Midnight Eye

Zwei Hauptstücke hat die neue Ausgabe des Online-Japan-Journals Midnight Eye. Zum einen stellt der Wiener Japan-Film-Experte Roland Domenig die Art Theatre Guild vor, die die Nouvelle Vague Japans ermöglichte und der im letzten Jahr auch mehrere deutsche Retrospektiven gewidmet waren:

The importance of the Art Theatre Guild (ATG) within Japanese cinema is equalled only by its obscurity in the West. During three decades, it produced, distributed, and exhibited the works of pivotal filmmakers like Nagisa Oshima, Susumu Hani, Kazuo Kuroki, Shohei Imamura, Yoshishige (Kiju) Yoshida, Shuji Terayama, and numerous others whose combined efforts have gone into history as the most daring, challenging, exciting, and innovative movement in the nation's cinema: the Japanese New Wave.

Zum anderen gibt es ein Interview mit dem Regisseur Hirokazu Kore-eda (Maborosi, After Life; Jump Cut Lexikon), der dieses Jahr im Wettbewerb von Cannes mit seinem neuesten Film "Nobody Knows" zu sehen war. Verblüffenderweise kündigt er an, als nächstes einen Historien-Film drehen zu wollen:

So my next film will be a jidai geki for Shochiku studios, based on a rakugo story with revenge as its main theme. I wanted to make a jidai geki like the type that Sadao Nakajima used to make, one that isn't so macho and where it's not about people dying all the time. I want to show how difficult it is to kill a person. The story revolves around a weak guy who goes out to avenge the death of his father, but he does it very unwillingly because he would prefer to live longer.


Ambivalenter als sie vielleicht gemeint ist, klingt die Kritik von Don Brown zum Animationsfilm "Casshern", dem Regiedebüt von Kazuaki Kiriya. Grafisch eindrucksvoll, lässt sich resümieren, aber mit Botschaften überfrachtet. Und vielleicht Teil eines neuen Genres:

Considering the recent success of similarly pessimistic glimpses of the future such as Battle Royale and Dragonhead, perhaps we are witnessing the birth of a new, uniquely Japanese mutation: the unapologetically nihilistic commercial blockbuster.

Jasper Sharp bricht eine Lanze für den charmanten "Yoshino's Barber Shop" von Naoko Ogigami:

A great piece of independent filmmaking that actually has something to say, Yoshino's Barber Shop is the kind of low-key offering that, unfortunately, far too seldom makes it past the film festival circuit, with foreign distributors almost dogmatic in their insistence that the only thing audiences possibly look for in Japanese film is sadistic violence and perverted sex.