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| Confessions Of A Dog |
Thursday, 16th – Sunday, 19th December 2010
Curated by Midnight Eye alumnus Jasper Sharp, November’s inaugural Zipangu Fest in London offered UK audiences a cinematic smorgasbord of Japanese rarities. Titled after Marco Polo’s romantic noun for the nation, the festival’s catalogue was imbued with pioneer spirit. Electric and eclectic, its programme compiled genres high and low, unveiling jewels of the east to curious occidental eyes. Documentary, exploitation and art house movies – including several premieres – were showcased, with high profile guests and informative Q&A sessions enhancing the atmosphere of proceedings.
As a satellite extension of the event, Bristol’s waterside arts bastion, Arnolfini, screened six films derived from the parent programme. Delivering a warming glimpse of the rising sun to frigid climes, this was a fleeting opportunity to witness obscure fare often denied provincial exposure. Regretfully, the most guiltily generic of the films - self conscious schlockers such as Big Tits Zombie 3D and Mutant Girls Squad – were excluded, narrowing coverage to a respectable nub. Since neither sage Mr Sharp nor his departed emissaries were on hand to provide introduction, the films stood – and fell - on their own merits, sans context…
Children Of The Beehive – Director: Hiroshi Shimizu (1948)
Purportedly a classic, but little known in the west, the festival’s initial title warrants reappraisal. Shimuzu’s post war indie debut is a compassionate, humanist work, touching on some of the moral and social issues Kurosawa explored in his roughly contemporary noir, Stray Dog. A parabolic expression of Japan’s post-war malaise, this stirring road movie documents the efforts of an un-named soldier to usher a gang of street kids towards a better tomorrow.
With an almost complete absence of war guilt or bitterness, Shimizu’s edifying focus is on the immediate present – survival – and the future. The film’s protagonists are constantly on the move; and there’s rarely time for ennui or entropy to set in. A moving document of the epoch, the film is a rare glimpse of Japan sluggishly emerging from the twilight to enter a new dawn of economic ascension. Nobly, its director righteously endorsed his own rhetoric, adopting the orphans that comprise its cast – and proving that personal intervention can make a difference.
Annyong Yumika – Director: Tetsuaki Matsue (2009)
A fanboy’s threnody to a deceased Japanese adult star, Hayashi Yumika, Matsue’s documentary is more of a narcissistic refraction of its participants’ obsessions than a revelation of its elusive subject. Meeting with fans, critics and colleagues, director-cum-narrator discusses Hayashi’s cultural impact and appeal, embarking on a nostalgic road-trip to follow in her high-heeled footsteps. Researching an obscure entry in her canon, Junko – Tokyo Housewife, the director reassembles its cast and crew for one final act of moving homage.
Painfully overlong, this soporific and cringingly contrived effort provides little insight into Hayashi’s life. With a bare-bones introduction to the Japanese pink scene, there’s no perceptive assessment of her status in the industry, nor her motives for entering it. With scant biographical import, we’re left to speculate about Yumika’s rise (or fall) into porn, with an associate’s banal assertion that she was a “free spirit” typifying the film’s startling inanity. One lonely critic serves some lucid metaphysics, discussing the ephemerality of stardom, and Hayashi’s creation as a commercial imago. Most profound is his observation that, as long as she’s watched – her myth endures. But when the final pixel dims – she dies a second time.
Footed Tadpoles – Director: Tomoya Maeno (2009)
The third film from a precociously youthful writer-director, Maeno’s comic coming-of-age yarn was the most generic of the festival’s offerings. A wry no-mance, it’s a familiar tale of boy meets girl. Or boy surveys girl, at least.
Junior high school pupil Toru (played by the director) has a white-hot crush on bespectacled super-swot, Nanae. Sadly, possessing the suavity of a doorstop, he can only yearningly ogle her from afar. Much to his disdain, Toru learns that Nanae will shortly depart for the prefecture’s elite academy, Joto High. A terminal slacker, this revelation spurs our protagonist into action. Persuading his mother to hire a private tutor, he resolves to correct his underachieving bent and, with the help of some nifty dance steps, moonwalk his way into Nanae’s affections.
An engaging, if predictable romp, Maeno’s film is most satisfying when he combines the tender, awkward flushes of first romance with surreal vignettes.
Toru’s camp tutor instigates much of the absurdity, devising a curriculum which will make him a ‘real man’ by mastering some flamboyant boogie. Convinced his aphrodisiac jiggery will woo Nanae, Toru spontaneously busts into an amateurish, Wacko-Jacko routine for her – to crushing indifference. The godlike powers of prance are finally vindicated when an imperilled Toru strips to his underpants and, with a lusty “OW!”, paralyses his foes with some slick pirouettes. Now that’s bad.
