What is the reason for the sudden fashion for Japanese film production in Russia and in the world? Today, the image of Japanese cinema, which in recent years has firmly won the world's screens, has undergone a dramatic change. Japanese filmmakers have radically changed the system of moral and artistic coordinates, defying our usual ideas about Japan and its culture with their shocking strangeness and search for new unusual sensations and forms of their artistic expression. Modern Japanese cinema is a cocktail of various ingredients. The main focus is now on the entertainment of films, the obvious predilection of modern Japanese directors for the cult of sex and cruelty, to blurring the boundaries between good and evil, etc.

SUCH A DIFFERENT MOVIE

One of the first foreign audiences was literally shocked by Nagisa Oshima, who showed the now cult film "Bullfight of Love". The film turned out to be truly stunning with its sophisticated eroticism, unusual for Europeans,and some kind of naked naturalism, sometimes bordering on physiology and therefore giving everything you see a mystical, mysterious color.

Thus, the director expressed his protest against the well-fed style of the classics of Japanese cinema, which he accused of blandness, impersonality and monotony. And at the same time, his film was a kind of challenge to Western cinema with its beautiful, but not very meaningful sexuality. Oshima's physiology is not just a component, but a defining aspect of human existence, and he proves this very reliably.

He tried to extend the same principles to the historical plot, making a film with a very symbolic and sensational title "Taboo", the success of which was already a priori worked by two points that were widely advertised by the press. A plot from the life of samurai, built on a story about the little-known customs and customs of this rather closed world, now already gone in the distant past, and the second, perhaps, main point is an undisguised hint of homosexual relations among samurai-something that was previously not customary to talk openly, and even more so, show it in movies. The film "Taboo", as well as "Bullfight of Love", for some time became a kind of business card of modern Japanese cinema.

A new sensation of this kind was the film "Audition" by Takashi Miike, which was first shown at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2000. On Russian screens, it was held under the name "Screen Test" and caused a stir among our audience.

Avant-garde Japanese film artists have long noticed this international creative platform for young, original and experimental cinema and are successfully mastering it. Suffice it to say that in 2006, the 35th Rotterdam Film Festival also opened with the European premiere of the film "Heart Beating in the Night" by Japanese director Shunichi Nagasaki.

Ending. For the beginning, see: "Asia and Africa Today", 2006, N9.

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But let's return to Takashi Miike, who, despite his young age, already has 50 films under his belt. If his "Screen Test" is a shocking film, then "City of Lost Souls", shown in 2001, is a sophisticated action movie that is common for modern Japanese and Korean cinema. Each frame is fantastically beautiful, each trick is thought out to the smallest detail and, of course, effective, but the plot of the film as a whole does not occupy the director too much. The Japanese mafia fights over drugs with the Chinese, and romantic Brazilians and funny Russians periodically get in their way, but it's not easy to understand who wants what. However, in Miike's films, as in many other contemporary Japanese films, the threat often comes from a young, beautiful girl. You can not say "evil" - it is a threat, but a deadly one.

Some people think that Miike's films are a great way to get adrenaline pumping. The films "Iti the Killer", "Alive or Dead", "Screen Test" and others are fascinating. Blood literally gushes from the screen, but this is just a funny provocation of the director, his style. I wonder why he chose this particular form of provocation. As Miike said in an interview, "When you shoot about real people, horror movies come out of your mind ..." ¹

According to the shocking effect of his film productions and the abundance of blood in them, another famous Japanese director, the namesake of the great Kurosawa, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, can compete with Miike today. After the release of the film" Charisma", which was awarded a number of awards, he made the film" Cure", which brought him international fame. The film is made perfectly, but it is difficult to watch it - there is too much blood. At the same time, the "new" Kurosawa had no desire to make a horror film. Rather, it's a dark thriller with a hidden ending. Apparently, this is how Kurosawa feels about modern Japan. His work makes you feel that our world is full of aggression, and the aggressiveness that is literally in the air today is quite in tune with the spirit of gangster and samurai films, which, of course, had a great influence on modern Japanese directors.

