What will this mean, I wonder? Well, there’s a few issues surrounding this. I’m no Tory apologist, believe me, but after the complete mess our last government left this country’s finances in, it’s clear that a bit of streamlining was in order. There’s been spending cuts across the board, as we knew there would be whoever was in government, and most from far more significant areas than the arts – notably in areas such as the health service. The UK Film Council’s £15m budget to invest in British films is best considered a drop in the ocean compared with the cuts that will be made elsewhere, but one wonders to what extent it will effect the UK film industry.

There are several issues worth discussing here. Firstly, to what extent should the population of a country be expected to support the concept of “a national cinema” through money that its government could be spending elsewhere? The hardline argument is that cinema is a commercial industry, and like all arts, if it has to be supported from outside, then how relevant is it to the general public? Should cinema be considered an art or an industry, should films only be considered successful if they make a profit, and does the success of Film Council-backed titles have indirect economic effects by promoting British culture overseas?

The other point is that where else are British filmmakers expected to raise money?

But what seems to be more the case is that it is not the film funding that is being axed but the layers of bureaucracy that decide how it gets allocated – exceedingly well paid bureaucracy too, compared to the actual creative agents involved in directly making the films. The UK Film Council was very good at promoting a certain type of British film, but its critics were keen to point out that it didn’t really encourage much in the way of spontaneity and experimentation.

Last year in the July 2009 issue of Sight and Sound magazine, a number of British filmmakers forced overseas to look for financing for their projects voiced their criticisms of the Film Council, few more vocally than Soi Cowboy director Thomas Clay:

“With Soi Cowboy we reached a DVD cut of the film for 75,000 Euros, and with that we submitted the film to Cannes last year and were invited. But we didn’t have the money to get the print and finish the film, so it seemed like a natural moment to go to the UK Film Council’s Completion Fund. [It didn't work out.] A month after Cannes, in June 2008, the UKFC said they wanted to be involved in my next film. I met Lenny Crooks [head of the UKFC's New Cinema Fund] and it seemed very positive, but after that- a complete disappearance, Crooks refused to take any of our calls or emails.My overall feeling towards the UKFC is that their policy of ‘creative partnership’ – of extensive, often fruitless, development periods, executive supervision, multiple editors and withholding final cut from the director- is not conducive to a culture of serious arthouse cinema in the UK. It is scandalous that these civil servants are paid six-figure salaries out of the public purse to sit around and not give money to Terence Davies, myself and others; to drag a director as eminent as Nicolas Roeg through years of development, resulting in a homogenised product. Serious UK cinema would be much better served by the creation of a separate entity – most simply, the reinstatement of the BFI Production Board – that awards smaller amounts of money in exchange for greater creative freedom, on the basis of proven merit and international profile, as opposed to ideological ‘correctness’ and deluded commercial concerns.”

There are many countries’ film industries that do not have the luxury of funding and assistance from government agencies such as this. One might argue that these are not as strong as the British film industry, although one only has to look at the case of Japan for a dynamic film culture that is not in any way State funded. But what I wonder is whether in the economic climate Britain finds itself in at the moment, will our cinema be able to find adequate funding from private sources, or will it revert to the same impoverished situation it found itself in under the last Tory government, when in the early-1990s one could have been forgiven for assuming that British cinema was dead and gone forever?

Brigitte Helm leads the excited charge in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927)

However, I don’t want to talk about Herzog for the moment, but instead hark back further in time to when German cinema was quite incontestably (in my opinion) the best in the world. Admittedly, this was over 80 years ago, but during the silent era no studio ever bridged the gap between art and commerce as successfully as the Berlin-based UFA, or to give it it’s full name, the Universum Film AG. UK distributors Eureka have already left an indelible glow in my heart due to their peerless releases of Japanese films such as Humanity and Paper Balloons, Face of Another, House, which I reviewed for Sight and Sound in March of this year, and more recently the Blu-ray of Shohei Imamura’s Profound Desires of the Gods, but their championing of some of the best German silent films through their Masters of Cinema label really clinches it for me.

After discovering the company hold a monthly sale on their website, I picked up one of these early releases, Fritz Lang’s Frau im Mond (1929), or Woman in the Moon, a couple of months back. Now, I’m not as familiar with the work of Fritz Lang as perhaps I should or want to be. I’d always considered him as playing slightly a second fiddle to UFA’s most celebrated genius, F.W. Murnau. This favouritism is no doubt more than a little coloured by Murnau’s premature demise in circumstances that have given rise to much mythologising, as well as leaving us wondering how the director of such macabre silent classics as Nosferatu and Faust might have fared during the sound era. Despite his sizeable output, Murnau perhaps didn’t have the same amount of time on this earth to put a foot wrong. Still, on the evidence of this film, to champion one at the expense of another isn’t entirely fair. What Murnau did with light and shadow, one might say, Lang did with line and form. The stories Lang told, which during this period were scripted by his then wife Thea von Harbou from her own novels, are less primal perhaps, but reward deeper analysis, and his work really sowed the seeds of cinema’s core genres – take for example, the secret-surveillance world of the Dr Mabuse films or his hugely influential spy-thriller Spione (1928).

Fritz Lang’s curiously overlooked Frau im Mond (1929), or Woman in the Moon

I’m going to write more about Murnau at a later date, but for now, lets focus on Lang, whose best known work is, of course, his epic imagining of the city of the future, Metropolis (1927), a title that any serious film fan worth their salt will have seen at least once, and apparently the first ever work of cinema to be listed by the UNESCO Memory of the World as an essential cultural artifact. Serious film fans will soon want to be giving it a second look too, as they’ll know doubt be aware that it has come in for some substantial restoration and is due to be released with an extra 25 minutes worth of footage believed lost to the world for over 80 years, only unearthed recently in Argentina, of all places. This recent discovery of the dusty old 16mm dupe negative at the Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken in Buenos Aires is nothing short of miraculous, and really raises ones hope that all those thousands of other titles believed no longer extant have at least some slim chance of turning up again somewhere in time. (As a quick aside, the BFI has just begun a season of “Elusive British films previously thought to be lost” entitled Long Live Film: BFI Most Wanted, which will be screening at the Southbank until 20 August). Anyway, the full story of the Metropolis restoration can be read about on the website, and the new version will be going out across the UK and Ireland from 10 September this year, with a DVD and Blu-ray to follow.

Visions of the future, in Lang's Metropolis (1927)

I was lucky enough, on one of my rare forays outside the house recently, to be invited to a press screening where I got my first glimpse of this new version. My first impression was just how clear the familiar footage, projected in this case from DVD, looked in this restoration. Its modernist designs looked so fresh, so pristine, it is almost impossible to imagine that the film was made 83 years ago. The older footage was understandably less clean, although it was integrated into the film perfectly, and while it was easy to see the joins, this didn’t distract from the viewing experience at all. In summary though, you’re pretty much getting a totally different experience watching this more complete version (there’s a few fragments still considered lost to the world), with at least one sub-story emerging into significant with the re-fleshing of the bare bones, and even the odd re-instated reaction shots giving a wholly different emphasis to key scenes.

The new restored Metropolis goes out across the UK and Ireland in September

The most head-scratching piece of the puzzle for me is that, given how timelessly classic this film is, how did we ever get in the situation where almost a quarter of the footage ended lost in the first place? The basic story is that after its premiere in Berlin on 10 January 1927 in the original 4189-metre director’s cut, Metropolis was released in the USA in a version heavily butchered by Paramount, with the intertitles rewritten, characters’ names changed, and large segments excised. Back in Germany, on 26 August the original was withdrawn and reissued in a similarly truncated 3241-metre version. The complete version of the film hasn’t been since, but at least on 10 September 2010, the general public will be as close to witnessing Lang’s full original as anyone has ever been over the past 83 years.

Wage slaves - the future labour force that keeps Metropolis ticking along

Frau im Mond was Lang’s last silent film and his second and final stab at science fiction after Metropolis (despite the title, his 1955 Moonfleet was actually about smugglers). It takes a radically different approach to its better known counterpart, more rip-roaring space opera than rigorous social allegory. Stripping the plot down to its basics, it portrays a group of benevolent scientists who create a space rocket only to find their efforts literally hijacked by a cartel of greedy capitalists who wish to co-opt their invention for their own nefarious ends, to gain access to the wealth of gold ore conjectured to exist on the dark side of the moon. There’s a bit of a sexual tension on the good guys’ side, with the female astronaut Friede (the “woman in the moon” of the title) the axis of attention among her two male rivals, and a rocket-obsessed 11-year-old boy also hops along for the ride.

Lang's final silent film and final foray into science fiction, Frau im Mond

At 163 minutes (as it plays on the Eureka disk), Frau im Mond is perhaps a rather lengthy undertaking, especially given that the first half is given over entirely to setting up the characters prior to their launch into space. It never bored me though. Again, I really savoured the modernist Art deco designs, even in the earthbound sequences. The general air of quaintness reminded me a little of the Tintin comic book Destination Moon from 1953, while the science behind the fiction was particularly intriguing, drawing heavily upon the writings of a certain Professor Hermann Oberth, a school master and amateur physicist who published heavily in the field of theoretical rocket science. The short documentary included on the Eureka disk is full of all sorts of fascinating insights. Frau im Mond included the first ever 10-9-8-7… countdown sequence, adopted by NASA for their first successful space rocket launch some 30 years laters, and the rocket technology underpinning it was considered so realistic that the film was subsequently banned by the Nazi party, who were then researching missile technology for military means, resulting in the V-2 long distance rocket that entered production in 1943. After the war, a large number of German rocket scientists were recruited by NASA to assist in their space programme.

Who needs a helmet? A moon landing as imagined in 1929, in Lang's Frau im Mond

But there are also other things – the film portrays how the characters are effected by the weightlessness of space, at a time long before anyone had ventured into the upper atmosphere, yet not its airlessness, allowing them to bounce about on the moon’s surface without helmets and oxygen tanks. The costly flop of Metropolis explains why the production values look a little slimmed down, with the moon basically little more than a painted backdrop, although this adds a certain retro something to proceedings, and invokes memories of the Georges Méliès proto-science fiction adventure film, A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune) from 1902.

So while you’re waiting to reacquaint yourself with the Metropolis restoration, I heartily recommend you take a look at this lesser-known work, which might not have the same epic status, but is highly enjoyable and just as thought-provoking in its own right.

Kihachiro Kawamoto's sublime House of Flames (Kataku, 1979) at Shinsedai tonight!

The first evening is going to present you with a pretty impressive evening of Momoko Ando’s Kakera: A Piece of Our Life, much appreciated in these parts, and a programme of Kihachiro Kawamoto’s gorgeous stop motion animations. I’ve been harping on about the Kawamoto films for over 7 years, have written articles, programmed seasons etc etc, so hopefully you’ll have got the message by now – I think these are brilliant.

Anyway, if you are there, you won’t need to read the ramblings on the blog of someone the other side of the Atlantic to let you know what’s going on, and if you are not there, there’s not much point in me telling you about the programme anyway – it will only frustrate you. I will however be posting links to any news I find on the web about the weekend, as it is happening, in the comments here, so keep watching this space.

I am also wondering if I can beg a favour of those who are there to indulge the wishes of the co-programmer who couldn’t make it, and to post your thoughts on the festival here in the comments section of this post, not on my Facebook please, but on jaspersharp.com, just to keep me in the loop with how things are going. Let me know what you enjoyed, what you didn’t, what else you’re getting up to at the fest – everything in fact, to make it feel like I was there, if you will. After all, the first ever postings on my website were from last year’s Shinsedai, so it would be carrying on the tradition. Cheers!

Life has been even crazier than usual these past few weeks, which is why there have not been any posts recently and there my not be that many more in the immediate future either. For those that don’t know, my beautiful partner Michelle gave birth to our son, Thorin, at 2.30am on 8th July, so the past week has been something of a mixture of euphoria, blind panic, disbelief and head-mashed exhaustion. Wonderful news, being a dad, but I won’t bore you all with the details at this juncture. No, I’ve got a few other announcements to make first….

You're forgiven if you missed it, but Gen Takahashi's Confessions of a Dog was the best Japanese film of 2006!

First up is a reminder that next weekend in Toronto it is the 2nd Shinsedai Cinema Festival, a four-day showcase of the best recent Japanese films taking place in the Japan Canadian Cultural Centre between 22-25 July. There’s a link to this on the right hand of this page, just beneath Graham Humphrey’s masterful portrait of me, or you can click on the ‘events’ tab up above and you’ll get a whole load more info about this, including a map showing you how to get you to there, should you be in Toronto or anywhere near at the time – you’ve no excuse for not going! I do have an excuse for not going, of course, namely the baby, as well as the Atlantic ocean between me and the JCCC, but I did go last year and would have done again this year if I didn’t have another hungry mouth in the house to feed. It’s going to be amazing, I promise you.

There are some brilliant films playing, including some of the best-regarded titles of the past year, such as Tetsuaki Matsue’s Live Tape, Koya Yoshida’s Yuriko’s Aroma, Momoko Ando’s Kakera: A Piece of Our Life and Tokachi Tsuchiya’s A Normal Life Please, plus a few revivals/rediscoveries, notably Go Shibata’s stunning 1999 debut NN-891102 and Gen Takahashi’s epic The Wire-styled expose of police corruption Confessions of a Dog, a film I am frankly amazed so few people know about given that it was made back in 2006, although one which I am pretty sure will be picking up a lot more interest as the year progresses.

And another scene from Confessions of a Dog, as I love this film so much!

Another thing I am particularly excited about this year is a screening of Kenji Mizoguchi’s hauntingly beautiful silent classic The Water Magician, with a new soundtrack by the Toronto-based experimental outfit Vowls (their website is here, and you can also have a listen on myspace. Japanese silent films are rarely screened outside of Japan, but along with Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Page of Madness, this is one of the best of the limited handful of titles that survive, and it’s from one of the world’s greatest ever directors too. It looks absolutely gorgeous, with Mizoguchi’s atmospheric tracking shots and Kyoko Izumi’s vaguely ero-guro style carnival milieu making this a must-see, and the live accompaniment is only going to work in its favour. I’m actually gutted I am not going to be there!

Kenji Mizoguchi's haunting Water Magician, playing at Shinsedai with a live score by Vowls

There’s a whole host of filmmaker guests going to be attending too, including Akino Kondoh, Gen Takahashi, Momoko Ando, Yasunobu Takahashi and Tokachi Tsuchiya. Anyway, there’s a lot more info about the festival on the Shinsedai website, but if you are a Japanese film fan or scholar and are based in Toronto or its immediate environs, you will not get a better selection of films laid out for you than this.

Right, my next bit of news comes courtesy of Matteo Boscarol, who has his own impressive looking Italian-language blog on all things Japan-related. It is about the Italian DVD release of Masao Adachi’s Gushing Prayer, or rather Gushing Prayer: A 15-Year-Old Prostitute as it was originally known: when I got a new print struck up from the original negative as one of the films to go out on the various screening to promote Behind the Pink Curtain (its played at the British Film Institute, Austin Fantastic Fest, Montreal Fantasia, Thessaloniki and Nippon Connection so far), I decided it was wise to suppress any insinuations of underage sex in its title to facilitate its passage through customs. Those that have seen it will know it is not some lurid jailbait fantasy, but a rather haunting avant-garde work that takes a metaphorical look at the student protests in Japan in the 1960s. Or something like that. I’m still not entirely sure what it means. This was a film that got a rather polarised response during its festival screenings, with some viewers scratching their heads non-plused before moving on and dismissing it as pretentious, and others bowled over by its rather melancholy tone and fascinating snap shots of Tokyo back in the day. Personally I love it, but whatever your take, you can’t deny its uniqueness. Now it is finally available for viewing on DVD, and I have it on good authority that the release by Raro Video actually has English as well as Italian subs, which I take to mean that they haven’t blocked out the English language subs that were burnt into the actual print as we prepared it. So this is great news for all Adachi fans, and if you’re interested, then please allow me to direct you to one of the several online retailers offering it up for order here.

Italian DVD release by Raro Video of Masao Adachi's Gushing Prayer, with English subtitles!

I also don’t know if I’m giving too much away here, as I think it is something of an open secret, but there will be a Masao Adachi retrospective in France later in the year, which should result in some of his other films being released on DVD. If there are any readers who don’t have a clue who Adachi is, then I’ll point you to an interview I did with him for Midnight Eye a few years back.

So that just leaves one other brief topic before I sign off for today, which is the publication of issue two of the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema. Articles include Olga V Solovieva’s Kurosawa Akira’s The Idiot: Where the East meets the West, Isolde Standish’s Night and Fog in Japan: Fifty Years On and Steven Rawle’s From The Black Society to The Isle: Miike Takashi and Kim Ki-Duk at the intersection of Asia Extreme.

There’s also a rather nice review of Behind the Pink Curtain by Stephen Prince, who writes “Jasper Sharp gives us a detailed history of the pink film, copiously illustrated and written in an accessible and engaging manner… [he is] an able guide to this inchoate genre that fused social subversion and crass exploitation… Behind the Pink Curtain will not soon be equaled in its portrait of a cinematic demi-monde whose film-makers have flaunted their status as outlaws and outsiders.” Nice!

I’m a little more sympathetic to Ebert’s claim that it is just a way for the industry to charge more for admissions. The Peckham Multiplex not only put a £1.50 surcharge on the ticket, they also forced me to buy the glasses, which cost another quid, although this at least means I can keep them for future presentations at this venue (Space Chimps 3D? Well, maybe one has to draw the line somewhere…) As an aside, the glasses provided to view the system used to project StreetDance 3D, RealD, appear to be incompatible with Toy Story’s Disney Digital 3-D system, so already we seem to be in a war of formats, although I assume that the projectors being rolled out across the world can handle both systems, and any differences between these formats are at the production level. There’s some info about this on Wikipedia, with RealD described as “the world’s most widely used technology for watching 3D movies in theatres and the cheapest to install and maintain,” while Disney Digital 3-D is actually a brand, “not a presentation nor a production format or technology. Films advertised as Disney Digital 3-D come from a number of sources, film, digital camera as well as animation software, and can be presented using any digital 3D technology.” I wonder what the projection technology actually was for Toy Story was then, seeing as my RealD glasses didn’t work for it?

Pixar's latest animated masterpiece, Toy Story 3D

The trouble most critics are likely to have with explaining the appeal of 3D is that it is often difficult to describe the aesthetic aspects of cinema in basic words. It is something one feels at a deeper level than words can often do justice to. It is also difficult to illustrate the formal aspects of 3D on a 2-dimensional screen, such as the one you’re looking at this article on now, and besides, publicity stills don’t always accurately represent the scenes as they appear in the actual film, nor can they convey movement. My ideas are therefore based largely on my impressions while watching the film.

There’s a further trade-off to these new productions that the widescreen formats never had to deal with – while CinemaScope titles eventually found themselves on television within the first decade of this new anamorphic projection system, reframed and re-cut to fit 4:3 screens, they were made to be shown in cinemas. As soon as widescreen became a standard but it was acknowledged that a great deal of viewers would watch the film on television, directors came up with strategies to limit this damage, by centrally positioning the characters in the frame, for example, so that it didn’t matter if the edges fell outside of the TV screen – many even oversaw the TV edits of their films. Now that widescreen TVs are the norm, reframing for domestic viewing is no longer an issue.

Comparing the switchover from standard to widescreen ratios with the adoption of full colour is also interesting. Colour was, perhaps to a lesser extent than 3D, also associated with added spectacle, arguably a needless luxury as far as most viewers were concerned, judging by the several decades it took to become a production standard, and not something that necessarily contributed to any sense of “realism”. Look back to the early Technicolor productions and you’ll see it was originally associated with non-realistic, fantasy genres such as animation, or musicals, while serious dramas such as On the Waterfront (1954) remained in monochrome. I think the contrast between the colour and monochrome sequences in The Wizard of Oz (1939) perfectly illustrates this point (made, not by me, but by Ed Buscombe in the essay “Sound and Colour.” in Movies and Methods vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols, 1985).

A scene from Wizard of Oz demonstrating that colour most certainly was not equated to realism in its early applications.

It was several decades before colour became the norm for filmmakers, due to the cost of the film stock. If you remember that the BBC only began colour broadcasting in 1967, any films shown on UK TV would have been viewed in black and white anyway. It was after this point that the number of films actually produced in monochrome started to decline, with black and white films coming to be seen as old fashioned. Interestingly, the UK’s first colour TV broadcasts were matches in the Wimbledon tennis tournament (see more here), while the UK’s first 3D broadcast, on February 6 of this year, was also sport, the England Vs Wales rugby match, although it was mainly seen this way by viewers attending participating cinemas (see here). Still, with 3D ready flat-screen TVs now a reality, who knows how long it will be before such broadcasts become the norm? And what will this mean for cinema?

Twickenham Stadium, as seen by viewers at 40 Odeon and Cineworld cinemas on February 6, 2010

Still, at the moment, it is assumed that the majority of viewers for the latest wave of 3D titles such as those by Disney/Pixar will be watching the film at home, not projected in 3D. Here’s the compromise: films must be made that use the format in a way that persuades viewers it is worth paying that bit extra, and yet take care that their impact is not diminished on the flat screen.

This compromise is much in evidence in StreetDance 3D. Thinking about it a little more, this film is the first actual live-action film produced in 3D that I’ve caught in the cinema, distinguishing it from the other titles I’ve written about, which are either animations such as Coraline or Up, films which make heavy use of CG such as Avatar, or films which were rendered as 3D in post-production such as Clash of the Titans or Alice in Wonderland. For those who’ve not heard anything about it yet, it’s a pretty fascinating title, a British film realised on a relatively modest budget of £4.5m that took more at the UK box office than Ridley Scott’s new Robin Hood film (budget $200m+) and Prince of Persia ($150m) in the first week of its release on 21 May. It’ll no doubt do pretty good business internationally too, for a film of this scale. It’s already been sold to almost 30 countries. You can read more about this surprise box office success on the websites of The Guardian, The Telegraph and The Times, or indeed the film’s own website.

Britain's Got Talent's Diversity, one of the many charms of StreetDance 3D

You won’t hear serious film critics talking much about the film though. It’s thoroughly lowbrow entertainment aimed at a teenage demographic, one of its hooks being the performances of Diversity, the East London street dance group that famously beat Susan Boyle to win last year’s season of the ITV competition Britain’s Got Talent. The plot isn’t much to write home about either: a young South London girl working at a sandwich bar leads her dance posse to success after drafting the failing students of a snooty ballet school, under the encouragement of their teacher, Charlotte Rampling (the only real name actor in the film). It’s an exuberant wish-fulfillment fantasy in the vein of the TV series Glee or Adrian Lyne’s Flashdance, a title from 1983 that wasn’t made in 3D. Lets face it, it’s really not aimed at people like me, but you may be surprised to hear it, I enjoyed its naive razzle-dazzle far more than I did Avatar.

Here  is a film that uses 3D in a totally different way from what we have been led to expect by previous releases. There are precious few moments of objects coming out of the screen at you, although a hat is flung out into our faces at the end of one early dance number, and there’s a riotous food fight in the ballet school’s cafeteria which I thought looked pretty good. What really impresses is the use of depth, the sense of a lived in space beyond the plane of the screen; the framing of shots along the ballet school corridor that stretches into the distance, the vistas of London bathed in a cosy sunset glow that evoke a city far different from the one of my daily experience. And then there are the dance scenes themselves, whether they take place in shopping malls, nightclubs or the ballet academy’s class room. These look best in static wide angle shots, which create a depth of field in which all of the dancers remain in focus. There’s no need to break down these scenes of action into bewildering flurries of MTV-style edits, although this has been the norm for these types of sequences since the 1980s, an aesthetic cultivated by the rise of the pop promo, and an aesthetic which the film struggles to resist. Can we imagine this sort of style applied to old-school martial arts films such as the finest work of Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers, where the real-life gymnastic depicted on the screen are what causes viewers to sit up and gasp, rather than the fake CG-enhanced Matrix-styled sequences we’ve all become so inured to?

An impressive use of the screen depth in StreetDance 3D - the image remains in focus at all depths of field

This is where the compromise come in, though, because as successful as it has been upon its theatrical release, a larger part of the film’s revenues are sure to come from DVD sales for people viewing it flat. The sensation of dancing bodies arranged and moving through a palpable volumetric space is not only sure to be lost on TV, it will also look decidedly unspectacular in comparison to films such as Flashdance, that ‘cheat’ by cutting up and reassembling the breathtaking real-life action of the performance in an attempt to create something more spectacular. Projected on 3D in the cinema, these straight filmed performances are impressive enough, they don’t need editing to make them look any more dynamic (and again, one is reminded of Jean-Luc Godard’s statement about cinema, that “Every edit is a lie”). We also have the luxury of allowing our eyes to roam around the various moving figures on the screen, be they in the background or the foreground. We don’t get this on the small screen.

Shots like this have a real sense of indepth dynamism to them, but how will they look on TV?

Filmmakers working in 3D need to be mindful about such intrinsic aesthetic considerations though. For one thing, dazzling montages of short cuts can really give you a headache. Stereoscopic images might trick the brain into believing we’re looking through a window into the distance, but our eyes are still focussed on a flat screen a fixed distance away from our noses. Static shots allow us to take in the details across the whole scene. Moving shots give our eyes time to adjust to the illusion that we’re part of the scene. Rapid edits between shots of different focal lengths jar and confuse, which is why so many people claimed that Avatar hurt their eyes. They’re probably not lying.

This seems to present another interesting aspect of 3D. If you look closely at some of these screen shots, you’ll notice that they are composed in accordance with 2D film aesthetics. If the camera is focused closely on a foreground object or character, then the background is thrown out of focus. The use of narrow angle lenses strive for this very effect. Take a look at this shot of Carly in the foreground. It is clearly composed to draw the eye to the details of Carly’s face, and yet if this were reality, the viewer would also be able to change their focus onto the dancers behind her, which here remain a blur. Our sense of reality is shattered, as we are made aware of the constraints of the camera lens. Here, the use of focus serves the same effect as an edit. We are forced to concentrate on one specific detail, rather than look around the scene looking for other salient features that may, or may not, be a part of the narrative.

Nichola Burley as Carly, very much the centre of attention in this shot.

Compare this with the shot below. The ballet dancers are arranged in a straight line perpendicular to the camera, with each figure afforded equal prominence by the focal length of the lens. They are clearly the subject of our gaze. However, rather than depict an out-of-focus background space behind them, the painted backdrop prevents our eyes from looking past them. Some viewers might wonder what lies beyond the screen obstructing their view. Most, in reality, probably won’t, but at least they have the freedom to do so, rather than being made aware of the role of the camera in framing what they can or can’t see. They won’t feel like their missing something taking place in a background blur.

The dancers remain the foreground interest without the distraction of an out-of-focus backround

In my previous posting, I talked a little about staging in depth (profondeur du champ), which David Bordwell goes into inconsiderable detail in his book On the History of Film Style (1998). 3D is clearly ideally suited to this type of scenic composition. It encourages our brains to compose our own narratives from the details we can see on the screen, in the foreground and the background, and across the multitudes of depth planes in between. A long static shot of characters moving along the Z-axis, into or out of the screen, for example, down a corridor (inventively lit so that certain details are hidden by real-life phenomena such as shadows, we might imagine), along a road, or as in this case within the space of a stage, also seems a good use of 3D, as relative size is also a depth cue that works in tandem with stereoscopic vision, to heighten the sense of realism.

As well as causing huge headaches for 3D film viewers, rapid editing shifts the balance of power to the director and editor. Controlled focuses within narrow depths of field might not cause headaches, but they similarly highlight the viewer’s passive role in the film. From this I draw my conclusions that using long depths of field is the best use of the 3D screen. (There was another thing I noticed though: when the film cuts from mid shots or close-ups to the extremely wide shots of the dance group onscreen, it gave the odd effect of the figures appearing to shrink in size to Lilliputian dimensions.)

Camera lenses have certain physical constraints, particularly in different lighting conditions, so that if focusing on something particularly close in the foreground, the background will be out of focus. I don’t know as much as I’d like to on the issue of to what extent modern 3D camera equipment is limited by these real-world practicalities, but the field of CG animation most certainly isn’t. It should permit every depth plane of the image to be in as sharp a focus as the next. Toy Story 3D uses the 3D format in a way that is effective and yet doesn’t draw attention to itself. And yet if we look at this scene here, we can see Andy in sharp focus, holding Woody and Buzz Lightyear (slightly out of focus) and the background of his bedroom (out of focus). The virtual camera is emulating the focal depth of a real-life camera.

An example of CG animation emulating the effect of the camera. Note intentional emulation of a narrow depth of field that throws the background out of focus

One of the things I’ve often mentioned as strange about CG animation is that in its attempts to be realistic, it emulates camera-lens realism, introducing such details as lens flares and camera judders in action sequences. But the thing is, it doesn’t have to replicate the same sense of depth of field. This is an stylistic choice. This scene (perhaps not the best example, but the best I could find on the web, and again, I make the point that publicity stills might not accurately reflect how the scene looks in the film) could have been rendered so that everything would be in perfect focus. I don’t intend this as a criticism of the film (which, like all of Pixar’s releases, raises the bar for CG animation even further). For all I know, it might look really strange if everything was in totally sharp focus, perhaps because viewers are habituated to a lens-based reality in cinema.

