The Midnight Eye Guide
to New Japanese Film
by Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp
review by Christian McCrea
Christian McCrea is completing a PhD on philosophy and digital life at the University of Melbourne, and researches
anime, the “total cinema” movement, occult film, and anything that can be
described as “random footage”. He mourns the loss of Billy “Bass” Wolf, one
of the stars of Wild Zero (Tetsuro Takeuchi, 1999).
The Midnight Eye
website is a common sight when peering over the shoulder of fans of Japanese cinema.
Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp edit a formidable resource on all aspects of the
Japanese moving image. In particular, their coverage of directors through
feature articles and dossiers is likely to be the most comprehensive on the
net. The continuing search for the next thrilling iconoclast auteur has helped
produce a grand resource of interviews, reviews and articles that investigators,
academics, fans and aspirants have come to rely on.
The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese
Film has clearly grown out of
the editors' work on the website, expanding, reworking and reorganising some
material while adding an entire volume of new entries. The volume is largely
made up of 19 sections on individual film directors and producers – Seijun
Suzuki, Masato Harada, Kinji Fukasaku and Takeshi Kitano amongst them – then
subdivided into breakdowns of their most famous works. The final chapter attempts
to catch the notable exclusions of this approach. The volume boasts nothing
short of a “groundbreaking and gap-filling insight into the inner workings
of the industry and the leading creative minds”, according to the publicity,
although most readers will find it far more successful at providing insight
into the latter than the former. The film resource/guide genre has proven
to be perilous; unable to balance history with analysis, most books of a similar
style (especially for horror and cult cinema) suffer from too many omissions
to provide an accurate history, or too much history to provide a context.
Thankfully, this volume attempts only to produce a series of remarks on recent
Japanese cinema and its luminary directors, allowing for a breadth of commentary
that satisfies the cinephilic pedant and enthusiast, although never attempting
a deeper contribution to scholarship.
Mes and Sharp paint a convincing story
of the fall-and-rise of the “new” Japanese cinema, of a daring and visionary
generation emerging from the fog of commercialisation and the global gentrification
of the imaginary, most notably the collapse of the Japanese film industry
in the late 1970s. While more academic accounts of this period have tended
to conflate the trajectories of the directors with the mechanics of the industry,
here the directors are given individual focus and a rich picture of their
roots emerges.
They came from 8mm underground experimentalism,
from the ranks of film critics, from the erotic “pink film” or porn, from
television, and from the straight-to-video filmmaking that had shot up in
the ’80s in the wake of the boom in home video player ownership. (Introduction,
xii)
The auteur profiles go beyond a simple
historical contextualisation and thankfully dispose of the thin thematic analysis
that marks so many film resource books of this type. For the most part, Mes
and Sharp use their encyclopedic resources to provoke interest in the lesser-known
directors through connections to others, and they generate enough anecdotes
concerning the more popular directors to go beyond cinephilia. Interviews
with the directors themselves are cultivated to produce a potted history of
each; Shinya Tsukamoto's commentary on the trajectory of the Tetsuo/Bodyhammer
films provides an insight into the ambition of the director to revisit the
films, despite his move into the subtler territory of Gemini (1999)
and A Snake of June (2002). Fragments from an interview reveal that
Quentin Tarantino had offered to produce the third chapter in the kinetic
cybernihilistic series, which resulted in Tsukamoto losing interest and shelving
the project, before musing that if he were to “make Tetsuo III and
it’s received very well in the United States, after that [he'd] like to make
Alien 5. And then Ridley Scott will come back and make Alien 6
and that would be the final film in the series” (151). One can imagine
Tarantino flicking through the pages of precisely this sort of volume, filing
each entry under “influence” or “potential remake” as he progresses.
The book takes an uncomplicated approach
to the internationalism of some of the directors – a thankful reprieve from
the desperate search for meaning behind segments of misspoken English phrases
– often letting directors like Tsukamoto provide clues to their relationship
to the West, but largely leaving the topic in the realm of the obvious. This
confidence is rewarded with some fragments of analysis (although the book
is often frustratingly limited in this way) concerning the cultural histories
of the directors.
A more critical reader may tire of the
love affair Mes and Sharp display for the outsider aesthetics which encompass
their subject, and the valentinian deployment of heroic hyperbole – let the
phrase “belonging to the last generation of idealists” be henceforth stricken
from the public record – although the context is rich enough for this to avoid
becoming a distraction. To their vast credit, Mes and Sharp have made some
hard decisions in declaring the over- and under-rating of some of the films
being examined, adopting an approach less like guides to the naive and more
like curators to the fascinated. Sogo Ishii benefits from a wry and understated
entry that leaves no doubt as to his position as one of the great workers
of the millennial para-genre of total cinema (elsewhere known as punk-rock
cinema, or pankku-rakku (no) eega) and of special note is the loving
tribute to his 1982 elegy to guitars and fury, Burst City, which finds
itself rightfully in the can(n)on of excess. Takashi Miike, about whom Tom
Mes has published a similar volume, Agitator (1), has perhaps the richest
entry, which touches on a range of the prolific director’s works, from the
signature balletic incandescence of Audition (2000), to the black society
trilogy which culminates in the vagrant story of Ley Lines (1999),
named here as Miike's most important work.
While the predictable quest for absences
produces a handful of titles (the lack of an entry on the near-perfect Wild
Zero being a particular sore point for this writer), a dozen profiles
on obscure gems emerge for every gap the would-be connoisseur manages to find.
Of particular note are the generously harvested illustrations, capturing some
chilling grimaces and perfectly poised objects (often people-as-objects),
which do as much to render the gestural nature of recent Japanese cinema as
the accompanying text.
© Christian McCrea, June 2005
The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese
Film, by Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp,
Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, 2005.
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Endnotes
- Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike,
by Tom Mes, FAB Press, Surrey, 2003.
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