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04
Nov

My, time flies! It’s been a few weeks since Zipangu Fest announced its line-up for its second year’s outing, to be held at the ICA between 18-24 November, and I’ve been so busy I’ve not had a chance to stick any news about it up on this particular site.

Zipangu Fest 2011 design by Michael Lomon

If you want to read the original press releases, you can find them on the press section of our website here, but if you want more basic details about the lineup, you can find the full schedule either on the ICA website or on the Zipangu Fest website.

Basically we’ve divided the programme into four sections, all of which overlap and inter-link in various cunning ways that I’m about to outline: Sounds of Zipangu, Experimental/Animation, Zipangu Retro, and Nuclear Reactions. The first section consists of two European-produced documentaries that look at Japanese avant-garde/experimental music and the traditional, religious and contemporary cultural forces that inform it, with We Don’t Care About Music Anyway… and KanZeOn both looking as good as they sound.

We Don't Care About Music Anyway... (Cédric Dupire & Gaspard Kuentz)

The latter film, which also screened over this summer at Shinsedai in Toronto and EvA in Estonia, provides the inspiration for our opening party, which features an astounding line-up of DJs and performers, not least in the form of tat2mi, the beat-boxing Buddhist monk featured in the film in his first ever London performance. The event, to be held in the ICA’s bar, boasts a live remix of the visuals by Amoeba.Av with director/cinematographer Tim Grabham (aka Cinema Iloobia).

I’ve already posted the flyer for this party just below this entry on my blog, so do feel free to circulate, won’t you! You can win tickets for our marvellous opening screening and party via this competition on the Japan Centre website.

All of this links rather nicely with another film in this section, Abraxas, about a former punk musician turned Buddhist monk who finds himself drawn back to give just one more performance. Not only is the soundtrack by Yoshihide Ohtomo, a towering figure in Japan’s avant-garde scene who is featured in We Don’t Care About Music Anyway…, but coincidentally the film was shot in the rural Fukushima region devastated by the earthquake and tsunami on 11 March of this year.

Set in Fukushima and featuring a soundtrack by Yoshihide Ohtomo and a starring turn by Suneohair, Naoki Kato's Abraxas.

The earthquake of course can’t help but cast a long shadow over any Japan-related events this year. Zipangu Fest will be doing their bit to raise awareness and hopefully a bit of money to help those affected when we move temporarily out of the ICA on Tuesday 22 Nov for a special charity screening of experimental films at Cafe Oto in Dalston. The two Nippon Re-Read programmes, as announced previously on this website, are part of a touring programme curated by Kinema Nippon (Aily Nash and Nine Yamamoto-Masson) and cover key works in the history of Japanese experimental film from the 1960s to present.

If you’re interested in either experimental film or Japanese cinema, the Nippon Re-Read: Radical Fragments and Abstractions from Japan I & II night on Tues 22 Nov presents a unique chance to watch these works placed within an informative yet fun context at one of London’s funkiest venues (worth visiting for the okonomiyaki and decent bar prices alone). It’s only £5 to get in, although you are free to pay more as all profits will go to the Japan Society Earthquake Relief Fund, and you can also buy advance tickets via WeGotTickets. As if this wasn’t amazing enough value for money in its own right, legendary London-based Japanese psychedelic rockers Bo Ningen will also be in attendance to perform a live soundtrack to Tatsuo Sato’s surreal animated classic Cat Soup from 2001.

Experimental films and a live performance from Bo Ningen at Cafe Oto on 22 Nov

This provides me with two ways to segue back into the other parts of the programme, but I’ll take the Experimental/Anime route. Alongside Abraxas on Saturday we have the Beyond Anime: The Outer Limits programme which, to whet your appetite for Cat Soup, will provide a wonderful and revealing glimpse of the innovation and creativity in Japan’s independent animation scene. This is a truly amazing sample of works covering a wide range of ground, but I’ll say it now, Sayaka Oka’s mesmerising Melting Medama is about the closest thing to a religious epiphany I’ve experienced this year.

What eyes are made for - Sayaka Oku's Melting Medama, part of the Beyond Anime programme

On a similar tack is the Enter the Cosmos programme of three works by that maestro of cinematic abstraction, Takashi Makino. His recent film Still in Cosmos will be screened as part of Tuesday’s Nippon Re-Read earthquake appeal night, but here’s a unique chance to immerse yourself in the full experience, with Makino himself there to introduce the films. Linking back to the Sounds of Zipangu section, Makino’s films are collaborations with some of the the foremost international talents of noise and soundscape music, including Jim O’Rourke and Machinefabriek. Another connection is that both Makino and KanZeOn’s Tim Grabham have served some time under the Quay Brothers, an influence that will become all the more clear when you see the Death of Phonebook animation made by Tim (under his customary handle of Cinema Iloobia), the honorary gaijin included in the Beyond Anime section.