This is just a point to ponder, and it applies to live-action too. If the backgrounds of StreetDance 3D were in completely sharp focus in the close-up scenes of the characters, would this look really bizarre too? I’ve no answer to this, but aside from my observations that I found the wide-angle shots the most impressive, the point I am making is that 3D makes possible a radically different onscreen reality than that which we have become accustomed to in cinema. That animators are already beginning to explore its potentials is evidenced by the short animation Day & Night that accompanies Toy Story 3D, which I found fascinating. I can’t sum up its experimental approach of juxtaposing 2D and 3D any more succinctly than its Wikipedia entry, which describes its approach thus: “The insides of the characters are computer animated, the use of a masking technique allows the 2D characters to be windows into a 3D CGI day or night world inside them.”

Links to the rest of these articles:

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 1: Avatar

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 2: Paradoxes of Visual Knowledge

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 3: Welcome to the Feelies

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 4: 3D or not 3D?

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 5: A Joyride to Nowhere?

The German-based distributor Rapid Eye Movies has announced its first co-production deal with the Japanese pink production company Kokuei. Going under the working title of Underwater Love, the film is to be directed by Shinji Imaoka, to my mind one of the more interesting of the latest generation making films at the company, one of a group of seven directors labeled by Japanese critics as the Shichifukujin (or Seven Lucky Gods) – although it should be added that several of them  are no longer directing pink films. Interestingly, the legendary Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle, renowned for his beautiful visuals in Wong Kar Wai’s films as well as his behind-the-scenes hell-raising, is slated to shoot the film, so it is certainly going to look a whole lot better than your average contemporary pink film. I’d imagine the budget will be higher and the shooting schedule longer than the norm too, as this project has been long gestating, at least since Imaoka’s last visit to Nippon Connection back in 2007 with his Uncle’s Paradise (at least, I think this was his last visit, as his geriatric pinku Tender Throbbing Twilight screened in 2008, although I can’t remember him being there that time). I know the script went through quite a few drafts, with my Midnight Eye stablemate Tom Mes working on at least one of these.

Shinji Imaoka's Frog Song (2007)

Imaoka’s films seems to be the most widely screened aborad out of all contemporary pink filmmakers. I know Nippon Connection also showed Lunchbox (2003), as well as the two aforementioned titles, and I’ve also programmed all of these three at Raindance. It seems there’s quite a bit of excitement as the film is going to be a Bollywood-style musical, a natural step as Rapid Eye Movies have apparently fared pretty well with their Bollywood releases in Germany. This isn’t such a new thing though, as those who know Imaoka’s work will know; his 2007 film Frog Song culminated in an impromptu song and dance number just outside the exit of Shimokitazawa station (I can’t remember offhand if this particular title played many festivals, although it did get a UK DVD release from Sacrament).

Needless to say, you can find out a whole lot more about Imaoka, the production company Kokuei and the pink industry in general in Behind the Pink Curtain. For those who have yet to be introduced to this weird and wonderful world, allow me to point you in the direction of the US distributor Pink Eiga, who have released numerous works from the past couple of years since around the time my book was published – those who’ve been at some of the pink retros I’ve curated since then probably still bare the scars of the outrageous S&M Hunter. Their two latest releases, the pinku period drama Ninja Pussy Cat and the sci-fi (?!) skinflick Deep Contact provide ample evidence of the diversity and shee entertainment of the genre, though for my money you don’t get much more bang for your buck than The Japanese Wife Next Door by Yutaka Ikejima, considered the industry’s hottest director – I wrote a little bit about this film and its companion piece in my book, under its translated Japanese title Family Gets Rude (parts one and two).

The unforgettable S&M Hunter

And finally, while we’re still on the subject of Pink Eiga, those in Paris this week will probably want to check out the second Sexy International Paris Film Festival (SIPFF), which is showing two of the company’s finest releases, A Lonely Cow Weeps at Dawn and Blind Love.

If you’re in Toronto this July, my God you’re in for a treat. If you’re not in Toronto, then I suggest you make an effort to be so, if only because on the weekend of the 22-25^th is the second Shinsedai Cinema Festival, one of the biggest, if not the biggest, showcases of recent Japanese films in North America.

I’ve been working on the line-up with my festival co-director/co-programmer Chris Magee of the Toronto J-Film Pow-wow for the past 6 months now, and we’re both really proud with what we’ve got on show this year.

I posted details about the first batch of titles to be announced a few weeks ago (see here). Now the full programme has been published, and you can find all the information you should need up on the Shinsedai website. There’s also a Facebook group and you can get updates and news by signing up to our Twitter.

I could rave on about the films for ages, and indeed I probably will over the coming weeks. For now however, I’m going to post up Chris Magee’s info about the festival, and please please please, if this appeals to you, can you pass the info on as far and wide as possible? Thanks!

Anyway, over to you Chris…

The anticipation has been building for the past few weeks, but now we are very proud to announce the full line-up and screening schedule for the 2nd annual SHINSEDAI CINEMA FESTIVAL taking place at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto. Joining the already announced screenings of Kenji Mizoguchi’s silent classic “The Water Magician” (with live musical accompaniment by Toronto’s Vowls), the Canadian Premiere of Gen Takahashi’s police epic “Confessions of a Dog” and the Toronto Premiere of the ward-winning concert documentary “Live Tape” are:

KAKERA: A PIECE OF OUR LIFE (Toronto Premiere/ Opening Night Film): Haru (Hikari Mitsushima) is a university student with a less than ideal boyfriend whose life is turned upside down after meeting a young woman named Riko (Eriko Nakamura). the two women fall for each otehr and embark on a rocky and romantic relationship. First time director Momoko Ando goes well beyond tired old lesbian chic with this magical and absurdly comic film. We are pleased to announce that director Momoko Ando will be in attendance at this screening!

YURIKO’S AROMA (Canadian Premiere/ Closing Night Film): Massage therapist Yuriko (Noriko Eguchi) is a master of scent. She whips up aromatherapy lotions to slather into her clients at her friends massage spa, but Yuriko isn’t prepared when she catches a whiff of the the salon owner’s sweaty 17-year-old soccer-playing nephew Takeshi (Shota Someya) and is immediately overcome with desire… or love… or possibly both in this sexy black comedy by Koya Yoshida.

Noriko Eguchi in Yuriko's Aroma, directed by Kota Yoshida.

A NORMAL LIFE, PLEASE! (North American Premiere): 37-year-old cement truck driver Nobukazu Kaikura kept up a hellish work schedule during the spring of 2006 – 552 hours in a single month. When Kaikura seeks the protection of a labour union he incurs the wrath of his bosses and 5the thugs they hire to intimidate Kaikura and his family day and night. Tokachi Tsuchiya’s A Normal Life, Please! has won Best Documentary at the 2009 Dubai International Film Festival, and Best Documentary at the 17th annual Raindance Film Festival in London.

OUR BRIEF ETERNITY (Canadian Premiere): A mysterious virus is infecting the population in Takuya Fukushima’s Our Brief Eternity. Those afflicted suddenly fall into a coma and when they recover they have lost their memories of the person closest and dearest to them. During this epidemic irresponsible playboy Teru (Kouta Kusano) runs into his old girlfriend Mio (Romi), but she doesn’t remember him. Mio has fallen victim to the virus. The two must start their relationship from scratch, but Teru’s case of cold feet causes him to make a drastic decision – to risk infection and his memory.

Takuya Fukushima's Our Brief Eternity

LOCKED OUT (Canadian Premiere): Six-year-old Ketia (Takeru Shimada) gets lost in a mall parking lot and accidentally gets into the car of a young man named Hiroshi (Kiichi Sonobe). Hiroshi has a bloody pick axe in the trunk of his car and is haunted by a violent, demonic doppelgänger, but is he what he appears to be – a psychotic killer, or is there a different story to be told? Yasunobu Takahashi’s Locked Out is equal parts edge-of-your-seat psychological thriller and life affirming road movie.

OFF HIGHWAY 20 (Canadian Premiere): Route 20 is a highway that runs west out of Tokyo as far Shiojiri in Nagano. About 130 kilometres from the highway’s starting point is Kofu City. This is the birth place of director Katsuya Tomita and his film Off Highway 20 shows us a side of Japan that many people never see one populated by yakuza, small time street thugs who huff solvents, gambling addicts and speed freaks. Gritty and blackly comic like Jim Jarmusch crossed with Trainspotting, Off Highway 20 takes us on a walk on the wild side of contemporary Japan.

Katsuya Tomita's chav-tastic Off Highway 20.

KIHACHIRO KAWAMOTO: JAPAN’S MASTER PUPPETEER: Born in 1925 in Tokyo Kihachiro Kawamoto orginally wanted to pursue a career in architecture while taking up doll-making as a hobby, but in 1950 he embarked on what is now a legendary career in animation. Kawamoto has spent the last five plus decades creating exquisite stop-motion puppet animation that has won him praise worldwide. In a special programme curated by Jasper Sharp audiences will get to see a sampling of some of Kawamoto’s best known short films including 1970′s The Demon, 1973′s The Trip, 1976′s Dojoji Temple, 1979′s House of Flame, 1988′s To Shoot Without Shooting and 1990′s Briar-Rose, or the Sleeping Beauty.

House of Flame, part of the programme of Kihachiro Kawamoto's haunting stop motion puppet animations.

OH! OTSUKA DRUGSTORE: (Canadian Premiere): An off kilter comedy about a curmudgeonly woman who runs a drugstore and one of her regular customers – young high school girl she takes under her wing. It turns out this girl has a crush on a certain boy but is too shy to make the leap and speak to him. Can the drugstore owner help her young friend find true love? And if so will her crazy methods actually work? Romantic comedy meets bizarre friendship tale, and all set to music by Japanese pop sensation AKB48.

DOME ANIMATION SPECIAL: (Presented in partnership with Nippon Connection) Tokyo’s Image Forum is the most respected producer of experimental film, video and animation in Japan, as well as one of the most important sources for experimental visual culture in the world. DOME Animation collects 15 short animated films by 15 of Image Forum’s most promising young animators.

NN-891102 (Toronto Premiere): A survivor of the bombing of Nagasaki has in his possession an astounding document of that tragic day –the sound of the “Fat Man” atomic bomb detonating on August 9th, 1945 at 11:02AM. At first he is appalled by this recording, but as time goes by he becomes obsessed with recreating this terrifying sound… a process that will jeopardize his sanity and his life. The debut feature film by Late Bloomer and Doman Seman director Osaka’s Go Shibata presents a gripping portrait of grief, memory, madness, and dangerous personal obsession.

NN-891102: Go Shibata's startling debut resurrected.

If those films aren’t enough to get you excited the Shinsedai Cinema Festival is also proud to announce a great selection of shorts that will be screening with our feature selections: sugarmountain’s zany “Gunman Champion”, Satoshi Nagano’s black comedy “Finishing Touch”, Shoh Kataoka’s sweet look at childhood “Jellyfish Boy”, Reiko Tahara’s experimental short documentary “Remnants”, Kotaru Wajima’s mini-family drama, “Invitation” and Hiroshi Iwanaga’s meditative coming-of-age story “That’s All”.

Last, but not least is a way to see selected films at Shinsedai 2010 cheaply, or for FREE. As a way to highlight some of the more off-center and experimental Japanese indie films we have created the Jishu Eiga Room. Throughout July 24th and July 25th the following films will be playing continuously starting at 12:00PM so you can sample a little or a lot of work that pushes the boundaries of film.

DOME ANIMATION SPECIAL

DIFFERENT CITIES

OH! OTSUKA DRUGSTORE

YUKI KAWAMURA TRILOGY

Access to the Jishu Eiga Room is FREE FOR DELUXE and 5-FILM PASS HOLDERS (entry into the Jishu Eiga Room does not use up one of the five films on the 5-Film Pass), while INDIVIDUAL ENTRY FOR NON-PASS HOLDERS COSTS ONLY $4.00.

We are also proud to announce our FULL SCREENING SCHEDULE for the 2nd annual Shinsedai Cinema Festival! Visit our website to start planning your festival experience:

http://shinsedai-fest.com/tag/shinsedai-2010/

TICKETS AND PASSES will be going on sale for the 2nd annual Shinsedai Cinema Festival this coming WEDNESDAY, JUNE 23rd! See you all at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre next month!

Best,

Chris MaGee

From the New York Times, an image from Why Husbands Flirt (1918), one of the 75 silent films recently discovered in New Zealand that are being returned to the United States.

This morning I found two such stories linked to my facebook page. First up, both Cathy Munroe Hotes, who keeps a pretty nifty Japanese film-related blogspot of her own, Nishikata Eiga, and Daniel Bird directed me to this article in the New York Times, reporting how some 75 vintage Hollywood films believed to be no longer extant have been discovered in an archive in New Zealand, including John Ford’s Upstream (1927), the comedy Mary of the Movies (1923), which is the earliest Columbia feature known to survive, and The Woman Hater (1910), an early outing for Perils of Pauline star Pearl White. The story is also reported in the UK paper The Guardian. It’s going to take a while to restore all these, and even then, one wonders how easy they’ll be for most of us to see – silent films are hardly the greatest money-spinners on the DVD market. Anyway, the films are being restored by the National Film Preservation Foundation in America, and if you look on their homepage, you can already see a few clips from one of the films, The Sergeant (1910), “one of the earliest surviving narratives shot on location in Yosemite Valley.”

The Sergeant (1910): “one of the earliest surviving narratives shot on location in Yosemite Valley.”

This is a pretty great site really. You can watch several of the films they’ve restored previously online, although the clips they do have really do have one begging for more. Some of my favourites are this rather saucy trailer for the long-lost title The Sin Woman (c. 1922); the early animation Mutt and Jeff: On Strike (1920), clearly made before the days when cel-animation was the norm, because you can see the blurs around the characters where they’ve rubbed them out and redrawn them over the backgrounds; and this fascinating early documentary-travelogue A Trip through Japan with the YWCA, filmed around 1919.

The second bit of news came once more courtesy of Daniel Bird. It pertains to an article on the BBC website about a 1935 Soviet film entitled Kara Bogaz, which was never actually released because it was made without the authorisation of Stalin. The film was the first ever production in Turkmenistan, but it has been lying around in the vaults for some 75 years, unscreened and forgotten. It’s getting an airing tonight in London, at Free Word in Farringdon, a venue I must confess I’d never even heard of before. Annoyingly, I only found out about it today, and have other commitments for this evening, but, I know it’s short notice, maybe some of you reading this might find time to fit it in.

Kara Bogaz, the first production from Soviet Turkmenistan, unseen for 75 years.

Still, these reports led me to a bit of internet trawling this morning, and reminded me what a wealth of obscure cinematic treasures there are for viewing online, films you’ll never have heard of from the early days of cinema, and films from some of the furthest-flung reaches of the world. Earlier this year, Sight and Sound conducted a poll of its contributors’ favourite online resources; the resulting article never appeared in print, but can be found on the magazine’s website. There’s some pretty interesting discoveries to be found here. For example, did you know that Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Love of Sumako (Joyu Sumako no koi), one of his lesser known works from 1947, is available to watch in its entirety on Youtube? I didn’t until I was pointed in its direction by Brad Stevens. London Screen Archive also has a Youtube channel of its own, full of valuable archive material of our great capital, and you can also catch this year’s Palme d’Or winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 11-minute short Phantoms of Nabua online here. If Senegalese cinema is something of a mystery to you, well, why not check out the 1973 feature, Touki Bouki,  directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty. And while you’re at it, how about checking out The Feminists Art Project, which features some classic experimental work from, among others, Maya Deren and Germaine Dulac.

Touki Bouki (1973), described by some as "the Senagalese Rebel Without a Cause."

My own choice is the Europa Film Treasures website, which could keep you occupied for hours with its collection of early titles from Europe and America, and a good host of contextual information about the films and their makers too. My top choice is this proto sci-fi title, The Airship Destroyer (Der Luftkrieg der Zukunft), made way back in 1909 by Walter R Booth. Or how about following this link here, from which you’ll learn that the industry of the country that spawned Michael Haneke pioneered the production of early cheesecake one-reelers sporting titles such as The Saucy Chambermaid. Why, one need never leave the house to go to the cinema again!

Early scif-fi in William Booth's The Aircraft Destroyer (1909).

If anyone reading this has any other links to share, please don’t be shy. Post them in my comments section. I’m all ears (and eyes).

Comin at ya! Friday 13th 3D (1982)

On Monday I went to see Up again as part of the Barbican’s Animate the World Festival, with specs and on a big screen, as it was intended, and it really struck me what a different kettle of fish this film is from the bulk of 3D offerings that the format’s detractors wheel out to predict that the party’s over before it’s even begun. I seem to recall at the time of its original release a number of critics saying that the story could just have easily have been presented “flat”. This seems an odd thing to say, rather like suggesting that The Robe would have been fine in Academy Ratio, Star Wars would have worked just as well in monochrome or Shrek could have been made as live action. For a start, these films were made primarily with a theatrical audience in mind, even if most people are more likely to experience them on the small screen, which now provides the largest share of the film industry’s revenues. Narrative content and presentational style are two separate aspects of a film, so to point to the limitations of one to criticise the other is a red herring.

But in any case, Up presents a rare case where these two facets work in tandem. Like Toy Story, it boasts a perfectly-crafted script (I’m talking in terms of structure rather than content), that draws attention to the tricks it is playing with the new medium it is showcasing (CG in the case of Toy Story). To say it would work just as well in 2D baffles me. Take for example the scenes set inside the otherwise claustrophobic confines of Mr Fredricksen’s house, in which the landscape through which it is floating can be spied through the windows and doors, giving a dynamism and richness of detail that wouldn’t be present in its flat presentation, or the use of fog and cloud effects as objects and characters emerge from the distance. I won’t argue the case for this particular film much further, but let’s just say it worked for me.

Pixar's masterful Up.

Lets look at the other good example from last year, Coraline. David Bordwell makes some fascinating observations about this film’s style in this posting from his website, in particular the skewing of perspectives and manipulation of depth cues in several of the scenes in the alternate worlds that its main character explores. This toying with the volumetric dimensions represented on the screen is not something that a critic might find easy to put into words, but it does have a tangible effect on mood and atmosphere.

A subtly skewed scene from Coraline

With the huge glut of films coming out in 3D this year, it’s been difficult to sort out the wheat from the chaff. To the list of titles I mentioned in my opening paragraph that adopt 3D as a gimmick, we might add the following that make use of the revived format (albeit using new technology): Scar (2007), My Bloody Valentine 3D (2008) and The Final Destination (2009), all genre films whose appeal is mainly visceral. Then there are concert films such as Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert (2008) that attempt to replicate the excitement of being there, but let’s face it, if you’re not into the music, you probably wouldn’t want to be there anyway. The two main titles exploiting 3D that have aired so far this year in the UK, Alice in Wonderland and Clash of the Titans, were not filmed using the process, they were converted in post-production: in other words, they were not conceived with this technology in mind, so did not use it to its best advantage. Yes, it’s easy to dismiss 3D if you’re only looking at titles such as these, none of which were particularly groundbreaking on a narrative level and most of which just weren’t satisfactory entertainment full stop. (As an interesting aide, I just heard that the recently released StreetDance 3D is currently out-performing Robin Hood and Prince of Persia at the UK box office.)

It is also important to remember the obvious, that the most successful 3D films of last year were CG animations: Up, Monsters vs. Aliens and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs . These are presumably easier to produce in 3D, as they are created using 3D models on the computer, so the flat versions are only rendered as 2D projections of the same created objects. And lest we forget it, Avatar itself was essentially a CG animation with integrated live-action footage.

The first cinematic "rollercoaster", courtesy of Cinerama

With regards to the aesthetics of 3D, I want to return to my previous discussion of the widescreen formats that emerged in the 1950s. The showcase “documentaries” with which Cinerama and Todd-AO were released, This is Cinerama (1952) and The Thrill of Todd-AO (1955), both featured lengthy sequences filmed with the camera positioned on a rollercoaster, promising you the thrill of being there in the front seat; this came at a time when theme parks were popping up across America, with the film industry getting directly involved when the Walt Disney Company opened Disneyland in 1955. In such films, audiences could experience all the thrills of Coney Island without having to go there. Cinema’s decline as a quotidian form of entertainment throughout the decades saw releases of a smaller number of higher-budgeted films, instead marketed under the rubric of “events”, “blockbusters” or, tellingly, “rollercoaster movies”. The showcasing of new exhibition technologies in this fashion didn’t end in the 1950s. I vividly remember my first trip to an IMAX cinema in Paris in 1993, where I swayed giddily in my seat during a screening of Grand Canyon: The Hidden Secrets (the film was actually made in 1984), thrust into the spectatorial position of a passenger in an ultralight aircraft soaring over vast crevices. It felt like I was witnessing cinema for the very first time.

An IMAX presentation of Grand Canyon: The Hidden Secrets (1984)

Doesn’t this all sound remarkably familiar? Didn’t Avatar aim for exactly this effect in its climactic battle scenes? Doesn’t Up itself, and countless other titles, boasts its share of sequences that exploit this form of cinematic dynamism, the sensation of plunging ever forward into the unknown or providing the viewer with a front-of-the-seat that perspective that would be impossible to replicate in reality?

Cinerama, Todd-AO and IMAX are as much characterised by the size of their screens as their dimensions, so that the images projected upon them occupy the whole visual field, with the edge of the frame, the proscenium and all other features external to the film itself falling outside this range. In his book Widescreen Cinema, John Belton argues that this changed the very nature of the viewing experience: “In positioning the spectator at the center of a semicircular arc that filled the field of vision, widescreen processes both centered and decentered the spectator. The spectator was physically centered in the theater, but his or her attention was dispersed across a wider area; the horizontal field of view of Cinemarama (at 146 degrees) was so extensive that the spectator did not know where to concentrate attention… These extreme widescreen processes encouraged the spectator constantly to redirect his or her interest across a panoramic field of view.” In other words, cinema changed in the 1950s to a more active, rather than passive, form of entertainment.

The curved screen of Cinerama covering the entire visual field

In Avatar, we can see this in the opening scenes on Pandora, as our eyes dart around the screen in what are known as saccadic movements to take in every detail of this rich alien environment. This form of presentation largely informed the style of CinemaScope films such as The Robe, in which our eyes scan the scene, fixing on individual details and piecing them together in our minds. Taking this theoretical route to its extremes, we could argue that each individual viewer might have experienced a different film by fixing on the myriad of different details within the frame, and that the film would not have been the same exact experience upon repeated viewings.

This form of active perceptual participation came earlier than widescreen, as David Bordwell points out in his On the History of Film Style (1998), with the introduction of deep focus techniques such as those pioneered by the cinematographer Gregg Toland most famously in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1942), allowing staging within a standard ratio using the full depth of the scene, what French critics such as André Bazin labelled profondeur du champ. If we look at the evolution of films style, whereas the silent films championed as art in the 1920s used montage to construct a scene through individual shots, and the classical early sound cinema of Hollywood in the 1930s used découpage to break down a scene and reassemble it (like your typical television drama), profondeur du champ kept editing to a minimum. All of the relevant details of a scene could be combined in a single frame, in the foreground, middle-ground and background, there for the viewer to seek out rather than have his or her eye guided by the edit (Incidentally, Bordwell expands upon this in this other piece on his website.) 3D heightens this effect, and there are numerous moments in Up and Coraline in which action and incidental details are juxtaposed in the foreground and background for comic or dramatic effect.

Action and detail in three different planes, in a scene from Citizen Kane

This active form of viewing approximates live theatre, where the audience’s concentration is not channelled into one area by a limited frame, and it is worth pointing out that the worthy nature of a lot of CinemaScope titles, often historical or religious epics, optimised this sense of spectacle to bring cinema closer to “legitimate theatre”. The wide, lateral strip of the CinemaScope format was also perfectly suited for the depiction of spectacular panoramic landscapes, a salient feature of the American Westerns produced in this era. Fixed scenes are a characteristic of CinemaScope, whereas Motion in Depth, as opposed to profondeur du champ’s staging in depth, is something of a rarity, unlike Cinerama or IMAX productions.
It is where Motion in Depth is introduced that we experience another, more primal, mode of viewing, closer to the “rollercoaster” than “legitimate theatre”, arguably more passive than active, as we place our experience wholly in the hands of the director in the same way as we did when the editor reigned when montage and découpage were considered the height of cinematic art (cf. Jean-Luc Godard: “Every edit is a lie”). This is essentially the issue I had with Avatar, as I discussed in my first musings on the subject of 3D back in December. In its latter stages, we are not encouraged to participate in exploring the onscreen world as we are in Coraline or Up. We are forced to sit back and marvel at the technological wizardry of James Cameron – and following on from Godard’s maxim, I couldn’t but help notice that Avatar’s action scenes, like those of Michael Bay or Roland Emerich, featured one hell of a lot of edits!

Anyway, these were just random thoughts I had at the time, encouraged by some of the ideas in Thomas Lamarre’s recently published Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation and put forth perhaps a little vaguely, mainly as a discussion point, as something to think about a little more: the idea that such hyper-kinetic Motion in Depth scenes equate with realism, whereas in reality it is a form of realism I refer to as cinerealism, one which is only possible in cinema as opposed to an everyday reality. I argued that technological advances don’t make films more realistic, they make them more cinerealistic.

Publicity image from the Avatar video game – note the blurring at the periphery

Rather than pursue the political or theoretical ramifications of this here, I want to end with another fruitful path of looking at the possible appeal of such dynamic action sequences as those contained at the end of Avatar. First of all, I acknowledge that the categorising of viewing modes into “active” and “passive” as problematic. What I am referring to here is the viewing experience, the visual processes involved in processing static scenes and dynamic motion-in-depth sequences, regardless of narrative content. If I define active viewing as scanning the details of a static tableau as if looking at a painting or theatre stage, and passive as fixing the central origin that the camera is moving towards on the retina, with the rest of the image whizzing past in the peripheral vision as if the viewer were hurtling forward on the front of a rollercoaster, it is not to apply a value-judgement that one is intellectually superior to the other, just that the visual processes are very different. Finding fault with the narrative of Avatar is something that comes about through higher-level thought processes than those that take place in the visual cortex, the same processes that we engage to piece together the meanings of arthouse films by directors such as Theo Angelopoulos, Bela Tarr and Hou Hsiao Hsien. In fact, there’s been a bit of a hub-hub following Nick James’ piece in Sight and Sound earlier this year, which claimed that such examples of “slow cinema” were easier for film critics to champion as “challenging” or “artistic” because they necessitated a different manner of viewing and their content was slight – see here. There has to be a more fundamental reason why general audiences prefer the thrill of Avatar or Michael Bay while they are bored by the static tableau of “slow cinema”.

Shinji Aoyama's Eureka (2000) – Japanese-style widescreen "Slow Cinema"

Psychology tells us that motion, depth, form, and colour are all handled separately within different areas of the visual cortex and integrated at a higher level to give the experience of seeing. I’m simplifying things a little here, but if you don’t believe, take a look here, here and here. We know this from studying different animals, that most mammals do not have the capacity for colour vision, and that a frog’s visual system is primarily geared towards detecting motion – surround it with dead, immobile flies and it will starve to death. So on the basic level of pure aesthetics, a different part of the brain is stimulated by form (the details the eye scans across in active modes of viewing) than by movement or colour (a subject I want to address in a future posting, but it is often viewed as a “biological luxury” and is not essential for humans to function in the world, just liven it up a bit).

The oft-reported tunnel hallucination

Motion in depth stimulates different parts of the brain. The information that is fed into pour visual cortexes comes from the optic flow of our peripheral visual, more than our foveal vision (the fovea being the area of the retina where visual acuity and colour perception is highest). The fovea, used during the scanning of an image to discern its form, is densely packed with photoreceptors known as cones. In the peripheral image, there a different form of photoreceptor predominates, rods, which as you can see by this article here [the rods are better motion sensor] are “responsible for our dark-adapted, or scotopic, vision…the rods are better motion sensor”. At low levels of light, it is difficult to detect colours such as red and discern visual details, but you’ll notice something whizzing past your head pretty sharpish!

So it is this part of the brain that thrills to Avatar’s virtuoso dragon battles and This is Cinerama’s rollercoaster rides, and clearly we love it, as sensations of movement are a widely reported part of any psychedelic experience. A good number of writers, including Paul Devereux in The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia , have hypothesised that the notion of witches riding on broomsticks derived from their use of natural hallucinogens, activating the part of the brain that perceives movement without the external stimulation provided via the optic nerves. A key part of shamanic rituals is that they often take place in conditions of sensory deprivation, in low-lighting conditions, at night or underground. David Lewis-Williams sees the very origins of art in the trance-like states attained in shamanic rituals in his book The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art , a brilliant study of Paleolithic cave art and the biological mechanisms that may have invoked it. Ideas of “vision quests” and psychedelic “trips” derive from these artificially invoked sensations of motions. I refer you also to this fascinating article on the geometric basis of tunnel hallucinations here.

