A book just came out from my favorite source on Japanese films, Midnight Eye. The book serves as a companion to the Midnight Eye website which has festival news, interviews with directors, and lots of reviews. Among other things, they credit Svankmajer-influenced "Tetsuo: The Iron Man" as resurrecting the current Japanese film industry.




"In his foreword, Nakata paints a very grim picture of the Japanese film industry in the late 1980s/early ’90s. Talented and creative directors were forced to work like slaves for the struggling studios, cranking out soft-core porn or cookie-cutter yakuza flicks for the straight-to-video market. Japanese contributions to international film festivals had all but come to a halt, and many outside Japan wondered what happened to the country that gave the world Kurosawa and Ozu. In the early ’90s, the major film studios, all with histories of nearly a century, started to severely cut back on production or go bankrupt, and it seemed as if the entire industry was prepared to finally concede defeat to TV and the internet.

Then the unexpected happened: a renaissance revitalized Japan cinema. Shinya Tsukamoto’s ultra-low budget "Tetsuo: The Iron Man" (1989) took Rome’s Fantastic Film Festival by storm, winning its top award and sparking a new international interest in Japanese film. "Shall We Dance" (1996) became the top grossing foreign film in the U.S. and inspired a Hollywood remake. Nakata’s "Ring" (1998) introduced J-horror to the world, and was remade first in Korea and later in Hollywood. In 1999, Kiyoshi Kurosawa accomplished the astonishing feat of having three separate films play in three of the world’s biggest film festivals in Cannes, Berlin and Venice. Hayao Miyazaki’s animated spectacle "Spirited Away" (2001) became the biggest earner of all time at the Japanese box office, a record previously held by Titanic."


Japan Today has a book review,
Or check out the Midnight Eye website.