Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - Asia - 6 (42) Japan - Part one

 

6 (42) Japan

Akira Kurosawa (66) b.10, Keisuke Kinoshita b.12, Kon Ichikawa (70) b.15, Masaki Kobayashi (77) b.16, Kirirō Urayama b.30   

New Wave:  Seijun Suzuki b.23, Yasuzo Masamura b.24, Shōhei Imamura b.26 Hiroshi Teshigahara b.27, Kaneto Shindo b.28, Susumu Hani b.28, Masahiro Shinoda.b.31, Nagisa Oshima (71) b.32, Toshio Matsumoto b.32, Yoshishige Yoshida b.33   Figure in parenthesis  indicates year nominated as one of International Film Guide’s ‘5 Directors of the Year’  

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Part 1 : Political modernism and the New Wave:         

Audie Bock's classification of periods in Japanese cinema was taken up and further explicated by David Desser in 1988 to describe the ideological purpose of his introduction to the New Wave, as conceived and written. It “is to try and bring historical specificity to Japanese New Wave cinema and to place it within the wider discourses of historical, political, social, and cultural studies” without claiming it to necessarily be “the best and only way to study the Japanese New Wave movement” (p 2).  

Yasujiro Ozu

Three periods are identified. The first period from 1930, and the period leading up to it, Desser identifies as the classical paradigm, best exemplified by Ozu and the more diverse oeuvre of Mizoguchi. From 1945-60 is the modern period with Kurosawa the paradigmatic modern director “the dynamism [of whose]  method of storytelling through images [had] always gone hand in hand with a humanist treatment of his subjects” (Komatsu 716). From  around 1960 to the early 70s is the modernist paradigm with Oshima the paradigmatic director.

“The terms classical, modern, and modernist need to be associated with their ideological underpinning. The classical paradigm is linked to the classical arts of Japan and subscribes to a “transcendental” schema. The 50s modern paradigm, postwar humanism and individualism exemplified by Kurosawa, had its roots in the theatrical mode of Shingeki (see below) and individualism.  The modernist includes a “metahistorical” model.” (16).  The salient features of each paradigm are set out below, summarised in tabular form, based on Desser’s outline (pp 15-22) “that throughout the course of Japan’s long history, the culture did experience significant shifts under the impetus of various forces; and that the New Wave movement in cinema, itself part of a larger cultural movement, represents one such shift” (15).

 Classical:       chronological/episodic/cyclical/mythic/transcendental/Ozu   

 Modern:        chronological/causal/linear/historical/individual/Kurosawa

 Modernist:     achronological/episodic/acausal/anti-mythic/metahistorical/anti-psychological/Oshima                                                                                               

Akira Kurosawa

It should be noted that in adopting Bock’s classification periods David Desser (pp15-24) acknowledges that he also uses terms adopted from David Bordwell's book 'Narration in the Fiction Film' (see ‘forms of narration’ in part 4 of the introductory essays) in what he identifies as the four major modes of narration. Desser replaces Bock's “the early masters” with “classical” and Bock’s “the post-war period” with the “modern” paradigm, the New Wave becomes “modernist” but as modes they do not correspond to Bordwell's “transcending genres, schools, movements and entire national cinemas.”  Except in name, in this instance, Desser puts Bordwell's modal specifications aside not in disagreement but to consider the Japanese cinema as part of a system: self-contained modes isolatable across Japanese film history, at least from the late 1920s through to the 70s. His stated intention is to demonstrate how Japanese cinema connects with Japanese culture.  

The classical nature of Ozu's narrative style can be linked to many of the classical arts of Japan. Following Desser's schema, in the shift from the classical to the modern paradigm, is a shift in the attitude to the status quo. From acceptance of life's problems we find the emergence of the individual who fights against his circumstances, in short, the emergence of bourgeois individualism from which follows causal, linear and historical thinking in constructing a narrative. This is the Hollywood mode. In Japan, however, post-war humanism and individualism had its roots planted by the theatrical mode of Shingeki, meaning “new theatre,” which originated in the Meiji period (1868-1912) as part of an overall attempt to “modernise” Japan. Inspired by the plays of Ibsen et al, theatrical troupes, instrumental in fostering a new theatre, modelled themselves on the European naturalist theatre of psychological realism and representationalism. The late twenties saw the rise of a left-wing, socially conscious theatre within Shingeki which had a profound influence on cinema through tendency films (keiko eiga), part of the overall move to greater representationalism and psychologism (condensed from Desser pp15-24).