This is why I am so eager to see the results of Werner Herzog’s recently announced 3D documentary on primitive cave art. As one of the world’s most insightful filmmakers, I am sure he’s going to lead us through all manner of exciting visual possibilities in his study of mankind’s most basic reproductions of his environment using today’s cutting edge technology.

Prehistoric spectacle. Panoramic cave art in Chauvet, with the rock surface used to provide an illusion of depth

I should point out that I’m not entirely sure what conclusions I am stumbling towards with these perhaps rambling posts, just that there might be other ways of looking at cinema, animation and 3D in particular, in which form, format, technology and content are all inextricably linked. I intend to look more closely next time at the issue of colour in film, in relation to James Cameron’s suggestion that 3D would become the standard format in a couple of years, “definitely less than the 25 years it took colour movies.”

Links to the rest of these articles:
Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 1: Avatar

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 2: Paradoxes of Visual Knowledge

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 3: Welcome to the Feelies

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 4: 3D or not 3D?

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 6: Changing our Focus – StreetDance 3D

Since our inaugural year in 2009 so many great films have come out of Japan. Shinsedai Cinema Festival co-programmers Jasper Sharp (Midnight Eye) and Chris MaGee (Toronto J-Film Pow-Wow) have spent the past eight months watching as many of these films as humanly possible so that they can bring the best independent, and in many cases under-appreciated, Japanese films to movie audiences here in Toronto. From July 22nd to July 25th, 2010 the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre will be hosting this celebration of Japanese film, and while Sharp and MaGee are still putting the finishing touches on the 2nd annual Shinsedai Cinema Festival line-up we are proud to announce the first block of films that audiences can expect this year at the JCCC.

Live Tape – The Toronto Premiere of Tetsuaki Matsue’s award-winning concert documentary featuring indie singer-songwriter Kenta Maeno. Shot on New Year’s Day 2009 in one single unbroken take Matsue and Maeno take us on a musical tour of Tokyo’s Musashino district. Winner of the top prize in the Japanese Eyes programme at the 2009 Tokyo International Film Festival and the Nippon Digital Award at the 2010 Nippon Connection Japanese Film Festival in Frankfurt.

Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Water Magician – The silent 1933 classic by one of Japan’s most revered directors is also one of Japanese cinema’s very first independently produced films. The love story between a renowned female performer who literally makes water dance across the stage and an impoverished carriage driver will be brought to life with live musical accompaniment by Toronto experimental quartet Vowls. Not to be missed! *Co-presented with the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival*

Confessions of a Dog – A gritty police epic that exposes the corrupt underbelly of Japanese law enforcement, Gen Takahashi’s Confessions of a Dog was too controversial to receive a theatrical release in Japan. The drama that stars Shun Sugata as a police detective who not only bends the rules but breaks them ended up having to be distributed through Hong Kong to festivals world wide. We are proud to premiere the film in Canada and to have Gen Takahashi as our guest.

Island of Dreams – First time feature director Tetsuichiro Tsuta goes against the trend of shooting on hi-def video with his film Island of Dreams, an homage to 1960s films of Akira Kurosawa, Seijun Suzuki and Kinji Fukasaku. Tsuta and his crew not only shot this eco-thriller on 16mm black-and-white film, but also developed and edited the film entirely by hand.

The Dark Harbour – A hilariously downbeat comedy with a heart, Naito Takatsugu’s The Dark Harbour will be having its Canadian premiere at Shinsedai. The story of a lonely fisherman who discovers a single mother and her son hiding in his closet The Dark Harbour brings to mind the straight-faced comedy of Finnish master Aki Kaurismaki.

The Red Spot – Marie Miyayama’s Japanese/ German co-produced debut feature is a touching drama about a young Japanese woman who travels to Bavaria to search for the exact spot where a car accident took the life of her parents and younger brother 18 years before. What she discovers in Germany is more than just a red spot on a map though.

Different Cities – Experimental video artist Kazuhiro Goshima uses subtle CGI-animation to clear Tokyo of all but a handful of its inhabitants in Different Cities. We follow five inter-weaving characters as they wake up to discover they’ve become lost in their own city.

Yuki Kawamura Trilogy – Musician, video artist, and now filmmaker Yuki Kawamura has crafted three touching Ozu-esque drama’s about the impermamance of life and the magic that can be found in a single moment. Mixing traditional Japanese Noh theatre and modern hi-def technology these three films – Spark, Angel Robe and Grandmother – will be receiving their Toronto premiere at Shinsedai.

Ladybirds’ Requiem – Artist and animator Akino Kondoh’s first short film The Evening Traveling was a huge hit at Shinsedai last year, so this year we’ve not only programmed Kondoh’s second animated short Ladybirds’ Requiem, but we are featuring her 2004 painting Red Fishes as our official poster image. To top it all off Kondoh will be in attendance at this year’s festival.

That’s just a smaple of what audiences can expect this year at the 2nd annual Shinsedai Cinema Festival. Check back on June 17th for the full line-up and schedule of this year’s festival!

James Cameron and Sam Worthington on the set of Avatar

So, sorry, as I wend my weary way back to Avatar again, but I’ll confess, I have more than a passing interest in the subject of 3D, as I’m currently in the midst of a PhD about the adoption of widescreen technologies in Japan during the 1950s, and there appear to be many clear parallels with Hollywood’s attempt to force a new mode of exhibition on a generation of cinema-goers who were then being lost to the new medium of television and discourses surrounding the 3D revival happening today. Having spent the past few months picking through John Belton’s monumental study Widescreen Cinema (1992), it seems that the historical case for the success or failure of 3D is not quite as cut and dry as the rather simplistic one-line quotes presented in this article suggest.

Raoul Walsh's Grandeur film, The Big Trail (1930)

A Polyvision sequence from Abel Gance's Napoleon (1927)

For a start, all of the technologies underpinning the new immersive cinema experiences introduced in the 1950s, be they Cinerama (multi-screen), CinemaScope (anamorphic widescreen), Todd-AO (wide-gauge, faster frame rate of 30fps) or emulations, variations or amalgamations of all of the aforementioned (Vitascope, Technirama, Super Technirama 70) had already been experimented with in the 1920s and 1930s: Abel Gance’s three-camera Polyvision system for Napoleon (1927) ; Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper’s Chang (1927) , with its Magnascope elephant stampede sequence; the Fox Film Corporation’s early 70mm Grandeur productions like The Big Trail (Raoul Walsh, 1930) and Warner’s 65mm Vitascope production of films such as The Bat Whispers (Roland West, 1930) . The reason they failed to take hold then was due to the plethora of non-compatible formats that meant that exhibitors weren’t sure which equipment to hedge their bets on (especially as the coming of sound had already presented a significant expense for exhibitors at a time of economic uncertainty as the Great Depression dawned). Also, with no viable alternative arenas in which to view films, audiences didn’t need bigger screens to lure them to the cinema. We could also add that no small number of these simply weren’t very good films. The landscape was considerably different in the 1950s, an era in which television was taking root and Americans had a greater amount of money and leisure time to spend on other recreational pursuits.

See the joins? This was Cinerama!

All of these widescreen formats developed by rival studios went head to head with one another in the 1950s, but the key point is that they were promoted at the time as being “3D experiences”. They weren’t 3D in the sense we now understand the term (i.e. stereoscopic), but they introduced a new, more active way of looking at the film being projected, with picture detail and movement also taking place in the peripheral vision, setting them above the Academy ratio that had been the industry standard since 1932. The film now considered to be the first colour 3D feature, Bwana Devil (Arch Oboler), which premiered on 26 November 1952, was filmed in a process called Natural Vision, although of course there’s not much that’s natural about peering at the screen through red and green pieces of perspex. It arrived less than two months after the premiere of the Cinerama featurette, This is Cinerama, at the time itself touted as the future of cinema (although its three-projector technology used significantly more film stock and required multiple projectionists at specialist exhibition venues, and the joins between the screens were also visible, so the format never really went anywhere). With the major players struggling to come up with their own single-camera widescreen solution, Natural Vision was initially rejected by the major studios and Bwana Devil was produced independently, although the first studio-produced films using the stereoscopic process, House of Wax (André De Toth) and Man in the Dark (Lew Landers) were both released by Warners and Columbia respectively in April 1953.

Not so Natural Vision

Nevertheless, their timing was not particularly propitious, because within six months, on 16 September 1953, 20^th Century Fox unveiled its first feature using its proprietary widescreen CinemaScope process, The Robe (Henry Koster). As CinemaScope projection equipment and screens were rolled out across America and the rest of the world (most importantly from my point of view, Japan – the “full package” included a specially curved screen and a stereophonic sound system, but most venues opted out of the last option, and I’m not sure yet if Japanese exhibitors went for the curved screen either), Natural Vision’s days were numbered from the very outset. Of course, CinemaScope was a superior format in any case, but it was helped by the fact that the epic religious subject matter of The Robe gelled more closely with the critics’ and the general public’s notions of what constituted a “quality picture” than the schlocky genre pieces that were initially produced in Natural Vision (the oft-quoted exception is Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder , released in 1954, although the film has rarely been shown subsequently in its 3D mode).

It was the rapid adoption of the CinemaScope format and its variations that put the kaibosh on the first wave of 3D releases, but as mentioned, it was itself initially promoted as a 3D format: Belton argues that both Natural Vision and “flat” widescreen cinema shared the common goal of encouraging a more participatory viewing experience by breaking down the viewer’s sense of the frame (see also William Paul’s “The Aesthetics of Emergence”, Film History, Vol. 5, No. 3, Film Technology and the Public (Sep., 1993), pp. 321-355).

A wider view in the first CinemaScope feature, The Robe (1953)

CinemaScope’s main rival came in 1955 with the release of the first feature using the Todd-AO format, Oklahoma! (Fred Zinnemann). Todd-AO used 70mm film stock and upped the frame rate from 24fps to 30fps: the picture was bigger, sharper and relatively flicker-free, but films could only be projected in venues with the necessary specialist equipment. There were only a handful of such theatres at the time (four in 1955), and though this number grew slowly, such venues remained limited to larger urban centres. Oklahoma!, its rights acquired at great cost from Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein, creators of the phenomenally successful 1943 Broadway musical from which it was adapted, was a hugely expensive project, with the Todd-AO process requiring considerably more raw film stock: the cost of a Todd-AO production was between 2.5-2.75 times that of the average for a 35mm film from Hollywood. Not much more than a dozen such films were made using the format, prestige spectacle films such as Around the World in Eighty Days (Michael Anderson, 1956) and Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963). Such films were often also released in separate CinemaScope versions to ensure their more widespread distribution, but it was always made clear that you wouldn’t be getting quite the same movie experience unless you shelled out that little bit more to see it in one of the small network of high-class theatres especially equipped for the purpose.

A scene from the Todd-AO version of Oklahoma!

For Mike Todd Jr., the maverick who bankrolled the development of the system that bore his name, the issues of spectacle and elevation of each performance to an event were paramount: “I’m not interested in making movies,” he famously claimed. “Movies are something you can see in your neighbourhood theatre and eat popcorn while you’re watching them.” Ticket prices might have been accordingly much higher, but as he explained, “the carriage trade will swim a river of crocodiles to see it. To show they got class and appreciate the arts, they’d be insulted if you didn’t charge premium prices and make it a little hard to see. Besides, if you get the reviews and have a hot ticket, the gum chewers will figure out how to get in as well.”

The same scene again from the CinemaScope version for the oi-polloi.

A number of widescreen technologies, or new names for rejigged versions of the old ones, have emerged since the arrival of 70mm Todd-AO and anamorphic 35mm CinemaScope. Once seen as novelties, widescreen formats have long been the norm, but though widescreen temporarily forestalled the constant drift of audiences towards television, the heyday of Hollywood blockbusters such as The Robe and Oklahoma! was short-lived. As habitual movie-going continued declining, individual titles became marketed as one-off events. By the 1960s, 3000-5000 seater movie palaces were swiftly becoming the stuff of history. The emergence of the multiplex saw theatres sub-divided into smaller screens, and such lavish large-screen spectacles came primarily to be experienced on television (and later video) in panned-and-scanned, squashed or cropped versions that went against their very essence.

Nowadays, HDTV widescreen TVs, DVD and Blu-Ray mean that we at least get to experience films in the aspect ratio they were intended to be shown in (and with the original soundtrack: for simplicity I’ve avoided mentioning the various sound technologies that also played a major role in the CinemaScope and Todd-AO experience, and the different proprietary screens the films were projected upon). But watching the various titles I’ve mentioned on DVD, it is difficult to get any real sense of how it must have felt to experience these films in situ at the time of their release. Watching a Todd-AO film on my 32” LCD flat screen television in my living room is hardly the same as seeing it on a 52×26 foot curved screen with an audience of 3000.

A cast of thousands in the Sovscope 70 spectacular, War and Peace (1967)

This is the environment into which Avatar has been released, and I think the parallels between James Cameron and Mike Todd Jr. are quite illuminating. Both Avatar and Okalahoma! were independent productions. Okalahoma! was the most expensive film of its era, and Avatar now ranks as the most expensive production of all time. (That said, much of Avatar’s budget went to vital R&D that can be considered an investment for future productions, and its promotional budget alone was $150 million. If we allow for inflation and exchange rates, the Soviet production of Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace (Voyna i mir, 1967) is often cited as the most expensive film in cinema history, itself filmed using a version of the 70mm Todd-AO format known as Sovscope 70; that said, this 484-minute epic was actually released in four standalone parts over the years, so I’m not sure if it really counts. I ploughed my way through the DVD release of this over the Christmas break, around the same time I saw Avatar, and I have to say, I found it far, far, more impressive and engrossing than Cameron’s film). Both films were developed to showcase a new type of technology, and both, in order to appreciate the full experience, were intended to be viewed in a specific type of venue capable of projecting them in a specific way. In no small part because of this, Okalahoma! was not the commercial success it was hoped for, but Avatar is now apparently the highest-grossing film of all time. Yes, Avatar has been shown in many places in a ‘flat’ 2D version, and has just been released on home-viewing formats that also serve to reduce its sense of spectacle, but if you wanted to see it in optimum conditions, you’d need to catch it at a cinema with 3D IMAX projection.

And this is one of the most important points about Avatar. In 1999, the British Film Institute opened its 477-seat IMAX cinema in Waterloo, boasting a curved screen 20 metres high and 26 metres wide. A further nine such screens were rolled out across the country, but most failed to attract much customer interest. Tickets were bloody expensive, and with no narrative features specifically made for them, the best they had to offer their potential audiences were documentaries about that traded on the spectacle of 3D projection on a large screen – not to dissimilar from Cinerama in the 1950s, then. In a nutshell, no one went. In the space of a couple of months, Avatar pretty much turned the remaining venues’ fortunes around. Tickets at the BFI IMAX in London were booked up for months in advance. It is somewhat ironic that as far as I know, at least two of these venues constructed at vast expense in the UK not even ten years ago are no more – the Bournemouth one is set to be demolished, while the one in Bristol closed a few years ago, although it seems to have reopened in some form. If only Avatar had arrived a little earlier to save them.

BFI Imax, London

Avatar’s success does prove, however, that people were quite willing to pay that little bit extra if the film promises to deliver. Whether IMAX will find new films that justify the higher ticket prices in the future is uncertain, but Avatar is going to remain a historical landmark for this reason alone. It barely matters if one considers it a good film or not. Like both The Robe and Oklahoma!, it was the new format that set tongues wagging and put bums on seats. Venues across the world are now busily equipping themselves with 3D projection equipment and there are plenty of new titles in the pipeline aimed at exploiting it, as both the production and exhibition of subsequent 3D films becomes relatively more cost effective.

I am not sure whether I agree with Cameron’s prediction’s that 3D will become the norm. Like Natural Vision, the glasses are still a real problem. Even if the new system doesn’t tinge everything red and green, they still reduce the amount of light getting into your eyes by 30%, and aside from the number of people who have reported headaches or are just unable to perceive the image stereoscopically, many regular spec-wearers seem to be having trouble keeping both pairs on at once, not something I’ve had a problem with myself, but maybe my nose is bigger. I also don’t agree with Kermode’s curmudgeonly carping that 3D is just a gimmick. Filmmakers are really only now just beginning to explore once more how to exploit the aesthetic potential of the added dimension. Avatar didn’t do it for me, it’s true (there again, neither did The Robe ), but I amm intrigued by Werner Herzog’s plans for a new 3D documentary on 2D primitive cave art.

3D may not be THE future of cinema, but it is A future. I’ve got a lot more to say on this subject, but for now I just want to end with a head’s up on the UK’s first ever stereoscopic short film festival, Short & Sweet 3D , taking place at the Barbican on Friday, 16 July; you can book tickets here and also follow them on Twitter for more regular updates. Don’t just take the word of the evangelists and naysayers for it, go and see for yourself and make your own mind up!

Links to the rest of these articles:
Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 1: Avatar

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 2: Paradoxes of Visual Knowledge

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 3: Welcome to the Feelies

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 5: A Joyride to Nowhere?

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 6: Changing our Focus – StreetDance 3D

First up, though I’ve posted it before, is the Origins of Anime programme playing at the Barbican in just over a week, as part of the Barbican’s Animate the World festival beginning this weekend and running to the 27 May. The Origins of Anime, a whistle-stop tour of Japanese animation’s formative decades as presented by yours truly, is next Wednesday. Hope to see some of you there, and while you’re in the area, I advise you to check out some of the other great screenings being held as part of the festival. Should be quite a week!

Following their comprehensive retrospective of Ozu’s existing films in January and February, June sees the BFI celebrating the oeuvre of Akira Kurosawa for the first time since 2001, taking on a touring programme that’s played in a number of other countries so far. The season is called Akira Kurosawa & His Influence and stretches through to July. Quoting from the BFI press release; “In his centenary year, Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) continues to win admirers and inspire homage. We present a season of the director’s finest films, complemented by a selection of films testifying to his enduring influence abroad.”

I’ve only seen the June programme so far, so it’s too early to judge whether they’re going to screen the one Kurosawa film that doesn’t appear to be on DVD anywhere, the home-front propaganda film made at the tail-end of the war

Akira Kurosawa's forgotten The Most Beautiful (Ichiban utsukushiku, 1944)

. Shame, as I’d love to see it, but for now, this image will have to suffice.

Yoshitaro Kataoka’s haunting Danemon Ban: The Monster Exterminator (1935)

There’s plenty of other goodies during the week too. Helen McCarthy will be there to introduce a Japanimation double bill of Summer Wars and Dante’s Inferno the day before, on the 25 May, to carry on the Japanese theme. Outside of the Japanese stuff though, there’s a special focus on Czech animator Karel Zeman with screenings of his Invention for Destruction (1958) and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1961), a chance to catch Piaxar’s UP in 3D again, if you missed it first time round, and a host of other interesting-looking shorts and features. Move over Mickey!

Karel Zeman's surreal Invention for Destruction (1958)

What with the upcoming screening of Wakamatsu Pro’s The Red Army / PFLP: Declaration of World War as part of the London Palestinian Film Festival on 4 May, and Ladislas Starewitch’s bewildering piece of dead insect-animation The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912) as part of the ongoing Silent Film & Live Music series on 9 May (you’ve got a real treat in store if you’ve never seen this – it’s unbelievable!), it’s a good reminder to check out the Barbican’s programme a lot more often – the tickets are pretty reasonable if you’re a member, and they show some truly amazing stuff.

Ladislas Starewitch’s The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912) - you won't have seen anything like it.

Anyway, here are some more details about my special night from the Barbican Website:

The Origins of Anime (12A)

Cinema 1, 26 May 2010, 18.30.

Japanese film specialist Jasper Sharp explores the origins of anime, with an exclusive selection of influential pre-war animations.

Tickets: Standard £7.50 online (£9.50 full price); Barbican Members £6.50 online (£7.50 full price); Concessions £7.50.

Terracotta Far East Film Festival

One specialist festival, Nippon Connection, now over; another, Udine Far East Film Festival with its amazing-looking retro of Shintoho films, currently in progress; and yet another just round the corner, mercifully, given last week’s farrago, closer to home! The website for this year’s Terracotta Far East Film Festival has been pretty lively these past few days, so I am posting up some details for London’s premier event dedicated to Asian cinema.

Coming soon from Third Window, Fish Story

Only two weeks away, and held at the Prince Charles Cinema, within spitting distance of Leicester Square, from 6-9 May 2010 Joey Leung of Terracotta Films will be treating Londoners to various premiers from the Far East, including some intriguing looking titles from China, Hong Kong, Korea, Thailand and of course, Japan, the latter represented by Yukihiko Tsutsumi’s 20th Century Boys 3, Shimiko Sato’s K-20: Legend of the Mask, the upcoming Third Window release of Yoshihiro Nakamura’s Fish Story and Mamoru Hosoda’s highly-acclaimed anime, Summer Wars.

Yakuza Eiga, one of two documentaries playing from Yves Montmayeur

Asian film fans will also want to check out the two documentaries from French filmmaker Yves Montmayeur, In the Mood for Doyle and Yakuza Eiga, as well as Johnny To’s latest Vengeance. Among others, Bodyguards and Assassins-director Teddy Chen will be attending the festival, which will also be presenting an award to Jackie Chan – does this mean Jackie’s going to be around too?

Tickets are £7.50 per film, or £6.00 for Prince Charles Cinema members. The full line-up can be found on the festival’s website.

I'm the King of the World!!!! Cruising back to Dover.

Wow, that was a longer trip abroad than I expected! Finally got in midnight last night, after a 12 hour car/ferry journey courtesy of a ride-share agency, a concept all but unknown in the UK, but very popular in Germany, and in this particular instance, invaluable – my flights got cancelled twice, and I was getting rather itchy feet in Frankfurt, so am just amazed I am now back at home in one piece. Piles upon piles of stuff to catch up on now I’m back, so this post will be brief, but I just want to say a huge thanks to Marion, Holger, Alex, Mayu, Christiane and all the others at the fest, not only for their work in putting together such a great event, but for their amazing behind-the-scenes level-headedness in making sure all of us were housed and entertained during our extended stay, while they attempted to find ways of getting us all back home. I’d also like to say thanks to my hosts for my final days, Heiko and Kerstin, who kindly provided me with a bed while I ummed and ahed about the best way of making it back home.

Freak volcanoes notwithstanding, this year’s Nippon Connection was the most fun I’ve ever attended, with great films, great guests, and a generally excellent atmosphere all round. Sadly, I fear, few of the organisers got the chance to enjoy the festival as much as they should have, considering it was the tenth anniversary, occupied as they were by these unexpected events in Iceland. Film festivals are an immense amount of work at the best of times, so I really feel for the Nippon Connection staff who had to spend the past few days dealing with the volcanic aftermath, and as far as I know, are still dealing with it now. Hope they get a chance to relax soon and realise what a great job they’ve done. For these and so many other things, I salute them all. See you next year, Frankfurt!

Of course, things could be a lot worse. If the volcano had blown a few days earlier, there would have been no guests, no prints and basically no festival, hardly a fitting celebration for Nippon Connection’s tenth year. I’m actually in a better situation than most of the others here who need to get back to Japan or North America, because in the worst case scenario, I can always hitchhike up to Calais and stand on the beach, as in Atonement, amassed with all the other Brits awaiting repatriation. And we should spare a thought for the poor jishu eiga director who has been grounded for the past 5 days in Istanbul, where he was meant to be transferring flight…

I have to say, I’ve been fairly in the dark about the whole situation until today. I’d not read any newspaper coverage nor seen any TV reports about the volcano in the English language. The only screens I’ve been looking at have been filled with Japanese films. I knew over the weekend that the whole incident was going to be a damn inconvenience, but buried my head in the sand as I realised that there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it and didn’t want it to affect my enjoyment of the festival. Now it looks like I’m here for a couple more days, at least I’ve got my laptop, internet access, and a few DVDs to watch, so things could be a lot worse.

Well, that brings me to the festival, which is, after all, the reason we are all here, and though we’re all going to look back and laugh in a year or so on the events that overtook the tenth Nippon Connection, the festival was memorable for other reasons too, namely the films. This year, I was accorded the honour of sitting on the jury for the Nippon Digital Award, alongside Bernt Brehmer and Dr Roland Domenig. It is the first year Nippon Connection has had a competition for the digital selection, which has got stronger and stronger over the years and at present provides the best showcase anywhere in the world for some of the most important discoveries in the world of Japanese indie filmmaking, documentary and experimental animation, courtesy of the pioneering efforts of programmers Alex Zahlten and Christiane Borchert. Basically, if you’re into the edgier, more innovative side of Japanese film, Nippon Connection’s annual selection is second to none. This meant, however, that I had to spend much of the fest in the digital screening room, so never got the chance to watch any of the more mainstream fare playing on the big screen. Some of these I’d seen before, but I didn’t catch any of the films that got the audience award this year: in third place was Hitoshi Matsumoto’s Symbol; second was Shuichi Okita’s The Chef of South Polar; with the main prize going to Oblivion Island: Haruka and the Magic Mirror, a 3DCG animation from Production I.G. directed by Shinsuke Sato – well, I never saw that one coming, but the Nippon Connection audience has always been an unpredictable lot.

Noriko Eguchi in Kota Yoshida's Yuriko’s Aroma

There was some great stuff playing in the Nippon Digital selection however, including Daishi Mochinaga’s documentary on the bizarre transgender performance artist Pyuupiru, which you can read all about on Midnight Eye and Yu Irie’s 8000 Miles Part 2: Girls Rappers, which I mentioned in my Yubari report. However, we were all particularly impressed with Kota Yoshida’s Yuriko’s Aroma, a slick and sexy comedy-drama starring Noriko Eguchi of Moon and Cherry fame, playing a not dissimilar role as an aromatherapist with a particularly sensitive olfactory organ who develops an unhealthy obsession with her employer’s sweaty teenage nephew.

Pyuupiru, in Daishi Mochinaga's film of the same name

It wasn’t the winner, but we gave it a special mention anyway, and hopefully I’ll find a way of bringing it to the UK before the year’s out. The man of the moment, though, was Tetsuaki Matsue, who impressed me a lot about ten years ago with his promising documentary debut, Annyong Kimchee, detailing his own “coming out” to his friends about his Korean ancestry. I’d always felt that Matsue had subsequently rather coasted along on his talents, but it seems he’s finally come of age this year. It’s true, his Annyong Yumika, also in competition this year, his portrait of the legendary AV and pink actress Yumika Hayashi, who tragically died in 2005 and who is perhaps best known with foreign audiences for her role in Shinja Imaoka’s Lunchbox (2003), wasn’t a million miles away from his usual style. It manifested both the strengths and weaknesses of Matsue’s previous films, though it was engrossing enough, and for those who don’t know much about Japan’s sex film industry and its surprise hidden links with Korea, it was certainly a revelation. Still, it wasn’t quite winning material, so it’s just as well that Matsue also had another film in competition, the near work of genius that is Live Tape. I’m going to be covering this film in a whole lot more detail on Midnight Eye very soon, but for the moment, the nutshell description is this is a single-shot film of the musician Kenta Maeno (also at the fest) as he wanders around Kichijoji performing with his guitar. It’s actually a whole lot more than that too, but basically we were all agreed this was the most innovative, refreshing and inspiring uses of a single DV tape we’d seen in a long, long time and a much-deserved winner. Matsue’s prize is the subtitles of his next film provided completely free of charge, courtesy of the Japanese Visualmedia Translation Academy (JVTA). It should be finished before the year’s out – there’ll be more info on this nearer its release, but for now I’ll just say it is going to be set around Tokyo’s celebrated otaku enclave of Akihabara.

Star of the show: Kenta Maeno in Tetsuaki Matsue's Live Tape

Unfortunately I didn’t get my camera out for any of the festival, so you’ll have to make do with stills of some of the films I’ve mentioned for now. Anyway, this is me signing off for the day. Can’t get back to London for the Takahiko Iimura films, but it doesn’t really matter as he can’t make it either, which leaves me with no other choice other than to pop out for a coffee and a Bratwurst, and try to amuse myself while I await further news on my travel plans.

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2010/04/nippon-connection/feed/ 0 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2010/04/japanese-experimental-films/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2010/04/japanese-experimental-films/#comments Mon, 12 Apr 2010 20:27:39 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=314 I’m gearing up for my trip to Frankfurt at the moment for a fun-packed and furious four-and-a-bit days of Japanese celluloid overload courtesy of those fine folks at Nippon Connection. By this time next week I’ll be back in Blighty again, but if I was anticipating a heavy film-festival hangover, then it looks like I’ll have a couple of rare screenings of Japanese films in London to ease me through the comedown. The first of these comes literally the day after I touch down in the form of an evening of experimental films from the legendary Takahiko Iimura. Observer/Observed – The Films of Takahiko Iimura is on the 20th April at the The Working Men’s Club, 44-46 Pollard Row, London E2 6NB.