Aggression and apocalyptic motives today permeate the work of many leading Japanese directors. In July 2002, Moscow hosted screenings of the film "Avalon "by Japanese director Mamoru Hoshii, who gained a cult reputation thanks to the fantastic manga"Ghost in the Shell". James Cameron praised this animation to the skies, and the Wachowski brothers used its concept in the legendary "Matrix". This time the director declared himself in a fantastic genre.

The hero of " Avalon "(actor Keanu Reeves) breaks out of the virtual embrace of a megacomputer and finds himself in a desolate landscape with charred ruins (what remains of Chicago). At the same time, the director went for an original experiment: for filming the collapse and decline of the future, he chose Warsaw instead of Tokyo, invited Polish actors and shot the dim reality of the post-Socialist world, which turned out to be quite fantastic and quite virtual.

In the film, you can feel clear traces of the influence of Andrei Tarkovsky and his film "Stalker", but you can't call the picture imitative. The image, etched and monochrome, may be somewhat similar to Tarkovsky's style, but it is connected not with the gloom of the worldview, but with the effect of a computer game. "Avalon" is such a brutal paramilitary game, where young people, having lost faith in the criteria of reality, are ready to run away to experience the lost taste for life. A girl named Ash flies there like a moth to the fire, following her partner who disappeared into the virtual wilds.

The film combines different levels of not only plot, but also aesthetic reality. The cinematic key to its understanding is Eastern European cinema, in particular the films of the Polish school, which described the Second World War as an existential horror, but not without a romantic aura. The final point in the film is set to music-a symphony written and performed specifically for the film in the community of Japanese and Polish musicians.

The same dark and tragic feeling permeates the latest sensational blockbusters "Battle Royale" - 1 and 2 - by the recently deceased classic of Japanese cinema Kinji Fukusaku.

The first "Battle Royale" was released in 2000 and became a sensation at "advanced" festivals, such as Rotterdam, and in film distribution in Asia, Europe and Russia. In the United States, the film was shown only at a few local film screenings, but it was never released: for America, where the topic of teenage school violence is one of the few absolute taboos, the story of how four dozen teenagers destroy each other turned out to be completely unacceptable.

In the first episode, Kinji Fukasaku portrayed Japan as a future country with no order or prosperity. To bring discipline in the ranks of young people, the government comes up with an educational program " Koro-

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levski games": a class that skips a lesson in full strength goes to the island, where for three days classmates are required to kill each other until the last winner. And if more than one survives in three days, then no one will be saved.

Blood begins to flow even at the assembly point, where a boy who tried to develop anti-war agitation is immediately shot. The captions regularly show accurate accounting - who was killed and under what number in a few reporting minutes.

The second series overseas was not shown, especially. In the first shots of the film, Tokyo skyscrapers slowly collapse. This is the work of the fighting terrorist group "Wild Seven", led by grown-up teenagers (the only survivors of the meat grinder of the first part), which is fighting the new world order. The rules of the game have changed: now unsuspecting schoolchildren will not have to kill each other, but become participants in an anti-terrorist operation and storm the impregnable island on which the "Wild Seven"is entrenched.

The film begins with a view of two towers collapsing at the same time, almost identical to New York. The authors, not without pleasure, repeat this beautiful shot once again in the middle of the picture and, showing undisguised anti-Americanism, identify with Palestine, where they send their heroes-winners of the first game-in the interval between two films.

In Japan, "Battle Royale" became the absolute champion of the national rental, losing the championship only to the second "Matrix". This once again demonstrated a strange paradox that still persists in Japanese cinema: films that have a high rating in Japan do not have such wide popularity outside the country, and vice versa. The reasons for this are different. First of all, the difference in cultural traditions, national mentality, aesthetic views, etc.

It is precisely because of these circumstances that the great Akira Kurosawa, being an indisputably recognized cinematic master in the West, who had a huge impact on the development of world cinema, was not so revered in his homeland and received well-deserved laurels only after his death.