Desser concludes that since traditional Japanese art is already formally subversive, a genuinely radical, political art must move beyond the kind of radical content apparent in the pre-war left-wing socially conscious “tendency” films or the postwar humanist left-wing cinema of Kurosawa, Kobayashi, Ichikawa, Kinoshita et al. In the theatre there was also an attempted radicalisation of forms which had much in common with the New Wave cinema's rejection of humanism and old-left Communism.

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Shohei Imamura

In 1961, following the bankruptcy of Shin Toho which had produced only sensationalist films for a limited market, there were five major film companies in Japan: Nikkatsu, Daiei, Toho, Toei, and Shochiku,.  Fifties classics had been produced by Daiei, such as Kurosawa's Rashomon, Yoshimura's Night River (1956), Mizoguchi's Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), Kinugasa's Gate of Hell, Naruse's Lightning (1952) and Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain (1959). Toei had been attracting audiences since 1957 with rapidly produced genre films such as jidigeki  (period drama) on the widescreen, to become by 1960 the most profitable film company. Toei also produced artistic films directed by masters from the pre-war era like Daisuki Ito and Tomu Uchida but did not offer places for new young talent. The same was true of Toho where pre-war directors like Mikio Naruse and Shiro Toyoda were employed but young directors were not offered the same scope to further their careers.

Shohei Imamura joined the then re-established Nikkatsu in1954 to produce his early 'black comedies' which appealed to the younger market. Kiriō Urayama, who had earlier been Imamura’s assistant, directed realistic films with a social message at Nikkatsu that differed from Nikkatsu’s stereotyped genre films in that they contained political elements. Both Imamura and Urayama developed a metaphysical quality in their films culminating in subjective hallucinatory shots in Urayama’s last film, scripted by Imamura, The Girl I Abandoned (Watusi ga suteta mona 1969) was too abstract for Nikkatsu’s executives. After making Intentions of Murder (Aka satsui), in 1963 Imamura left to found his own company.  Nikkatsu which had tried to establish a new genre aimed at the younger generation in the 50s, increasingly maintained its viability through the 60s with soft core pornography, Toei with gangster films.  

Seijun Suzuki

Seijun Suzuki (1923-2017) who had made a series of eccentric yakuza and “pink” genre movies at Nikkatsu between 1956-63, turned to adapting novels with the increasing complexity of his “Brechtianism” standing just to the side of the New Wave in beginning to really assert Suzuki’s own voice in a “wonderfully eccentric work of art.” Fighting Elegy / a.k.a. The Born Fighter and Kenka Ereji (1966) is a perversely comic condemnation of the way war robbed young people of their youth, a script by Kaneto Shindo based on a novel by Takashi Suzuki. Gate of Flesh / Nikutai no Mon (1964) based on a best selling novel by Taijiro Tamara that sparked off an entire genre of fiction, the film’s dialectic between social realism and a lurid phantasmagoria of nightmare, “so powerful, so Bunuelian” (Rayns). Suzuki’s “last word on the yakuza genre” Branded to Kill / Kuroshi no Rakun (1967) drew company executive accusation of “incomprehensibility to the public” leading to Suzuki’s forced break with Nikkatsu in 1968.

At Shochiku, the most conservative of the companies, before his death in 1963, Ozu directed a film each year but otherwise only Keisuke Kinoshita was given any autonomy and even that was limited. The studio executives’ conservatism prevented them from exploiting new genres like Nikkatsu and Toei. Faced with declining box office in 1960 as a result of the effect of television, however, they changed their policy. Young directors were given the opportunity to make the films they wanted with a degree of freedom. They were termed ”the Ofuna new wave” after the studio where the young directors - Oshima, Yoshida and Shinoda - were located.