Takahiko Iimura's On Eye Rape, 1962

Barely a fortnight after that on 4th May comes a really rare chance to see the Koji Wakamatsu-produced, Masao Adachi-directed The Red Army / PFLP: Declaration of World War , as far as I know the first ever screening of this inflammatory work in the UK, almost 40 years since it was made – in fact, one of a tiny few English-subtitled showings of the film ever. The film is showing at the Barbican as part of the London Palestine Film Festival and is a must-see for anyone with a serious interest in Japanese film. I write about this film in some detail in Behind the Pink Curtain , but if you don’t know anything about it, here’s a quick excerpt from the Barbican website:

“This rarely seen work is a milestone in militant filmmaking and vital testimony to an era of global revolutionary beginnings. Renowned, already notorious Japanese filmmakers and activists Masao Adachi and Koji Wakamatsu stopped in Beirut on their return from the Cannes Film Festival in 1971. There, in collaboration with a newly-emerging Japanese Red Army (JRA) cadre and leaders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) including Ghassan Kanafani and Leila Khaled, they produced this newsreel-style depiction of the everyday activities of Palestinian fighters so as to call for a worldwide Maoist revolution.”

Wakamatsu and Adachi's The Red Army / PFLP: Declaration of World War

I’ll just end by giving the heads up on another event coming up at the Barbican at the end of May, which I’m involved in, a screening of prewar Japanese animation. Watch this space for more details…

Audrey Ewell and Aaron Aites' documentary Until the Light Takes Us

On a personal level, my interest in the subject stretches back almost to day one, when Tommy Vance played the Mayhem song ‘Necrolust’ on the BBC Radio One’s Friday Rock Show way back in 1987. At the time I was deep into some pretty extreme and obscure music, and this seemed more extreme and obscure than most. The damning review in UK metal mag Kerrang! clinched it, and I ended up sending my international money order for $6 (was it?) to Norway, and not long after, my copy of the Deathcrush EP, one of a limited edition of 1000 pressings, with its infamous shocking pink cover, flopped through the letterbox and onto my doormat. If I’m honest, it was probably a little too raw for me at the time, but it got dragged out every so often over the next few years every time I felt like clearing a party, before my musical tastes moved on and it ended up in a box in the attic along with the rest of my vinyl collection. It remains there to this day, although I think it might well be time to drag it out again very soon….

Mayhem's self-released debut EP, Deathcrush

The next time I heard the name Mayhem was in 1993, in the notorious article in Kerrang!, which all Black Metal fans should remember well. The article, entitled “Has Black Metal Gone too Far?”, detailed the killing of Mayhem guitarist and founder member Oystein Aarseth (aka Euronymous) by rival musician Varg Vikerne (aka Count Grishnackh) of the one-man band Burzum over money and the spate of church burnings in Norway with which the latter was linked. The description of the Deathcrush EP as “now a much sought after rarity” immediately caught my notice, but I was away at university and wasn’t entirely sure where the record was at that time. Unable to capitalise on my investment, I assumed the subject would soon go away, and forgot immediately about it. How wrong I was.

A page from Kerrang!'s notorious 1993 expose

Five years later, I was wandering around Tower Records in Leicester Square when I spied a copy of Michael Moynihan and Didrik Soderlind’s Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground, which rekindled my interest in my headbanging past. Now, over the years, this book has attracted a considerable degree of criticism, especially directed at Moynihan (not least on Vikernes’ own website!), but if you haven’t read it, I strongly advise you do – whatever one might say about either Moynihan’s own philosophical, political or religious convictions, or his reading of those of his subjects, this is certainly the most exhaustive take on the genre and its history, and a thoroughly enjoyable, thought-provoking read. Still, one can’t help but get the inevitable feeling that it contained only part of the story.

Book cover of Michael Moynihan and Didrik Soderlind's Lords of Chaos

Rumours of a film adaptation of Lords of Chaos have been circulating for a couple of years now, and it was while Googling for further news on this that I came across Until the Light Takes Us. It came as a particularly bizarre coincidence to discover several months later that the director now attached to the project is none other than Shion Sono, whose Love Exposure I was also desperately trying to get my hands on for Raindance last year. Christ knows what Sono is going to make of the subject in his first English language feature, but the Black Metal contingent have been pretty vocal about it on various discussion boards (check out, for example, this imdb thread). It’s been a bit touch and go as to whether this project is going to happen or not, but as far as I know, it’s going ahead, and there’s already a holding page up for the movie.

Even Until the Light Takes Us is not the first film on the subject however. As far back as 1998 there was a Norwegian documentary directed by Torstein Grude entitled Satan Rides the Media (Satan rir media), which examined the rather histrionic treatment of the murder and the church burning incidents by the national press and how it literally fanned the flames by leading to further copycat arson attempts, as well as how the aforementioned Kerrang! article was largely responsible for the huge surge in popularity that made Black Metal what it is today. More recently Pure Fucking Mayhem (2008) recounted the suicide of vocalist Dead and the murder of Euronymous through the eyes of Mayhem’s surviving members. You’d think there wouldn’t be room for another take on events, but the whole subject is something that’s so hard to get one’s head around in all its Rashomon-like complexity that Ewell and Aites’ film certainly can be said to add something to the discussion, as well as serving as a perfect introduction for those not familiar with the story.

All dressed up and no place to go: Oystein Aarseth a.k.a. Euronymous

The main interviewees here are Fenriz of Dark Throne, one of the original bands associated with the movement, and Vikernes himself, from his prison cell in Trondheim, where he was serving a 21-year service, the maximum possible in Norway, before he was released last March after only serving 16 years. Fenriz’s main beef is the way that a musical movement that revelled in low-fi production values and gloomy obscurantism has now been co-opted by the mass media (one might draw parallels with the Seattle grunge scene, and it’s worth remembering that Kurt Cobain’s suicide more-or-less coincided with Vikernes’ sentencing.) It’s pretty clear here that Fenriz was always more interested in the music than the scene’s extracurricular activities, and bemoans the way that Black Metal has been transformed into something it never was. The footage of Harmony Korine prancing around like a tit in full corpse paint with a lurid yellow wig provides ample evidence of Fenriz’s concerns, and as he wanders around an exhibition by a local artist held in an upmarket gallery adorned with photos of his dead or incarcerated friends, one can sense his quiet rage. Vikernes’ description of Fenriz as a “philosopher” might elicit a few chuckles, but on the evidence of his scenes here and in other interviews you can find of him on youtube, he’s not quite as green as he’s cabbage-looking, coming across a little petulant at time, maybe, but genuinely passionate in what he does and blessed with moments of surprising insight. I actually rather warmed to him. He’s the sort of guy I can imagine it would be pretty fun going for a pint with, and lets face it, his role in establishing the genre, its musical style and its imagery, can’t be denied. Clearly frustrated by the way the scene has turned out, he delivers the one of the film’s most penetrating observations, “I guess people just like dressing up.”

Gylve Nagell, a.k.a Fenriz

Vikernes, too, is incredibly poised and articulate, his clean-cut demeanour at odds with the brutality of his early music and his prior actions. For a moment one almost forgets that he’s a both murderer and a racist. Vikernes has had a long time to nurture his own peculiar ideology, and I can see where he’s coming from, up to a point, but his particular brand of spiritist nationalism – Norse mythology filtered through the spirit of Gary Gygax as much as JRR Tolkein – seems depressingly similar to sentiments I’ve heard espoused by certain right-wing elements in Japan. One can be sympathetic to ideas of a national culture emerging from a particular landscape, and if he’d stuck to firing shotguns at McDonalds rather than advocating the destruction of historically significant cultural artefacts, I’d be more won over to his cause. One doesn’t have to be a Christian to appreciate the beauty of Norway’s wooden stave churches. Worse still is the exclusionist philosophies of right-wingers such as these. Whatever quasi-mystical terms they are couched in, the unadulterated racism of some of the comments he has made in the past are a real turn off. Those who have been following the ideas on his website over the years, or in the interviews he has given since he first emerged into the public eye, will also have noticed the chameleon-like manner in which he is constantly shifting his ideological position, juggling such various ‘isms’ as Satanism, paganism, Odinism and Nazism in an attempt to articulate his own belief system; discrepancies between his private and public thoughts are often attributed by him to misquotation, mistranslation or miscomprehension. I seem to remember some time back him saying that he would never return to the Black Metal genre, something to do with rock music’s Jewish or African roots, but exactly a year after his release, his latest album and first in eleven years, Belus, is out already. Vikernes is clearly an intelligent guy, but I’m not sure his spell inside has actually done him much good. The trouble is, I do actually rather like his music.

Varg Vikernes in Until the Light Takes Us

And then there’s the central enigma of the whole story, the character of Euronymous, absent from proceedings save for a few ghostly photographs and fuzzy VHS recordings from Mayhem’s early years. Aarseth comes across as a thoroughly unsympathetic character in other sources; check out for example this radio interview from 1993. You get a better portrait of the man in the Pure Fucking Mayhem official band documentary, but one really wonders where this character would be today had he not met such an untimely demise.

Euronymous of Mayhem

While providing a really good introduction to the Black Metal scene, there are still a few points that I feel Until the Light Takes Us left underexplored, especially for those unfamiliar with the history of heavy metal music around this time. For example, the dark theatrics and self-consciously fuzzy sound that mark the genre are often described as a reaction to the increasing commercialism of Death Metal, notably the clean production values and more down-to-earth baseball cap and black T-shirt look of bands such as Obituary or Death, but the true nature of this counter movement is hard gauge for those not familiar with the longer history of thrash or speed metal. One can, of course, only fit so much into one film, but to the outsider such specialist musical genres might sound much of a muchness, and for many Black Metal’s adoption of corpse paint might seem more in the tradition of more mainstream cock rockers such as Kiss or Alice Cooper.

'A Blaze in the Northern Sky', Dark Throne's early classic of the genre.

The other thing that I’ve never been entirely clear about is to what extent a Black Metal ‘scene’, as such, actually existed at the time. There were the core agents in the drama that congregated around Aarseth’s shop Helvete, but how significant a crowd was this exactly? One thing that should be remembered is that many of these “bands” hardly ever played live; they were essentially studio acts consisting of a couple of members who bolstered their profiles with gloomy photos and tacky videos of themselves prancing around forests (I love this Youtube clip!) This was the sort of music that was designed to be sold through mail order, with the musicians masquerading behind outrageous pseudonyms and costumes. Burzum, of course, was a solo project, with Vikernes taking charge of vocals, guitars, bass, drums and keyboards. As far as I can work out, Dark Throne too have hardly ever played live. Presumably, then, these guys wouldn’t have met at each others gigs, and I’d imagine the audience for this revolutionary form of music at this time must have been fairly tiny in relation to the snowballing number of bands. In relation to this, clearly whatever the “scene” was in Oslo, where Aarseth was based, was somewhat different to the one in Bergen, where Vikernes was based. So in what form did this Black Metal movement, if it ever was a movement, exist? As an extended network of penpals or a small group of people clustering in bars, parties or holding demonic rituals? I guess such unanswered questions only serve to contribute to its mystique.

Burnt church on the cover of Burzum's EP Aske (Ashes)

These points are in no way criticisms of Until the Light Takes Us, which is a fascinating work that inspires you to want to find out more about the subject, always the hallmark of a good documentary. I’ve already watched it about four times. All of which should explain why Sono’s film of Lords of Chaos is for me, the most exciting proposition of the year. How will an outsider, from a completely different language and culture and with no real interest or love of the music tackle the material? I think this cultural distance is going to be the film’s key strength. As far as I can see, there’s a couple of inroads into the subject dramatically. Firstly, with regards to the church burnings: on a purely abstract level, the premise of a fringe group of socially marginalised young people who band together to declare all out war on what they perceive as a staid and decadent society, abandoning all vestiges of humanism and common sense in favour of half-baked, ill-conceived ideologies as they egg each other on to more extreme acts without anyone stopping and saying “Hey guys, enough’s enough!”, has clear parallels elsewhere – for example, with the radical leftwing revolutionaries that were the subject of Koji Wakamatsu’s United Red Army, or with lunatic Islamic groups such as Al-Qaeda blowing themselves up on public transport, or even the football hooliganism firms of the 1980s. Secondly there’s the converging fates of Count Grishnackh and Euronymous, two characters who failed to distinguish between reality and the image that they created for themselves. Either way, the story has all sorts of intriguing reverberations.

'It' from Abruptum - "too evil for a human name"!

Sadly, none of the films released so far have made any mention of a rather odd-sounding band that immediately sprang out of the pages of Moynihan and Soderlind’s book – “The bizarre duo Abruptum, who allegedly recorded their music during bouts of self-inflicted torture, was praised by Aarseth as “the audial essence of Pure Black Evil”,” led by a dwarf who, apparently “too evil to have a human name”, went by the monicker of ‘It’ – you can get hold of their first CD, Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectere Me, on Amazon if you’re interested. I certainly hope there’s  a small part for them in Sono’s film.

To find out if Until The Light Takes Us is playing anywhere near you, you can check out the film’s website or join the Facebook group Bring Until The Light Takes Us to the UK!

Kakera UK release poster

I had a lot of fun this Saturday, with the UK launch of Momoko Ando’s Kakera taking place at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts and distributor Adam Torel of Third Window Films laying on a really great shindig after the screening. This wasn’t the official UK premiere, as the film was the centrepiece of my Japanese Women Filmmakers special programme at Raindance last year, which was in actual fact the world premiere. Instead, this event was billed as the Special Gala Opening, before it begins a longer run at the ICA from April 2^nd and goes on to play selected venues across the country, and I’m delighted to say that, as with the Raindance showings, it was really well attended and it was great to see Momoko back in the country again.

Tasuku Nagaoka and Hikari Mitsushima in a scene from Kakera.

Unusually, the film is being released more or less simultaneously in London and Tokyo, so Momoko has already jetted back for the Japanese opening. Anyway, I was present at the ICA to conduct an interview for the forthcoming DVD release and to moderate the Q&A after the screening, which I thought went great; there were a lot of interesting, intelligent questions from a lively audience (especially from members of the Coventry East Asian Film Society, who were there en masse),  and the director gave us some fascinating insights into some of the personal experiences that worked their way into the film. All in all, a big success, and a great time was had by all.

There’s going to be an interview with Momoko and a review of the film popping up on Midnight Eye any day now to tie in with the UK theatrical run, and it will also be playing at Nippon Connection in Frankfurt mid-April (and presumably other festivals after that), but if its not coming to a cinema near you, then the DVD is already up for pre-order on Amazon, and is released on June 21st.

Momoko Ando and the controversial Japanese ad campaign for Kakera, taken in Tokyo.

Third Window has also announced it has acquired Yoshihiro Nakamura’s Fish Story for the UK, which was in many of the other Midnight Eye critics Top Tens from last year. I have to confess I still haven’t seen it, but along with the rest of all us London-dwellers, I’ll get a chance in May at the Terracotta Far East Film Festival held at the Prince Charles Cinema, Leicester Square, along with a whole host of other top titles from 2009, including Mamoru Hosoda’s acclaimed anime Summer Wars. Oh yes, these are good times for Asian film fans in the UK…

While it was great to see Momoko back in London again, I should add that it was only a couple of weeks ago that I last saw her in Tokyo, along with all the other guests that came to Raindance, firstly at another great bash in Tokyo kindly organised by Yoshihiro Ito, director of the sublime shorts package Vortex and Others, then secondly at a post-screening screening panel discussion for Yasunobu Takahashi’s Locked Out, which after touring various international festivals last year had just been released at the new Roppongi Cinemart, on a double bill with another great indie title that has screened quite extensively worldwide, Nobuyuki Miyake’s Lost & Found.

Yasunobu Takahashi's Locked Out

A quick bit about the Cinemart. There’s been a lot of negative murmurings over the past year or so about the current state of the Japanese film industry, namely the dominance by the major studios, in particular Toho, and the prevalence of tried and tested formulas such as TV and manga adaptations, idol vehicles and the like, but this new venue is quite a find, and apparently part of a minor chain with others venues in Shinjuku and Shinsaibashi too. Stuck in the heart of Tokyo’s gaijin stronghold of Roppongi, it boasts several screens (I think there were three but I can’t remember exactly) pretty much dedicated to screening lower-budget or independently-produced films, mainly Japanese made, but also from other Asian countries, most notably South Korea, as well as other international art films. I’m trying to imagine how a similar enterprise in London might fare, devoted to British and Irish works, but somehow I can’t imagine it being as well-attended as it was for the late screening I caught of Locked Out. This is what I love about the Japanese industry; just when you think its dying out or has reached a lull, there’s some new development that emerges that completely catches you off-guard. One of the main problems that Japanese filmmakers have faced over the last five years or so is the bottleneck in getting their films actually out there to the general public. There was no shortage of interesting work being made, just a shortage of screens on which to get them out there. And I’m also heartened by the fact that there’s clearly a local audience out there for it too.

Nobuyuki Miyake's Lost & Found

The other thing that really hit me this trip out to Japan was the vast leap in the quality of recent indie jishu eiga releases. There’s barely any of the self-indulgent approach to storytelling and amateurish shaky handicam stylistics that dominated much of the sector’s output a few years ago. Both Locked Out and Lost & Found are really slickly made, well acted, well lit, and beautifully shot using HD cameras, and they both tell solid stories in a nicely-paced, self-contained format. In a nutshell, they are both really professional pieces and their directors are certain to go along way in the industry. After also recently catching Yosuke Okuda’s polished and energizing youth-on-the-rampage movie Hot as Hell, which won the Grand Prix in the Off Theatre section of Yubari and Tetsuichiro Tsuta’s retro-looking environmental thriller Island of Dreams, which scooped up a number of awards at last year’s PIA Film Festival, it is clear to me that there are some great new directors emerging and Japanese cinema is once more in the midst of a quiet but highly significant indie revolution, and its going to be fascinating to see where it’s all going to take us.

Locked Out director Yasunobu Takahashi flanked by Tokachi Tsuchiya and Momoko Ando during panel at Roppongi Cinemart on 9th March 2010.

Anyway, the Locked Out panel discussion made for a lovely penultimate night during my Japan trip, as it took place between Yasunobu Takahashi, A Normal Life Please director Tokachi Tsuchiya and Momoko Ando, all three friendly faces from their trip to London last October for Raindance – there was much natsukashii sentiment in the air as Takahashi-san presented a 10-minute video diary he had shot during Raindance, which was quite a shock as I hadn’t exactly anticipated seeing my face projected large onto the screen, and was content to sit discreetly hidden in corner, before being invited out front to say a few words on the state of recent indie productions in Japan. A great coda to my stay, and I wish all three a great future in the industry – they’ve certainly all got the talent for it!

With Locked Out director Yasunobu Takahashi and lead actor Kiichi Sonobe

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2010/03/banzai-kantoku-tachi/feed/ 2 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2010/03/feelies/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2010/03/feelies/#comments Tue, 16 Mar 2010 19:59:52 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=283

Avatar in 4D

You know, I hate to keep harping on about Avatar, but it seems you just can’t get away from the film at the moment. I managed to catch some of this year’s Academy Awards ceremony on the morning of Monday 8th while I was still in Tokyo, and was somewhat relieved that it didn’t pick up as many plaudits as first anticipated. The Hurt Locker, after all, was in most respects a far superior work, even if it didn’t make as much money.

Still, though I guess I’ve made my feelings pretty clear about the film itself by now, there’s other interesting aspects to the Avatar phenomenon. While in Yubari, I heard from some of the Korean guests that Cameron’s film had just been released in Seoul in 4D (more here). What, another dimension, I hear you ask? But which one? Have they perhaps added ‘time’ to the equation, so that the 162 minutes doesn’t seem to stretch for an eternity? Or maybe some actual depth has been added to the characterisation? No, actually these special screenings at selected venues have instead opted for juddering moving seats, wind and water effects and synthetic smells. This is all very interesting, this attempt to draw viewers into cinemas for the type of all-round sensory experience that you could never hope for at home, although personally I have my doubts as to whether Pandora and its population of noble savages could ever smell quite as good as they look.

I’m not sure if the moving seats will ever be more than a novelty either. I remember a couple of years back at Puchon Festival there was a guy attempting to corral all the foreign journalists into having a go on a prototype of this new gimmick. I was subjected to about five minutes of being vibrated along to some suitably brash Hollywood action movie – I’m not sure if it was Con Air or Black Hawk Down, but it was something of this ilk- and the impression I was left with was that unless the film was specifically made with such technology in mind, it didn’t really add much to the viewing experience, and was actually more of a distraction. I felt a little queasy afterwards.

Putting the cynical old curmudgeon in me aside for one moment, I should say that if this kind of cinema floats your boat, Avatar seems tailor-made for such auxiliaries in that it is ultimately about creating an all-immersive viewing experience. As I’ve mentioned in my previous posts, it trades in what we might call cinematism rather than realism. The viewer is pitched headlong through Cameron’s world at a dizzying velocity to create an exaggerated hyper-reality of the type that we could never experience in real life, with an emphasis on dynamic movement throughout all three dimensions.

Another Avatar pic

I’ve always preferred my viewing experiences to be of a more contemplative nature myself, but still, different horses for different courses; one can’t deny that Avatar is lighting up the exhibition sector in a way that hasn’t happened for quite some time. If only because of this, it is of great historical significance. In any measure, it’s pretty clear that the 3D boom isn’t going to go away anytime soon, so I was intrigued to hear of a recent Japanese film that attempts to get in on the act, the second release I’ve heard of from the country after Takashi Shimizu’s Shock Labyrinth 3D (Senritsu meikyû 3D), soon to be unveiled in the UK.

J-horror in 3d: Takashi Shimizu's Shock Labyrinth

I’m actually pretty bloody amazed no one else has been talking about it either, as it seems pretty much tailor-made for the overseas midnight movie circuit. The film in question is the latest instalment in the Perfect Education (Kanzen naru shiiku) series that began some ten years or so back (I reviewed the first entry for Midnight Eye back in the early days), although which largely seems to have slipped beneath the radar of most foreign observers, for perhaps fairly obvious reasons. Despite the first being scripted by living legend Kaneto Shindo, the Perfect Education films are to the world of Japanese softcore what Friday 13^th is to the horror genre. Still, their largely formulaic narratives revolving around solitary men capturing comely young beauties and ‘grooming’ them until they fall in love with them seems to have attracted some interesting directors in the past, including Bashing helmer Masahiro Kobayashi (Perfect Education 5: Amazing Story), and Koji Wakamatsu (Perfect Education 6 : Red Murder). Neither of these filmmakers are strangers to the world of erotic cinema – you’ll find plenty of references to them in my Behind the Pink Curtain. The latest offering, however, is the work of Kenta Fukasaku, best known as the son of Kinji, who took over the reins of his father when the latter died during the early stages of shooting Battle Royale II.

Kenta Fukasaku's Perfect Education: Maid For You

Perfect Education: Maid For You already has a pretty irresistible hook in that its victim is a worker in an Akihabara maid cafe. Not content with this, the producers have gone that one step further by utilising 3D in a similar manner to how pink films from the 1960s livened up their saucier sequences by bursting into colour. Unlike Avatar, Maid For You’s application of the third dimension clearly prioritises volume and form over movement, and it’s somewhat comical to picture the viewers donning their polarised specs and extending their hands while grope towards the shapely torso of the main actress and Gravure model Ayano every time she disrobes.

Maid For You

I should add that I’ve not seen the film as yet. It ended its brief single-theatre run only a month before I got to Tokyo, so I can’t really vouch for how the 3D scenes worked out, but my curiosity has been piqued. What is interesting is why a title like this, part of a series that is ultimately targeted at the home-viewing market, should adopt such a cinema-specific approach. How many times will it ever be seen in this way? Although, of course, 3D HDTV’s are already there on the market, so perhaps its films such as these that are going to provide one of the impetuses for upgrading to the new equipment.

Britain's first 3d feature, Pete Walker's Four Dimensions of Greta (1972)

Maid For You is certainly not the first sex film to make use of 3D. I recently heard something about a pink film released by Shintoho in the 1980s (ok, so I missed this one in the book!), although I’m not sure what its title was. In America, Al Silliman Jr. gave us the Stereovision spectacles of The Stewardesses as early as 1969, touted as one of the most profitable releases of all time (you can see the trailer on youtube, flat version only I’m afraid), while Britain’s first ever 3D feature came in 1972 in the form of Pete Walker’s Four Dimensions of Greta (also known as Three Dimensions of Greta – not sure where the other dimension came from). And before I sign off, here’s a link to a piece about Tinto Brass’ plans to remake Caligula (1979) with the new 3D technology – without the smells, wind, water and juddering chairs, one assumes…

Links to the rest of these articles:

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 1: Avatar

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 2: Paradoxes of Visual Knowledge

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 4: 3D or not 3D?

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 5: A Joyride to Nowhere?

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 6: Changing our Focus – StreetDance 3D

Yubari International Film Festival 2010

So here I am once more, seated in my customary position somewhere in the murky depths of south-east London staring at my face partially reflected in the monitor of my Mac. Wasn’t it always thus? It seems so, the past few weeks now reduced to a fragmented fever dream of regurgitated sense memories; floating faces from a previous life, flashing neon signs of alien characters, the repetitive blare of electronic melodies echoing through my subconscious. But no – the paper trail of ticket stubs in my back pocket and appointments jotted in the pages of my diary, the unpacked suitcase overflowing with dirty laundry, DVD screeners and chirashi one-sheets, and a camera memory card full of surreptitious snapshots seem to indicate that somewhere within the blur of the past month or so, I was there, back on the other side of the world again.

The main venue, the Adire Yubari

I don’t know why I always feel the need to make such disclaimers, but yes, I had originally intended to give regular updates on my movements during this last trip to Japan, if only for my own benefit as some sort of confirmation that I was actually there as much as to jot down my impressions on current developments within the Japanese film scene. Somewhere along the way however I was absorbed into the vortex, with barely a moment to draw breath between the stream of meetings, screenings, research sessions and barroom re-acquaintances with old friends. Even sleep was a rare luxury.

Nippon Connection's Alex Zahlten in the izakaya that served as the main main post-screening meeting point

This post, then, is the first of several, I hope, in which I will attempt to set down the salient points of my stay, beginning with my first weekend at the legendary Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival in Hokkaido. This isn’t intended as any sort of review or festival report. You’ll be able to find these from previous years on Midnight Eye, with Eija Niskanen’s piece on last year’s here and Tom Mes’ from the one before here. No, basically this is just an excuse for my to put up some of my photos from that weekend and assemble them into some sort of narrative.

Freezing at the saturday night stove party with Eija Niskanen

I’d been in Tokyo a couple of days before flying up to Hokkaido, the evening before spent back in a bar run by a certain pink director best known for his work in the 1990s. All this meant I didn’t get a huge amount of sleep before heading to Haneda airport at some ungodly hour on the morning of Thursday 25th Feb. Turns out I needn’t have bothered rushing as the flight was delayed by several hours due to the dense fog encircling Tokyo, so several hours were spent loafing around drinking coffee and saying hellos to all the others heading up north. These included such notable luminaries as director Nobuhiro Yamashita and actor Ryo Ishibashi, both of whom were sitting on the festival jury – as well as a whole swathe of festival staff members, casts and crews of the films playing there, and numerous others drawn to the buzz of one of the high-points in the Japanese movie world’s social calendar. My own reason for going, aside from the sheer joy of being there and looking out for some decent titles to introduce to England, was to participate in a panel discussion with two other Japanese film specialist programmers, Marc Walkow (NYAFF) and Alex Zahlten (Nippon Connection), about the overseas appreciation of Japanese cinema, which all went pretty swimmingly, I thought.

Hand-painted hoarding for Carmen Comes Home

Without saying too much about the individual titles that played at this years fest, which I’ll have ample opportunity to do over the coming months, my overall impression of YIFFF was that the overall emphasis was on the fun and the films rather than glitzy red carpet posturing (the various financial difficulties suffered over the past few years, not only by the festival but the actual town itself, have been well-documented elsewhere). Outside of the festival, Yubari town was quite an experience in itself. A tiny place about an hour-and-a-half drive from Sapporo otherwise better known for its melons and its now defunct coal industry, it consisted of little more than a couple of hotels and a handful of buildings surrounded by snowy mountains and linked by a main road covered in a thick sheet of ice that made crawling between its small selection of screens, bars, eateries and karaoke joints a pretty perilous experience.

Hand-painted hoarding for Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon

The other most noticeable thing about the town is that its streets are festooned with hand-painted classic film posters, both Japanese and western. This is a clearly a town that takes its cinema pretty seriously. Aside from skiing and melon farming, one can’t imagine there’s much more for people to do here other than watch films, although outside of the festival one imagines that opportunities to catch the latest releases on a big screen must be pretty limited. The eclectic programming mixed recent foreign hits such as District 9, The Hurt Locker, Sherlock Holmes and An Education and home-grown premieres like Tomoyuki Furumaya’s Bushido Sixteen and Shusuke Kaneko’s Bakamono- The Idiots with a host of modestly-budgeted jishu eiga titles, the best of which screened in the separate Off-Theatre section. The less said about the opening film, Surely Someday, the better. A puerile caper movie involving a boy band starring and directed by Shun Oguri (from Boys over Flowers, Crows ZERO), it did at least provide a welcome opportunity to catch some shut-eye. Elsewhere however, there were some great discoveries, with the premiere of Yu Irie’s 8000 Miles Part 2, the follow up to last years Off Theater winner 8000 Miles (the Japanese title Saitama Rapper gives a better indication of the film’s contents) capped off with a sprightly performance from its pert ensemble cast of girl rappers (comprised of Love Exposure’s Sakura Ando and the newcomers Maho Yamada, Fumi Sakurai, Kumiko Masuda and Mayumi Kato) providing an uplifting end to the Friday evening.

