Lack of censorship leads to very few classic movies in Japan: Oguri

Kolkata, Nov 15 (UNI) Despite the making of more than 200 movies by Japanese film makers in their country every year, not even five of them can be bracketed as ''classic'' movies, as the rest are only Hollywood type entertainment based films.

This view was expressed here by well known Japanese Director Kohei Oguri while speaking to UNI after the screening of his award winning film ''Umoregi'' (The Buried Forest) at the ongoing 12th Kolkata (International) Film Festival yesterday.

Though claiming that his latest movie 'Umoregi' could justifiably be considered as ''one of the very few Japanese classics' like Shohei Imamura's 'The Insect Woman'(1963) and Kenji Mizoguchi's epic film ''Sansho the Bailiff''(1954), Mr Oguri, however, agreed that ''a certain degree of abstraction was unavoidable in the 93 minute film.

Referring to the present overwhelming trend of ''blindly following'' the Hollywood blockbusters among the contemporary Japanese film makers, Mr Oguri felt that with the passage of time the inner beauty and sensuality of Japanese art, culture and tradition would be a thing of the past in Japanese films.

Refusing to identify the real causes for the new trend, the well known film maker from the 'Land of the Rising Sun' felt that absence of any government control over the multi-billion dollar Japanese film industry and the lack of any worthwhile censor mechanism before the release of any film was greatly responsible for the current trend.

About his past experiences and future plans, Mr Oguri said since he made his directing debut in 1981 with the making of a full length feature film called ''Doro no Kawa'' (Muddy river), he has so far made nine films including ''Shi no Toge'' (The sting of death), which was the best Academy Prize winner in foreign language film section in 1990 Cannes Film festival and ''Nemuru Otoko''(Sleeping Man) which won the Grand Jury prize in the Locarno festival four years later.

''Though at present I am not in a hurry to make more films, but of late I have been reading a lot of books in search for the right script'', he said without elaborating further.

About his knowledge regarding Indian movies or whether Bollywood had any effect over the present Japanese generation, a smiling Mr Oguri replied in the negative. ''Though I know that a lot of movies were being made in Boolywood every year, we have very little idea about what type of films are being made since the concept of entertainment might differ between the Indian and Japanese audiences,'' Mr Oguri pointed out.

He was accompanied by leading actress of ''Umoregi'' Kazuma Shimojin, the 29-year-old primary school teacher in Kobe.

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