The films in this year's program by the Japan Foundation are connected by the exciting tension of authorship and genre between two breakthroughs in Japanese cinema, which are forty years apart



Is this a breakthrough? The modernists in Japanese cinema, is the title of an essay by Japanese "iconoclast" Nagisa Oshima on the phenomenon of the Sun Tribe / taiyozoku films at which he merely sneered until the debut of Ko Nakahira's Crazed Fruit / Kurutta kajitsu in July 1956, when he felt that "in the sound of the girl's skirt being ripped and the hum of the motorboat slashing through the older brother, sensitive people could hear the wails of a seagull heralding a new age in Japanese cinema." While the historical Japanese New Wave was created by young filmmakers whose adolescence began in the shadow of defeat, the emergence of depoliticized, escapist films in the Season of the Sun that preceded it, as the product of "the society of the spectacle", heralded a Japanese cinema like nothing seen before.

The Sun Tribe is a name for the idle, lost generation of the time of Japanese postwar economic recovery. They are on permanent vacation, on the beach, indulging in a fever of sex and violence. There's nothing to throw ourselves into, even if we wanted. So we make boredom our credo, pronounced Yujiro Ishihara who embodied the paradigmatic anti-hero of the genre. Yujiro Ishihara was a real model for the new hero of "emphasized ego" to his older brother, novelist Shintaro Ishihara. Thanks to the adaptation of his early works Season of the Sun / Taiyo no kisetsu, Punishment Room / Shokei no heya and Crazed Fruit, cruel stories of the Sun Tribe became the most popular Nikkatsu genre, and charismatic Yujiro Ishihara the star attraction of Japanese pop film culture.

Films in this year's program by the Japan Foundation, organized by the Japanese Embassy in Zagreb, are connected by the exciting tension of authorship and genre between two breakthroughs in Japanese cinema which are forty years apart: from melodramatic Nikkatsu film noir conceived by Yujiro Ishihara as a soft version of youth films after taiyozoku in the mid-1950s, to the first films by Takeshi Kitano from the early ‘90s. Genre mutations are a constant of Japanese narrative cinema, conditioned by and inextricable knot of influences of domestic and foreign films and powerful modes of production within the film industry, even after many directors shifted to alternative methods of producing their films. This is an opportunity for a quick look at the differences and alterations of aesthetic strategies of the three oldest Japanese film studios: Nikkatsu, Shochiku and Toho (Daiei i Toei are missing from "the big 5") after the middle of 50s, during the second life of film images, after film ceased to be the only kind of moving image.

The mid-1950s productions are the zenith of the Japanese film industry and the beginning of merging modernist practices with artistic and genre films, as well as being the period of the first discovery of Japanese cinema (more precisely the two filmmakers, Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi) by the West. Then, in the mid-1990s, déjà vu:
The rediscovery of Japanese cinema by the West (more precisely two films by Takeshi Kitano and Shohei Imamura) triggered the discovery of the Japanese "New New Wave", as well as earlier films by Kitano, which we will see in this program.

Films by Nikkatsu company The Man Who Raised the Storm / Arashi o yobu otoko with Ishihara and his fatal taiyozoku co-star Mie Kitahara and A Red Handkerchief /Akai hankachi by a master of the genre Toshio Masuda, are melodramatic versions of borderless action / mukokuseki akushun and mood action / muudo akushun films, hybrid "hardboiled" film noirs which connect the old Japanese type of nihilistic anti-hero with the sense of loss in the American and French crime movies.

Forty years later Takeshi Kitano reconstructs the genre into a permanent survival game, with yakuza on the beach in the spirit of erotic-grotesque-nonsense / ero-guro-nansensu, an aesthetic of shortcuts, repetitions and stoppages.
In the title of his debut film That Man is Brutal / Sono otoko, kyobo ni tsuki, Kitano emphasizes hallucinations of borderless violence, embodying the grotesque stoicism of the most radical Nikkatsu films of 60s by Seijun Suzuki.

Yoshishige Yoshida and Shohei Imamura, authors of the historical New Wave Nuberu bagu (although, they refuse the term that Shochiku coined for them, imitating the model of success of the French auteur cinema), dissect myths of victimization and humanism from women's point of view in most of their existentialist films. In the naturalistic The Ballad of Narayama / Narayama-bushi ko, the only history lesson jidai-geki in this program, Imamura's impulsive images diagnose civilization. In the film of an impossible love Akitsu Hot Springs / Akitsu onsen, the first of many anti-melodramas that Yoshida Yoshishige made with actress Mariko Okada, a woman takes on the collective weight of impossibilities and defeats. A man says: On the day of defeat you cried for hours. You cried so sincerely, that I decided to live. These two canonic examples of Japanese feminusuto film outline a different horizon of the emancipated cinema, Japanese sunless cinema. That horizon of recognition and the differences in the reality of each newly discovered film from the history of Japanese cinema, continue to fascinate us from an unyielding distance. (Tanja Vrvilo)