Stirrings amid Stagnation

By RICHARD CORLISS

Do a few good films signal Japan's return to world class?

Twenty-five years ago, it was among the healthiest of Japanese industries: six thriving studios produced 503 films that sold more than 1.1 billion tickets in 7,067 theaters. Today, in an entertainment world that moves to Sony Walkman rhythms and Pac-Man blips, Japanese cinema is troubled and timid. The five studios that have survived the national movie recession of the past decade or so--Toho, Toei, Shochiku, Nikkatsu and Daiei--find their profits in real estate, supermarket chains, Kabuki theater troupes and bowling alleys. Most of the 322 films produced last year were roman poruno, or lowbudget, soft-core-sex pictures. The number of theaters is down 68% since 1958, and ticket sales were a pathetic 150 million (down 87%). Even compared with reduced attendance figures in the West, Japan is a disaster area: five tickets were sold last year for every person in the U.S., vs. only 1.3 tickets for every Japanese citizen. Though in 1982 both attendance and revenue rose significantly for the first time in two decades, the increase was due entirely to a 13.4% surge in distributors' grosses for foreign films--including Japan's new alltime box-office champ (yawn), E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.

In the 1950s Japan could boast not only a robust film industry but also a vibrant national cinema, with three directors--Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa--who could be counted among the handful of film-making giants. Mizoguchi died in 1956, Ozu in 1963, and no younger director has since achieved nearly their stature. As for Kurosawa, he has been able to realize only three films since 1965--all outside the studio system--and in 1971, frustrated by the industry's intransigence, attempted suicide. His latest project, a retelling of King Lear set in medieval Japan, was recently postponed when Kurosawa's old studio, Toho, declined to invest in the film.

Nor is Japan's premier director alone.

The nation's film industry, which once gave its power to, and took its glory from, strong-minded directors, is today run by cautious bosses looking for quick profits in a few restrictive genres. Besides the ubiquitous porno, local audiences embrace movies about gangsters and itinerant swordsmen, family sagas, cartoon fantasies and stoic romances in which the hero and heroine never kiss. The endlessly popular Tora-San movies, which trace the comic misfortunes of a middle-aged wanderer and his family, will soon appear in The Guinness

Book of World Records as the longest movie series; the 31st Tora-San feature will be released in August. But none of these genres is likely to restore Japan to international prominence. Times look dark in the cinema of the rising sun.

In its current state of near exhaustion, the Japanese cinema has returned to the exotic isolation of its earliest years. Moviegoing in Japan at the turn of the century was an experience more closely allied to other national arts than to the nickelodeon fever of the West. Until 1918 female roles were played by Kabuki actors in drag. Until the arrival of talking pictures in 1931, audiences depended upon spellbinding narrators called benshi to interpret the on-screen action; many were more popular than the country's movie stars. Though Japanese cinema was a strong force in Asia (so much so that in Thailand the word nippon came to mean movies), its films were virtually unknown in the West. Haifa century later it would take an alliance of television, video games and indifferent product to reduce Japan to the status of also-ran among national cinemas. As Film Historian Joseph Anderson wrote last year, "The Japanese film industry, in contrast to so many other Japanese manufacturers, has no significant foreign markets and the worst prospects at home. It has become Japan's answer to Chrysler."

Things may be changing. The Japanese cinema has not been so lucky as Chrysler in 1983, but there are small stirrings of renaissance. In May, for only the second time since 1954, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival went to a Japanese film: Shohei Imamura's The Ballad of Narayama, an elemental and unsentimentahzed portrait of Japan's mountain people in the 1880s. The same festival also showcased Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, a P.O.W. melodrama set in Java in 1942 starring David Bowie and two popular Japanese performers, Singer-Songwriter Ryuichi Sakamoto and the TV comic Takeshi. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is scheduled to open this fall in New York as the spearhead of an Oshima retrospective.

"The Imamura and Oshima films are neither flukes nor mutants," says Tadao Sato, a respected Japanese film critic, of their success. "They are part of a new tendency among Japanese directors to visualize the 'irrational' elements of the Eastern world through Western-style intelligence. Once, when a Westerner looked at Japanese movies--at Kurosawa's kamikaze-type warriors in The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, or Ozu's gentle heroines in Tokyo Story and The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, or Mizoguchi's evocations of Kabuki drama in Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff--he, could tell himself, 'This is Japan!' He can't find that kind of false reassurance in the works of Imamura or Oshima."

These films mark returns to prominence by directors who have been working in movies for at least a quarter of a century. But where are the Japanese equivalents of Spielberg and Lucas, Coppola and Scorsese--younger directors who can revitalize the box office and the art form? Some are locked into the industry's tradition-bound system of slow advancement, where experience is rewarded but rarely offered. "This brutal apprenticeship has long controlled the Japanese studio system," notes American Writer-Director Paul Schrader, who will soon go to Japan to film a biography of Novelist Yukio Mishima. "I think we're finally starting to see that system break down."

For those directors who resist marching single file on the genre treadmill, the way can be difficult. Donald Richie, an American critic who has lived in Japan since 1946, enumerates the obstacles: "First of all, the Japanese banks can rarely be prevailed upon to make loans for films; they're as cautious as the big studios. And even if an independent film is financed and completed, there are few places to show it, since most moviehouses are owned by the major studios, which naturally want to keep the market cornered." Directors must become studio outlaws, raising money from independent sources, and this demands as much ingenuity as planning and shooting a film. Oshima financed his last three films with help from producers in France, Britain and New Zealand. Other directors may receive grants from the Art Theater Guild, which in the past 20 years has helped launch the careers of Oshima, Susumu Hani and Masahiro Shinoda. "If Japanese cinema hasn't become extinct," says Critic Sato, "it is because of the life-and-death efforts of directors who risk their own money and property to make movies."

After nearly two decades of depression, the Japanese art film has returned to the status of a cottage industry. But it has not seized the world imagination as it did in the 1950s, when the Western success of Kurosawa's Rashomon unlocked a trove of tantalizing, hitherto unknown masterpieces. Part of the appeal of these films lay in their strangeness: Japan seemed not just another country but a different world, full of mystery, elegance, violence, surprise.

Today that world has changed again.

To the West, Japan is now that more familiar quantity, a friend and competitor. And yet the most ambitious of current Japanese films continue to plumb the nation's unique otherness: the traditions of rigorous personal discipline, honor and revenge. As Imamura, the international prizewinner, notes, "I refused to accompany Narayama to Cannes this year, because I thought the film would be misunderstood there. When the people at Toei approached me about submitting it to the festival, I told them to wait 50 years or so. By then we will be understood. And we'll be winning the prize every year.'' --By Richard Corliss. Reported by Yuki Ishikawa and Alan Tansman/Tokyo

With reporting by Yuki Ishikawa, Alan Tansman This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.