For the last eight years www.midnighteye.com has been the indisputable resource for the best of Japanese cinema on the net. A growing repository of reviews from expert writers from every corner of globe, including Japan, it is the place to go to find out more about what remains one of the most exciting and diverse cinemas in the world. It is also a prime example of how the internet can be used positively to create a community and promote films outside of mainstream channels. maddog spoke to founders Jasper Sharp (author of Behind the Pink Curtain, featured in November’s issue) and Tom Mes (author of Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike).

MD: Tell me a little about what you guys were doing before Midnight Eye?

Tom: I was living in Rotterdam, Holland, where I had been a freelance film critic for a couple of years and I was working as a scriptwriter for an animation studio.

Jasper: I was a computer programmer for about 5 years. I’d worked in a number of places – London, Montreal, and Finland, and then I got a job with Yellow Pages in Amsterdam. I always liked travelling, and my interest in film essentially stems from an interest in other countries and cultures.

MD: So how did you come to meet and decide to set up Midnight Eye?

Tom: Some friends and I had been doing an online zine for a while, and Jasper wrote in to see if he could write some movie-related stuff for it. But at the time that website had pretty much run out of steam and everybody was too busy doing other things. In my case, that included brooding on the idea of what was soon to become Midnight Eye. One of the topics Jasper originally suggested covering was Japanese film, so I asked him if he felt like joining the new project instead. Luckily for us, he did.

Jasper: Yes, it was quite a bizarre coincidence, because I was utterly fed up with my job and was getting itchy feet again. I really wanted to leave both the IT profession and Holland, so was thinking about going to teach in Japan, and also about finally doing something about my long-held ambition to be a writer. Amsterdam had these amazing video shops, so I could easily rent Japanese films I wouldn’t have been able to see in the UK. There wasn’t much written about the new Japanese cinema in the late 90s, so I thought I could do my bit to redress this, and then I met Tom, after stumbling upon his earlier website. We were both in Holland, both liked writing and both got passionate about Japanese cinema around the same time. It all stemmed from there.

MD: What attracted you to Japanese cinema so much?

Tom: It goes back to my childhood. Japanese culture and history have always fascinated me. I don't know where that comes from, there certainly weren't any books on ikebana on the family coffee table or anything remotely like that. There were the "bastardised" versions of Japan that you saw in American films and TV series I grew up with, like Shogun or those ninja movies starring Sho Kosugi, and James Bond in You Only Live Twice of course! But I also remember seeing Akira Kurosawa's films, like Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, in my very early teens. Then a few years later I'd started going to the very fine Rotterdam Film Festival, where I got to discover the new generation that was coming up in the early nineties, like Takeshi Kitano, Shinya Tsukamoto and several others. Their work impressed me so much that I tried to see more and more Japanese films at the festival every year.

Jasper: I only really got seriously into Japanese film in the late 90s. Before that I was a big film fan, but more into European films, art house stuff – generally not big budget Hollywood films, which were pretty dire in the late 90s. But I saw all the Japanese films that were coming out then, things like Sogo Ishii’s Angel Dust, Shohei Imamura’s The Eel, Ryosuke Hashiguchi’s Like Grains of Sand, Kon Satoshi’s Perfect Blue, and Takeshi Kitano’s Sonatine. What struck me then was the totally different approach to storytelling, the different types of stories being told, and the more experimental approach to editing and shot composition. The films weren’t always easy to understand, but they made me think, they made me want to know more about the culture that produced them, and they made me realise how many different ways there were to make films. It was very exhilarating, and the more films I saw, the more I wanted to see.

MD: What kind of status do you think it has in the UK now compared to when you started?

Jasper: The important thing to remember is that we started before multi-region subtitled DVDs made seeing these films a lot easier, and also before Ring, Audition and Battle Royale launched a new interest in Japanese cinema. In the 90s, there would probably be only about 4 or 5 titles from Japan coming out a year. I wouldn’t say its much better now, in terms of theatrical releases, but there’s certainly a lot coming out on DVD, and also a lot more being screened at film festivals. Japanese films always seem to be popular at film festivals. I think in general terms, people are a lot more aware of the huge diversity of films coming out of Japan, whereas they’d only have had a chance to see a few titles before.

MD: You don't simply limit yourself to stuff that's being released over here. Which directors and or films are you most pleased to have discovered? Any filmmakers we should be keeping our eyes open for?

Tom: If I interpret "discovery" as something purely personal, then seeing my first Takashi Miike film, Dead or Alive, without any preconceived notions back in early 2000 surely counts as one of the great moments. It literally changed my life. But the whole process continues to be one of constant discovery. Focusing on Japan is very rewarding, because in addition to the country's incredibly rich cinematic past, there seems to be a constant stream of young talent popping up. Recent personal favourites include Yuki Tanada, whose Moon and Cherry was a very smart and sexy take on shifting gender roles; Nami Iguchi, who works in similar territory as Tanada; and a director of very funny pseudo-documentaries called Kenji Murakami. There are many others worthy of mention and recommendation, but for those you'll simply need to check Midnight Eye.

