BOOK OF THE WEEK
 Schilling,
Mark. (1999). Contemporary Japanese Film. New York: Weatherhill.
Mark
Schilling’s knowledge of modern Japanese film never ceases to
amaze me. He is well on his way to becoming the next Donald
Richie, a modern interpreter of Japanese film for the West, albeit
more open minded. (I still bristle at Richie’s wholesale
dismissal of the anime medium.) On the heels of Schilling’s 1997
landmark Encyclopedia of Japanese Pop Culture was this
book, filled with analyses and reviews of modern Japanese film.
One
of my few complaints is with the title of the book. Calling this
book Contemporary Japanese Film was something of a gamble.
Covering a ten year slice from 1989 to 1999, this book is a
snapshot of Japanese filmmaking at the end of the twentieth
century. However, the identification of the films of this era as
contemporary will only last another few years, and the book’s
title will soon become anachronistic. For example, much to the
publisher’s probable chagrin, this book precedes by only a few
years the boom in interest in Japanese film ushered in by the film
Battle Royale as well as director Takashi Miike. (The book
does contain reviews of two Miike films, but they seem to be
relatively minor ones in his ever-expanding oeuvre.) Only three
years out, the book is already beginning to lose its grasp on the
word “contemporary.”
Complaints
about the title aside, this book is a wellspring of useful
information for anyone interested in current Japanese film. The
book is divided into three sections, of which “Essays” is the
first. The first chapter, “Mainstream Japanese Film,” examines
the state of the Japanese studios during the mid- to late-90s,
particularly the system of distribution employed by the Big Three
distributors Toho, Shochiku, and Toei. Moving on to the
independent film, Schilling briefly examines “The New Wave of
the Nineties” and assumes a broader outlook in “Asians in
Japan, Japanese in Asia.” The second section includes interviews
and profiles of those individuals Schilling considers to be among
“some the most important filmmaking talent working in Japan in
the 1990s,” from perennial Western favorite Akira Kurosawa on
down. The bulk of the book, however, is the third section of film
reviews. It is these reviews that are particularly impressive. Not
only has Schilling seen more Japanese films than I can ever hope
to see (without living in Japan and working as a film reviewer for
the Japan Times), he has something interesting and insightful to
say about each.
These
reviews contain a fair number of reviews of anime films,
especially those from Studio Ghibli (although Hayao Miyazaki was
inexplicably not one of the filmmakers interviewed or profiled in
the second section). Pompoko, Porco Rosso, Kiki’s
Delivery Service, Whisper of the Heart, Princess
Mononoke, and Only Yesterday are reviewed, as well as Ghost
in the Shell, Perfect Blue, and the Evangelion
movie, among others. Also included are a number of live-action
movies that have been made from manga, as well as live-action
films whose staffs have ties to the anime industry (such as
Hideaki Anno's Love & Pop and Gamera 3, for
which frequent Oshii collaborator Kazunori Ito wrote the
screenplay.) Additionally, a significant number of the anime films
reviewed make Schilling’s best of the decade list (Ghost in
the Shell, Kiki, Memories, Princess Mononoke,
and Perfect Blue).
I
like Schilling’s book because it gives Japanese animation its
due within the field of film in general, as opposed to the generalizing
and derogatory statements Richie has made about anime in the
past. Although not about anime specifically, it provides some
much-needed contextual background for the understanding of the
Japanese animated film within modern Japanese filmmaking as
a whole. Not only is Contemporary Japanese Film a useful
reference text (many of the films Schilling discusses are not
well known in English; this book may be one of the few English
resources for such films), but it is also a good read. I find
myself picking this book up at regular intervals and flipping
to a random page, to simply see where the avenues of modern
Japanese film may lead.
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