He will be the first to miss the call of the new generation of independent filmmakers. In the 1990s, two generations of filmmakers met in Japan. While the elders of the intemperate new wave – Nagisa Oshima (1932-2013), Shohei Imamura (1926-2006), Yoshishige Yoshida (born in 1933) – sign their last film, a new line is hatching, notably composed of Takeshi Kitano (born in 1947), Kiyoshi Kurosawa (born in 1955), Nobuhiro Suwa (born in 1960), Naomi Kawase (born in 1969), Hideo Nakata (born in 1961), Hirokazu Kore-eda (born in 1962). This is to say the chromatic richness of this independent production, of which Shinji Aoyama, born on July 13, 1964, in Kitakyushu, and died on March 21, in Tokyo, following cancer, was a stakeholder.
Trained in the subtle school of film critic Shigehiko Hasumi, who is also a specialist in French literature, we find, in Aoyama, this Francophile tropism, since he was himself a critic for Japan Cinema Notebooks and became assistant to the Swiss filmmaker Daniel Schmid (1941-2006) on this very beautiful film devoted to kabuki, entitled written face (1995). His cinephilia, very eclectic, like his cinema, also drew him strongly towards contemporary American cinema and its stylized violence. In France, however, only a small part of Aoyama’s work, inaugurated in 1996, is known, which includes around fifteen feature films.
Survive the disaster
Turning, at the beginning of his career, yakuza films distanced and quickly put together (two thugs, 1996; Helpless, 1996), his induction on the international scene took place in Cannes, in 2000, where his film Eureka goes into competition. It’s a blast. Three and a half hours of world cinema in black and white and in Scope, violently opening onto the massacre of the passengers of a bus by a madman, then seeking a possible resilience, a hypothetical rebirth, through the post-traumatic experience of the three survivors of the attack – two teenagers and the driver of the vehicle. This work, bathed in strangeness, carries with it the memory of the sarin gas attack perpetrated in the Japanese metro by the Aum Shinrikyo sect, in 1995, but questions, more broadly, the ability of humanity to survive. to disaster.
This flagship film of the Japanese generation of the 1990s, in any case, augured a promising career for Aoyama. It did not happen. From the following year, Desert Moon (2001), a fable of intimate disaster in a Japan obsessed with financial competitiveness, sealed the disenchantment between the public and Aoyama. The film was however not without qualities, just like EliEli, lema sabachthani? (2005), an apocalyptic work in which circulates a virus pushing people to suicide, or crickets (2006), a cold horror fable of radical strangeness. sad vacation (2007), pulls, on the contrary, through the reunion of a mother and her son, towards the more classic melodrama.
You have 17.05% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.