Onstage shenanigans from the cast of Saitam Rapper 2: Girl Rappers

It also soon became clear that in packing for my trip to Japan, I’d failed to appreciate just how damn cold it got in Hokkaido in March. Ok, so it wasn’t so much of an issue while watching films of course, but the walks between the various venues and post-screening drinking holes might have been a little less gruelling had I thought of bringing along a pair of gloves, at the very least. The Saturday night ‘stove party’, which followed a mind-blowing selection of ero-guro anime including Naoyuki Niiya’s revelatory kami-shibai workout, Man-Eater Mountain (Hitokui yama), was great fun, swilling down warm sake and feasting off charcoal grilled dear meat, octopus and scallops, although sadly the cold soon got the better off us and we beat a hasty retreat to the cosy Grace Karaoke bar for a lengthy singsong session.

Naoyuki Niiya's experimental kami-shibai movie Man-Eater Mountain

Christ knows what the place is like once all traces of the festival have gone, but it was clear that the locals definitely appreciated the massive influx into their town, and were the epitome of politeness and welcoming geniality. Lovely people. The cosy friendliness of the place was infectious, meaning that it was easy to rub shoulders with the other festival guests, including the highly-personable Ryo Ishibashi, and the legendary Johnny To, who generously treated all of the other guests to a farewell party at a local sushi restaurant. Yes, Yubari 2010 is a memory I am going to treasure for a long, long time, as it was one of the best film events I’ve ever attended in Japan. I pray I make it back again sometime in the not-too-distant future.

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2010/03/yubari/feed/ 0 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2010/02/japanese-films-with-english-substitles-at-athenee-francais-tokyo/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2010/02/japanese-films-with-english-substitles-at-athenee-francais-tokyo/#comments Tue, 23 Feb 2010 04:27:11 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=265 Just touched down in Tokyo yesterday morning and so far, touch wood, I don’t seem to be too afflicted by jet lag. Went for a quick spin around Shinjuku last night to re-acclimatise after so long away, picking up a couple of books in Kinokuniya including Yoshiko Yamaguchi’s autobiography Ri Koran o Ikite and a wonderful recent photo-book about Shintoho studios, before popping off to Shibuya with my kind hosts Karen and Koichi for some fodder, stopping at Tower Records on the way where I discovered my Behind the Pink Curtain proudly displayed in the book section. I couldn’t resist taking this photo…

Behind the Pink Curtain at Tower Records, Shibuya

I’m off to Yubari Film Festival this thursday where I will no doubt come across a whole host of new discoveries by young directors, which I hope to share with you by way of this site over the coming weekend. Popping out to an Ainu restaurant in Nakano tonight to prepare myself for my trip up north! My return to Tokyo next week seems to be rather serendipitously timed with a series of screenings of nine Japanese films with English subtitles at the Athenee Francais, a definite rarity around these parts which I shall be indulging in as fully as my schedule allows. Among more familiar titles such as Takeshi Kitano’s Sonatine and Naomi Kawase’s Hotaru (Kawase will be there at a talk event introducing her film next monday), as well as some classic titles I’ve not seen since I lived in Tokyo 5+ years ago – Hiroshi Shimizu’s Notes of an Itinerant Performer and Tai Kato’s brilliant By a Man’s Face Shall You Know Him there’s a couple of rare gems I haven’t seen before, including Kazuhiko Hasegawa’s Youth to Kill (Seishun no satsujinsha), Kohei Oguri’s Muddy River (Doro no kawa) and Hiroshi Inagaki and Masahiro Makino’s Duel in Takadanobaba (Takadanobaba no ketto). The series also includes free lectures from Aaron Gerow, Roland Domenig and Chris Fujiwara. Great stuff!

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2010/02/japanese-films-with-english-substitles-at-athenee-francais-tokyo/feed/ 0 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2010/02/eureka-to-release-imamura%e2%80%99s-profound-desires-of-the-gods-on-blu-ray-in-may/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2010/02/eureka-to-release-imamura%e2%80%99s-profound-desires-of-the-gods-on-blu-ray-in-may/#comments Sat, 20 Feb 2010 12:30:20 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=260

Imamura's Profound Desires of the Gods from Eureka

Just back at home a few days from a 10-day break in Kenya en route to my next stop on a work/research trip to Japan, and while I should be busy unpacking my shorts, swimming trucks and suntan lotion in exchange for clothing more suitable for the icy climbs of Hokkaido where I’ll be heading on Wednesday for Yubari film festival, I just couldn’t contain myself at the news, which reached me via the Wildgrounds website, that UK label Eureka are to release Shohei Imamura’s Profound Desires of the Gods on Blu-Ray in May as part of their Masters of Cinema series.

Profound Desire of the Gods

Yes, it’s slightly annoying that this is only on Blu-Ray, but on a more positive side, this is the first time that I’ve felt the Blu-Ray I’ve had hooked up to the HD TV for the past 9 months has actually been necessary. Imamura’s film is a beautiful-looking work, shot in vibrant colours in verdant, tropical climes, all in expansive widescreen NikkatsuScope. This is a film I’d been waiting to see ever since I first read about it about ten years ago while researching the Imamura chapter of The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film. It’s true, while I was living in Japan, I could quite easily have rented the VHS and watched it without subtitles, but from what I’d read, this film was so close to my own interests and tastes that I wanted my first encounter with it to be a little more special, which is the main reason for getting involved in the Imamura showcase at Bristol’s Arnolfini last October (see my thoughts on the retro), to actually bring a subtitled print across to the UK. Well, the film was everything I’d hoped for and more, from the bizarre opening sequence of a pig being throw into the sea as a sacrifice to be feasted upon by sharks to the coda set on the ludicrous tourist train, and caused much discussion with the other viewers at the Arnolfini after the screening finished. This is an utterly one-off work, and I am trembling in anticipation at seeing it up on a screen again. I can’t emphasize how much I love the films of Shohei Imamura. This is among the best, ranking in my books alongside Pigs and Battleships and The Ballad of Narayama. Imamura is pretty well-represented on region 1 DVD, but I just hope this Eureka release garners enough attention and excitement for further UK releases of his films. These really benefit from being seen as a large a screen in as high resolution as possible.

Profound Desires of the Gods

I do remember suggesting this title to Masters of Cinema quite a few years ago, so whether they took my advice, or were inspired by the Imamura season last year, or already had it under consideration anyway, I don’t know. I’m just ecstatic it’s imminent. Now its time to work on the next campaign to spread the word outside Japan about forgotten or unknown classics from forgotten or unknown filmmakers, and the next candidate is Susumu Hani, a director who I am quite flabbergasted that Western distributors or film curators have not picked up on yet. Following the Tomu Uchida season, Alex Jacoby and I pitched a retrospective of this figure to the British Film Institute, but didn’t get any response at all – the powers-that-be there obviously think it safer to stick with what they know, so we get Ozu and Kurosawa retrospectives again this year. Anyway, keep your eyes fixed on Midnight Eye, as you’ll find out plenty more on Hani there in the coming month or so.

In the meantime, as mentioned, I’m off to Tokyo tomorrow, and to Yubari Film Festival on Wednesday, from which I hope to post updates about the good films on offer there. I also hope to post a bit more on some other Eureka releases which I’ve not had time to write about yet, so I hope to be rather more active on this site than I have been over the past month or so.

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2010/02/eureka-to-release-imamura%e2%80%99s-profound-desires-of-the-gods-on-blu-ray-in-may/feed/ 3 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2010/02/nippon-connection-programme-taster-for-14-18-april-2010/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2010/02/nippon-connection-programme-taster-for-14-18-april-2010/#comments Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:42:45 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=258

As some of you may know, the start of 2010 for me has been a rather gruelling period spent finishing off another book manuscript which I’ll post details about on this website closer to its publication date. This is the reason why my posts during January have been rather sporadic, and are going to continue to be so for February, I’m afraid, as I’m going to be taking a well earned holiday before heading off to Japan at the end of the month for the legendary Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival in Hokkaido. I’ll post on my adventures from Yubari while I’m there. I’m going to be partaking in a panel discussion there with a couple of other guys who are also active in curating Japanese cinema programmes across the world, namely Marc Walkow of Outcast Cinema and Alex Zahlten of Frankfurt’s Nippon Connection, which should be a lot of fun. Which leads me on to this particular post, as Nippon Connection have just sent me through a taster of what’s in store this April, promising an end to this long dark winter of the soul.

Nippon Connection is the largest event devoted to Japanese film outside of Japan, and in fact, probably inside Japan too. This year’s festival celebrates its tenth anniversary between 14-18 April, with another impressive programme, which is set to include the latest from 9 Souls/Blue Spring/Hanging Garden director Toshiaki Toyoda, The Blood of Rebirth; Takashi Miike’s Crows II; Miwa Nishikawa’s Dear Doctor, the best Japanese film of last year according to the critics of Kinema Junpo magazine; actor Koji Yakusho’s directing debut, Toad’s Oil; Tekkon Kinkreet director Michael Arias’ live action debut Heaven’s Door; and many other titles.

I should also point out that beyond the big name titles on the press release, Nippon Connection boast a brilliant selection of independent work from first time directors, which always lead to some exciting discoveries. In previous years, they’ve presented the likes of Yasutomu Chikuma’s Now, I… and Tokachi Tsuchiya’s A Normal Life, Please, so there’s always plenty of fresh new gems to stumble across in its packed programme.

Just before I head off however, I’d also like to remind all UK Japanese film fans that the Japan Foundation UK’s touring programme is kicking off at the ICA on Tuesday 9^th February with six films going out under the banner “Girls on Film: Females in Contemporary Japanese Cinema” which will be also travelling to the following venues:

9 to 17 February – ICA, London

22 February to 4 March – Showroom, Sheffield (Except German plus Rain)

5 to 9 March – Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast (Except Non-ko)

10 to 14 March – Filmhouse, Edinburgh

13 to 21 March – Arnolfini, Bristol

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2010/02/nippon-connection-programme-taster-for-14-18-april-2010/feed/ 0 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2010/01/paradoxes_of_visual_knowledge/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2010/01/paradoxes_of_visual_knowledge/#comments Thu, 28 Jan 2010 11:07:02 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=246

James Cameron's Avatar

I’ve not been updating this site as frequently as I’d have liked over this past month, mainly due to having a rather hefty load of work to get finished. Still, as January rolls to an end, I thought it was time I got at least one more post out, especially as I’d left my discussion of Avatar at the end of last month dangling with the promise of more to come. The original plan was to take a look at another title to investigate in more detail the concepts of realism and spectacle in cinema. However, with James Cameron’s film now counted the highest-grossing of all time and a news report this morning that the broadcaster Sky is launching its new 3d channel this Saturday with a live Premier football match that will be beamed out to nine selected pubs across the country, I get the feeling that we could be discussing the virtues of 3d, CG graphics, and all the other issues raised by these technologies and where they’re taking us, for quite some time (even though I find the prospect of legions of footie fans across the nation settling down on the sofa wearing 3d specs rather unrealistic in itself). Heck, even Mayor of London Boris Johnson weighed in with a rather strange article about how people are struggling to cope with life in our recession-stricken capital in this dreariest of seasons after being immersed in Cameron’s world.

The film industry has always been driven by new technologies (sound, colour, widescreen, digital cameras are but a few), and one of my interests is in how these have shaped the form of its resulting products. So now seems as good a time as ever to begin exploring the question, what the hell is reality? I want to return to Avatar for the moment, a film that looks set to be honoured at the Oscars this year. First of all, lets ignore the quality of the story-telling. For me, Avatar was more than just an entertaining diversion in that it throws up all sorts of issues to think about, even though I don’t think its 100% successful in what it says. It is undoubtedly one of the reasons the film is proving so successful, if only due to word of mouth – it is a definitely talking point title, and I think it’s great that its getting people into cinemas, if only because the industry as a whole really needs this at the moment.

I don’t, however, think its going to have a lasting legacy in that all Hollywood action blockbusters are now going to add a third-dimension. One only has to look at the lacklustre reception to Roland Emmerich’s 2012 last year to realise that you can only go on making things bigger and more spectacular before the law of diminishing returns kicks in. Avatar gives us something new for the moment, but once 3d ceases to become a novelty, I think it will be difficult to justify the expenses of productions such as these unless there’s more to them than just the visuals. For the moment at least, however, I think a precedent has been set that will pave the way for other more inventive works, and for that reason, it is definitely the film of the moment.

Roland Emmerich’s 2012 - A 'flat' spectacle.

“Aha! But what more inventive works?” I hear you ask. Avatar seems to present us with a number of other ways to go, but I think if 3D is to be more than a gimmick, then new narratives or modes of expression will have to emerge to exploit the possibilities it provides. I’m intrigued by projects such as Wim Wender’s Pina, a dance film about legendary choreographer Pina Bausch (not sure what the status of this is now, since the death of Bausch, but there’s more on this film here). This could be one application of celebrating human movement within three dimensions.

As for the use of computer graphics, I find it a little disappointing that most animation always tries to emulate live action cinema when the medium has the potential to create any sort of world they can, by experimenting with presentational/representational modes. Of course, it is easy to indulge in pie-in-the-sky thinking about what could be possible, and obviously economic factors play a role. Due to the sheer costs involved, I don’t think cinema will ever see a complete break from its representational roots in the way that painting, for example, did at the beginning of the last century. The best example I can think of that experiments with these sort of ideas is Mamoru Oshii’s Tachigui: The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters from 2006, a fascinating film to analyse and meditate over, but I’m sure Oshii would be the first to admit it didn’t exactly set the box office on fire, and it is not what most people would desire from a good night’s worth of entertainment.

New forms? Mamoru Oshii's Tachigui

So anyway, as a critic of cinema rather than a creator, and as such not as dependent on its economic realities, you can consider me as playing something of the devil’s advocate in my opinions. But I think the next few years are going to be interesting in terms of what people are doing with these new technologies, so I think I’m going to continue with these posts for a while, using this website as a sounding board for my ideas. To this end, I’m posting the first half of an article I wrote a couple of years ago for the Deutches FilmMuseum’s Ga-Netchu! The Manga Anime Syndrome book, which was to lead into a discussion of Oshii’s film but was cut from the finished publication due to limits of space. I think it probably elucidates what I was driving at in my first post on this subject, and to some extent where Thomas LaMarre is coming from with some of the arguments he presents in Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. I look forward to hearing your feedback… (and if anyone could tell me how to put a damn space between this line and the next using WordPress, I’d be really grateful!)

Tunnel Vision: A Western Malaise

“It is well to remember that a picture before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.” observed artist Maurice Denis in 1890. As well as drawing attention to the role of aesthetics in art, Denis’ statement highlights the limitations of collapsing a three-dimensional scene onto a two-dimensional surface, something keenly felt by painters at the time.

Maurice Denis' Holy Women Near the Tomb, 1894

For over 500 years, the dominant form of pictorial representation in the West has been linear or fixed point perspective, developed by Renaissance artists and set in stone by the Classical painter and theorist Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72). Depth is signalled geometrically, with all lines converging towards a fixed point and distant objects appearing at a smaller scale than those closer to the viewer. Alberti’s observation that his paintings represented the visible world viewed as if through a window has led to this method being labelled Alberti’s Window, and it soon became the guiding principle for artists.

In his book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, British artist David Hockney hypothesises the widespread use of lenses and mirrors by Western artists from the Renaissance onwards to render nature more efficiently and realistically. Lens-based devices like the camera obscura and camera lucida allowed artists ranging from the Italian and Dutch schools, namely Caravaggio and Jan Van Eyck, to the Salon painters of the continental academic tradition like Bougeureau, to paint from a projected image rather than directly from nature, or at the very least, to use this projected image as a drawing aid. The use of optics accounted for the abrupt emergence of a new kind of pictorial realism that to the modern eye still appears almost photographic. It was marked by a greater sense of detail, especially in the rendering of light and shadow (chiaroscuro). Among the mountain of evidence Hockney presents is the close ties between painters and glass- and mirror-makers in the 15^th century (who in the Low Countries shared the same guild), the emergence of the ‘still life’ genre at this point, and that Vermeer was a close friend and neighbour of van Leeuwenhook, known for his work on lenses and microscopy. He also makes the analogy between artists’ studios, which employed assistants to aid in the image-making process in tasks ranging from mixing paint and arranging the scene to actually rendering parts of it on the canvas, and the image factory of Hollywood: painters such as Rembrandt were not the solidarity creative geniuses we might imagine, with a role akin to film directors today. The difference was that, rather than the mass market, the artist was reliant upon the patronage of the Church or powerful political figures, who thereby effectively controlled the creation and distribution of images.

Camera Obscura

That there are ruptures contained within the works Hockney discusses with what would have emerged had the artists adhered entirely to the rules of classical perspective indicates the distorting effect of the lens, specifically with regards to issues of lighting, depth of focus and relative scale. For example, the fragmented non-Euclidian space or “wrong perspectives” (as opposed to the Euclidian space of “correct” geometrical perspective) art historians have detected in Flemish painting is attributable to the scene being reproducing from different viewpoints, with the lens re-focussed to take in the various figures, objects and details contained within the tableau. In effect, the works are a collage of multiple ‘exposures’; the scene as viewed from a number of different windows within the one main window. Moreover, linear perspective alone would never have allowed even the greatest of painters to depict the detailed patterns following complex contours like the folds on the clothes of their subjects.

Look, the heads are the wrong scale - Jan Van Eyck's Madonna of Chancellor Rolin , c. 1435

Optical methods presented a sense of realism that was compelling and, as the technology advanced, evermore expedient. In the 1820s, photography emerged, allowing the projected image to be fixed permanently by chemical means. Eadweard Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope and the advent of cinema followed at the end of the 19^th century to create the illusion of movement from the synthesis of its constituent parts. In addition to the two-dimensions of the screen, within the moving image a third dimension was introduced, but it was not depth, it was time. Still, the dynamism of the moving camera brought about its own changes in our understanding of space and of objects’ positions in relation to one another, both in the physical and temporal dimensions, and thus a different conception of reality. However, this new cine-realism was still constrained by the monocular viewpoint of the camera lens. Furthermore, cinema is an ephemeral phenomena. Its individual elements exist only as they are projected, at a rate now standardised at 24 frames a second.

Muybridge's horses, 1878

Human perception does not work in the same way as the camera. We have two eyes, and the images that fall upon the retinas are seldom static. Perceptually, humans are active participants in their environment, never mere passive observers. Our knowledge of the world is build up through complex processes, with the body and both eyes actively moving through nature. These physical processes are transformed into experience, as the perceiver constructs an internal mental model of the external world. In interpreting a scene, the eyes dart around the salient details of line and form, in what is termed by psychologists as saccadic movements. This is why we don’t immediately notice the “wrong perspectives” in Flemish painting, as our eyes flick over the different parts of the picture, and also why we accept, though never entirely believe, the simulacrum of cinema.

As the photographic image became more widely distributed, artists began to question and eventually break away from the static ocular centrism that had dominated Western presentations of the world since the Renaissance. The lineage of Modern painting can be traced from the Impressionists and post-Impressionists like Paul Cezanne, through Cubism (on which Hockney, as an artist, himself draws upon in his multiple-perspective photo-collages) to abstract art’s complete break with representation. These movements explored the quandaries presented by recreating a solid object on a flat canvas; the difference between “seeing” and “knowing” the world, and breaking it down into its aesthetic atoms. But in the age of mechanical reproduction, they couldn’t hope to compete with the tunnel vision presented by the photographic snapshot or the moving pictures, which were easier to produce and to circulate, and more attuned to the demands of consumerism.

David Hockney's Mother I, Yorkshire Moors, August 1985 #1

Whether the image was moving or not, the emergence of the new consensual reality brought about by its mass circulation during the twentieth century had profound social and political ramifications. Through photographs, cinema and its more pervasive small-screen relation television, it became the primary mode through which people experienced the world beyond their immediate environs. “The camera never lies,” goes the maxim, leading to Jean-Luc Godard’s famous quote that “Cinema is truth twenty-four times per second” (though he later added the caveat “Every edit is a lie.”)

We rarely doubt the lens’ vision, but perhaps we should, as Hockney challenges us: “Look through an old stereoscope and ask ‘where am I?’ You are in a black void looking out. Alberti’s window seems to be a prison. Has photography pushed the world away? Has it done something to our view of the world? The optical projection dominates the world, but it is only one way of seeing, and one that separates us from the world. This might not have been a problem six hundred years ago, but it is a very big problem indeed NOW.”

Links to the rest of these articles:

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 1: Avatar

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 3: Welcome to the Feelies

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 4: 3D or not 3D?

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 5: A Joyride to Nowhere?

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 6: Changing our Focus – StreetDance 3D

Jun Ichikawa's How to Become Myself

Posting for the first time in 2010 from an icy, snowbound London, I wanted to pass on details about this year’s touring programme across the UK from the Japan Foundation, for which, as I have done for the past few years, I acted as advisor. This year’s selection of six films is themed ‘Girls on Film: Females in Contemporary Japanese Cinema’, and runs from 9 to 17 February at the ICA in London, before heading off to other venues, details of which I’m providing below. Copying the blurb about the tour from the JF UK’s website:

“The Japan Foundation’s 2010 touring film programme looks at contemporary Japanese cinema made for, about, and, in some cases, by women. Touring to five venues during February and March, the programme is composed of works from the past few years and showcases how Japanese contemporary filmmakers, from the very established, such as the late Jun Ichikawa, to young and promising filmmakers, like Satoko Yokohama, approach the issues facing women and adolescents. This season also includes works by female directors, reflecting the exciting trend of a marked increase in the number of female directors working in the Japanese film industry. This is a unique collection of films not to be missed!”

Naoko Ogigami's Kamome Diner

I’ll also be giving a talk at the London Office in Russell Square to introduce the season, at 6.30pm on 4 February 2010. It’s free (and usually a few drinks involved too), but you’ll need to book with the Japan Foundation first. More details here.

The tour line up is as follows:

Fourteen (Ju-yon-sai, Hiromasa HIROSUE, 2006)

German Plus Rain (German + Ame, Satoko YOKOHAMA, 2007)

How to Become Myself (Ashita no watashi no tsukurikata, Jun ICHIKAWA, 2007)

Kamome Diner (Kamome shokudo, Naoko OGIGAMI, 2006)

Non-ko (Nonko 36-sai, Kazuyoshi KUMAKIRI, 2009)

Asyl: Park and Love Hotel (Pâku ando rabuhoteru, Izuru KUMASAKA, 2007)

Izuru Kumasaka's Asyl: Park and Love Hotel

And the dates:

9 to 17 February – ICA, London

22 February to 4 March – Showroom, Sheffield

5 to 9 March – Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast (Except Non-ko)

10 to 14 March – Filmhouse, Edinburgh

18 to 21 March – Arnolfini, Bristol

I’ll no doubt be posting up reminders and more details, as they arrive, throughout this month. You can find out information on some of these titles on Midnight Eye of course. Anyway, for most of the films, this is the first time they’re playing in the UK, so I really hope to see you at the screenings or the introductory talk, and please, spread the word!

Kazuyoshi Kumakiri's Nonko

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2010/01/japan-foundation-uk%e2%80%99s-annual-touring-programme-announced/feed/ 0 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/12/happy-new-year/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/12/happy-new-year/#comments Thu, 31 Dec 2009 09:04:30 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=236 I’m going to be away from my computer for the next few days, so wanted to post my best wishes for the coming year to everyone before I go. 2009 was quite an adventure, travelling to various parts of the world with my pink film programme following the publication of Behind the Pink Curtain. I don’t think 2010 is going to be quite the same whirlwind of activity, which is something of a relief as I could do with some time to catch my breath, but there’s still plenty of exciting projects in the air at the moment, which of course I’ll be announcing on this website as and when I have news about them.

In the meantime, I just wanted to say a big thanks to all those who have supported me with their friendship and encouragement, and everyone who has bought my book and come to my film screenings. I would however like to say a big special thanks to Michelle Thomas, for her love and support, to Harvey Fenton, for publishing my book, to Tom Mes and the rest of the writers who’ve continued to make Midnight Eye such a success, to Tun and Fei, for creating this website, to Graham Humphreys for my wonderful portrait, and to the following who’ve invited and hosted me during my various jaunts across the world: Alex Zahlten, Holger Ziegler, Marion Klomfass and the rest of the folks at Nippon Connection in Frankfurt, as great this year as it’s ever been; Monika Haas at the Deutsches Filmmuseum for bravely hosting the pink retrospective there; everyone at Fantasia, but in particular Pierre Corbeil, Mitch Davis and Stephanie Trepanier; the lovely people at the Cinematheque Quebecois, especially Karine Boulanger; Chris Magee and James Heron, my partners in crime for the new Shinsedai Film Festival in Toronto, all the volunteers and staff of the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre who made it such a success, and Polly for providing a cosy bed to stay in during my visit; Madam Miaow herself, Anna Chen; Lefteris Adamidis and everyone at Thessaloniki International Film Festival; all the Japanese guests who made Raindance such a pleasure this year, and all those labouring behind the scenes who made it happen – my endless thanks goes to Sayaka Smith for her delightful company and her selfless willingness as an interpreter; Junko Takekawa at the Japan Foundation UK (details of the 2010 touring season will be announced on this website soon); Al Cameron of the Arnolfini, host to the Bollywood for Beginners and Pigs, Eels & Insects: Reassessing the Legacy of Shohei Imamura seasons; Susie Evans at the Barbican; Mark and Maddie at the Watershed; Sarah Acton at the Cube Microplex; and all those in the Japanese film industry, sales agents, filmmakers, producers and everyone who helped bring Japanese cinema to the wide world – I’ll see you all when I’m in Tokyo sometime very soon.

I look forward to seeing all of you over the coming year, but for now, thanks again, and have a brilliant New Year’s Eve!

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/12/happy-new-year/feed/ 0 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/12/cinematism-realism-and-spectacle-part-1-avatar/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/12/cinematism-realism-and-spectacle-part-1-avatar/#comments Tue, 29 Dec 2009 13:53:38 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=231

Like many of us, I’ve been indulging in my fair share of festive film-watching this past week, both catching up on some of the year’s more important titles and looking back to past gems. As the decade draws to a close, it would be difficult not to give some mention of the talking-point title of the holiday season, James Cameron’s Avatar, although having just come more or less fresh from it, I’m not sure quite what to make of it in terms of its self-touted status as a landmark in film history. For the first 40 minutes or so, I was absorbed in the immersive detail of its alien world, before the sheer idiocy of the story loomed into the foreground: one-dimensional characters and plots in a three-dimensional world. There’s no need to go into too much detail regarding the story, as I’m assuming many of you have already seen it, and if not, you’ll probably already have heard that it’s a banal hotchpotch of Pocahontas, Dances with Wolves, Princess Mononoke and Fern Gulley – yes, the soundtrack even includes pan pipes. The end impression, however, was something akin to how I felt coming out of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within or Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake. All very impressive, yes, but just how significant is it in the long run? Will we still be talking about the film in a couple of years, and just how will it play on the small screen?

Just as the Final Fantasy film did, Avatar got me thinking about technology and cinema, this time primed by the fact that I’m currently absorbing the implications contained within the opening chapters of Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation , Thomas Lamarre’s fascinating and perceptive look at how technology has influenced the form and content of Japanese animation, and basically THE book I’ve always been waiting for on the subject. One of the axioms of Lamarre’s argument is that cinema’s development has been shaped by its technology, the movie camera, which allows movement in three dimensions, and enforces a strictly rational viewing mode upon the world, that of vanishing point perspective, whereas the basic machinery from which animation is constructed, the animation stand, provides a very different means of lending the illusion of three dimensions to its images, with the camera shooting from a fixed position and the way that the individual layers of cels are composited to work with one another just as, if not more important than the actual drawings upon them. He labels the differences cinematism, a dynamic, cine-realistic interpretation of the world, and animetism, an aesthetic unique to anime born of the machinery that produces it. Both, however, are only means of arriving at representations of the world: artists and psychologist have been arguing for at least the past century that this is not how humans actually perceive their environment.

Of course, the use of digital technologies over the past 20 years has revolutionised the way animation is made, and its aesthetic, but I think it is particularly interesting that Japanese animators have made judicious aesthetic decisions to either reject computer technology for the very purposes for which it is most suited (i.e. movement in depth), as is the case of Hayao Miyazaki, or explore other ways of representing ideas with it, the best example of which being Mamoru Oshii’s The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters. After all, why use a purely man-made medium that is so intrinsically non-rooted in reality to emulate the lens-based reality that has so defined the last century?  I’ve written about this phenomenon in some depth, notable in a series of articles for the magazine 3D World, and in my chapter “Between Dimensions: 3D Computer Generated Animation in Anime”, included in Ga-Netchu: The Manga Anime Syndrome published by the Deutsches Filmmuseum back in 2008, although due to word-count constraints in this publication was not able to pursue my ideas as much as I would have liked. My basic view is that cinema of any description always requires a suspension of disbelief. Cinematic realism (cinematism) is only one way of representing the world, and total onscreen realism is a straw man. The more you strive for cinematic realism, which in the case of animation means adding more visual detail and more dynamic movement within three dimensions, the further you depart from reality, or the more you draw attention to the unreality of cinerealism. The new vogue for 3D cinema only emphasizes these points.