Shasyo, one of several of Ryu Furusawa's films included in the Beyond Anime section

On the other side of the Sounds of Zipangu musical spectrum lies the sickly sweet strains of J-pop teeny band Momoiro Clover, as featured in Koji Shiraishi’s hilariously cruel J-horror mockumentary Shirome. Watch the tribe of teen songstresses agree to sell their souls for fame and fortune, and remember, nothing about their performance is faked for the camera!

Horror also lies at the heart of one of our Zipangu Retro screenings, and I am absolutely delighted that we have managed to make this come together, in partnership with the National Film Centre of Tokyo and the Japan Visualmedia Translation Academy. Never seen before in the UK, the 1938 supernatural chiller Ghost Cat and the Mysterious Shamisen is going to shake up a few preconceptions about the development of the horror around the world during is early decades, revealing that the genre was alive and kicking in Japan long before the films of Nobuo Nakagawa for Shintoho in the 1950s. Pioneering director Ushihara went to Hollywood to study filmmaking under Charlie Chaplin in the 1920s, so it is no surprise that he kept more than one eye on other developments in American cinema throughout his career. Personally I think that with its well-deployed arsenal of kaleidoscopic lenses, double-exposures and slow-mo sequences, in the expressionistic stakes Ghost Cat is easily abreast of, if not ahead of the Universal horrors of the period. Zipangu Fest have especially arranged to get this film subtitled and available for English speaking audiences, so make sure you don’t miss it while it is screening over here – the film gets its UK premiere ahead of Zipangu Fest at Leeds International Film Festival on Tues 8 and Thurs 10 Nov, and will be playing in Bradford in December and Newcastle in March. More details as they come, but if anyone out there reading this is also interested in showing this rare gem anywhere else, then drop me a line!

Vintage chills in our UK premiere of Ghost Cat and the Mysterious Shamisen

And our second Zipangu Retro screening takes us into our final section, Nuclear Reactions. Lucky Dragon No. 5 is a little-seen work by a pretty well-known director, Kaneto Shindo. One of the most important figures in the history of independent cinema in Japan, Shindo is primarily known in the West for his two horror films Onibaba and Kuroneko (another film about a ghostly black cat!), but also for a number of films on the subject of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and the director’s own birthplace of Hiroshima, beginning with the first fictional work from Japan on the subject, Children of Hiroshima (1952) right up to his latest film Postcard (2011), realised at the age of 98. I have no idea when was the last time this film was shown in the United Kingdom, if ever, but suffice it to say, you probably won’t get another chance to see it soon. The film is a docudrama based on a real life incident in which the crew of a fishing trawler were caught in the vicinity of American atomic bomb testing in the Pacific during the 1950s. The incident is pretty well-known today, if only because it inspired the original Godzilla.

Shinpei Takeda's poignant documentary road trip, Hiroshima Nagasaki Download.

Lest we forget, the legacy of the atomic bomb is the subject of our second film in the Nuclear Reactions section, with Hiroshi Nagasaki Download detailing a road-trip by the Mexican-based Japanese artist Shinpei Takeda, who will be coming as a guest of Zipangu Fest to introduce his film, as he and his college friend embark on a road trip across North America to interview a number of the survivors of this tragedy who have now made their homes outside of Japan.

The Nuclear Reactions section is our attempt to remember the potentially lethal destructive power of atomic energy, whether used militarily or to provide our energy needs, with a series of four films produced in a country that has suffered the most from its misuse. The nuclear power debate in Britain seems to have already died down in the wake of the catastrophe at the Fukushima power plant, a power plant that politicians repeatedly told the Japanese public was completely safe. In Japan, Hitomi Kamanaka has made several films that have attempted to delve beneath the claims of the politicians long before the disaster, and her findings in the two films that we are screening at the festival, are both chilling and yet also provide hope for those who are prepared to engage with the issues more fully. With the director travelling to Sellafield in the first of these two films to investigate a radiation leak that already seems to have been forgotten by the British media and public, the films offer little in the way of cold comfort for those still convinced by the “can’t happen here” argument.