Jasper: I’d second Tom’s praise of Yuki Tanada. For me the most interesting development since we started covering Japanese films is that there’s been a big explosion in the number of films by women directors, so there’s probably more in Japan than any other country now. As for other discoveries, I was one of the first to cover Ryuichi Hiroki’s films – a lot of these are poignant dramas about modern Japanese women and the issues they face. I also really love Yutaka Tsuchiya’s films. He hasn’t made many, but for example, his documentary The New God really enlightened me about the various political debates between nationalists and more leftwing groups in Japan, and the relationship of modern Japanese to the war. And finally, I was very excited when I first discovered the films of Masao Adachi. He was active as an experimental filmmaker in the 60s, and also worked in the pink [soft core porn] film industry, but he left Japan to join the pro-Palestinian cause in 1972 and had been all but forgotten until he finally came back to Japan at the beginning of the millennium. He was the main inspiration for me to write Behind the Pink Curtain, my book on the pink film industry.

MD: Do you feel you have achieved much in terms of raising awareness?

Tom: I believe we've contributed to breaking through the polarised way of approaching Japanese film. Before we started there seemed to be academic writing, mainly about Ozu, on the one end and cult ravings about violent low-budget movies on the other, and nothing in between. At the same time, established historians of Japanese film seemed to adhere to the general consensus that nothing interesting had been made since 1970. That left a big void, and we noticed that it was precisely there that all the interesting stuff was happening: new, fresh, wonderful films that went unnoticed because they didn't fit into these categories. With Midnight Eye we just started filling the gap. One personal success story was seeing the effect of my book Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike - after it came out, films of his that previously nobody knew had existed suddenly were available on DVD with English subtitles at your local HMV.

Jasper: It would be a little arrogant to say we’ve been instrumental in popularising Japanese cinema overseas, because lots of people also became aware of it around the same time as us, due to the rise of the internet and DVDs, but we were definitely a major part of the phenomenon. We were the first website to specialise exclusively in Japanese cinema, and we’ve continued with it for almost 8 years now, so now there’s a huge wealth of material on Midnight Eye that wouldn’t be anywhere else on the internet if it weren’t for us. I’ve also been working with the Japan Foundation and Raindance Film Festival since 2005, and have organised a number of tours of Japanese films, so I can say I’ve been active in introducing films to UK audiences they might not have seen otherwise.

MD: You always seem to be one step ahead of the game. How do you go about discovering new talent?

Tom: Film festivals and film markets are a major source for me. Also, I'm in Japan roughly once a year. Plus, there are people in Tokyo who point me in the right direction.

Jasper: Pretty much the same for me. Frankfurt’s Nippon Connection festival is always the best one-stop to go to in Europe if you want to discover what’s new, and recommendations from friends.

MD: Do you have any plans to go beyond simply promoting the films to perhaps releasing some?

Tom: I have no interest in getting involved in distribution or organising festivals.

Jasper: Certainly no plans to get involved in DVD distribution, but its always fun getting stuff into cinemas or festivals. I remember someone told me there was no point in writing about films and hoping some distributor would read about it and go and release it. The best thing is to screen the films and hope someone else will write about it, and to develop a market for these films. For example, about 10 years ago, the conventional wisdom was that Japanese comedy was unmarketable in the West. Last year’s sold out screening of Fine, Totally Fine at Raindance, with all the audience laughing, goes to show how wrong this is.

MD: You brought a Midnight Eye book out at one point. How did that go?

Tom: The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film was a further attempt to close the gap. By doing a book you reach a different audience than with a website. I believe it helped to get a good number of films released on these shores and screened more widely. And judging from reactions we continue to get, a lot of students use it as one of their main references for studying contemporary Japanese film, so it's helped broaden the canon a bit. Takashi Miike and Kiyoshi Kurosawa seem to have overtaken Yasujiro Ozu as the Japanese filmmakers that spawn the largest number of student theses.

Jasper: We interviewed most of the directors in the book, which, as with the website, I think was its biggest strength. Rather than to try and infer what the filmmakers were trying to say using our own cultural biases as foreigners, we tried to tell the story using their words, and to describe their work within Japan’s broader cinematic culture and history. It was also an attempt at bridging the gap between academic and fan writing, and to show that Japanese cinema hadn’t died in the 1950s, as quite a few would have had people believe at the time.

MD: Any big plans for the future?

Tom: In terms of the site - simply to keep it running for many more years, at the same level of quality and with the same mission. We receive a healthy number of submissions these days, a lot of which are by very promising new writers, and I'm glad that we can play a part in nurturing some upcoming talent as well.

Jasper: Midnight Eye will be around for some time yet, and I’m pretty sure both of us will continue with other writing projects too. Its great we’ve managed to find our niche and stick with it, and I can only see things getting better.

Intrigued? Check out the site here: www.midnighteye.com Or why not take your inspiration from Jasper and Tom and start up a site on your favourite neglected area of cinema? The Internet is a wonderful thing and the possibilities are endless. Remember our philosophy here at maddog is: if no one else is doing it, then you just have to do it yourself…

Words > Dean Bowman