Our film programs of contemporary Japanese films began almost at the same time as the web page Midnight Eye, devoted to contemporary visions of Japanese film that has just recently announced the end of its operation after 15 years



Within this fifteen years-long frame, Midnight Eye is an unavoidable database in English language for contextualization of Japanese films, authors and books who have appeared in the dense unknown areas that were pragmatically named new wave of the 1990’s.

The most famous representatives of the new wave - Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Takeshi Kitano, director Naomi Kawase, Hirokazu Koreeda, Nobuhiro Suwa, Shinji Aoyama, Jun Ichikawa, Shinya Tsukamoto, Takashi Miike, Makoto Shinozaki, Shunji Iwai, Satoshi Isaka, Sabu, Akihiko Shiota, Yoichi Sai and many others created an explosion of feature films that encompasses diverse adaptations of old Japanese genres and contemporary stories of gendai mono themes, ranging from restrained family and existentialist dramas about post-family and post-homogenous society, across films about the youth called seishun eiga – whose protagonists are most often losers on the edge of the world of crime and yakuza – to psycho horrors. “Everything happens in waves (or circles)”, wrote Dutch film critics Jasper Sharp and Tom Mes on June 29 of 2015. The author duo behind the webpage Midnight Eye were referring to the polarized condition and an artistic standstill in the newer Japanese cinema. Thus we could say that the latest post-wave era as a focal point of their enthusiastic research officially ceased to exist on that same date.

Our experiences in research, screening and reception of films differ greatly as Japanese waves arrive in a synchronous manner with sometimes greater or lesser lateness and are permanently merely absent. We would equally like to see entire retrospectives of films from the silent era, classics, new wave films by directors from the 1960’ and 1970’s as well as directors who started to make a name for themselves in the 1990’s.We know that even at the time of Zagreb’s Cinematheque, we did not have an opportunity to see an entire retrospective of one of the great masters such as Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Miki Naruse, Akira Kurosawa or modernists Nagisa Oshima, Yoshishigo Yoshida, Shohei Imamura. The most encompassing retrospective ever shown in these parts of the world was the one including films by the new wave director from the 1960’s Seijun Suzuki, who has directed 40 films in 12 years only for the studio Nikkatsu, organized by Film mutations; Festival of Invisible Film in June 2012. It consisted of twenty two films and it was made possible thanks to support and in collaboration the Japanese foundation and the Japanese Embassy, Austrian Film Museum, Croatian Film Association and Art kino Croatia. We strive to show “waves” of the first and second century of Japanese films so that there could be serious writing about Japanese films.

The first small program of contemporary Japanese films from the archive of the Japanese Embassy in Zagreb and the Japanese Foundation in Tokyo began spontaneously in 2002. After the lecture “History of Japanese Film” that I held in that same year as part of the program of Days of Japanese Culture in the Varaždin National Theatre, in which I had been an actress at the time, I got the opportunity to show two contemporary Japanese films on 16mm film tape by two to me unknown Japanese directors. Avant-garde filmmaker Vlado Petek was attracted by the title of one of the films Sky Cannot Be This Blue (Sora ga konnnani aoi wake ga nai, Akira Emoto, 1993) and accepted the invitation to bring his 16-mm projectors to the Cultural home in Trešnnjevka where we showed the two films as well. In the following year I selected several titles for the Program of contemporary Japanese films in the MM Center in Zagreb and invited the Japanese historian Kenji Iwamoto to hold a lecture at the Academy of Drama Arts. From 2004, these programs became a regular part of the yearly film program in the Tuškanac cinema, and since the beginning we have shown about a hundred films.

The reason to recollect names of the directors and article I have written during these fourteen years is not just the end of this abundant period but also the occasion to see the film by one of the most exciting new wave directors from the 1999’s Shinji Aoyama Sad Vacation, which is the first film by this director to be shown within our programs. With the title of his film taken from Johnny Thunders’ punk eulogy devoted to Sid Vicious, Aoyama concludes his saga about the northern Kyûshû. This unplanned trilogy was announced by his debut film about the lost Helpless (1996) and one of the best films from that period Eureka (2002), a reflection of a real event, the deadly incident when members of a cult organized a “sarin incident” in the Tokyo subway in 1995. “Do you remember that incident when a bus was hijacked?” a young heroine of the film asks. Aoyama is a musician, experimenter whose beginnings are connected to 8mm films, writer and theoretician as well as a lecturer at the Tokyo University and the Tokyo Film School. Sad Vacation is the film adaptation of his novel in which the protagonists are aimlessly searching for the members of a lost family. Aoyama starts from actualities in a naturalist manner but pictures of emotions and impulses stop the trans-like anti-heroes in the cruel time of fatality. In the anti-Oedipal dramaturgy of mothers, sons, fathers, daughters transport themselves from other tragic families and times to a “vacation”. It’s a sad vacation, what can I say, verse from the song Sad Vacation and a too big soap bubble is a shattered display of their idealism.

As a dedication to the imperfection from that period we would like to remind of the two excellent films that we have already shown previously, Osaka Story (Ôsaka monogatari, 1999) by Jun Ichikawa who portrayed growing up of a young girl in a poor family of manzai comedians, and through poetic documentarism created a meditation about a fatherless society (from the program in MM Center in 2003) and Kamikaze Taxi by Masato Harada (Kamikaze takushî, 1995, from the program in Tuškanac in 2006), an impressive combination of the road film genre and the action film with yakuza as well as a critique of the political situation, relationship to the military history and unacceptance of foreigners and outsiders. All three films deal with the theme of a temporary community of those who have nowhere to go. We open the feature film program with the film About Her Brother (Otôto, 2010), directed by the neoclassic Joji Jamada, who directed more than eighty films with historical and contemporary topics. Among others, he directed the longest film series about the travels of Mr. Tore (49 films from 1969 to 1995), and fans of comicbooks will be thrilled with six new animas. (Tanja Vrvilo)