1. In Millenium Actress Kon creates a film unit in micro, illustrating various periods of Japanese filmmaking by entering the memories of a retiring actress. Perfect Blue might be seen as the dark end of that history, with Kon describing a society enmeshed in celebrity worship and warping at the seams through the push of technological innovation. Viruses and ever-proliferating liquid life-forms come into play in later Kon films: societal forces given shape and tangible destructive power.
2. Shohei Imamura never liked the representation of Japanese society posed by Ozu, so he made his own. Kitano bleeds genre through a pretty wry form of ‘art film’. In The Eel, Imamura illustrates the downside to Ozu’s modes of familial respect and restraint, but eventually rests on his own version of a similar ideal.