Live Tape - Director: Tetsuaki Matsue (2009)
Matsue’s second entry on the programme is an oblique, ingenious concept. Essentially a one-take concert film, its apparent simplicity belies multiple layers of action, as both its star attraction, members of the public and cast seamlessly interweave. So spontaneously verité is the reactive camerawork, it’s nigh on impossible to gauge at what point reality is subtly augmented by effortlessly naturalistic mise en scene.
A devious mesh of art film and music video, this novel effort is perhaps more rewarding as idea than idiom. Inevitably repetitious, star Kenta Maeno’s oeuvre and generic rock star affectations may fail to impress dilettantes, leaving a certain vacuity at the heart of a brilliantly conceived trompe l’oeil. Yet, as its atmospheric finale segues to titles, one is left retrospectively questioning all that they’ve witnessed before. Certainly the most daring movie on the bill, Matsue deserves kudos for this bold, beguiling experiment.
NN-891102 - Director: Go Shibata (1999)
The spectre of the bomb is omnipresent in Japanese popular culture. As implied menace, or explicitly, in Godzilla and anime Barefoot Gen, the nightmare lingers. A modern addition to this fearful canon is Go Shibata’s little heralded NN-891102, a title which connotes the film’s thematic and formal penchant for experiment. Whereas the festival’s earlier post-nuclear entry, Children Of The Beehive, is a primarily corporeal affair, Shibata’s abrasive tour-de-force is an apocalyptic psychodrama, glimpsing the internal reverberations of the bomb. A macabre visual rhapsody, NN-891102 amplifies the ceaseless death-rattle inside one man’s skull.
Like shards of shrapnel, figments of Reichi’s past, present and subconscious collide; transforming the narrative into an ephemeral text comprised of reverie and reminisce.
Using a striking gamut of effects, the film is a sensory tour-de-force, channelling a stream of scarred consciousness. Ravishingly shot, a succession of striking filters – orange, sepia and blue – colour co-ordinate Reichi’s past, accentuating the force of NN-891102’s subjective ellipsis. Bravura editing compliments the director’s visual brilliance, his superb evocation of angst pummelling the viewer in a tsunami of lyrical montage.
Confessions Of A Dog - Director: Gen Takahasi (2005)
Written, directed and edited by indie provocateur Gen Takahashi, Confessions Of A Dog is a searing indictment of police corruption. Billed as a Japanese answer to Serpico, its rhetoric is similar, but the diagnosis: terminal. Sidney Lumet’s classic provides righteous closure, viewing institutionalised graft as a disease to be rooted out. Takahasi’s pessimistic film conceives the entire institution as a monolithic parasite, so inextricably permeating all levels of Japanese society, that the cancer is inviolable. With fatalistic weariness, and only a sliver of triumphalism, this inflammatory epic insists that the biggest yakuza gang of all are the boys in blue.
Offering much intrigue, but little palpable tension throughout its three hour running time, Takahashi’s film is padded with high level connivance that mars its pace. Slowed to a TV-drama torpor, Takeda’s fatalistic collapse assumes the momentum of quicksand. One advantage of this epic, multi-generational range is its depressingly circular trajectory; revealing a new bunch of recruits that succumb to familiar temptations. Regrettably, by the time the film’s combustible finale ignites, this detailed study of the banality of evil has too often consigned itself exclusively to the banal.
Unfortunately, each of the festival’s screenings were sparsely attended, creating a slightly disconcerting vacuum where muttering, sporadic laughter and popcorn rustling should have filled the void. Apparently reserved for a few hardened Japanophiles, this was a tepid response to a bold schedule. Fittingly, the festival served at least one turkey in time for Christmas, but none of its offerings deserved the apathetic welcome they received. At least one of the films – Go Shibata’s edgy, gracefully apocalyptic NN 891102 – approached the realms of the visionary. Cinema such as this is potent enough to concretise nebulous eulogies like ‘visual poetry’. Four people in Bristol now know this.
Meanwhile, across the river, the city’s other alternative cinema – The Watershed – was unrolling a part seasonal programme comprising canonical faves like It’s A Wonderful Life. This was clearly the ‘other cinema’: the different stuff, the far-out stuff, the essence of whatever it is readers of this website hope to experience. Where were you? And what was amiss? Anarchic weather, festive consumerism, poor publicity and erratic content are all culpable. But a post-mortem would be premature. Perhaps running the event earlier, alongside the mother-festival – facilitating occasional guest appearances – might boost its profile next year, eluding the seasonal slowdown. Because this ambitious festival richly deserves a rerun.
Sequels are always inferior to an initial instalment, according to cliché: but hopefully the Zipangu Fest’s second year will defy that maxim. Think Empire Strikes Back rather than Phantom Menace, y’all. DJO
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| Children Of The Beehive |
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