It's strange that I get knocked for not knowing a thing about cinema, yet I'm supposedly somewhat knowledgeable about literature. In fact, I studied cinema in university and have always considered myself more of a film snob than anything else. In literary matters I am a rank amateur, with ride-ranging but slapdash enthusiasms (no Homer, no Hugo, no Austen, no Bronte). On film, though, oh mercy... Admittedly, having been in the Far East for ten years I have been able to catch only so much that's arrived in that time - which may be why I don't recognize some of the newer names on your list. I've been able to read about what's been going on, I've followed the major film festivals, and I try to keep abreast of things. I've also made an effort to track down the recent movies of certain filmmakers (Hong Sang-soo, Lee Chang-dong, Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, Gianni Amelio, Terrence Malick, the Dardennes, etc) who continue to interest me. If I do not know all the names on your list of "great" Japanese filmmakers, it could be due to ignorance on my part. But bearing in mind that we no longer live in days where film distribution is creaky and ineffective, that there are tons of film enthusiasts and film journals out there, keeping this in mind it is certainly POSSIBLE that a world titan Japanese filmmaker has somehow largely escaped the major festival circuit, the major film journals, and my notice - it is not hugely likely.
It does not help that you continue to rate negligible filmmakers as "great" - in doing so you lessen my initial sense of being ill-informed when it comes to names I haven't heard of. Let's take Mr. Suzuki Seijun for instance. Suzuki I would rate with Paul Verhoeven - a director who was pretty much given lousy B-pictures to make, and who was able to transcend those pictures to a degree, but who nevertheless is, at the end of the day, a B-picture filmmaker. If Suzuki was able to fool with the Yakuza picture, if Verhoeven was able to wink at his own moronic uber-violent action movies, it is to their credit. But it hardly makes them great, and it possibly really only points to a lack of ambition on their parts. Certainly Suzuki's silly post-"rediscovery" movies have not shown that a buried wealth of talent had truly eluded the world for so many decades. A movie that knows that it's bad, that continually reminds the audience of its badness (a la the Charlie's Angels films) is no less bad for its self-knowledge. In most cases it just takes on an extra level of smugness.
Ordinarily I would not go out of my way to say that just because someone's tastes differ from mine they are thoroughly, devastatingly wrong. But to say that the man who made Ichii the Killer, one of the most repugnant and stupid movies ever made, is on par with the man who made Ugetsu, Sisters of Gion, and Sansho the Bailiff, and superior to the men who made Tokyo Story, Early Summer, An Inn in Tokyo, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, Yearning, The Sound of the Mountain, Pigs and Battleships, Intentions of Murder, and Giants and Toys, to name but a pitiful few titles; where the man who made - well, which third-rate, phony poetic Kitano film can I not use as a punching bag here? - is equal to the fellow who made Seven Samurai, Stray Dog, and Ikiru, is batshit bizarre. It doesn't show a lack of taste so much as a call from some Twilight Zone where taste is upside down and inside out. Tell me you think Mizoguchi is a better filmmaker than Ozu, maybe. I may not agree with you, but it's not a completely ludicrous thing to say.
Frankly, my dear Sir or Madam, I suspect that your knowledge of film is what's lacking. I suspect that once we get past certain flashy Japanese directors of the last twenty years and dip into, say, Japanese movies of the 1930s or, worse still, Iranian or Czech cinema, you'll have far less to discuss. My "ossified film canon" may be just that, but they aren't established masters for nothin'. How many Ozu and Naruse films have you actually seen?
. And what do you think of Hiroshi Teshigahara?
