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