The Cinematheque

“Iwai occupies an unusual place in contemporary Japanese film. A maverick in ways not dissimilar to Kitano Takeshi—his fame comes from hugely successful television work—Iwai also stands apart from his peers [in] his absolutely rigorous control of structure.”

Noah Cowan, TIFF

Iwai Shunji’s restless, insatiable approach to creation—whether his medium is literature, internet art, or cinema—set an impossibly high standard when he emerged as an independent director in the 1990s. Iwai (b. 1963) came to cinema acclimated to the fast life of the Japanese pop-media landscape. For over a decade before his first feature film, he made idol music videos, TV dramas, advertisements, and short films at a staggering rate. But after his teleplay Fireworks (1993) won a Directors Guild of Japan award, he focused on filmmaking. The era-defining Love Letter marked not just the beginning of Iwai’s feature-length work, it was also the start of a run of features made closely with cinematographer Shinoda Noboru, who was most well-known at that point for films he had shot for Somai Shinji (Love Hotel, The Friends).

Like Somai, Iwai’s films are fuelled by the enigmatic troubles and boundless energies of youth, but his navigation of this genre is far more fractured, both in the stunning range of images authored by Shinoda, and the way Iwai, an inventive and prolific writer, centres authorship as a necessary (and necessarily messy) stage of adolescence. Letters, message-board logs, rumours, and lies circulate and completely rewrite character motivations; Iwai is also fond of dispersing these narrative concerns across multiple time periods and character pairs—in Love Letter, two roles are even played by the same actor.

While Shinoda helped choreograph elaborate long takes to match Somai’s interest in physical, behavioural action, in his work for Iwai any character can be looked at a dozen different ways, from grand pop-icon portraits to diaristic, seemingly unfiltered digital snapshots. In this way, Iwai and Shinoda were completely refashioning the Japanese tradition of the youth film and the melodrama. Even if the world is almost classically exerting its will upon many of the characters—tragedy is present right from the start in Love Letter—the diverse visual strategies that co-exist in Iwai’s films allow for a multitude of access points for emotional depths. His work is clearly the product of a novelist—one who conceives of most of his projects as both novel and film simultaneously, each an alternate version or ​“cut” of the same narrative—but Iwai also chases transcendence by other formal methods, such as the circularity of musical motifs and the maelstrom of jarring montage. (In addition to writing, Iwai edits and sometimes scores his films.)

Though his work’s proximity to pre- and early-internet popular culture has sometimes resulted in critical skepticism, a cult of devotion has long followed Iwai and sustained interest in his work even as his pace of feature filmmaking has gone from prolific to infrequent. Iwai’s collaboration with Shinoda was cut short when the cinematographer died in 2004 just before the release of Hana & Alice; a decade of work in documentary, animation, and producing followed, in which Iwai essentially avoided working with a new on-set director of photography. Iwai continues to direct ambitiously sized projects today, but that period from 1995 to 2004 remains emblematic, and helped define the expressive possibilities available during the transition to the digital age.

“Immersed in the Ether” offers a rare chance to theatrically revisit highlights in Iwai’s career, all of them still carrying the shock of something new. The series features a new restoration of Love Letter introduced by Iwai and marks the 25th anniversary of All About Lily Chou-Chou.

“For Iwai, cinema is a living art form that resists summary … It’s an effect, an emotion, or a mood, as much as it’s a plot, a soundtrack, or characters.”

Grady Hendrix, Film Comment