Organizer and Chair: Keiko I. McDonald, University of Pittsburgh
Discussant: David Desser, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
After several years "away," Japanese cinema is back in the international limelight again. Recent triumphs at Cannes, Venice and other festivals feature talents old and new, with a definite emphasis on the new. In fact, one might say that audiences around the world are being invited to consider the work of a whole new generation of Japanese directors.
This is not to disparage the work of veterans like Shohei Imamura. His Eel (Unagi) shared the 1997 Palme d’Or for best picture at Cannes with Iranian director Abbas Kiarostani’s Taste of Cherries.
Three newcomers to the international scene stand out as especially promising.
Noami Kawase (now Mrs. Naomi Sento) was just twenty-eight when the Cannes jury awarded its 1997 Camera d’Or for best first feature to Suzaku (Moe no Suzaku). This film takes a refreshingly innovative approach to key issues of family life in Japan today.
The coveted Golden Lion at the 1997 Venice Festival went to the multi-talented Takeshi Kitano (a.k.a. Beat) for Fireworks (Hana-bi). He is already enormously popular in Japan, where a number of films testify to the scope and variety of his talents. Fireworks, in effect, introduces him as a director in command of all the forces that go into the making of a film.
Masayuki Suo’s Shall We Dance? (1996) is still fresh in memory with audiences everywhere, since it was a world-wide hit. The National Board of Review followed that success with a Best Picture award in 1997.
Many critics have drawn attention to another new development in Japanese cinema: the important spur to creativity given by the independents. Suzaku and Shall We Dance? were both independently produced. So was Fireworks, though Takeshi Kitano’s first three films were backed by major studios.
Our panel gives these three directors pride of place today for a number of reasons. For a start, their place in the international limelight seems assured. But just as importantly, we think the attention paid them at home and abroad raise interesting questions about contemporary Japanese cinema. What do we have here, the makings of a renaissance? Are these new films really all that different? If so, how so? Is it their subject matter only—or do they have other surprises in store for us?
Joseph Schaub considers two films of Masayuki Suo as works which "deal most exclusively with the Japanese family as the institution with the greatest impact on socially determined gender behavior." The earlier film dates from 1983. Its title is descriptive, if a bit unwieldy: Abnormal Family, Older Brother’s Wife (Hentai kazoku, aniki no yomesan). The other film is his 1996 triumph, Shall We Dance? Schaub’s paper focuses on the role of the daughter as an advocate of change in the postwar generation. For example, in the first film he sees Suo using parody to achieve the effect of a so-called "pink comedy." Suo can count on his Japanese audience to see the resemblance between characters in his tale and their counterparts in the venerable Yasujiro Ozu classic of 1949 Late Spring (Banshun).
Female directors are still a rarity in Japanese cinema, so new talents like Naomi Kawase are bound to be closely watched for reasons good and otherwise. Her semi-documentary Suzaku brings a confident, personal touch to issues of family life deeply rooted in Japanese society. This story of a rural middle-class family destroyed by Japan’s new economic order is important both for itself and for its relevance to the director’s life. Keiko McDonald’s paper shows how Kawase gives her subject the benefit of a powerful synergy of stylistic and narrative means.
Daisuke Miyao pays tribute to the many talents and achievements of Takeshi Kitano. He looks at a decade of work, from Violent Cop (Sono otoko kyobo ni tsuki) of 1989 to Fireworks of 1997. Miyao shows how Kitano, uses death and violence in what amounts to an allegorical representation of life in contemporary Japan. Kitano’s favorite characters are those who live where death and disaster thrive—gangsters and policemen and teenagers. Most of his youths are delinquents or physically handicapped.
Kitano is famous as a stylist especially sensitive in his use of color. Many critics, in fact, claim that Kitano constructs a film beginning with color imagery, not with a story. Miyao shows how colors—especially the so-called Kitano blue—reinforce the thematic context of these films. As a critic, he sees them as placing the "dialectical function of color between spectacle and realism."
David Desser will be discussing these papers and also offering a general overview of how and why Japanese cinema has returned to the limelight.