So what do you do with nuclear waste? Hitomi Kamanaka's Rokkasho Rhapsody provides a chilling answer.

So there’s a guide through our programme for this year’s Zipangu Fest. No doubt there are even more links between the films if you look for them, and we really hope this years festival succeeds in fulfilling our goal of bringing people together to enjoy these films, and to talk about them and other related matters. I’m certainly looking forward to it myself!

Almost forgot too, just a few days before the festival, me and Julian Ross will be at the Horse Hospital near Russell Sq at the invitation of Electric Sheep magazine for An Evening of Subversive Japanese Cinema. Electric Sheep and Strange Attractor will present a screening of Koji Wakamatsu’s anarcho-pinku Sex Jack (1970) to tie-in with their recent book publication The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology, while Julian and I will be there to provide some cultural background to the film as well as another screening of one of the top hits from last year’s Zipangu Fest, Naoyuki Niiya’s ero-guro kami-shibai animation Man-eater Mountain.

Yumehiro Imanari's highly entertaining documentary short The Student Wrestler, playing alongside Hiroshima Nagasaki Download

In the meantime, here’s a link to an interview I did with Zoe Baxter on her Lucky Cat show on Resonance FM last Saturday (29 October), in which I talk a lot more about the films and a few other things besides.

Parts of Zipangu Fest’s programme will be touring to the Bradford Media Museum on 10-12 December, and the Star and Shadow Cinema in Newcastle in January.

More news as it comes, and again, if there are any venues out there in the UK that are interested in hosting parts of the Zipangu Fest programme, then do drop us a line.

And in the meantime, you can sign up to our press list, our Facebook page and our Twitter feed.

Posted at 15:52 on 04 November 2011

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28
Sep

Bathed in Blood – more on the UK Grotesque ban in Tokyo’s Metropolis magazine

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.

Posted at 11:47 on 28 September 2009

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19
Aug

Japanese “Torture Porn” Grotesque Banned in Britain.

Koji Shiraishi's Grotesque

I’ve just had my attention drawn to this piece of news on the BBC website regarding the decision by the British Board of Film Classification on August 18^th not to pass the Japanese horror film Grotesque (Gurotesuku). The film is directed by Koji Shiraishi, best known as the director of Slit-Mouthed Woman (Kuchisake onna) from 2007, released internationally by Tartan under their ‘Asian Extreme’ label as Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman, and one of the two films that came out around the same time based on the same Japanese legend (the other being Takuaki Hashiguchi’s 2005 supernatural pink film of the same title). Shiraishi also directed a number of straight-to-video J-horror titles, and the 2005 feature Curse (Noroi), so he’s not exactly a major name by any standard.

I can’t say that Grotesque is a title that has ranked high on my must-see list. In fact, I was completely unaware of it until today. It was released theatrically in Tokyo in January of this year, but it hasn’t exactly created a huge buzz on the festival circuit. To give you a bit of background, culled from Kevin Ouellette’s Nippon Cinema website, the film is a gruesome rendition of the minimalistic torture porn genre exemplified by Eli Roth’s Hostel, featuring a sadistic maniac who kidnaps a young woman (played by AV actress Tsugumi Nagasawa) and her boyfriend and precedes to torture, mutilate and kill them. In other words, the pseudo-snuff video Guinea Pig series of the 1980s reprised for the big screen.

There’s nothing on the BBFC website entry about the reasons for rejecting the film, which was submitted by distributor 4Digital Media Ltd, although the BBC article quotes the BBFC director David Cooke as saying it presented “little more than an unrelenting and escalating scenario of humiliation, brutality and sadism…The chief pleasure on offer seems to be in the spectacle of sadism (including sexual sadism) for its own sake.”

It’s funny, because compared to the era in which I formed my viewing tastes, back in the 1980s when the BBFC was run by the tyrannical hand of James Ferman, I’d not really been aware of any cases of films being “banned” outright in the UK, although certainly cuts are still regularly being demanded (Takashi Miike’s Ichi the Killer in 2002 is just one Japanese example I can recall, but I know there’s been plenty more for the video market). If a film isn’t passed, it’s usually a low-profile offering for the home-viewing market or a pornographic title: only three films hoping for an 18 certificate have been refused over the past four years. These, as the BBC article states, include “violent sex thriller Murder Set Pieces and Terrorists, Killers And Other Wackos, a film comprising real clips of execution and torture.”