To a lesser extent, but this problem is experienced in his creative activity and today's idol of the West Takeshi Kitano, who is considered a cult figure in Russia and in many other countries. He once remarked with sadness in one of his interviews: "Take my film "Sonatina". It was the starting point of my international career. When" Sonatina " was released in Japan, it was barely running on the wide screen for a few weeks. It wasn't until years later that I found out that a European festival had given Sonatina its grand prize. The Japanese distributors of the film did not inform me about this: they really did not like that a film that they actually ignored in Japan was so well received in Europe.²

Reflecting on the reasons for this attitude in his homeland, the director said:: "I am too direct and outspoken, always telling the truth about everything that is happening in Japanese society... For example, about the corruption of the Japanese government system, about the exploitation of the population, about taxes. They (the Japanese) don't like it, and they treat me accordingly."³

The Kitano phenomenon is still waiting to be solved. Known for his bloody stories, he made a picturesque film about tragic love - "Dolls". All three novels in the film are based on the stories of the famous Japanese Edo-era playwright Monzaemon Chikamatsu, who created a large number of plays for the Bunraku puppet theater and Kabuki theater. The plot of the film is very traditional. It is natural and logical that Bunraku dolls appear at the beginning and end of the picture.

Careful attitude to tradition on the part of the director, who violated and destroyed it all his creative life, it would seem, should have testified to a turning point in his work. However, the director himself was quick to get ahead of such interpretations. "All I'm trying to do here is convey what I think about time," Kitano stated to ⁴. In fact, he deliberately and artfully gave the stories of old life a modern entourage. The characters, dressed up in adorable costumes by Yoji Yamamoto, are tormented by high passions against the backdrop of landscapes of unprecedented beauty.

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The Japanese reaction to this film was similar to the reaction of an international audience who saw "Dolls" at the premiere in Venice: some love, and others hate. At the same time, it is very difficult for both of them to explain in words what exactly they liked about it, or, on the contrary, what aspect, what particular scene. They like, rather, "how the film affects them, but they can not logically explain..." ⁵

Still, the answer to this question is not difficult to find. As the popular Moscow newspaper Gazeta put it succinctly: "Our mutual favorite Takeshi Kitano is like a Western favorite Akira Kurosawa compared to Yasujiro Ozu, who is adored by the Japanese but little known in the West." ⁶

And it is hard not to agree with this, turning to one of the last films of Yoji Yamada - "Twilight Samurai", which was released in the Russian box office in November 2003. It became the absolute leader of the rental market in its homeland, and also collected a harvest of 12 Japanese film awards for best film, best director, best screenplay and best actor. At the same time, because of the psychological barrier that has not yet been fully overcome, it seems to be very difficult for Europeans to fully understand and feel its charm, rhythm, and style, like the Japanese. Suffice it to say that while participating in the Berlinale 2003 competition, the film did not receive any of the numerous awards provided for in the regulations; it is also significant that many European countries did not buy the film for rent.

The point is not that "Twilight Samurai" is a specific or particularly intellectual film: on the contrary, it is an absolutely popular film intended for viewers of any age or social category, with a clear plot, bright characters, humor, lyrical and battle scenes. It's just that it's a specifically Japanese movie.

"Twilight Samurai" is a classic "samurai" film, however, many people will find it unusual. It's too quiet, discreet, non-aggressive. The main character is a poor samurai Seibei Iguchi (actor of the cult horror film "Call" by Sanada Hiroyuki). After burying his wife, who died of tuberculosis, he was left with two young daughters and a crazy old mother. A poor but honest man, unwilling to draw his sword unnecessarily. Even standing up for the woman he loves, he prefers to stun the opponent with a blow to the head with a stick, and in the final decisive battle he draws his sword only at the last moment for reasons of self-defense.

The picture does not contain the usual beauty of Japanese nature, bright clothes and interiors. Everything is designed in shades of dusky brown. Most of the time, the screen is dark. At the same time, Yamada masterfully uses the audio sequence: we learn about the hero's injury by the sounds of blood dripping on the wooden floor. Thus, the director illustrates the central idea of the decline of the Samurai era (the action takes place at the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate), about the death of old traditions.