Generation Female: The Evolution of Male/Female Relations in Two Films by Masayuki Suo
Joseph C. Schaub, University of Maryland
The success of Masayuki Suo’s Shall We Dance? (1996) in the U.S. has established his reputation as Japan’s foremost romantic comedy filmmaker. However, his skill at critiquing Japan’s complex system of gender relations has not yet been explored. Suo’s films tend to feature male lead characters, and at least on the surface do not appear to challenge traditional gender roles in any significant way. But by focusing on the interaction between different generations of women in his films, it is clear that Suo is suggesting that women are the primary initiators of change in Japan’s struggle to achieve male/female equality. In this paper I will examine two films by Masayuki Suo which feature a young female character who is influenced either to promote change in gender behavior or to accept the status quo by an older female character in her family. Suo’s first film, Abnormal Family, Older Brother’s Wife (1983), a pornographic sequel to Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring (1949), features a young, motherless female character who, although she is critical of the roles available to women in her society, accepts the fact that she is powerless to change anything. Her role model is her older brother’s wife, modeled on the very traditional Noriko of Ozu’s Late Spring. In Shall We Dance?, however, the young daughter plays a pivotal role by inspiring her parents to change their behavior toward each other. Her role model is her own mother, who may appear traditional, but has also, because of the era she grew up in, been indoctrinated with a belief in sexual equality. By reading these films through Sumiko Iwao’s The Japanese Woman, a highly regarded study of three generations of women in Japan, I will demonstrate that Suo highlights the importance of a particular generation of women in his films—those raised immediately after World War II, whom Iwao calls "the first postwar generation." Suo’s films, like Iwao’s book celebrate the contributions of these women in Japan’s progress toward’s gender equality. In this light Shall We Dance? is as much about a mother’s influence on her daughter as it is about a man’s obsession with dancing.
Documenting the Country Family: Suzaku by Naomi Sento
Keiko I. McDonald, University of Pittsburgh
Family decay has fascinated Japanese directors for half a century now. Masters like Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio, Naruse study it time and again in the Fifties, the golden age of post-war Japanese cinema. Fifty years later now, directors old and young still make family their theme. In fact, some younger directors are approaching the subject in refreshingly thought-provoking ways.
Naomi Kawase’s Suzaku (Moe no Suzaku), the winner of the Camera d’Or at the 1997 Cannes Festival, addresses issues one might expect to interest a director old enough to be harking back to personal experience of a world well-nigh vanished, thanks to the rapid pace of change in late-twentieth-century Japan.
The rapidity of that pace is spoken for by the fact that Kawase (now Mrs. Naomi Sento) was just twenty-seven when she made this film. Yet there it is: the confident, personal touch she brings to issues of family life deeply rooted in Japanese society.
The story she tells is quietly sad, though filled with compelling questions about the nature and structure of human relations in modern-day Japan. She shows a rural middle-class family being destroyed by the fluid, inconstant nature of the new economic order the Japanese have made their own with such conspicuous success.
Suzaku offers an autobiographical and documentary approach. Its story is set in Nishiyoshino-mura, an isolated village in Nara Prefecture. Kawase grew up in Nara and spent some time in the village before shooting began. Her cast were all amateurs except for the actor who plays the role of paterfamilias. A hand-held camera was often used to shoot local events. One noticeable omission is that mainstay of documentary filmmakers: the harsh indictment of the socio-political system responsible for the human tragedy at hand.
Suzaku, especially its powerful final sequence, invites reflection on fundamental issues of family, not challenge or confrontation. Kawase’s expressive devices all accommodate that approach. Her camera eye studies nature up close and far away with obvious lyrical intent. Often she rests our gaze on scenes for that better part of a minute which, in cinema, has such power to bring thought and feeling together.
Blue vs. Red: Takeshi Kitano’s Color Scheme
Daisuke Miyao, New York University
Critics often compare Takeshi Kitano’s films with those of other directors. Thierry Jousse of Cahiers du Cinema says the yakuza in Sonatine (1993) seem like characters from a Michelangelo Antonioni film who wander into a Samuel Fuller film, and Japanese critic Shiguehiko Hasumi refers to a relationship between Sonatine and Seijun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter (1966). Antoine de Baecque of Cahiers du Cinema brings up Jean Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965) when he talks about Sonatine.
It seems noteworthy that most of the directors with whom Kitano is compared are sensitive to the use of color. This paper reviews Kitano’s filmography in terms of his color scheme. Kitano confesses his strategy of filmmaking in one interview. He says that he starts a project not from a story but from the color of the images. If Kitano’s films come out of the colors of images, as Kitano says, how are those colors constructed and articulated in his works? Is it possible to place Kitano’s films into a distinctive trend of color scheme in Japanese cinema: generating spectacles through graphic patterning and symbolic use of color, as directors such as Ozu, Kurosawa and Suzuki did? As the words "Kitano blue" indicate, the blue color plays a dominant role in Kitano’s films. I will mainly examine relationships between blue and red in Kitano’s films. Kitano says, "My favorite color is blue, so that I use blue as my base color in films." How does he use his favorite color in his films?