The visual aesthetic in Avatar attempts to dazzle with its spectacle. That is its purpose, and perhaps I’m being unfair, it is its only purpose. It has always been thus with Cameron – think Terminator 2. He delights in showing us what is possible at the cutting edge of technology. We are to be as much impressed with the machinery behind what’s onscreen as what’s onscreen itself. Avatar’s tragedy, perhaps more so than Final Fantasy, is that it fails to find its own unique form within its technical possibilities. It is pure cinematism. There was a brilliant article by Ben Walters and Nick Roddick earlier this year in the March edition of Sight and Sound, entitled “The Great Leap Forward” that looked at some of the considerations that filmmakers working in 3D need to consider; rapid editing forces the viewer to change their focal point quickly, leading to headaches, but also jolting them out of the onscreen world, while in contrast, long moving shots make one feel very much part of it. It brings about its own set of problems too – just where does one put the subtitles along the depth plane? Nevertheless, there is still a sense of liberating potential about the new technology, if used inventively, to revolutionise film aesthetics and the way we experience cinema. Rather than constructing action sequences by editing together lots of short, explosive shots to create the illusion of an impossible, dynamic hyper-realism, perhaps the new aesthetic should be a return to longer, more fluid sequences that fully exploit cinematic depth, focussing on the created worlds and how, by way of proxy through the characters who inhabit them (our avatars), audiences interact with them. For a while Avatar managed this. I revelled in every magical detail of the lush jungle planet environs of Pandora. But then it was back to fiction once again.

Form and content are inextricably linked, a factor which animators as diverse as Mamoru Oshii and the talents at Pixar seem to understand perfectly. It doesn’t help that from a narrative point of view, Avatar’s corollaries with real-world events are too obviously silly; an alien race whose blue reptilian skin and flattened noses serve as indicators of their otherworldly status (though their bare, body-painted torsos and Maasai braids seem rather closer to home) sitting on vast resources of the precious resource unobtainium (you couldn’t make this stuff up) are infiltrated and subsequent invaded by mechanized, militarized cartoon-evil humans with America accents. We’re firmly rooted in la-la land here, with nothing to take back home to reality with us. It’s all about about as heartfelt as the ersatz anti-Neocon tract of one of the daftest films of the decade, Eagle Eye. The underlying message is that war, imperialism and explosive violence may be bad things, but nevertheless, they provide the building blocks for a certain kind of action cinema born out of the 1980s, one in which bodies can fall hundreds of metres without so much as bruising, in which whole worlds are created only to be destroyed, and we can all go home with the cosy feeling that it was all only a movie, only a movie, only a movie…

Avatar was unfortunate to have been preceded into theatres this year by Coraline and Up, neither of which can be described as “realistic” in the same sense as current conceptions of “reality” – the reality of  cinema and computer games – and yet which, adopting a more simplistic visual style, were far more convincing, far more immersive in their story-telling and their action sequences, and far more attuned to the aesthetic considerations brought about by the addition of an illusionary third dimension. For me, both ranked among the best of the year, fully cinematic experiences that I will treasure for a long time. James Cameron’s fascist aesthetic feels more like an evolutionary dead end than the the future of cinema, which for me seems to be better represented by Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker , and it’s evident that if the resurrection of 3D is to be any more than just the gimmick it was in the 1950s or its brief revival in the 1980s, then its possibilities must be used more inventively. I think I’ve already reached the saturation point where I won’t go and see a film just to be dazzled by the 3D unless it can do something new, a state I reached with CG animation in the ake of Toy Story around the time of the appearance of Ice Age. I’m less excited by Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland than Takashi Shimizu’s The Shock Labyrinth, because I think that given his Juon films, Shimizu’s handling of depth and shadow to create shock and suspense are going to result in something that I haven’t seen before. In the meantime, I adhere to the belief more strongly than ever that cinema is a delicate smoke-and-mirrors balancing act between what you show and what you don’t. By showing us everything from every conceivable angle, Avatar leaves no room for the imagination, making us painfully aware that actually there’s nothing really there.

Links to the rest of these articles:

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 2: Paradoxes of Visual Knowledge

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 3: Welcome to the Feelies

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 4: 3D or not 3D?

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 5: A Joyride to Nowhere?

Cinematism, Realism, and Spectacle part 6: Changing our Focus – StreetDance 3D

Hikari Mitushima in Momoko Ando's Kakera - A Piece of Our Life

Some rather joyous festive season news courtesy of Third Window Films. The company has just announced that is has acquired UK theatrical and DVD rights for Momoko Ando’s touching debut, Kakera – A Piece of Our Life. As has been mentioned on these pages several times, the film played to great aplomb at this year’s Raindance Film Festival back in November, with Momoko in attendance for two sold-out screenings along with former Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha, who contributed the film’s score. It was greeted with a similarly enthusiastic reception at Stockholm Film Festival and Kinotayo in Paris, where Momoko was awarded the ‘Prix Nikon de la Plus Belle Image.’ The film opens in London on April 2^nd 2010, coinciding with the Japanese release, although there will be a premiere in London the week before this, which I’m rather hoping that Momoko Ando will be over for.

This is probably as good a time as any to correct a piece of misinformation that somehow crept on to the Raindance website and has found itself replicated on the Internet Movie Database, but Kakera was directed and WRITTEN by Momoko Ando – the credit for Yuko Shiomaki is incorrect, so I hope this gets changed on the IMDB sometime soon. Momoko  is the daughter of the famous actor-director Eiji Okuda, and sister of Sakura Ando, one of the most exciting new actresses to emerge from Japan in recent years. Sakura can be seen in Yuki Tanada’s Ain’t No Tomorrows, but also in Love Exposure, which Third Window put out theatrically a month or so ago to an overwhelmingly positive critical response. Love Exposure and Kakera also share the same actress, Hikari Mitsushima.

Still on the subject of Love Exposure, other news from Third Window is that this films DVD release has been put back a fortnight to January 25^th, although it is still up for Amazon pre-order.

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/12/kakera-%e2%80%93-a-piece-of-our-life-up-for-uk-theatrical-release-in-april/feed/ 0 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/12/kore%e2%80%99eda%e2%80%99s-still-walking-gets-a-uk-release-next-month/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/12/kore%e2%80%99eda%e2%80%99s-still-walking-gets-a-uk-release-next-month/#comments Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:04:20 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=220

Hirokazu Kore'eda's Still Walking (Aruitemo aruitemo)

One of my high points of Thessaloniki was Hirokazu Kore’eda’s Air Doll (Kuki ningyo), a film I’d managed to miss during its screenings at this year’s Cannes and London Film Festival. I didn’t post anything on this website about it nearer the time, as Tom Mes had already written his review for Midnight Eye, but I will add my voice to the chorus of approval and say it is one of the director’s finest, maybe his best since After Life (Wandafuru raifu, 1998). I know Tom isn’t usually the world’s biggest Kore’eda fan, but personally I’m always intrigued to see what this fascinating director comes up with next, because he’s someone who is not afraid to take risks. True, his experiments don’t always come off – I’m thinking mainly about Distance here, but at the end of the day, no Kore’eda film looks like another, nor do they really seem to bare any comparison with films by other directors, and you can’t say that about many filmmakers working at the moment.

Air Doll (Kuki ningyo)

Air Doll seems particularly fresh. Based loosely on a manga by Yoshiie Goda, this tale of a sex doll who inexplicitly comes alive bears obvious comparisons with the basic story of Pinocchio, but it’s a far deeper and darker tale than that, as Nozomi attempts to learn what is means to be human in a world populated by people who seem to have long forgotten themselves. Kore’eda directs with a breathtaking simplicity that gels perfectly with the story and characters, and that seems a far remove indeed from his more characteristic explorations of cinematic form.

Still Walking

Anyway, I’m certainly glad I caught this in Greece, as not only is it one of the finest Japanese films of the year, but I’m also wondering if I’ll get a chance to see it again. There was a time when there was space in the UK film market for films like Kore’eda’s, but now I’m not so sure. Outside of festivals, none of his works since Nobody Knows (Dare mo shiranai) have circulated British cinemas, and I haven’t really had much of a chance to keep up with what he’s been up to. So I was overjoyed to hear that his previous film Still Walking (Aruitemo aruitemo), has been picked up for UK distribution by New Wave Films. I popped down to the press screening last week and it made me revise my opinions as to whether Air Doll was Kore’eda’s finest since After Life, because this too is an amazing piece.

Still Walking

Again, I’m not going to cover it in too much detail here, as this film too has been covered on Midnight Eye in a review by Roger Macy, but I just wanted to jot down a few thoughts here. Firstly, as I mentioned, Kore’eda’s films don’t bear much comparison with one another, so there’s no point judging it along the same lines as Air Doll. That said, while it is a very different film on the surface, it does explore similar territory, depicting a world in which people seem to have forgotten how to communicate with one another.

Still Walking

Still Walking’s has courted strong comparisons with the home dramas of Yasujiro Ozu, but while descriptions of modern Japanese films as “Ozu-esque” often come across as more than a little trite, here they seem particularly apt. Tokyo Story (Tokyo monogatari) is the obvious touchstone, as three generations gather for a family reunion one summer’s day at the house of a retired doctor and his wife to commemorate the death of their son, Junpei, some fifteen years before. The main difference is, that while Ozu’s bitter-sweet tale sees the older generation virtually ignored during their trip to stay with their offspring who are too wrapped up with their jobs and daily lives to spend any time together, here it is the older generation who seem completely insensitive to the feelings of the younger generation. Curmudgeonly father Kyohei spends much of the day holed up in his study, occasionally emerging to aim a provocative remark at surviving son Ryota, who is keeping his recent unemployment secret from his parents, while Kiki Kirin steals the show as the mother Toshiko, who spends the whole day cooking and plying everyone with food while tossing out barbed, hurtful asides at Ryota’s new wife, a widow with a young son. The film unfolds virtually in real time, with Toshiko’s culinary ministrations depicted with the same exhaustive detail as Saturday Morning Kitchen, her often banal babble expressing very little; what is left unsaid speaks volumes.

Still Walking

The eye for nuance and detail within the perfectly-observed mundanity of its setting, a legacy of Kore’eda’s documentary background, results in a touching, funny, and often rather tragic portrait of family life that anyone can identify with, and at times will have you squirming with recognition. Still Walking is a brilliant film that will undoubtedly get brilliant reviews. The film is playing at the British Film Institute next month on an extended run, as one of a series of films included in the season Ozu and His Influence, which will also provide a rare opportunity for viewers to see some of Ozu’s films from the 1930s. Anyway, I’m not sure to what extent it will be playing in other parts of the country, but if you can’t catch it at the BFI, then I certainly advise you look out for the DVD, because take my word for it, it’s a beautiful work that will appeal to everyone.

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/12/kore%e2%80%99eda%e2%80%99s-still-walking-gets-a-uk-release-next-month/feed/ 0 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/12/on-annual-best-of-lists/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/12/on-annual-best-of-lists/#comments Mon, 14 Dec 2009 10:24:49 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=210

Sacha Gervasi's Anvil! The Story of Anvil

It’s that time of year again – Not only a dwindling number of shopping days till Christmas, but floods of annual “Best of…” lists sprouting up all over Facebook, specialist film websites, and the rest of the print and broadcast media, as well as a couple of solicitations for my own favourites. Anyway, the appearance last week of my top five films of 2009, published alongside numerous other international critics in the January issue of Sight & Sound (which for some reason has me based simultaneously in France and Japan – the reality of my actual existence in Southeast London is rather less exotic!), got me thinking a bit.

Henry Selick's Coraline

One thing I want to say about 2009 is that I saw a hell of a lot more films than I have for quite some time. Another thing I would add is that in general, the quality and diversity of what I managed to see was far higher than 2008, not only Japanese films but also those from other parts of the world, including mainstream Hollywood. Trying to whittle down the best into a mere five titles was quite problematic. For example, the rennaissance of the 3D format can be considered one of the most significant developments of the year, but while I was blown away by Pixar’s Up, I was only marginally less impressed by Coraline, a darker, smaller film, but also one which made great use of the aesthetic possibilities of working with an extra dimension to the screen (and I haven’t even had the chance to see James Cameron’s Avatar yet!) So, do I put both films in my top 5, or should I also recognise that there were some great works of an entirely different nature – hard-hitting documentaries such as Afghan Star or The Cove; edgy offerings from the farther flung reaches of world cinema, like Chile’s quite unforgettable Tony Manero, Russia’s Morphia or Egypt’s Heliopolis; noble arthouse titles like Michael Winterbottom’s Genova or Jane Campion’s Bright Star; genre fair like Nacho Vigalondo’s Time Crimes, Ben Wheatley’s Down Terrace or Buddy Giovinazzo’s Life is Hot in Cracktown; my top Japanese tips like Hirokazu Kore’eda’s Air Doll or Hajime Kadoi’s Vacation; punch-the-air Hollywood rollercoasters like District 9 or Drag Me to Hell; and what about the strong tide of Oscar hopefuls from earlier in the year that included Gus Van Sant’s Milk or Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire? Yes, there certainly were a lot of films out there in 2009.

Havana Marking's Afghan Star

There’s a few points I want to make about this. Firstly, as I’ve said, five films isn’t really enough to cover all the corners I’d like to have, so in my final Sight and Sound list several worthy titles got nudged aside to make room for others of a similar genre or tone. Secondly, there were a couple of titles which impressed me on an initial viewing, but I had the chance to catch a second time and were less impressed by. Thirdly, the atmosphere one catches a film in is pretty critical – if you’re surrounded by all the hubbub of a film festival, you’ll probably have a different view of a film than if you’re sitting in a near deserted press screening or watching a DVD screener for review purposes or, heaven forbid, you’ve actually paid to see it. Fourthly, I haven’t had a chance to see a lot of the more critically-lauded titles myself yet, like Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman or Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. Fifthly, do I recommend films that others might have seen or will at least get a chance to see, or do I try and point people to more obscure titles? Who’s reading the list anyway? If I checklist an obscure Chinese indie like Panda Candy, will there be a distributor out there who’ll prick up their ears and look to see if it’s worth acquiring? Probably not… Will the average reader be able to track it down? Hmmm…. And finally, related to this, is the question of release dates. To take but one example, I saw Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In last year and already included it in 2008’s list, but it was only released in the UK this Spring. It was the same story with Laurent Cantet’s The Class, though I didn’t see it at a festival, but on DVD after its UK release this year, so included it in 2009’s list. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata I caught during a press screening at the end of last year, though it was released in January, so by the time it came to the end of this year, it was almost a dim and distant memory, while Hirokazu Kore’eda’s Still Walking was released in Japan last year, when it also played London Film Festival, but is only getting a release next year in the UK – ditto for Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo on the Cliff. If I saw them last year, should I include them this year, or make room for more recent films and wait until next? For other more obscure titles, do I wait on the off-chance they get a broader release in the UK, or just include them anyway?

Hirokazu Kore'eda's Still Walking

You’ll have to buy Sight & Sound to see what I finally did plump for, or wait a few months to see my round-up of the year along with the other contributors for Midnight Eye – for the reasons I’ve given above, the lists will probably be fairly different. I’ve seen a lot of good titles since I originally submitted my Sight & Sound list in mid-November, including a whole pile at Thessaloniki, and perhaps by the end of the year I’ll have a different perspective on what was hot and what was not. All I will say is that I’m not going to confuse matters by adding a third list here on this website.

Nacho Vigalondo's Time Crimes

But the final point I would make is the same one that was made in the article accompanying the Sight & Sound list – there’s a vast amount of really good stuff out there at the moment, and individual critics can only go by what they saw, as well as being influenced by their own tastes and areas of expertise. The whole film market has changed vastly over the past ten years. There’s a lot more choice out there, and many titles come and go so quickly that by the time you’ve made up your mind to see them in the cinema, you’ve probably missed them, while converselty, within 6 months of the hype of the Oscars or Cannes, the bigger titles of the year might already be available for a fiver at HMV. It’s almost tragic.

Pablo Larrain's Tony Manero

In such an environment, the role of the professional film critic looks increasingly precarious. What should a major newspaper’s film editor choose to focus on when there’s upwards of ten films released every week and only space to cover a handful? The latest Harry Potter or Twilight film or an obscure Eastern European, Asian or South American title that probably won’t play outside of a single-screen in London? I can think of three Japanese films that got great reviews this year in the UK popular press – Tokyo Sonata, Departures and Love Exposure – but each got a very small release window, rarely more than a week and usually on only a handful of screens.

So in this context, the whole concept of an annual Top Ten has changed. Rather than representing a canon of titles that might be seen as classics in the future, they merely give a glimpse of what’s out there, and leave it to viewers to follow the advice of the critics they tend to agree with. It’s all a matter of personal taste after all. And best thing now out there is that you do have the chance to see these on imported DVDs, film festivals, Video on Demand sites etc. Critics now must serve a different role of instead of telling you what’s the best from a given week’s selection, to point you in the direction of what’s of interest in the swirling sea of images being produced all over the world.

Hajime Kadoi's Vacation

On a related note, I’m sure no one has failed to notice that we’re approaching the end of the first decade of the 21^st century. Mark Schilling has already published his fascinating survey of the Japanese industry’s fortunes in the Japan Times, which demonstrate a number of trends equally applicable to the UK market. I’ll probably be posting my own highlights of the past decade, Japanese and non-Japanese, both here and elsewhere. But, I think I’ll wait till the year’s out first, and I’ve had time to gain a bit more perspective on what the really significant trends of the noughties really were.

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/12/on-annual-best-of-lists/feed/ 3 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/12/pioneering-woman-pink-director-sachi-hamano-interviewed-by-electric-sheep/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/12/pioneering-woman-pink-director-sachi-hamano-interviewed-by-electric-sheep/#comments Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:01:35 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=208

Sachi Hamano in London (photo by Fei Phoon)

Raindance seems like aeons ago, and I’ve still not got round to transcribing most of the interviews I conducted with our Japanese guests this year. Don’t worry, you’ll be getting a chance to read these in the not-too-distant future on Midnight Eye, but until then, you can make do with this interview with Sachi Hamano which has recently been put up on the website of Electric Sheep magazine. I covered Sachi Hamano in quite some detail in my book Behind the Pink Curtain. For those not familiar with her name, she’s not only the most prolific woman film director in Japan, but also one of the most (if not the most) prolific pink film directors, which probably makes her among the most prolific filmmakers in the world, male or female. It was a real honour to have her at Raindance this year as one of the people featured in the Japanese Woman Directors programme, where her non-pink comedy Lily Festival played to great aplomb, and I am delighted that Electric Sheep’s Virginie Sélavy recognised Sachi Hamano’s achievements in the industry and wanted to talk to her, as the interview makes for quite fascinating reading. As I’ve posted before, Electric Sheep also interviewed another Raindance guest, Momoko Ando, which went online last month. I should also point out that the photo of Hamano was taken during her stay in London by Fei Phoon, one of the whizz kids behind the design of this website.

On a sourer note, the latest print edition of Electric Sheep appears to be its last, at least in its current form, with the editors attributing the gloomy financial climate to its demise. Its very sad, because Electric Sheep plugged a valuable gap in the film media, giving intelligent coverage to films that weren’t necessarily getting covered elsewhere. The website will continue, as will the editors’ admirable attempts to broaden film culture with regular screenings in London of films that you rarely get a chance to see on the big screen nowadays. Anyway, you can pick up the Winter 2009 issue at a good magazine stockist, if you can find one – I was going to suggest Borders on Charing Cross Road, but it was just announced a couple of weeks ago that Borders UK has just filed for administration. One wonders if any of us in this country are going to get out of this recession in one piece!

Leonid Bichevin as the morphine-addicted country doctor Mikhail Alexeivitch Poliakov

I had hoped to have completed my series of reports on the standout films I caught at Thessaloniki some time ago, but have been otherwise occupied with work, illness, hangovers and various other commitments for the past fortnight. Anyway, for my last posting I want to return to the final film I saw, the Russian film Morphia. Now, anyone who has seen any of director Aleksei Balabanov’s previous works might well appreciate that it would be difficult to describe this particular title as ending the festival on a high note. His previous film, Cargo 200 (Gruz 200), a morbidly disquieting look at the mistrust and insecurity of the pre-Perestroika Soviet Union set against the backdrop of the invasion of Afghanistan, must surely lay claim to ranking amongst the top 10 feel-bad films of all time, while Of Freaks and Men (Pro Urodov I Lyudej, 1998), probably his best known title in the West, was a startlingly original, sepia-toned tale of a wealthy aristocratic household in St Petersberg at the turn of the 20th century as it is infiltrated by the corrupting influence of a pair of low-life pornographers who immediately take a shine to the pair of Siamese Twins who live there. Words like ‘subversion’ or ‘abjection’ don’t even begin to cover Balabanov’s darker work, so I knew there wouldn’t be too many people filing out of the Olympion by the end of Morphia with huge grins spread across their faces – in fact, one audience member had to be carried out, not even halfway through proceedings. I, however, have rather a soft spot in my dark heart for Balabanov’s grim vision, and was certainly not disappointed with this latest title.

Burn the Bourgeoisie! Balabanov's Morphia

The basic through-line of Morphia is simple: a young doctor, Mikhail Alexeivitch Poliakov (Leonid Bichevin) is posted to a ramshackle hospital in a godforsaken ice-bound provincial village, where he begins his miserable decent into morphine addiction as the events of the October Revolution of 1917 gradually make their impact across the country. As in Of Freaks and Men, the various scenes are broken up with intertitles, like a silent film, to cue you up for what is to come. An early example the “The First Injection”, signposts the beginning of Poliakov’s secret habit, after an allergic reaction to the dyptheria vaccine he takes following a failed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a local patient dying of the disease.

Ingeborga Dapkunaite as Nurse Anna

It quickly becomes clear that Poliakov is not a particularly accomplished doctor, dashing upstairs to consult his medical texts when expected to deliver a breech birth, giving the excuse to his nurses that he is going to fetch his cigarettes – Morphia, it should be mentioned, is often quite comic, in a particularly black sort of fashion. It was about ten minutes after the “The First Amputation” intertitle that a desperate, audible gasping was heard from the back of the auditorium, the lights came up and the film was stopped for about ten minutes, as the viewer who had fainted was escorted out of the screening, I think the first time I’ve ever witnessed such a thing. Depicted in unflinching detail, the amputation scene primed everyone for the worst for the rest of the film, so much so that after the “The Tracheotomy” title came up, I spent the next ten minutes gazing at my hands, shaking. I haven’t seen an audience so traumatised since Miike’s Audition at Rotterdam Film Festival all those years ago.

Poliakov entertained by his aristocratic neighbours

Grim as it may be, there’s more to Morphia than just a shocking parade of gruesome surgery sequences punctuated by Poliakov’s increasingly desperate drug taking. While deceptively simply staged, the film is beautifully shot in dingy washed-out greys and greens, with a great eye for the period. A night-time sleigh-ride as the doctor is lost in a blizzard, pursued closely by wolves, is one of the most memorable pieces of cinema I’ve witnessed in a long time.

The revolution arrives in town

Morphia is based on the semi-autobiographical stories of Mikhail Bulgakov, adapted by Sergei Bodrov Jr., who acted in several of Balabanov’s earlier films including Brother and War, and who had planned to make the film himself before his death in a rockslide in 2002. Some more blasé critics have dismissed it as “just another addiction film”, but I really loved the mood Balabanov creates here, like in his previous films, conjuring up a particularly grim and unappealing vision of Russia and its past. I was chatting to a Variety journalist a few days before the screening who told me that Balabanov has quite a cult following among young audiences in his own country. Personally I’d love to see a full retrospective of his work over here, because I’ve been mightily impressed with what I’ve seen so far.

Into the Fifth Kingdom

Visitors to this website who’ve checked out the ‘about’ section in recent days will no doubt have noticed that the old photo of myself has now been replaced with this original piece of commissioned art, which I think I’m going to call ‘Into the Fifth Kingdom’. Painted by Graham Humphreys, a friend of mine since way back when, it combines my passion for Japanese cinema and my side interest in the mycological world, with my own fungal photographic snapshots rendered in oils in a design inspired by the great Ishiro Honda monster movie Matango: Fungus of Terror (1963).

The Evil Dead UK quad poster

Graham’s iconic work should be well-known to genre fans. Most will recognise the distinctive designs from his original UK poster artwork for Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead and Nightmare on Elm Street, the cover for The Cramps’ Off the Bone album and the brochures for London’s Frightfest. More recently he also worked on the DVD inlay designs for Tartan and Nucleus Films. Anyone interested in commissioning their own unique work of art from this legendary figure can approach him directly through his website, through which you can also order prints and other original pieces of art. Check out the canvasses section for some great Doctor Who inspired pieces!

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/12/196/feed/ 7 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/11/thessaloniki-flashback-part-4-the-happiest-girl-in-the-world/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/11/thessaloniki-flashback-part-4-the-happiest-girl-in-the-world/#comments Fri, 27 Nov 2009 18:10:28 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=186

Family Fortunes: Romania's The Happiest Girl in the World

One of the notable strands of Thessaloniki is its Balkan Survey section, which this year featured 15 films from countries including Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovenia and Turkey, often co-productions with other European industries such as France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland (and in the case of one, Katalin Varga, with a British director at the helm, Peter Strickland), as well as a focus on Serbian director Goran Paskaljevic (Time of Miracles). It’s an area I know next to nothing about, so I was really looking forward to exploring its cinema, but at the end of the day, regrettably, I only caught one film, which is a double shame, because Romanian director Radu Jude’s The Happiest Girl in the World (Cea mai fericita fata din lume) was perhaps the freshest, most memorable work I saw during the festival.

Radu Jude’s The Happiest Girl in the World (Cea mai fericita fata din lume)

Now, cynics might argue that with substantial funding from the Netherlands, films such as The Happiest Girl in the World, like the European-financed Iranian titles that we get to see in the West, do not perhaps give the truest portrait of life in the country where they are filmed, nor reflect local viewing habits, but instead skew their reality to fit the tastes of foreign festival or arthouse audiences (Just a quick note following on from the comment  posted below by the film’s producer; at 10% of the budget, the funding from the Netherlands can’t really be considered that ‘substantial’ – I stand corrected). There might be something in this, but there’s a couple of points that are worth bearing in mind. Firstly, with the relatively small populations of most of the countries in the Balkan region (although with 21 million people living within its borders, Romania is considerably larger than others in the area, with Bucharest the sixth largest city in the European Union), many of the local industries face considerable difficulties maintaining their share of the local market and are reliant on such co-production deals. Secondly, while this particular film offers a critique of the rampant consumerism of a country in which free-market economics is still a relatively new phenomenon, the predicament of Delia Fratila, the unlikely heroine of The Happiest Girl in the World, shouldn’t be too difficult for most viewers to identify with.

Vasile Muraru delivers some fatherly advice to Andreea Bosneag

The film naturalistically documents a particular traumatic day in the life of its 18-year-old protagonist, a day which, by rights, should be cause for celebration. Delia has just won a car in a national competition held by a refreshments company after sending in three juice-bottle labels, and arrives in Bucharest with her parents in tow from the small rural town where they live. Like the other winners she gets to star in the company’s new advertising campaign, appearing alongside her prize while glugging from a bottle of orange juice while delivering the lines “I’m the happiest, luckiest girl in the world.” As soon as she arrives on set however, she starts bickering with her parents, who wish to sell the car and invest the profits in a guest house.

Violeta Haret and Andreea Bosneag

This is basically all there is to the film, which unfolds virtually in real time, as Delia is not only subjected to the haranguing of her domineering mother and father, but as the fading light ups the pressure to wrap the shoot, the director of the advertisement, who in turn is struggling to get his job done under the watchful and often disruptive gaze of the marketing agents that commissioned the campaign.It might sound like a slender premise, but the performances, particularly Andreea Bosneag’s beleaguered central turn, make for surprisingly compelling and often laugh-out-loud-funny viewing, as Delia is forced to perform take after take after failing to deliver her lines with the necessary gusto or fluffing them completely under the stress. Halfway through, someone notices that the orange juice drink doesn’t look suitably, well, ‘orange’, and so the insipid-looking tartrazine-yellow liquid is adulterated with a dash of Coca Cola for the cameras.

The glamorous life of Delia Fratila (Andreea Bosneag)

It’s the basic simplicity of the idea and the mise-en-scene that really impressed me, with most of the action unfolding on the shooting set in the heart of town; one assumes that  most of the people milling around in the background must have thought that a genuine commercial was being shot, not a dramatic feature. For me, this is one of the must-see films of the year. It has already played a number of festivals across the world since its premier at Berlin in February – yes, Toronto again, but also London Film Festival and Bristol’s Encounters, about the same time as Thessaloniki, which shows that there’s a print in the UK at the moment, and its undoubtedly gearing up for a bigger release over here. Ok, so Romanian films might not exactly be everyone’s idea of mainstream entertainment, but anyone with a genuine interest in cinema and its numerous possibilities will most certainly want to check this out.

The Happiest Girl in the World

Interest parties can watch the trailer on youtube and read an interview with the director from its Toronto screening on IndieWIRE.