Japanese critics, who are well acquainted with Yamada's work, agree that in the finale Yamada presents his main themes: the inconsistency of human nature, the inevitable disappearance of the samurai code under the pressure of "Westernization" and the absurdity of a deadly battle (and more broadly, war in general), as soon as the warring parties begin to see each other as living people.

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Starting in 1964, seventy-four-year-old Yoji Yamada directed, according to various sources, from 67 to 78 films. And it is almost impossible to believe that only by the end of his creative career, the director decided to take on the much - loved genre of samurai cinema in Japan. However, this is true, and this artistic endeavor of the venerable director turned out to be almost the most successful in his career (if, of course, you do not count his famous film saga "It's Hard for a Man", which immortalized the director's name in the annals of Japanese cinema).

It is hardly surprising that the director's new film "Hidden Blade" was shot in the same genre based on the novel by the same Shuuhei Fujisawa. There are many similarities between these two films. Suffice it to say that the action of the film "Hidden Blade" takes place in the same province, in the same Unasaka clan, around the same era (the second half of the XIX century).

"Twilight Samurai" and "Hidden Blade" are films in defense of traditions, not only formal, but also meaningful. These are primarily humanistic films, especially if you compare them with another Japanese masterpiece about the end of the old world, "Taboo" by Nagisa Oshima. At the same time, if Oshima is in many ways the opposite of Yamada, then another oldest Japanese director, Kon Ichikawa, is close to him in spirit. He also addressed the famous samurai legend of the victory of good over evil in his film Dora Haita (Stray Cat).

The almost detective story of the film is devoid of speed of action. The plot unfolds slowly, sometimes naively, sometimes funny. A new justice of the peace is sent to the samurai clan to restore order there. At the same time, the judge himself will not appear at the place of service during the board. Nicknamed the Stray Cat for his disorderly behavior, he infiltrates all the evil places, collecting dirt on the ruling elite of the clan. And in this way, order will still be restored.

The script of this tape has a long history. In 1969, famous directors Akira Kurosawa, Kon Ichikawa, Keisuke Kinoshita and Masaki Kobayashi created the Four Knights Committee to break through Japanese cinema to the world screen. They jointly created a script for the future picture, assuming that each of them will shoot their own part. It wasn't until 30 years later that Kon Ichikawa brought this idea to life, dedicating his work to the other three members of the committee, now deceased. The film was shown in Japan and other countries, including Moscow, but, unfortunately, it did not have the expected success.

Perhaps quite a rare gift among Japanese directors to achieve success both at home and abroad today has Sehei Imamura, known to the Russian audience as the author of the films "Legends of Narayama" and "Eel", which made him a two-time winner of the Cannes Film Festival. A few years ago, with incredible success in Japan and abroad, he held screenings of his next film, the erotic tragicomedy-allegory "Warm Water under the Red Bridge".

This is a parable about the miraculous power of love. Whimsically and slyly, as it should be in a parable, he told the story of the passion of a Man and a Woman who always need each other. Its hero, a diligent clerk Yosuke, abandons Tokyo and his former life and, in search of a treasure that a street philosopher has long told him about, comes to a village on the ocean. There, he meets a woman with an amazing ability to gush the purest water during lovemaking. Here is such a simple and original plot. The film was included in the competition program of the Cannes Film Festival.

In general, nowadays it is difficult to predict with absolute certainty the success of a particular film. But Japan has its own proven themes and laws of film making, which always apply and without exception. This is a historical theme that originates from Kabuki theater plays - "jidaigeki", the films we just mentioned, and films for so-called family viewing, the prototype of which was another classic theater genre - "gendaigeki".

Such, for example, is Kiyoshi Mitani's film "All about Our House" - a comedy about the problems that almost every average Japanese person faces in the process of planning their home. This is Shinji Somai's drama "Flower in the Wind", based on a situation that exploits a very popular plot in Asia about a man who wakes up with a hangover with memory loss (only from recent pictures the Japanese film "Monday" immediately comes to mind). Tape of a long-time favorite of Russia-

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Yaguchi Shinobu's "Waterboys", based on the true story of the men's synchronized swimming team. At the Japanese film festivals in Moscow, you could see the wonderful slow and" wrong "comedies of this director -" Adrenaline Hill " and "My Secret Treasures".

