough launching a new film festival, especially one that doesn’t deal with cult or genre material, but all in all, attendances were good, the comments on the response forms positive, and everyone seemed to have a great time, myself included. I was mightily impressed with the calibre of the audience, who seemed intelligent and receptive to new and sometimes challenging material. I guess the choice of venue, the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre was a key factor in this: the audience members either had firsthand experience of Japan or a genuine interest in the culture, meaning that films such as Yutaka Tsuchiya’s The New God, Yasutomo Chikuma’s Now, I… and Hiroki Iwabuchi’s Freeter’s Distress got the audiences they deserved and provoked animated discussions after the screenings. A lot of people really had their eyes opened by these titles, which show a completely different side of Japan to the one portrayed in the films that usually circulate in the West.

On the other side of the coin, we had more experimental material. Yoshihiro Ito’s Vortex and Others shorts programme and Aruongaku, a concert film on the avant-garde filmmaker/musician Masakatsu Takagi were met with a unanimously positive response. (I should add to European readers with a taste in such material, many of these films received their first international screening at the world’s greatest Japanese film festival, Nippon Connection in Frankfurt).

We were also lucky so many of the filmmakers came out to Toronto to join us too. Yasutomo Chikuma, Yoshihiro Ito, Peaches festival organiser Atsuko Ohno, animator/illustrator Akino Kondoh, and the Thunderfish-gumi of director Touru Hano, cinematographer Tetsuhiro Kato, and leading lady Junko Kimoto (pictured here quaffing sake with me and Chris Magee during the opening ceremony) all had a great time chatting with the audience, and participating in the panel discussion about the state of independent cinema. It’s a near certainty that we’ll be able to build upon this success for next year, with an even bigger and bolder programme, but I should add at this point that none of this would have been possible without the generous sponsorship of Subaru Canada (oh that UK-based companies were as generous!), the guiding hand of the unsung hero behind the scenes James Heron (rather like the cat in Hong Kong Phooey) and his colleagues at the JCCC, as well as the smiling, ever-helpful legions of volunteers. And of course, a huge thanks to Chris Magee of Toronto’s own J-Film Pow-Wow for his sterling work in bringing this all together in such a short time, and my personal thanks to him and the delightful Polly for putting me up for the weekend and keeping the whiskey flowing. Until the next time…