Oshima's first “Ofuna film,” Cruel Story of Youth (1960), was a success but he left Shochiku when the company withdrew Night and Fog in Japan (1960) from circulation after four days in release.  Oshima set the trend for independent production by establishing his own production company Sozosha (Creation) which did not start producing films until the mid sixties at the time Yoshida and Shinoda left Shochiku. The films they directed with the “Ofuna flavour” focusing on the lives and problems of their own generation, failed to generate sufficient box office returns. Shochiku survived with the phenomenally successful Tora-san series 1969-97 directed by Yoji Yamada, and also from the distribution of anime.

During the 1950s most independent companies had been organised by groups with socialist sympathies. Directors like Tadashi Imai and Satsuo Yamamoto produced films with a political message.  The independent sector then, was not interested in the development of film form and could not be considered avant-garde. However, in the 1960s the situation changed. New independent companies began to be established to produce films that could not be made by the major studios but were primarily concerned with extending the boundaries of Japanese filming and not just with political messages from a specific party. Out of such newly founded independent companies the so-called New Wave was born.                                                                                                                              Hiroshi Komatsu  (714)

Yasuzo Masumura

“Leaving behind the universal humanism of the earlier decade what [the New Wave filmmakers] sought was to make a different kind of film that was only for the Japanese.” Desser notes that the most immediate influence was the debut film of Yasuzo Masumura (1924-86), Kisses (1957), in which the youthful hero is from the masses, poor, alienated and angry, seeking immediate thrills. Masumura achieves a freshness of style through location shooting and hand-held camerawork anticipating the first features of the French New Wave. Of the film, Oshima said he “felt that the tide of a new age could no longer be ignored by anyone.” (42-3)

David Desser defines the Japanese New Wave as “films produced and/or released in the wake of  Oshima’s  Ai to kinono machi/ A Town of Love and Hope (1959), films which take an overtly political stance in a general way or toward a specific issue, utilising a deliberately disjunctive form compared to previous filmic norms in Japan” ( 4). Desser takes up the term “ avant-garde  movement” as defined by Renato Poggioli in ‘The Theory of the Avant-Garde’ (1968) as ”being constituted primarily to obtain a positive result, for a concrete end” (25 quoted Desser), or at least “concerned with creating a film content and form capable of revealing the contradictions within Japanese society and with isolating the culture’s increasingly materialist values and its imperialist alliances […] The avant-garde component [is] in the vanguard of a new social movement…utilizing artistic strategies of a new and challenging nature.” This is “within the context of a relatively liberal, mostly censorship - free society” (4). Desser adds that “the notion that the New Wave is a movement is important in defining it against the idea of being a school which was implicitly rejected by the ideology of the New Wave, quoting Poggioli that, “the [term] school presupposes a master and a method, the criterion of tradition and the principle of authority […] pre-eminently stoic and classical, while the movement is essentially dynamic and romantic” (20 quoted Desser 5).   

Nagisa Oshima

The assumption that an avant-garde artistic movement already has a political dimension was, Desser suggests, as crucial to the Japanese New Wave as it had been to the Russian Revolutionary cinema of the 1920s, the theatrical theories of Bertolt Brecht, and the French ‘nouvelle vague’, especially after 1968, with Godard entering the “Dziga-Vertov” collective. Desser shares Poggioli’s basic mistrust of the facile equation of formal radicalism being equal to political radicalism. Oshima insisted that he did not make political films but films on political subjects, free of ideology; the style depends on the theme, always trying to deny the style used in the previous film.

The radical individualism of the New Wave filmmakers was not a bourgeois individualism which posited a transcendental subject outside culture; rather it was the assertion of a will already formed by culture struggling with that culture. The form of rebellion this assertion of will took was often “spectacular,” a rebellion in the realm of spectacle, most typically in the realm of sexuality.                                                                                                                                 David Desser (p.77)