Iris Berben and Katharina Schüttler in Susanne Schneider’s The Day Will Come (Es kommt der Tag)

Five days back in the bitter chill of London and Greece is already beginning to seem like a distant memory. Nevertheless, I still have a couple more films I want to revisit from Thessaloniki before moving onto other things. One of the things about festivals is that, after a number of days of rapacious film-viewing, you begin to notice certain themes or trends emerging in your habits. By the end of the first weekend, I’d realised that over half the films I’d watched were from German directors, mainly due to the choice of Fatih Akin’s multi-cultural comedy Soup Kitchen as the opening night screening and the exhaustive Werner Herzog retrospective. The first Herzog film I caught which I hadn’t seen before, the hypnotic 1989 TV documentary Wodaabe: Herdsmen of the Sun also highlighted another trend at the festival, which was the number of films either set or made in Africa. The Egyptian film Heliopolis I looked at in some length in my last posting, but there was also Sherry Horman’s Desert Flower, based on the best-selling memoirs of Somali supermodel Waris Dirie, the Belgian/French co-production of The Day God Walked Away (Le jour où Dieu est parti en voyage) directed by Philippe Van Leeuw, whose portrait of a young woman caught in the midst of the 1994 Rwandan genocide earned Ruth Nirere the best actress trophy, and Chasing Moses, a well-meaning but otherwise truly execrable offering set in Nairobi from local boy Alexandros Konstantaras – I don’t want to be too cruel as I understand the director’s motives for this amateurish camcorder atrocity was to give Kenyans a chance to star and participate in the making of a feature, but really, this was not film festival material, and to be honest, there are filmmakers in Kenya already making far superior works to this (for example, Michael Wanguhu’s excellent documentary on the new Kenyan hip-hop scene, Hip Hop Colony from 2006).

Anyway, back to Germany, a country that seems to be coming out with a lot of really interesting stuff at the moment. Susanne Schneider’s The Day Will Come (Es kommt der Tag), actually a co-production with France, also highlighted another trend in the festival, films about terrorists, also the subject of Koji Wakamatsu’s docudrama United Red Army and Filipino director John Torres’ experimental (and somewhat self-indulgent) montage of observational footage shot in Manila and Berlin, Todo Todo Teros (2006), screened as part of the Philippines Rising section. Schneider’s film bears little relation to either of these aforementioned titles, neither concerned with reconstructing the facts of true-life events like Wakamatsu’s recent masterpiece or fellow-German Uli Edel’s slickly superficial and quite unsatisfying The Baader Meinhof Complex from last year, nor a more conceptual examination of what is meant by the word ‘terrorism’ as Torres’ film. Instead it’s a character study, centred around a proud middle-aged woman, Judith, whose radical activities in the 1970s forced her to disappear off to France where she has now forged a new life living on a family-owned vineyard in the Alsace region with a French husband and son and daughter. When her daughter, Alice, abandoned as a child when Judith went underground to avoid police capture, turns up on their doorstep incognito, she is forced to confront her past.

An awkward family gathering in The Day Will Come.

I have to admit, I didn’t go into The Day Will Come with the highest of expectations, probably in part due to the rather unmemorable title, which had me referring to it as “that German film” whenever it came up in conversation during the rest of the week. The film isn’t interested in detailing the true-life activities of the German red movement of the 1970s, and starts off slowly. Just as it picks up and we’re geared into expecting a very European style of psychological suspense thriller in the vein of, say, Francois Ozon’s Swimming Pool, the film suddenly moves into more interesting territory as it lays open its themes of guilt, self-justification and inter-generational conflict, with a standout scene where Judith’s aged bon-vivant in-laws turn up unexpectedly for a family lunch in which Alice threatens to expose her estranged mother’s skeletons in the closet constantly threatening to career off into Mike Leigh levels of catastrophic awkwardness.

Iris Berben confronts the past in The Day Will Come

One of the most interesting things is the Alsace setting, a formerly German-speaking area of France. Even though the film doesn’t really emphasize the political motivations of Judith’s peers, she does state that theirs was a rebellion against the wartime complicity of her parent’s generation, “everything we despised incarnate”, before railing against the self-absorbed complacency of her iPod generation children who’ve never had to fight for anything and addressing the wartime resistance activities of their French grandfather as a case where underground activity is perfectly justifiable. This is something that so many seem to people forget when they violently denounce street demonstrations and political activism – back in the Edwardian period there was little support for the suffragettes, and nearer in time in the 1980s, police regularly clashed with Anti-Apartheid demonstrators, yet who today would deny women the vote or suggest that black South Africans should be treated as second-class citizens in their own country? There is a fine line between when youthful idealism tips into violent or criminal activity. Mercifully, The Day Will Come doesn’t invite us to make easy judgements on its characters, opening up arguments about the validity of the more extreme actions of the the New Left movement of the 1960s and 1970s at a time when so many of us are content to sit shrugging our shoulders impotently in the face of world events.

Katharina Schuttler as the abandoned daughter Alice

I’m not sure whether The Day Will Come has much in the way of distribution as yet. Like several of the titles at Thessaloniki this year, it played at Toronto International Film Festival in September: you can read a little more about it here. It’s a deceptively-simple slow-burner of a movie, but incredibly compelling and thoughtfully constructed with some great performances, especially Katharina Schuttler as Alice, which earned her a special mention from the jury. One of the bests of the fest for me. I hope it gets the opportunity to screen more widely.

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/11/thessaloniki-flashback-part-3-the-day-will-come/feed/ 0 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/11/thessaloniki-flashback-part-2-heliopolis/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/11/thessaloniki-flashback-part-2-heliopolis/#comments Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:34:23 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=173

Hotel receptionist Engy (Hanan Motawe) talks to friend in Heliopolis.

While I’m still on my Mediterranean buzz, with the words of Durrell still ringing in my ears, I thought I’d focus on my next pick from Thessaloniki, Heliopolis (Masr El Gedida), an Egyptian film written and directed by Ahmad Abdalla. I think it would be fair to assume that most reading this won’t be too clued up on Egyptian cinema. I certainly know I’m not. I do know Egypt boasts a sizeable commercial industry that makes films primarily for local consumption, with little if any pitched at the Western art house market. I know also that it’s been going for some decades, probably longer than anywhere else on the African continent. I also know, because I learnt this at the Q&A with the director and lead actor Khaled Abol Naga after the screening, that currently it is almost entirely entertainment-driven, and that Heliopolis is very rare example of independent production in Egypt. That’s not to say that its a cheap, low-budget offering. In fact it’s an incredibly polished looking piece that actually came about through a voluntary collaboration between a number of major stars and accomplished technical figures in the industry (the director’s background is in editing) all united with the desire to make the type of film that the mainstream couldn’t, or rather wouldn’t, support.

Heliopolis director Ahmad Abdalla

I liked Heliopolis a lot. It presented a portrait of the city of Cairo and its inhabitants that I’d never imagined, modern, sophisticated, yet facing an uncertain future while gazing wistfully back at the past. It was moving, insightful, and more than a little melancholic. The multi-threaded narrative charts a day in the life of a number of different characters: a hotel receptionist who dreams futilely of living in Paris, a young couple about to set up home together as they joylessly shop for domestic appliances, a security guard who secretly befriends a stray dog for company while he stands alone in his sentry box, a doctor frustrated by red tape in his attempts to get a visa to move to Canada, and a university student, Ibrahim, researching the personal histories of the city’s ethnic minorities.

Khaled Abol Naga as Ibrahim

It is this latter strand that is the main theme of Heliopolis, which takes its title from a suburb of Cairo built by the Belgians in 1905. Once a thriving melting pot where Europeans, Egyptians, Jews and Armenians mingled freely, it stands as a microcosm for the whole country in which only traces of this cosmopolitan past remain. I should say that I’ve never visited Cairo, and that the impression I always got about the city from other people is that it is a dusty, sweltering, chaotic and exhausting place. My experience of Egypt is limited to a cruise down the Nile from Luxor to Aswan, both places that look like they’ve enjoyed considerably better days, and, returning to Lawrence Durrell, reading the four books in The Alexandria Quartet.

Modern Love: Newly engaged couple Maha (Aya Soliman) and Ali (Atef Yousef)

The image of modern Cairo presented in Heliopolis really drew my attention to this discrepancy between how I’d imagined the country through Durrell’s prose than through the reality I encountered in the more arid regions of my last trip. The film nostalgically harks back to this time when Egypt was a far more multi-cultural country than it is today, before the Europeans left en masse following Nasser’s assumption of the presidency of the country in 1954 (the events of Mountolive, the third book in The Alexandria Quartet, serve as a fictionalized allegory for the 1956 Suez crisis and touch upon the rise of pan-Arab nationalism during this period). Nasser was seen as bringing about a new era of modernization and social reform, but fifty years on, there are many in the country who seem to be questioning where it has all led.

Looking to the past: Khaled Abol Naga

This is not just some colonialist reading of the film on my part. This was a point that was emphasized during the Q&A, when Ahmad Abdalla and Khaled Abol Naga were joined on stage by a respected Egyptian film critic (whose name, unfortunately, I didn’t catch), who directly posed the question just what exactly was the revolution that brought Nasser to the world stage for, stating that modern Egypt, however you define the term ‘modern’, is more insular and less progressive-looking than it was back in the 1950s. There’s a scene in which Naga’s character Ibrahim is stopped while capturing the disappearing older parts of the city on video camera to form a visual archive, and ordered to cease filming by the police due to ‘anti-terrorist laws’. The consumerist paradises where the young couple shop for a new fridge are austere and near-desolate compared with these older, more vibrant areas, as the melting pot of the original Belgian district succumbs to modernity to be replaced with anonymous, gated enclaves for the city’s wealthier citizens. And the overall tone of the film is that each of the characters is stuck in the endless purgatory of their daily lives with little hope for the future.

Hanan Motawe

I was a little surprised that the rather scathing view of contemporary Egyptian society presented in the film, not to mention sub-stories in which several of the characters try to hook up with a local drug dealer, hasn’t fallen foul of the censors, but apparently it screened fairly widely on its home turf and has also played the Middle East International Film Festival in Abu Dhabi – it also showed at Toronto and Vancouver festivals just before Thessaloniki. It’s undoubtedly a political work, though the exact nature of its politics might be lost on audiences coming to it without the historical context provided by the Q&A. On another level though, I found the characters compelling, and their lifestyles, predicaments and general frustrations with their lots not a million miles away from those of any other major city-dweller. It was certainly intriguing enough to pique my curiosity and inspire me to learn a little more about Egypt, and also to keep my eye out for other films of its ilk, as it seems that there is a genuine desire among filmmakers there to make films outside of the commercial industry which have more to communicate than just mere entertainment. I hope the film will travel beyond the festival circuit, and advise interested parties to check out this interview with Abdalla on indieWIRE.

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/11/thessaloniki-flashback-part-2-heliopolis/feed/ 0 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/11/thessaloniki-flashback-part-1-samson-delilah/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/11/thessaloniki-flashback-part-1-samson-delilah/#comments Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:35:54 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=162

Inside and Out: The Olympion Theatre as projection space

Whisked back from beneath the limpid Aegean skies to my humdrum day-to-day existence on the more austere side of the European Union, I’m reminded of the words of Lawrence Durrell in Balthazar, the second book in his Alexandria Quartet: “We live lives based on selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time, not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.” It’s not to difficult to appreciate the huge influence Greece had in Durrell’s own fiction, but one wonders what he would have made of this year’s Thessaloniki International Film Festival, which was inaugurated exactly fifty years ago, around the time he wrote these words, and drew to a close last night. I think he might have liked it. The wonderful selection of films from across the globe gave an impressive insight into the various lives lived in such far flung reaches of the world as Australia, South America, Somalia and the Philippines, and in this context, the question “Why Cinema Now?” that served as the tag-line for its 50^th anniversary and whose text formed part of the montage of images projected across the facade of the impressive Olympion Theater, seemed particularly well posed.

The madding crowd, outside the John Casavettes screen.

Like many avid consumers of world cinema, I often feel I live in a different reality from the many whose opinions are informed by the more pervasive voices of the dominant mass media rather than the more rarefied world inhabited by the film curator and habitual festival-goer. What can we possibly understand about the daily lives of, say, an Australian aborigine, the middle-class metropolitan population of Cairo or those who were caught in the midst of the Rwandan genocide if the only windows on to the rest of the world we ever have access to are the increasingly conservative medium of television, the weighted voices of news pundits, or the mass entertainment opiates that overwhelm our cities’ cinemas and video rental and retail outlets?

Why Cinema Now? Festival poster at Thessaloniki airport.

The global film industry is going through a funny phase at the moment. While technological advances mean there’s more films being produced across the world than at any other time (especially in countries without well-established industries), the current crisis in distribution, in part due to this large number of films out there at present, means that many of the titles I am about to mention will largely go unseen outside of the festival circuit, which is a shame. In all other ways, we are far better connected with each other than ever before, but not only are opportunities for large groups of strangers to meditate together on visions of distant lands within a shared communal space rapidly dwindling, even finding information about what is available is a vast challenge. There were plenty of films screened at the festival that wouldn’t have looked out of place in London’s arthouse cinemas about ten years ago. Now, sadly, I’m not so sure this is the case.

The main pier forms an atmospheric hub for the festival.

Thessaloniki’s unique geographical position as a nexus between the European Union, the Middle East and the Balkan States, its cosmopolitan cultural mix and its long and influential history no doubt had a huge bearing on the selection of the films that screened there. True, some of these have played other international festivals already (a couple of titles came straight from last month’s London Film Festival), but the general impression I had was that more room was made for those films that reflected the general tastes and ambiance of the area rather than titles from, say North America or Western Europe. (A great film though it may be, the typically grimy British socio-realism of Samantha Morton’s directorial debut The Unloved seemed to attract fewer bums on seats than some of the other films in competition). Unfortunately, while Greece’s main festival was initially established to showcase the national cinema, for various political reasons which I won’t detail here, a large number of the country’s directors decided to boycott Thessaloniki this year, so the local product wasn’t so well reflected.

The poster for Blue Film Woman, part of the popular Beyond Pinku Eiga programme.

The competition results were announced last night: for more details you can check out the winners on the Variety website. I’ll have to confess I didn’t see many of these, but given that all the titles that competed are to be screened over the next two weeks in 17 cities throughout Greece and the amount of media interest generated by the guests who attended, it seems that Thessaloniki is a pretty good place for any filmmaker to showcase their work. For the ten days of the festival, there were films playing simultaneously in every one of the six screens, and the level of attendances was really quite staggering. There were a number of times I couldn’t get into the screenings I wanted, but on the flipside, one has to applaud any festival that can get in over 100 people to watch a double bill of Blue Film Woman and Gushing Prayer that started at midnight on a Friday night. The Beyond Pinku Eiga programme that presented my raison d’etre for being there was hugely successful – and I wish to say a big thanks to Lefteris, Myriam, Natasha and the rest of the Independence Days staff who made it all happen and who made my stay so pleasurable. There’s a brief article in Variety about this program too, but I’ve said enough about pink films over the past few months, so instead I’d rather focus on some of the other standouts from my trip.

Still time for sightseeing: in front of Aristotle statue

Coming back from any festival that boasts such an overwhelming amount of material presents a chance to bemoan what one has missed and celebrate what one saw. I probably caught about 20 films in total, while also making good use of my non-viewing time to do a bit of sightseeing and enjoy the city and probably the last bit of decent sunshine I’ll get to experience over the next six months. Over the coming days I want to write a bit about my favourites and hope that in some small way my words might shine a light on films that you might not get a chance to hear about otherwise.

Cannes Camera d'Or winner Samson & Delilah

The first truly great title I caught was Samson & Delilah (film website here), Australia’s shot at the Best Foreign Language Film for the 2010 Academy Awards. Yes, that’s right, foreign language – it’s perhaps too easy for us on the other side of the world to forget that Australia does have its own indigenous population, but the other thing one might note about Warwick Thornton’s film is there’s precious little in the way of any dialogue at all. Samson & Delilah really caught me by surprise. The one thing about focussing on Japanese cinema is that most of the festivals I get invited to focus primarily on either Asian film or genre/cult material. Until now, I’d assumed that The Horseman or Coffin Rock were the best contemporary Australian cinema had to offer. I’m happy to have been proven wrong.

Warwick Thornton's Samson & Delilah

Samson & Delilah is set in a remote aboriginal community in the Northern Territories (it was filmed near Alice Springs) and follows the relationship between a young man and woman, the Samson and Delilah of the title, in an environment that offers little in the way of hope or even basic material comfort. Samson might not be most girls’ dream date, but nonetheless, he’s the best on offer, and given the options in life afforded to him, one wouldn’t expect him to be any different. Initially resistant to his crude advances, the death of her grandmother leaves Delilah with little other place to turn, and their life together as they leave their tiny community soon descends into a nightmare of petrol-sniffing, poverty, hunger and homelessness. The early scenes detail the two protagonists’ mundane lives in their community in wordless detail and with a Groundhog Day-like monotony. Despite the miserable trajectory of their existence, the nuanced performances balance delicate moments of humour with considerable pathos. Like the best of the films I aim to cover from the festival, this is a story that if written down would appear slight and inconsequential. It masterfully harnesses the unique ability of cinema to convey emotions and ideas in images, and by doing so transcends the limits of the medium. Aside from the beautiful cinematography, the one thing that really stood out for me was the adroit use of sound. I remember little in the way of background music, but instead the emotional intensity of the scenes are underscored by the use of natural sound: for example, the scene in which Samson finally loses his rag with the Verandah Band that play continuously outside his bedroom unfolds in a screech of amplified feedback as he attacks the guitarist. It comes as little surprise to hear that Thornton’s credits as director, writer and DOP on the film sit alongside another credit, as a composer. He and sound designer Liam Egan have clearly worked very closely together to achieve such a remarkable synergy of sound and image, resulting in a remarkable work of visual storytelling in which dialogue is all but redundant.

Samson & Delilah

Samson & Delilah won the Camera d’Or for best first feature at Cannes Film Festival this year, and also played London Film Festival. A French release is imminent, and a UK release planned for earlier next year. So regardless of what I said earlier, this at least is a title that will get the wider audience it so deserves. At least one Australian critic has labelled it “the best (some would say the first) Australian film yet made”, and I for one am inclined to agree with him. A week and half since I saw it and it is still vividly and indelibly burned into my brain.

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/11/thessaloniki-flashback-part-1-samson-delilah/feed/ 2 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/11/greece-is-the-word-mid-fest-thoughts-on-thessaloniki/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/11/greece-is-the-word-mid-fest-thoughts-on-thessaloniki/#comments Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:51:10 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=161 It’s been quite some days since I touched down in Thessaloniki, and as is the usual case when you arrive at a new festival in a strange city, it has taken me a few days to find my feet and put some of my thoughts up. Well, this was always going to be something of a busman’s holiday so constant updates were never really on the cards, but I had intended to write perhaps a few posts at least.

I’m here for the full 10-day stretch, and aside from a few introductions, don’t have many duties, so it’s a great excuse to watch films that I usually wouldn’t get a chance to experience and to enjoy a new city. I’m feeling a bit discombobulated at the moment, as most of the filmmaking guests are only staying a few days, so for example Koji Wakamatsu has already gone after appearing over the weekend to promote United Red Army here, and several of the lively group of Philipino directors, including the charismatic Khavn de la Cruz, also departed in the small hours of the morning. I guess a fresh load of new faces will be arriving over the coming days.

I think the relatively relaxed atmosphere of the city has encouraged a certain lethargy in me after such a hectic couple of months, and while I’m catching a lot of films, I’m also catching up on a fair amount of sleep too, despite the fact that the screenings for the Beyond Pink sidebar I helped with all begin after midnight – things keep going pretty late here, and though its a bit of a pain having to stay up so late while remaining relatively clear-headed, its no real hardship and I’m really impressed with the level of interest these films are getting. For example, last night saw Wakamatsu’s Secret Acts Behind Walls playing alongside Noboru Tanaka’s Watcher in the Attic on two of the five screens used by the festival, and both were more or less full, making this the most successful by far of all the pink retrospectives I’ve worked on across the world since the book came out.

Thessaloniki International Film Festival is the first time I’ve ever been to Greece, something that’s always been of a mystery to me as having grown up reading the books of Lawrence and Gerald Durrell, and John Fowles’ The Magus, the country has always seems cosily familiar without my ever having visited. Somehow I always knew I’d love it, the food, the relaxed pace of life (the Rough Guide to Greece describes it as ‘sybaritic’), the sense of such a deep-rooted underlying history and culture. The city feels at once familiarly European, but somehow slightly more exotic than other Mediterranean countries I’ve visited like France, Italy Spain, for example. I guess Thessaloniki’s geographic situation, right in the northeast of Greece in the region of Macedonia accounts for its rather special atmosphere, reflected in its strong programming of Balkan cinema. Its the country’s second largest city and a major port, yet not too touristy. The people are very friendly, with some of the most striking-looking women in the world, and the prices are cheap. Festival or no festival, I know I’ll be back to this part of world pretty soon.

Time prevents me writing too much about the actual films at the moment, and I’d also wanted to post some of my photos, but annoyingly forgot to bring my connection lead to download them to my computer, so this will have to wait till I get back to London next week. One thing that did dawn on me though was that in the first few days, most of the films I’d seen were from Germany. There’s a complete Werner Herzog retrospective, with Herzog arriving in town for the next weekend, allowing me to catch up on some of his lesser-known documentaries that I’d probably not get a chance to see elsewhere. Fatih Akin’s Soul Kitchen was quite an inspired choice for the opening screening. True, it’s comedy was fairly laboured at times, but its easy going charm and story of a Greek immigrant in Germany’s attempts to keep his restaurant going against all odds went down well with local audiences here while presenting a positively multi-cultural image of Europe that would have had Robert Kilroy-Silk weeping. Another very powerful German film was The Day Will Come, a story about a former 1970s activist who disappears underground after abandoning her daughter, and finds her past catching up with her and her new family who run a vineyard in Alsace, by the German border. This film received its premiere hear in Thessaloniki, and was a really pleasant surprise.

Lots more other strong works too: I’ll write later about Samson and Delilah, this year’s Australian contender for the Best Foreign Language Oscar (although its Aboriginal characters actually barely speak at all), the polished Egyptian indie Heliopolis, and Dennis Villeneuve’s Polytechnique, a Montreal-based equivalent to Gus Van Sant’s Elephant. Right now I’ve got to dash and watch a film….

Momoko Ando in London

It’s only been about a month, but it already feels so long since Raindance that I was going to hold back for further news about festival guest and juror Momoko Ando’s debut feature Kakera – A Piece of Our Lives. For those who weren’t there for the screenings in London, I can promise there will be more postings here about it sometime in the near future, including an interview at some point on Midnight Eye, into which I’ll integrate some of the comments from the q&a with Momoko and ex-Smashing Pumpkin James Iha during their trip to the festival. I know Momoko Ando herself is heading off to Sweden to present her film as part of the Asian Images section at Stockholm International Film Festival, held 18–29 November, and to Paris for the fourth Kinatayo festival of contemporary Japanese film, held during the same period. No doubt there’ll be more screenings at other festivals over the next year too, and UK audiences should also be getting another chance to see it before too long.

To whet your appetites, I wanted to draw your attention to an interview with Momoko by Eleanor McKeown of Electric Sheep, the first of several conducted at Raindance that will appear on the magazine’s website over the next month or so. Japanese readers might also be interested in checking out Momoko’s own account of her trip to London on her blog.

Lala Pipo, playing at the ICA, London from November 13th.

Momoko Ando’s sister, the actress Sakura Ando also has a new film out in Japan sometime next year, Kenta to Jun to Kayo-chan no Kuni (trans. Kenta, Jun and Kayo’s Country) – the website and trailer are now online. Sakura, if you haven’t cottoned on by now from my various postings, can be seen right now on London screens in Shion Sono’s Love Exposure, putting in a sterling performance as the cult leader Koike, with the film promising to pop up at various future junctures in the UK over the next few months, including screenings at The Cube in Bristol and the Eden Court Theatre in Inverness according to the website of UK distributor Third Window Films. And while I’m on the subject of Third Window Films, their next release, Lala Pipo – A Lot of People is also out very soon, opening at the ICA on November 13th. This film was also part of my Japanese selection at this year’s Raindance, all of which brings us nicely full circle…

Koji Wakamatsu's United Red Army

The buzz surrounding Koji Wakamatsu is spreading across the globe at quite a pace at the moment. I’d like to think that Behind the Pink Curtain had something to do with all this, but the reality is that it is the other way round – I have benefited immensely due to the release of the finest film of Wakamatsu‘s career, and arguably the most important Japanese film of the decade, United Red Army, coinciding roughly with my book’s publication last October. The film is screening in the Cinemafamily theatre in LA this very evening, to be followed by a handful of  classics from his pinku eiga period in the 1960s, and French viewers already have the first in a series of box-sets of his work out there on DVD.

Masao Adachi's Gushing Prayer

My next Wakamatsu-related announcement is something I have had a hand in though, a special selection of pink and Roman Porno films that will be screening at the 50th Thessaloniki International Film Festival. The eleven chosen titles will be shown as part of the PINKU EIGA: BEYOND PINK programme in the Independence Days section, which I put together with critic and festival programmer Lefteris Adamidis. Films to be screened include Kan Mukai’s Blue Film Woman (1969), Masao Adachi’s Gushing Prayer (1971), Mamoru Watanabe’s Secret Hot Spring Resort: Starfish at Night (1971), Tatsumi Kumashiro’s Woods Are Wet (1973) and a selection of Noboru Tanaka films, including the rarely-screened Beauty’s Exotic Dance: Torture! (1977).

Kan Mukai's Blue Film Woman

I’m going to be heading over to the festival at the end of the next week, which I’m really looking forward to, as I’ve never actually been to Greece before. I hope to pop up a few posts while I’m there. Most exciting of all is that Wakamatsu himself will be coming to introduce United Red Army and three earlier films, Secret Behind the Walls (1965), Running in Madness, Dying in Love (1969) and Shinjuku Mad (1970). I’ve met him on several occasions before, twice at Frankfurt’s Nippon Connection, who have long championed his work, and one particularly surreal night over a drink in a bar in Tokyo’s Golden Gai – I think by now he’s realised I’m not the same person as that certain French Wakamatsu fan who directed Irreversible!

Koji Wakamatsu's Running In Madness, Dying In Love

Anyway, its going to be really interesting to see how these films go down with a Greek festival audiences. Several of the programme’s titles I’ve already screened in London, Montreal and Frankfurt, but this will be my first chance to see the new prints of Running in Madness, Dying in Love (1969) and Shinjuku Mad (1970) on a big screen, to me two of his most interesting works, (they’re also playing in LA – so if you see them, feel free to post your comments on them)  and am looking forward to catching United Red Army again.

Koji Wakamatsu's Shinjuku Mad

Hopefully this is the first of many airings of Wakamatsu’s films across the world, now that they’ve been newly subbed for foreign distribution (one of the reasons the director was so woefully underrepresented at last years Wild Japan season of Japanese erotic films at the BFI in London). And I’m sure some bold English-language DVD distributor will pick up on them before too long too.

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/11/wakamatsu-in-greece-for-50th-thessaloniki-international-film-festival-13-22-november-2009/feed/ 6 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/11/koji-wakamatsu-films-at-the-cinefamily-los-angeles/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/11/koji-wakamatsu-films-at-the-cinefamily-los-angeles/#comments Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:27:04 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=145

Koji Wakamatsu's United Red Army

Some great news for LA-based Wakamatsu fans, courtesy of my old mucker Nick Rucka of Maboroshii Productions. Starting this Wednesday at the Cinemafamily with Wakamatsu’s recent United Red Army, one of my favourite Japanese films from the past few years, there’s a month full of screenings from Japanese cinema’s original subversive, including your first ever chance to get to see subbed prints of Shinjuku Mad and Running in Madness, Dying in Love, two of his lesser-known masterpieces from his 1960s heyday. Full details on the Cinefamily website, but the basic schedule is as follows:

Nov 4th: United Red Army
Nov. 6th: Shinjuku Mad & Ecstasy of the Angels
Nov. 13th: Go Go Second Time Virgin & Running in Madness, Dying in Love
Nov. 20th: Violated Angels & Violent Virgin

This is the first of many posts I hope to give you about Wakamatsu’s films – I should have another announcement ready for you tomorrow. Great to see all these works finally getting out there anyway, and I’d imagine by the end of next year, Wakamatsu’s name is going to be pretty firmly on the lips of all decent cinephiles. Don’t miss ‘em!

Hikari Mitsushima in Shion Sono's Love Exposure

It’s done great guns on the festival circuit and now, courtesy of Third Window Films, Love Exposure is just about to get its official UK release with a month-long run at the ICA in London this November, with a screening on November 14^th at Leeds International Film Festival and no doubt other dates in the UK to follow. It’s surely a bold move on the behalf of both Third Window Films and the ICA, but (and I’m getting almost tired of saying this), DO NOT BE PUT OFF BY THE 4-HOUR RUNNING TIME! This is the strongest film from Japan I’ve seen in a long-time. Read any review you can find online about it, ask anyone who has seen it. They’ll all tell you the same thing – it’s an absolutely fantastic experience, so intense you’ll be still struggling to assimilate it all for days, nay weeks, after you’ve seen it. The film whips along at such a cracking pace that you’re barely registering the time, and when the interval occurs, it seems like a major inconvenience.

