© Cahiers du Cinéma Collection, Paris
Shinya Tsukamoto’s Bullet Ballet: a tough look at Japanese youth.
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There
is no such thing as national cinema, only individual filmmakers.
Youssef
Chahine, Egyptian film director (1926-)
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To know more
World production rank
1999: 3
Local films’ share of domestic box-office
1998: 32%
Number of films produced
Total population (millions)
1988: 122.6
1998: 126.3
Number of screens
1988: 2005
1998: 1993
Cinema admissions (millions)
1988: 144.80
1998: 153.10
Total film production
investment (US$m)
1999: 1053.16
Source: Screen Digest
(contact: David.Hancock@
screendigest.com).
and UNESCO
Institute of statistics. |
Shinji Aoyama’s Eureka, an emblem for Japan’s new directors. |
Young Japanese producers are stretching
tight budgets to produce a wave of often dark films while the big studios, fattened
by prosperity, are falling on hard times
 The tiny bar in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district has barely changed
over the past 50 years. Its owner keeps a careful eye on the rows of whisky bottles
that line the ancient dive’s walls, each bottle bearing the name of a filmmaker from
somewhere across the world. Every time one of these illustrious guests passes through
Tokyo, they find their private bottle waiting, intact.
For Masaki Tamura, a famous director of photography who worked with the big names
in documentary and fiction films in the 1970s and 1980s, the bar is a favourite hangout
when taking a break between two shoots. One day in the early 1990s, however, in the
middle of a shoot with a famous director, Tamura’s patience with movie-making finally
broke. “I was sick of the old methods. The approach was too conventional. I wanted
to give up film and I didn’t work for the next three years. I thought it was all
over for me.”
That is until he met Shinji Aoyama and did camera work for his first film, Helpless.
“During the shoot, everybody knew how to do everyone else’s job,” he says. “You had
to because the budget was so small. It was a miracle how we managed to make a three-hour
film in cinemascope with so little money.”
At 61, with a moustache, shock of grey hair, sensitive face and calm voice of a character
from a Yasujiro Ozu film, Tomura describes his new career as a conversion. “At first,
I didn’t understand the film language these young people used. The way they worked
was new to me. Ideas come from all sides. Everyone has something to say and we discuss
everything together. But I got used to it and now I speak that language.” For the
past five years, Tamura has been working exclusively with this young generation,
whose creative energy has given new life to Japan’s battered film industry.
These filmmakers are all between 20 and 40 years old, and produce their films with
extremely limited resources in the world’s most expensive city. Some of them have
worked in television, advertising or cartoons, and hold down several jobs to make
ends meet. They tend to focus on social and psychological themes, like delinquency
and mindless crime, which mirror the confusion and malaise of a generation that has
rejected the old ambitions of getting rich, blind loyalty to one’s employer and social
harmony.
Without access to major distribution networks, they make do in a ghetto of art cinemas
where competition is fierce: this new genre can never earn much money. Financing
the productions is also a nightmare, with budgets ranging from $100,000 to a million
dollars. Most do not even have an inter-negative version (from which copies can be
made without damaging the master)—a common sacrifice made by makers of short films
elsewhere.
“I often have to go into debt to get the film started,” says Shinya Tsukamoto. “You
start shooting with the crew working for nothing and hoping to get paid later. Then
I show the rushes to video editors to try to get them to invest in the film.” Making
fantasy films in the tradition of the Frenchman Georges Méliès, Tsukamoto
is a director, cameraman, set-designer, actor and producer all rolled into one.
At 40, he has made six films independently and another two for the big studios. It
took eight months to make Bullet Ballet, his seventh and second-to-last film, whose
street scenes were largely shot clandestinely. Like his first films, Tetsuo and Tokyo
First, Bullet Ballet conveys the vibrant energy of its director, who depicts the
fragile equilibrium of young people living on the brink of disaster, in a culture
of violence from which there is no return.
Just as in the 1970s, when major studios such as Nikkatsu switched to B movies and
the soft porn works on which many filmmakers cut their teeth, today’s producers have
made erotic films (pinku eiga) and gangster films on budgets even smaller than their
elders. These video or 16mm productions are targetted directly at the video market.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa continues to make film noir on 16mm for video, though he infuses
his creations with a surprisingly philosophical dimension. The two major works of
the Revenge II series, Eyes of the Spider and Serpent Path (1998), were shot one
after the other, each in two weeks, with the same crew and the same actors. The same
plot of revenge, however, is handled very differently in the two cases. “I don’t
mind shooting like this,” he says. “In fact it’s a luxury to be able to make two
versions of the same story.” Takashi Miike, king of gangster gore films, agrees.