In the same row is the film "Quartet for Two" by the famous director and actor Naoto Takenaka, known for the film "Gonin", where he was a partner of Takeshi Kitano, and one of the most popular Japanese films in the world recently " Let's dance?". This time, the director and actor in one person presented a musical on the theme of complicated family relationships.

However, the unsurpassed master of the so-called "family" genre is still Yoji Yamada. At one time, Yamada once and for all won the audience sympathy of the Japanese with his legendary TV series "It's Hard for a Man", which became the most striking cultural event in Japan in the late 1960s and early 1990s. What is the reason for its popularity? There are many of them, but the most important thing is that Yamada successfully combined "the fundamental values of the Japanese cultural tradition and some popular ideas of Western (American) mass cinema (the image of a cheerful and carefree tramp, a chivalrous attitude to the "beautiful lady", the idea of superman) without losing their identity and touching the most cherished strings of ethics, aesthetics, the mentality of the Japanese"⁷.

The content and aesthetic palette of the series fit seamlessly into the Japanese literary and artistic tradition. It is not difficult to notice its similarity with the works of classical Japanese literature. The visual images created by the director are often compared with the paintings of the outstanding masters of Japanese engraving "ukiyo-e" and "nishiki-e" Hokusai and Hiroshige, who managed to embody in their creations the form, color and rhythm of the Japanese vision of the world.

Yamada likes to talk about ordinary people, about their everyday life, about their work, everyday problems, in which there is always a place for a dream, even if unrealizable, illusory, but filling their prosaic existence with meaning. These motives are quite clearly traced in one of his last films, shown here at the Moscow Festival of Japanese Films in 2002 - "Fifteen years Old". It can be considered a continuation of the series "School" specially created by the director, which tells about the life of Japanese children.

The Kommersant newspaper wrote in this regard that " Japan, of all the cinematic countries, probably uses cinema most actively for the purpose of socializing the younger generation. Children and adolescents learn in advance that they will have to live in a very close-knit society with clearly defined values of teamwork and hard work.⁸

The film tells about a boy who, due to youthful maximalism, drops out of school, thereby upsetting parents who dream of their son's admission to the institute. Then he runs away from home altogether and goes on a hitchhiking trip across the country to look at the ancient cedars that he read about in a poem.

A completely different conversation about fifteen-year-olds is raised in his film "Young Girl" by director Iji Okuda. The film was shown at the Moscow film Festival "Faces of Love" in 2002 and won the Silver Arrow award for best performance by a female actor (actress Mayu Ozawa). The story of the 15-year-old nymphet was immediately dubbed the "Japanese Lolita" story, although it has almost nothing in common with Nabokov's Lolita. She didn't like it. This little Japanese girl loves it.

Another children's film, "Scoundrels", shown almost simultaneously with" Fifteen Years Old", illustrates another, to some extent dead-end branch of Japanese cinema, trying to combine imitation of American blockbusters and their light parody. Young viewers cheered at the appearance of talking robots and lizard-like aliens that can take the form of any earthling, but for an adult, the perception of this film, which differs from Hollywood only by the cut of the characters ' eyes, is rather tedious.

The complete opposite of this film is the film "Nagisa", in which director Masaru Konuma tells the story of a 12-year-old girl with soft humor. This is a subtle elegy about the growing up of teenagers in the distant 1960s. There are no computers or mobile phones yet. There is still no virtual world that separates people from each other, but there is the possibility of clear direct human communication.

These films are yet another proof that in Japanese cinema, the visual sophistication of cha-

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srt gets along with naive, moreover, to some extent infantile content. And, apparently, it can be argued with good reason that one of its features is a kind of childishness. The heroes of many paintings that carry an educational beginning are children, if not by age, then at least in the soul.

And this is fully convinced by the film "Actor" by the classic Japanese film Kaneto Shindo. The hero of the " Actor "(Taiji Tonoyama, who began acting in 1948 with Akira Kurosawa in "Drunk Angel" and over 40 years has played several dozen episodes in most Japanese directors) resembles the samurai Dora Haight from the film Kona Ichikawa, shown at the previous festival in Moscow. However, in Shindo, the hero's vicious tendencies are even more charming than Ichikawa's, and in general they seem to be the only way to preserve the child's ability to disobey.

