Midnight Eye. A book and five films.

fabulous new book from Abé Mark Nornes, whose previous publications include Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima, and The Japan/America Film Wars: WWII Propoganda and Its Cultural Contexts, a collection of essays which he edited with Yukio Fukushima. It should be pointed out right away, that Nornes's latest is not strictly about Shinsuke Ogawa, who died on 7 February 1992 from cancer of the colon, but about Ogawa Pro, the collective that bore his name. This is an important distinction; it is not often made clear where the dividing line between the man and those who congregated around him has been. Certainly Ogawa alone could not have immortalised the turmoil faced by Japan's more rural communities against the threat of a new, more economically-driven modern reality without the support, assistance and sacrifice of the loyal entourage that gathered around him, as becomes very clear in the opening chapters of this fascinating chronicle.

Film reviews:

• "In a 1993 interview with Dartmouth professor Jeffrey Ruoff, Kazuo Hara was quoted as saying that documentaries "should explore the things that people don't want explored," writes Lindsay Nelson. "His own documentaries have become famous doing just that, and for displaying images that the public doesn't necessarily want to see. Though his inaction in the face of the violence and potential suffering that happens in front of his camera raises serious ethical questions, The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On should be applauded for its sheer audacity, and for the important questions it raises about the roles and responsibilities of filmmaker, audience, and subject."

• "With its pan-European cast and Umbrellas of Cherbourg-director [Jacques] Demy behind the camera, Lady Oscar is hardly recognisable as a Japanese movie," writes Jasper Sharp. "However this lavish Toho production is in fact based on one of the most phenomenally popular shojo mangas (girls' comics) ever released."

• "I was beginning to worry that Shinya Tsukamoto was becoming lazy and more impulsiveness and imprecise as a filmmaker," writes Nicholas Rucka. "Nightmare Detective has made me reconsider that notion."

• "Before discussing The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai by Mitsuru Meike it might be prudent to consider the peculiar story of its journey from the far from glamorous sex theaters of Tokyo to the relative respectability of Cinema Village in New York, where it recently became the first Pink film to gain a theatrical release in the American art cinema circuit," begins Dean Bowman.

• And again, Dean Bowman: "Jun Ichikawa's film version of one of Haruki Murakami's most elegant short stories, Tony Takitani, somehow manages to redefine the whole process of literary adaptation, though with the same quiet, unassuming grace of the original story."

Posted by dwhudson at October 22, 2007 9:40 AM