Koji Shiraishi's Grotesque

Now, you won’t see me weeping bitter tears over the non-availability of such throwaway titles as Grotesque, nor succumb to the facile knee-jerk cries of “hypocrisy!” (or even “racism”!) that often accompany such BBFC rejections, but in the wake of the body’s passing of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist a couple of months ago, with the proviso that the poster contained the warning “contains strong real sex, bloody violence and self-mutilation” it seems high time this self-serving institution’s role in the 21^st century was subjected to a little more scrutiny.

Perhaps the rejection of Grotesque is best seen as a token gesture to show that the BBFC does still have some purpose, a case of being seen to act rather than actually having the power to stop people seeing films that can still be (illegally) downloaded or ordered from overseas online retailers. After all, it’s a minor title that few would have heard about (although the ban ironically means that more people will hear about the film now), as opposed to von Trier’s film, whose presence in competition at this year’s Cannes had already generated its fair share of press attention and wrapped it up in a specious arthouse sheen.

I’ve not seen Grotesque, as I’ve mentioned, but I know there are those that have perceived artistic merits in Antichrist that completely bypassed me. But surely the subjective notions of the quality of the films in question should not be a decisive factor in what gets passed and what gets rejected. What the BBFC are trying to do here is second guess the motives of the filmmakers, the distributors and the potential audience for such materials. It seems assumed that while viewers will be sickened by von Trier’s sexualized graphic violence, a different demographic will revel in similar displays in Shiraishi’s film.

The BBFC’s decisions seem to hinge more on how a film is marketed than its content. As an example, during a panel discussion entitled ‘Sex on Screen’ that took place as part of this year’s Bird’s Eye View festival in March, Petra Joy, a German woman who makes tasteful sex films for the couples and the female market, complained that the audiences for her works was unfairly restricted in Britain, as the BBFC automatically stamped them with the 18R certificate (introduced in 1999), meaning they could only be sold in licensed sex shops or screened at licensed cinemas, even though they were often less explicit than art cinema releases such as Baise Moi and Anatomy of Hell. We’re on the dodgy ground of content versus intent here, but it seems bizarre to me that films intended to titillate are treated as something more seditious than films that are intended to disturb or disgust.

In this age of internet downloads, it’s safe to say that anyone who really wants access to violent or sexually explicit material is going to be able to find it. The BBFC cannot stop that, nor is it in its remit to do so. It can only prevent films from theatrical or video release in UK markets. If the BBFC does have a role, it should be in the classification of releases, not the suppression, to give age guidelines about whom the film is suitable for. Distributors should also be allowed to bypass the organization entirely, as in America, and release their films unrated.

Because if the BBFC’s continued presence is of any consequence, it is mainly though protecting the interests of larger distributors and restricting the number of films that are commercially viable for release. To release a film theatrically or for the home-video market, it is a legal requirement to submit them to the the BBFC, whether they be sex films, horror films, action films or innocuous children’s titles or documentaries. The body charges a mandatory per-minute fee, charged separately for theatrical and DVD releases: if a company wants both, it gets charged twice, and once again for all DVD extras. This charge would be the same for Paramount and Universal as it would for if I decided to set up a label operating from my own bedroom. If, like me, you regard the moving image as much a valid form of communicating ideas as print media, then you’ll regard the BBFC’s power as profoundly undemocratic. Even if you don’t, it’s still an unfair bar on those wishing to enter the market.

The fact is, for smaller distributors, the BBFC submission charges are the most significant costs they’ll face. If a film is likely to sell less than 1000 copies, you might as well not bother, which immediately discounts the bulk of “minority interest” (in other words, foreign-language) films. A longer film, say three hours in length, would be charged twice as much as a 90 minute feature. This is the reason why Koji Wakamatsu’s United Red Army will probably never see a commercial release in the UK (I challenge somone to prove me wrong here!)

I personally couldn’t give two hoots about whether I, nor indeed anyone else, have the opportunity to see Grotesque. But there are plenty of other foreign films that won’t see release in Britain because the financial bar is set so high for distributors that they are commercially unviable. As the number of small indie distributors, valid commercial enterprises that are vital to the UK film industry, dwindle under the pressures brought about by the current economic situation and the rise in illegal downloading, this is more than a shame. It has implications for the entire cultural climate of the country.

For more details see also Brits ban ho-hum-sounding Flick and the Melon Farmers website.

Posted at 19:44 on 19 August 2009

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