Another veteran of Japanese cinema, Junji Sakamoto, who is most attracted to its independent flank, presented his film "The Face" to the Moscow audience, which collected all imaginable awards in Japan. For specialists, the film is interesting with the film debut of Naomi Fujiyama, a famous theater actress who has played more than 200 roles. Her movie character Masako, a sullen and withdrawn woman of unknown age, driven to despair by the bullying of her younger sister, kills her and flees, hiding from the police.

Recently awarded a European retrospective for his films, Sakamoto broke into Japanese independent cinema with "Knockout" back in 1989. The success of" Knockout " allowed Sakamoto to continue making fascinating films about the outcasts of society, which are distinguished, first of all, by their specific visual series, in which lighting and, of course, a special moral subtext play a dominant role. His eccentric comedies, action films that glorify criminals and losers: "Iron Fist", "Checkmate", "Boxer Joe", "Billiken", "Beaten Angels" and others brought him commercial popularity and critical acclaim in his native Japan. "Face" is the director's ninth film. His previous film Goofball, which debuted at the 1998 Toronto Film Festival, was described by critics as "very entertaining and provocative". Sakamoto is a recognized figure in modern Japanese cinema, but still waiting to be discovered by the West.

I would like to mention two of the most striking film events of the past year. The first of them is the unprecedented Japanese film "Yamato: The Last Stand". The film is aimed primarily at the Japanese themselves, who are careful about their history, especially since the time of its creation coincided with the preparation for the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, the results of which in Japan are still inclined to interpret in their own way. The film is dedicated to the fate of the battleship "Yamato" - the largest in the world, launched shortly before the outbreak of war. He participated in the battles of Midway, the Philippine Sea, and the Gulf. A terrible explosion that occurred on April 7, 1945, as a result of an attack by American carrier-based aircraft, sank the ship and claimed 2,498 lives. This event became a symbol of the end of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

Producer Haruki Kadokawa, who has invested $ 25 million in the film, expects at least 10 million viewers to watch it in Japan. In its first weekend of release, the film took second place in Japan at the box office, behind only the latest "Harry Potter".

The second acclaimed Japanese film of last year is a new film by the cult director Takeshi Kitano, shown for the first time at the Venice International Film Festival, whose name is pronounced by film critics of all countries in English: "Takeshis" (something belonging to Takeshi). The plot of this film is difficult to describe. These are the echoes of heavy dreams, according to Kitano himself, really dreamed of him. Kitano himself says about his film: "This is the funeral of a generation: a theme that has become end-to-end for dozens of films. And I have a feeling that this film will be the last in this series."

* * *

Japanese directors have achieved recognition on the world's screens, passing the tests of the most technologically advanced culture and preserving their own national identity. And this is understandable if we take into account the fact that on the way to the world Olympus, they had and still have to overcome the barrier between Eastern and Western traditional cultural values and national mentality, which is still not completely obsolete, despite the globalization and other modern processes that have engulfed Japanese society.

Japanese people are characterized by a dual worldview: calm adaptation to the Western way of life and at the same time preserving and protecting their own national spiritual values and customs. This country with its rich cultural traditions has never broken with its past. Japanese society in the spiritual sphere has never ceased to be Japanese, because the worldview of the Japanese, whether religious beliefs or understanding of reality, has always been determined by a centuries-old tradition, and as historical experience shows, they have always tried to adopt from abroad what corresponded to Japanese traditions, rejecting what contradicted them.

Therefore, Japanese films can easily be divided into two main categories: films for the domestic and foreign markets: films for Japanese people and films for export - for foreign audiences. But these two categories are still rarely used interchangeably.

¹ http://scit.boom.ru/music/kino/rardio-grama3.htm

² Newspaper, 16.01.2003.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Gazeta, 4.11.2003.

⁷ http://Russia-japan.nm.ru

⁸ Kommersant, 26.11.2002.

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