Mobile phones make a dent on cinema

By Gautaman Bhaskaran

TOKYO, AUG. 24. Strangely, there is an inherent connection between movies and mobile phones in Japan. The rapid and steep rise of cellular phone use among primary and middle school students is keeping them away from visiting the cinemas.

And here in this country, it is the young that has been keeping alive this form of entertainment.

But with as high as 40 per cent of children either owning a mobile instrument or using one that belongs to their parents, boys and girls seem to have little time for anything other than chatting with friends or exchanging E-mail over their sleek gadgets.

Although many theatres have opened in Japan in the recent past - there are about 3,000 now compared with about 1,800 in 1990 - there has not been a corresponding rise in ticket sales. The Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan says that 135.3 million tickets were sold in the country last year, a drop from the 144.7 million in 1999.

This roughly translates into an average per-capita cinema going rate of just 0.8 per cent, which is not even once a year.

Apart from cellular telephones, the almost killing cost of a film ticket, which is as high as 1,800 yen or about 15 dollars, keeps especially the younger generation away from the celluloid world.

Most distributors feel that unless this price is brought down, it will be difficult to get more people into the halls.

For one, the quality of the average Japanese picture has to be improved. To take just one example, this correspondent watched an evening show of ``Nami'' (Wave), a film released just that day. In an auditorium meant for 200, there were barely 10 men and women.

Of course, the work by a young Japanese director, Mr. Hiroshi Okuhara, was disappointing. Technically adhering to the 1920s standards (what a contrast in a techno-savvy nation like Japan) - where the characters even walk in and out of the frames with a camera which was boringly static and appeared to be hardly interested in what its subjects were up to - Mr. Okuhara adopted the single-take single scene format in a manner that created an uncomfortably wide chasm between the viewer and the screen.

After this, can one really blame a teenager if he or she prefers the mobile to this motion madness ?

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Section  : International
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