Takeshi Kitano, big brother to this new generation of filmmakers, started out in
a similar fashion. It was too hard being an actor and producer at the same time,
so he went behind the camera. Today his company Office Kitano turns out a steady
stream of independent films, though he makes most of his money by selling to television.
Never before has a “new wave” in Japanese cinema made such a virtue out of necessity.
The current generation has set up its own makeshift network with a freedom unprecedented
in the history of the nation’s film industry. The French “new wave” of the 1960s
had little choice but to depend heavily on big studio money. So long as the films
drew the crowds, independent filmmakers and the studio bosses always found a way
of working together.
But falling attendance rates combined with an economic downturn has dealt a sharp
blow to the Japanese industry. The major distributors—Toho, Toei and Shochiko—have
brushed aside the newcomers and made money by filling their cinemas with foreign
films (70 per cent of total revenue), animation (about 20 such films were made in
1999) or their own productions.
As a result, the “new wave” of the 1990s had to set up shop, physically and figuratively,
in a country where training had long been the preserve of big studios. New film and
video schools are springing up like Eiga Bi Gakko, which was founded two years ago
by producer Kenzo Horikoshi. Classes are often taught by young directors, who submit
film proposals as part of the school programme to produce two films each year. Akihiko
Shiota made a couple of erotic films before his remarkable Moonlight Whispers in
1999, which follows three children growing up in a city suburb and cost less than
$200,000.
“The films are made without any thought of the big studio network,” says Hirokazu
Kore-Eda, who directed Wonderful Life. Because they owe favours to no-one, the young
directors are totally free to experiment. For Wonderful Life, Kore-Eda, who was trained
in documentary production, sent his assistants out on a five-month mission to capture
on video “the best memories” of about 500 elderly people. He looked at the rushes,
did the casting and then contacted those he had chosen to appear in the film.
Nobuhiro Suwa, director of M/Other, developed in three feature-length films a very
personal style based on improvisation and lengthy shots, some of which last over
five minutes. H story, his third film, is the story of the filming of an imaginary
re-make of Hiroshima Mon Amour, in which Béatrice Dalle plays the original
star, Emmanuelle Riva.
As for Aoyama, his feature film Eureka deals with a recurrent theme in 1990s Japanese
cinema—that of a new life, a transition to an alternative state of existence following
a traumatic experience. It shows three people, a man and two children, who have escaped
from a bloody hostage-taking episode and struggle throughout the film to find their
way out of a maze of misfortune.
New outfits upstage the big
studios
The technical, stylistic and narrative maturity
of Eureka, made in black and white cinemascope, stands out among other independent
films which, despite all their energy, sometimes seem laborious productions overly
concerned with navel-gazing and experimentation. It is perhaps no accident that the
film was one of the first produced by Suncent Cinema Works, the new company of Takenori
Sentoh. The 38-year-old producer is seen by many as a pioneer of new Japanese cinema.
In 1992, he joined the pay-TV channel Wowow and gave several beginners their first
break, including Aoyama for Helpless. Since then, Sentoh has produced more than 35
films for Wowow and others companies, including some festival favourites of recent
years. In 1999, he set up his own production company, Suncent.
Distribution is still very difficult in Japan, but Sentoh’s success abroad and Kitano’s
commercial breakthrough have encouraged other centres of independent film production,
including, ironically, the former major distributors Daiei and Nikkatsu. Some previously
occasional partners of the new Japanese cinema (video editors, advertising agencies
and radio and television stations) are now more involved in co-production, while
countless multimedia firms (Little More, Uplink and Gaga, for example) are encouraging
alternative productions.
Meanwhile the disintegration of the big-studio system is gathering pace. An almost-bankrupt
Shochiku has sold its studios at Ofuna, near Tokyo. “This reminds me of the gekokujo,”
says the head of a film school, referring to 15th and 16th century feudal Japan when
the serfs took the place of the gentry. Sentoh for his part has started hiring banking
executives and others totally alien to the film industry on the condition that they
are true film fanatics. He has always wondered, he says, “if anyone in the mainstream
Japanese movie industry even likes cinema.”
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