Contemporary national cinemas
Contemporary Japan Film
The Japanese can be described
as the masters of essential; they stretched the poetics
of minimalism to its furthest limits. Japanese emptiness
is simply disturbing. However, the art of ’minimal’ demands
maximal discipline. It is present even in the genres in
which one would not expect discipline, like the Japanese pulp school
whose ideals are the pop culture and raw poetics of the
Hollywood B-movies. Many authors recycle Yasujiro Ozu’s
model of approach to film, but there are also those who
refrain from this obsession. Japanese auteur film at the
beginning of the third millennium can be categorized in
three schools. Representatives of the first school are
Ozu’s imitators (Masahiro Kobayashi).
The second school
make film modernists who have realized that the ’lost decade’
of the 1990s, with its recession and the explosion of juvenile
delinquency, changed the structure of the traditional family
and produced some new, alternative forms of family (Shinji
Aoyama, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Eiji Okuda, Ryosuke Hashiguchi).
The third group form Japanese catastrophicals (Nobuhiro
Suwa, Kiyoshi Kurosawa) who love to dissect millennium’s
fears and frustrations, aware of the fact that not a year
can go by without some nuclear catastrophe. If, however,
nuclear reactors rest, surely a member of some post-apocalyptic
sect will jump them on the way to work and throw some sarin
in the Tokyo underground. The text describes main representatives
of each of the ’schools’ and their individualities. Dragan Rubeša |