Takahiro Nishijima, the star of Love Exposure

I’ve experienced the film twice already, firstly on DVD while looking for suitable titles for this year’s Raindance, and secondly at Raindance itself. The first time I thought it would take a couple of sittings to get through, but it didn’t take too long for me to realise I was in for the long haul. The second time, at the festival itself, was my first chance seeing it on a big screen, and I was so immersed in it that even then I knew I simply had to see it again, so I’ll most certainly be trotting off to the ICA at some juncture. And this seems to be the typical response. Several at the Japanese guests at Raindance had already seen the film several times. One chalked up their sixth viewing at the festival – that’s a full day in total of Shion Sono’s masterpiece! Another reported their experience of seeing the film in Tokyo, in which during the interval the other viewers could be seen wandering around with ecstatic expressions on their faces, and I couldn’t but help notice a similar phenomenon at Raindance. Ooh, I’m getting goose-pimples just thinking about it. My only regret is that the film was originally meant to be six hours, and Sono had to cut it down by a quarter at the insistence of his producer. I can only pray that at some point we’ll ever get a chance to see the full cut.

Sakura Ando and friends

Not sure what else I can say to anyone but to implore you to go see it. If you’ve seen it once, then see it again, tell your friends what a masterpiece it is. And if you have no idea of what I am talking about, then here’s a quick taster in the form of the trailer.

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/10/shion-sonos-love-exposure-released-in-london-from-this-friday/feed/ 2 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/10/the-cove/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/10/the-cove/#comments Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:58:24 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=135

Dolphin slaughter at Taiji, as recorded in The Cove

I hardly need to say it, but I like Japan and I like the Japanese. The country and its people have been very good to me, and I’ve had some of the happiest times of my life there. But if there’s this one niggling side to the place that does bother me, it’s this apparent lack of awareness of how people in other countries feel about certain issues. If the whole world were a big party, I sometimes feel Japan would be off having a cigarette in the garden, alone by itself, rather than chatting with everyone else in the living room. I can’t really think of a better example than its adherence to whaling.

Of course, merely criticising Japan for its past or present actions isn’t very constructive, but what is frustrating is, on a national level, its refusal to even join the debate with other countries, and also just how plain ignorant many people are about certain things. I know I got into hot water once myself by raising this thorny issue while teaching in Japan, after a thirty-something Office Lady asked me if we ate whales in Britain, necessitating my explaining that Japan was one of the few countries in the world that ignored the global moratorium on commercial whaling. I was then asked by another student why Britain and America always thought they had the right to criticise Japan about everything. I hardly was in a position myself to take the moral high-ground at this point. After all, the whole reason the topic was raised was that I had actually sampled my first bit of whale meat in an izakaya the night before, as I duly explained to the student. There’s debates to be had about the pros and cons of whaling, but what most amazed me was that this particular individual was completely unaware of Japan’s unique position (well, along with Iceland and Norway) of going against the tide of global opinion. You’d have thought the country would be better off just going with the flow to save them the bother. After all, as I can safely vouch, whale meat really isn’t that great.

The Cove

As one interviewee puts it in The Cove, a startling new documentary directed by Louie Psihoyos, as a major economic power that once harboured imperial ambitions of its own, Japan really doesn’t like being told what to do by the bullying global powers of America and Britain. The Cove has a lot of other interesting things to say too, the most evident being that Japan’s opt out of the global moratorium – insisting it only catches whales for purposes of “scientific research” – also permits the slaughter of 23,000 dolphins a year. The average Japanese does not know this. I didn’t  either, and I thank the film for telling me. I am not sure what sort of distribution Psihoyos’ film will get in Japan, but I think a lot of people might be happy to hear about this. Naturally this is a sensitive subject, and the film courts some accusations of Japan-bashing. I see a number of one-line synopses proliferating across the media that describe it as a “documentary exposing the Japanese dolphin trade”. Well, this isn’t entirely accurate. At an early stage the film makes clear the complicity of the rest of the world in this live dolphin industry. Those performing dolphins you see in sea-life centres across the globe have to come from somewhere, and the fishermen of the town of Taiji, the town whose secret cove acts as the venue for this mass slaughter, get a hefty enough sum for each live specimen for them not to want to relinquish this cash cow. I guess the vast majority of the other dolphins that get butchered in the process might be considered collateral damage.

They might be considered the lucky ones, as it’s fairly obvious the dolphins don’t really take to a life in captivity. Ric O’Barry, the documentary’s central character, knows this better than most: he’s the man who trained TV’s first dolphin star, Flipper (real name, Kathy), and also the man who cradled the famous female bottlenose in his arms as she died, apparently by holding her breath underwater to commit suicide. Dolphins are intelligent creatures that migrate over huge distances, so life in a swimming pool balancing beach balls on their noses is clearly a pretty depressing existence for them. It’s this awareness that led to O’Barry’s campaign to free all captive dolphins through the Dolphin Project, founded in 1970.

The Cove

The Cove, which follows O’Barry and his crew’s attempts to document one of the regular dolphin slaughters that take place in Taiji, is both gripping (reviews have checklisted Ocean’s Eleven, and the documentary Man on Wire) and incredibly disturbing – I wept as the cove’s waters churned with the blood of the thrashing dolphins aware of their impending doom. What is perhaps most depressing is how needless the carnage is. While dolphin meat is made available for sale in Japan, it’s seldom labelled as being what it is, and the consumer demand is low enough for it to be a non-profitable industry. Apparently, the justification of the cull is not economic or scientific, nor even connected with abstract notions of “tradition”, but because dolphins are considered “pests”, held responsible for the declining fish stocks around Japan. Moreover, the film highlights that the meat of all sea creatures higher up the food chain, not just whales and dolphins but tuna and sea bass too, contains dangerously high levels of mercury, and those familiar with Japanese documentary history will no doubt be aware of Noriaki Tsuchimoto’s documentaries in the 1960s exposing what is now known as Minamata Disease, named after the town whose inhabitants fell prey to mercury poisoning due to industrial polution. If you don’t, you might want to take a look at this.

The Cove opened in the UK this weekend, and it is certainly among the most impressive documentaries I’ve seen this year. The ending, in which O’Barry alerts the various members of the International Whaling Commission to what is truly going on in Taiji, is as exhilarating as the scene at the end of Tokachi Tsuchiya’s A Normal Life Please, in which the members of the truck haulage union project their images of foul play on a large sheet outside the cement company’s headquarters. If nothing, these films show that documentaries do have the potential to change things (and in fact, The Cove is also reminiscent of another recent film about mankind’s abuse of the oceans, The End of the Line, which led to several UK sandwich chains rightly removing tuna from their menus). As O’Barry says at the end of the film, he could either be an activist or an in-activist, and we should be thankful that there are people like him who have chosen the former camp. Or to quote from the song Psyche by the mighty Killing Joke, ‘Dodge the bullet or carry the gun. The choice is yours.’

To find out what you can do to alleviate the burden on the planet’s fragile ocean ecosystems, check out the website here.

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/10/the-cove/feed/ 1 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/10/some-thoughts-on-the-shohei-imamura-retro/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/10/some-thoughts-on-the-shohei-imamura-retro/#comments Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:05:01 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=130

Ballad of Narayama

Back at home after a week dashing round the country for various reasons, not least of which was the Imamura retrospective at the Arnolfini which I had a hand in. After the punishing routine of Raindance, I was rather grateful to be afforded the opportunity just to sit in a cinema over a long weekend and binge on the six wonderful films in the programme in relative peace and quiet. Imamura was the one director who really stood out when I first started exploring Japanese cinema. There was something about his sense of humour and his general world view that struck a chord with me, the notion (some might call it cynical) that humans are essentially animals whose primary motivations are the satiation of basic needs such as food and sex, and their every other action is merely an attempt to rationalise these drives.

But it’s been almost ten years ago since I looked at the director in any depth, and I’d not revisited many of these films since. It was funny, because I thought the basic concept of the season, to reassess Imamura’s legacy, was slightly odd, being as his status as one of the key figures in Japanese cinema, and of the 1960s in particular, hardly needed emphasizing. But it became clear talking to several of the members of the audience that while Imamura’s name might be well known in Japanese film fan circles, the general public in the UK really haven’t had a chance to see many of his films, and by and large they loved them. It occurred to me how little of his work is available on DVD in comparison with other directors such as, say, Seijun Suzuki. It just goes to show how much a director’s currency can change over time. The last retrospectives on Imamura in the UK, I believe, were just after his Palme d’Or win for The Eel, and that was well over ten years ago. Clearly people do need to be reminded of this director after all.

Pigs and Battleships

Watching the films back to back it struck me, while there are certain uniform themes and ideas explored in his films, individually they are all very different in style and tone. I’d never actually seen Pigs and Battleships before, for example, which was one of the standouts of the programme, a more obvious commercial piece which bore some similarities with Sun Tribe films such as Crazed Fruit and Cruel Story of Youth, yet also signalled the direction that Imamura would pursue, with its bawdy humour, really vibrant style, and that wonderfully surreal ending as the pigs stampede through the streets of Yokosuka. Ballad of Narayama I’d not seen for years, but it has a special place in my heart as one of my first encounters with Japanese cinema in a screening at the Scala in the late 1980s (with Wakamatsu’s Violated Angels). Watching it again really spelled out for me what an amazing achievement it is, perhaps the quintessential Imamura film. The film isn’t well-known at all in Britain with modern audiences, but there is a US DVD. But one of the main treats of this program was finally getting to see Profound Desire of the Gods on a big screen, and what a bizarre film it is. If Ballad of Narayama is Imamura’s masterpiece, then this title is his folly, inviting comparisons with Herzog at his most ambitious, or Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain. It has its more digressive moments, it must be said, but the sheer scale and energy behind it really signals this out as an essential piece of cinematic history which will never be repeated. It is simply bewildering that this film is not out there on DVD anywhere, and I can’t work out why, because it’s handled by Nikkatsu, so obtaining the rights shouldn’t be too problematic. Someone rectify this situation, please!

Profound Desire of the Gods

Anyway, the main Arnolfini session is over, though there’s still a double bill of Vengeance is Mine and The Eel on Sunday 8^th November. Those in the UK who couldn’t make it to Bristol will be heartened to here that the films are now up in London and screening at the ICA this very weekend, before moving to the Glasgow Film Theatre next week. Go watch them all. Who knows when you’ll get a chance to see them on the big screen in the UK again.

Father and son, head to head in Ben Wheatley's amazing Down Terrace

Am now in Bristol in the midst of the Shohei Imamura retrospective down at the Arnolfini. First screening last night of Ballad of Narayama, a title I hadn’t seen for quite some time, and my, had I forgotten how good it was! This is arguably Imamura’s most perfect film, although perhaps I should hold off my judgement because, to my shame, I have never actually seen Profound Desire of the Gods, which gets a very rare UK screening on Sunday. For those interested who can’t make it to Bristol, the retro is travelling up to the ICA at the end of the month, then not long after up to Glasgow. Full day of lectures and discussions about Imamura tomorrow, with me delivering one such sermon trying to set Imamura’s body of work into some sort of context within the 1960s.

Down Terrace

Anyway, even though I’ve now moved onto the next thing, I still hope to find time to piece together some of the fragments of thoughts about the various films that played at Raindance, before the whole festival disappears from my memory into a murky haze. The next film under the spotlight is the winner of this year’s Best UK Feature, Down Terrace, directed by Ben Wheatley. This is a film that has come out of absolutely nowhere this year. It received its international premiere at this year’s Fantastic Fest in Austin, where it won best screenplay and Next Wave best feature, so with only two festivals it’s already won three prizes – a pretty impressive track record, for sure. The film was produced by Mondo Macabro’s Andy Starke, and is a far cry indeed from his last project, the Pakistani zombie movie Hell’s Ground.

David Schaal, Robin Hill and Ben Wheatley, Best UK Feature winners for Down Terrace

For those who know nothing about the film, the trailer’s here.

Down Terrace trailer

The dust has settled, the guests have all departed, and here I am sitting home alone mulling over how it all went. Yes, Raindance Film Festival is over for another year, and after a reasonably slow start, exploded into one of the busiest I’ve ever attended. As I posted last week, virtually every single screening was sold out on the Wednesday. Amazing! And it didn’t really let up after that… And what with all the late night drinking, meaning not getting home till at least 3-4am on most nights after negotiating the labyrinthine night-bus routes trying to work out how to get to my new home from various different parts of the city, I’m physically and mentally shattered. But I’m in high spirits nonetheless, as I know that I and all the other guests from Japan will be returning to our respective routines having made new friends, nurtured new ideas about the future and emerged from that great chemistry of minds that always occurs when you have creative, talented people from so many different backgrounds assembled in one place for such a reasonably long but intense period. So anyway, over the next few days, before I head down to Bristol for the Shohei Imamura retrospective at the Arnolfini, I intend to make good my original promise and actually write a bit about the festival – only not while its actually happening, of course, but by way of a series of retroactive looks at the high points of the past week or so.

One person who should be returning from Raindance very happy is Tokachi Tsuchya, proud recipient of the Best Documentary Award for A Normal Life Please (the Japanese title, Futsu no shigoto o shitai translates more directly as ‘I’d like a proper job’, a sentiment I certainly share at times!). And a much-deserved win it was too, for sure, but still a really pleasant surprise for me, as foreign language documentaries generally have to try so much harder with English language audiences, and chances for most people to see them are rare. Tsuchiya’s work was literally born out of his own blood, sweat and tears – he was assaulted several times during the making of his film, his glasses broken, cigarettes stubbed out on his hands, his camera grabbed etc, most evident during the film’s stand-out sequence when the heavies hired by the employers of truck driver Kaikura’s arrive at his mother’s funeral to intimidate him to leave his worker’s union. (I loved it when Tsuchiya said he was terrified that when the film screened in Japan, his nemesis Kudo might turn up with his gang and wreak their revenge).

Tsuchiya seemed particularly moved when he received the award, saying that not only was it his first trip to England, but also it was the first time he’d ever received an award (handed out this time by our wonderful guest and jury member, Momoko Ando). As he explained in the very animated q&a after the screening, not only did the whole concept of labour unions originate in England, but also their dark flipside in the form of Thatcher’s deregulation policies of the 1980s, which have had a profound influence on Japanese government policy, hence the large number of people working themselves to death in Japan and freelancers like Kaikura busting his guts for a mind-boggling 300 hours a month for really only the most basic of wages – I think his monthly take home pay was less than the equivalent of around 1500 pounds. The film’s airing was particularly timely in the UK, in light of our current economic situation necessitating severe economic belt tightening all round, specifically in the public sector (though I can tell you from my own situation as a freelance writer, pay rates have dropped so low that I might as well be working at MacDonalds) and the recent contraversial announcement by the postal workers union that they’re about to go on strike. One really gets the impression that the whole free market system that’s been pushed so far over the past few decades, in which the number agencies, sub-contractors, consultancy firms, advisors etc involved in every industry has expanded so much and the people at the bottom of the pile actually doing the work pushed to ever longer hours in increasingly poor working conditions, is reaching breaking point, and one has to wonder where it’s all heading. Tsuchiya’s film provoked a lot of discussion while exposing a particularly ugly side of Japanese industry that is near unbelievable for one of the richest countries in the world. I really hope more people get a chance to see it. It’s about as vital a piece of filmmaking as it gets.

I should also say a big thanks at this juncture to Yuri Kubota and those kind folks at Nippon Connection for preparing a subtitled version of this for festival screenings. This is a film that really needs to be seen by as many people as possible. I grabbed a pretty interesting interview with Tsuchiya-san too, which will appear on Midnight Eye sometime in the not so distant future, while in the meantime Japanese readers might be interested in taking a look at the film’s homepage. For now however, keep your eye out for other posts here in the not so distant future about some of the other titles we screened.

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/10/best-documentary-award-at-raindance-for-tokachi-tsuchiyas-a-normal-life-please/feed/ 0 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/10/mid-raindance-update-only-3-more-days-to-go/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/10/mid-raindance-update-only-3-more-days-to-go/#comments Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:01:56 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=119

Promises, promises, promises… Yes, I have promised much and delivered very little in the way of regular updates these past days since Raindance began – in fact, absolutely nothing at all beyond the odd tweet or two. I’d intended to do daily postings about my impressions on a number of films, including Down Terrace, Love Exposure and Until the Light Takes Us, but it’s been just so hectic, I’ve barely managed more than five minutes in front of the computer this past week, and then only to fend off urgent emails. Well, once life gets back to normal again, I’ll come back to these films I mentioned and my impressions on them, as I’d imagine most of these will be getting some sort of release, or will be travelling on to further festivals. They’re all bloody brilliant anyway.

For now, just a few vague titbits about the events of the last few days. We’ve had more Japanese guests than ever this year – Yumiko Beppu (from the Peaches shorts programme), Tokachi Tsuchiya (A Normal Life Please), Yasunobu Takahashi (Locked Out), Sachi Hamano and Kuninori Yamazaki (Lily Festival) and of course, Momoko Ando, who’s here premiering her first feature with us, Kakera – A Piece of Our Life. James Iha, ex-Smashing Pumpkins, was also here to talk about his work on the soundtrack (he also scored Linda Linda Linda), though he’s already jetted back to New York. And Tom Mes, my Midnight Eye buddy, is also here. So all in all, its been a pretty hectic time, but great fun, nonetheless.

Audience attendances at this year’s festival have been unpredictable, to say the least. Every film on Wednesday night was sold out – even I couldn’t get a ticket for Until the Light Takes Us, and I programmed it! Well, I’ve seen the film before of course, but I’d have been interested to hear the q&a, which by all accounts was pretty animated. But it was particularly exciting that Kakera was sold out. As I’ve said, this was the world premiere of Momoko’s first film, and we were all very excited about how well the film went down, and highly positive about where it’s going to go next. The q&a afterwards was really fun, and we all bounded off euphorically down to the Phonenix Arts Club afterwards to celebrate.

There’s already some press online on the Japanese website Cinema Today about the focus on Japanese Women Directors this year. I spent the afternoon interviewing Sachi Hamano for Midnight Eye yesterday afternoon, and had one of the most fascinating discussions ever. Some might know her name, as one of the most prolific makers of pink film in Japan – which would probably make her one of the most prolific directors in the world. But what is most amazing is that she is essentially the first woman in Japan who has been able to maintain a career solely as a film director, and for over four decades. Her stories about what a rough time she had of things when she started in the industry, as part of Wakamatsu Productions were really amazing. The film she’s here with, Lily Festival, went down really well, and the q&a after was animated and really fascinating – she’s a real pro about this sort of thing, none of the mumbling incoherence we get from most Japanese directors. I was amazed that Lily Festival hasn’t even had a proper release in Japan, because the cinema owners all told her “who wants to see a film about the sex lives of a lot of old ladies”. Well, its a damn funny film, and Mickey Curtis is simply outstanding in it. She really is an amazing person to have at any festival, and I hope one day pretty soon she receives the recognition she is due for her achievements in Japanese cinema.

Anyway, off to the next screening of Kakera now, so must dash. Sorry, no pix today! Those in London, be sure to come to A Normal Life Please tomorrow – it is an incredible documentary, and the q&a after promises to be something really special.

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/10/mid-raindance-update-only-3-more-days-to-go/feed/ 0 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/09/its-party-time-17th-raindance-begins/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/09/its-party-time-17th-raindance-begins/#comments Wed, 30 Sep 2009 10:57:58 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=115

And so, another year of Raindance Film Festival begins – 12 days of films, fun and frolics. We’re all gearing up for the opening film tonight, Humpday, and I’m just about to head into town to meet this year’s Special Guest and Jury Member from the Japanese section, Momoko Ando. I’m going to be updating as often as possible on developments over here for those that can’t make it, and for those who will be at the festival, letting you know about parts of the programme which might otherwise escape your notice.

The first is a couple of parties you might want to note down in your diary. This year we’re lucky to have a dedicated venue for all Raindance-related events and hospitality, a great place to liaise and network. Its the Raindance Film Cafe, at the Vinyl Factory, entrance at Phonica, 51 Poland Street, W1F 7LZ – not too far from the Raindance office. It’ll be open October 2nd – 9th, 12noon – 11pm, and is going to be hosting a number of the parties we’re having, as well as the ever-fun Live!Ammunition! event, something of a tradition at Raindance, where anyone can throw a quid into the bag and get to deliver a pitch for a film they wish to make – the winner gets to keep all the cash. This will be at 6.30pm next Monday, and will be followed by one of the many opportunities to imbibe alcohol and chat to festival guests, organizers and other audience members.

Before that however, is the Chinese Party on the Saturday evening, which will cost £8 to get in. This is the first year Raindance has had a decent lineup of films from Mainland China, with screenings of The Panda Candy, described as China’s own version of Nine Songs, and the enigmatic, lyrical love story Twilight Dancing. Panda Candy director Peng Lei will be around with his band New Pants, and also presents is DJ Lucky Cat with her selection of 1930s Shanghai tunes, a friend of mine who also DJ-ed at the Anna May Wong Must Die event I organized with Anna Chen back in May. There’ll be a live painting performance there too, inspired by the two Chinese films. Sounds interesting!

Japanese Party, featuring Momoko Ando’s A Piece of our life – KAKERA , remixed by Visually Impaired Artists Collective

Japanese film fans will also be chuffed to hear about the Japanese Party on Tuesday 6^th, a free event and a chance to mingle with the many Japanese guests we’ve got over this year, and another special guest in the form of my Midnight Eye confrere, Tom Mes. The centrepiece of this night is going to be a live remixing of Momoko Ando’s A Piece of our life – KAKERA , by Visually Impaired Artists Collective. Raindance is really excited to be holding the World Premiere for this beautiful film, the highlight of the Japanese selection, and Momoko herself is going to be around the festival all week. There’ll be a DJ set by Mariko from Levelload and Dj Tiger G from They Came From The Stars, I Saw Them. There’s also another really special guest on that evening; it’s a bit hush-hush who it is, but suffice it to say, if you’ve been reading this blogspot carefully, you’ll probably work it out. Anyway, do come along – anyone is welcome.

Until The Light Takes Us

And the final party announcement is the afterparty for the screening of Audrey Ewell and Aaron Aites’ amazing documentary on Norwegian Black Metal, Until the Light Takes Us. I am going to do a full posting on this particular film before it plays, and I’ll give more info about the event then, although if you can’t wait, there are details here. Again, we have a really important guest from this world, but I’m not at liberty to say who it is. This event, I’ll add, will not be taking place at the Raindance Film Cafe, but the suitably grungy Intrepid Fox, 15 St Giles High St, near Tottenham Court Road, and is sponsored by Terrorizer magazine.

I’ll just end by saying the first Japanese screenings are tomorrow – Hotaru, at 4pm and Instant Swamp, at 8.30pm. There’s also the screening of Playing Columbine at 9.30pm, which you can find out a little more about by checking out my previous posting here.

Well, a busy week or two ahead, so I’ll sign off now, but hope to see some of you around the festival, and keep checking for further updates.

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/09/its-party-time-17th-raindance-begins/feed/ 0 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/09/bathed-in-blood-more-on-the-uk-grotesque-ban-in-tokyos-metropolis-magazine/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/09/bathed-in-blood-more-on-the-uk-grotesque-ban-in-tokyos-metropolis-magazine/#comments Mon, 28 Sep 2009 10:47:18 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=112

Koji Shiraishi's Grotesque

I wrote about the UK banning of Koji Shiraishi’s Grotesque a month or so back, primarily to refocus attention on what the role of the BBFC is in this increasingly multimedia, fast download age, as well as exploring issues of whether the Japanese have a particular penchant for blood-drenched sadism or whether it’s in fact us in the West who select our image of Japanese film to fit our own tastes and preconceptions. Anyway, the news of the ban got back to Tokyo, resulting in this fascinating article in Metropolis magazine by Sarah Cortina, which explores just these sort of issues. I was one of the interviewees for the piece, and the only one based in the UK. Others include Shiraishi himself, who now rather interestingly is suggesting his future filmmaking path lies in more comic territory, Robo Geisha producer Akira Yamaguchi and Tokyo Gore Police director Yoshihiro Nishimura. Well, I doubt I’m going to win myself any new friends with my comments on this kind of film, but I like the angle of the piece, and it’s always an honour to be cited in such a widely-circulated magazine.

Sachi Hamano's Lily Festival

My article on the new wave of Japanese women filmmakers is now online on the Japan Times website, just in time to tie in with my Raindance programme, as is my interview with Atsuko Ohno, organiser of Peaches festival, from which we’re screening 3 films. Thankfully, someone at the paper came up with a decent title for the piece, because I’d been racking my brains all year, not just for this article, but for a general angle for the Raindance focus as well. I mean, how do you sell this idea? You either go the Orientalist route, say, something like “Cameras and Kimonos”, “The Chrysanthemum and the Camera”,”Not Just Cherry Blossoms” or something similarly banal, or take the condescendingly sexist approach – “Japanese Sisters are Doing it For Themselves”, “Girls in Film” … you catch my drift.

After all, should we be really surprised that women have been the guiding hand behind some of the most interesting Japanese films of the past few years? Is it really different from the situation here in the UK? I mean, I was looking through this year’s London Film Festival line-up this year, and there seemed to be a fair few woman directors listed there. Are films by women so different from those by men?

Well, these are all discussion points of course, but a couple of facts remain. Firstly, I don’t think I could have put together a 6-slot focus on Japanese women directors quite so easily, say, ten years ago. Secondly, I gave a talk about this very subject at the Japan Foundation UK last summer, and someone came up to me afterwards and said that when she told her friend she was off to a lecture on Japanese women directors, her friend said “ That will be a cosy ten minutes then” – it seems a lot of people, at least in this country, have assumptions about the roles of and opportunities for women in Japanese society that a more than cursory look at the facts would overturn. Thirdly, I should point out that it wasn’t really particularly hard to find enough films for it this year. I went through the usual procedures of drawing up a shortlist of the best titles of the past year, and half of the directors happened to be women, so it was just a case of adding some older names to the mix, of women who’ve been in the industry long enough to remember the days when their gender was an issue, such as Sachi Hamano and Naomi Kawase, and the programme pretty much formed itself.

The fact is though, this section could have been much bigger – there were plenty of other suitable titles out there from the last year, like Tsuki Inoue’s Autumn Adagio, covered recently by Tom on Midnight Eye, Satoko Yokoyama’s Bare Essence of Life, playing Vancouver and London film festivals very soon (I personally didn’t like it, but I know it has its fans), or Shimako Sato’s recent cult fantasy K20 Legend of the Mask, which certainly doesn’t fit the stereotypical image of a “woman’s picture”. It would also have been nice to delve back in time and add some historical landmarks, like Kinuyo Tanaka’s films, which have hardly been shown at all in recent years, although locating prints and negotiating affordable screening fees was something of an issue here.

Its obvious though, that if one wanted to do a fuller retrospective on Japanese women filmmakers, there’s no shortage of material to draw upon. It’s probably the right time to do it too, because it seems obvious to me that if recent years are anything to go by, future Japanese film programmes will feature an equal mix of male and female directors without any such need for making an issue about it.

Anyway, as the fest draws ever nearer, I should mention that we’ll have a healthy showing of guests to accompany this Japanese section; Yumiko Beppu, director of Csikspost from the Peaches selection has said she’ll be over, as will Sachi Hamano, whom I’ve written lots about in my book Behind the Pink Curtain, and her scriptwriter for Lily Festival, Kuninori Yamazaki – I’m really looking forward to talking to these guys. Also Yasunobu Takahashi, director of Locked Out, and Tokachi Tsuchiya, of A Normal Life Please. But most exciting, is that we’re getting the world premiere of Kakera, and not only will director Momoko Ando be over, but the musician who scored her film too – James Iha, best known for his stellar guitar work for Smashing Pumpkins. It all promises to be quite the party.

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/09/japan-times-article-online-women-who-love-to-shoot-a-rising-tide-of-women-film-directors-in-japan-gets-festival-treatment/feed/ 0 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/09/playing-columbine-and-the-possibilities-of-videogaming/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/09/playing-columbine-and-the-possibilities-of-videogaming/#comments Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:57:35 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=102

Playing Columbine

The Raindance lineup has now been fully announced, and the schedule should be up on the website in the next day or so, leaving me some time to go over some of my high points from what I’ve seen so far. I’m going to kick off with Playing Columbine, a documentary by Danny Ledonne that I caught at Montreal’s Fantasia this year. I don’t think its played any other major festivals yet, but I know Raindance will be its UK debut. The film looks at the controversy surrounding Ledonne’s own online game, Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, based on the infamous 1999 high school shootings, which provoked a media uproar in the US when the press first cottoned on to it. Is there any more to the game than a sick cash-in of a terrible tragedy, especially given the role video games were alleged to have played in creating such killers? Ledonne himself certainly thinks so, and uses his documentary to explore the current state of the video gaming and its so far neglected potential.

Chuckie Egg