Midnight Eye.

"In what seems like an active form of resistance to the feverish pace of film production in Japan, [Kohei] Oguri has directed only five feature films in a 25-year career," writes Tom Mes. "The impact each of them has made, on the other hand, has been formidable." Mentions of Oscar and Cannes follow, and then, "The Buried Forest like Oguri's previous films, is an attempt to reawaken our capacity to interact with images. The casual viewer might complain that there is no story, but they would be wrong. There is no plot, perhaps, but there are stories aplenty."

Oguri is also the featured interviewee in this new issue of Midnight Eye. Because human vision and the film image are so radically different by nature, "cinema becomes fiction," he tells Mes. "Instead of trying to overcome that hurdle by widening the scope of the image, we can emphasise the fiction, to try to find the reality within the fictional image."

The other feature sees Alexander Jacoby looking back on Pordenone, or the Giornate del Cinema Muto, a festival of silent film staged last month in Sacile. Japan was the focus this year, specifically, "the gendai-geki: films about contemporary life," including four by Mikio Naruse and other works by Hiroshi Shimizu, Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi and many others.

The idea behind Mes and Adam Campbell's roundup is open enough: All five films hit Japanese theaters this year. Mes's favorite, though, Ryuichi Hiroki's "powerful, uncompromisingly intimate" It's Only Talk, has a page all its own.

Adam Campbell's review of Train Man offers background on the enormous popularity of other "whimsical" love stories like it, such as Crying Out Love and Korea's My Sassy Girl.

We need a book like Japanese Horror Cinema, notes Jasper Sharp, "a timely and welcome attempt at creating a wider discourse around this vital aspect of modern global film culture. Unfortunately, taken as a whole, it is not an entirely successful one."

Posted by dwhudson at November 23, 2005 1:44 AM