In Eros Plus Masscre: An Introduction to the Japanese New
Wave Cinema, David Desser examines the creative and revolutionary spirit that
defined the 1960s Japanese new wave movement (nuberu bagu) apart from the
facile identification and synchronicity associated with the coincidental
emergence of the French new wave, and more importantly, refocuses his
exposition within the indigenous specificity of Japanese culture in the face of
postwar social, economic, and geopolitical transformation. Presenting the emergence
of the movement as the fateful intersection between the budgetary realities of
declining (and increasingly competitive) commercial film production among the
nation's institutional motion picture studios (as a natural consequence of
television's popularization as a medium for audiovisual entertainment) that
also enabled the creation of more autonomous, independent film production and
distribution companies such as the Art Theater Guild, and the modernist
influence of the prewar Shingeki "new theater" (a movement patterned
after the European Naturalist Theater) that, in its focus on the problems of
the individual, served as an effective vehicle for promoting left-wing
ideology, Desser underscores the significance of the industry's fostered
climate of innovation and (implicitly transgressive) experimentation, not as
the creative reinvigoration of a dying studio system, but rather, as a
desperate means of luring audiences back to the cinema. Within this context of
reflexive, corporate-driven goals of returning to profitability, Desser
illustrates not only the highly conducive environment that cultivated the
movement, but also foreshadows its inherent unsustainability.
Using the generational classifications outlined in Audie
Bock's Japanese Film Directors - Early Masters (Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu,
Mikio Naruse), Postwar Humanists (Akira Kurosawa, Keisuke Kinoshita, Kon
Ichikawa, Masaki Kobayashi), and New Wave (Shohei Imamura, Nagisa Oshima,
Masahiro Shinoda) - as a basis for tracing the movement from its origins within
the studio system through their tenure as assistant directors to established
filmmakers (along with noting the natural human tendency to reject a mentor's
influence in an artist's development of his own aesthetic), Desser further
expounds on Bock's paradigm by presenting the precursive influence of the
Shingeki modern theater in the creation of politically rooted, keiko eiga
"tendency films" during the 1920s that explored social problems as a
means of inciting change, as well as the popularization of the youth-centric
taiyozoku (sun tribe) films that iconized the image of a rebellious,
disconnected, and self-destructive postwar generation. Framed against the left
movement's fervent opposition to the ratification of the bilateral Anpo Security
Treaty of 1959 that sought to formally ally Japan with the U.S. in the Cold War
against the Soviet Union (and implicitly, marginalize the country's own nascent
socialist party), Desser illustrates the integral politicization coupled with
the existential angst of youth culture the capture the zeitgeist of the
movement.
Beginning with the chapter entitled Ruined Maps, Desser
examines the commonality of sociopolitical themes that continually resurface in
the films of the Japanese new wave, in this case, dislocated sexual energy as a
manifestation of the integral question of Japaneseness. Diverging from the
pinku eiga (pink films) genre in their political implication, the transgressive
sexuality of Nagisa Oshima (Cruel Story of Youth, The Ceremony, and In the Realm
of the Senses), Shohei Imamura (The Pornographers and The Profound Desire of
the Gods), Seijun Suzuki, Koji Wakamatsu (Go, Go, The Second Time Virgin), and
Matsumoto Toshio (Funeral Parade of Roses) reflect the moral confusion,
dysfunction, and repression that intrinsically form the consciousness of
Japanese postwar identity. This postmodern anxiety is incisively captured in
Hiroshi Teshigahara's adaptations of Kobo Abe's modernist fiction, where the
dehumanizing performance of absurd, everyday rituals (The Woman in the Dunes),
physical disfigurement and transplantation (The Face of Another), and
impersonation and social disengagement (The Man Without a Map) reflect the
conscious erasure of identity as a delusive means of amnesic transformation -
an potent metaphor for the superficial rehabilitation of national identity
through imposed conformity, ideological re-identification, and revisionist
history.
Desser similarly examines the essence of Japanese
"feminism", or feminisuto, in the essay Insect Women - a cultural
particularity that hews closer in spirit to the idealized portrait of
sacrificing, indomitable, marginalized women in Kenji Mizoguchi's cinema than
to the ideological pursuit of equal rights. Observing the role of sexuality as
a means of empowerment and liberation in the films of Shohei Imamura (The
Insect Woman and Intentions of Murder), Masahiro Shinoda (Dry Lake, Pale
Flower, Banished Orin), and Kaneto Shindo (Onibaba), Desser also cites the work
of lesser known filmmakers, Susumu Hani's A Full Life and He and She in the
idea of spiritual emancipation through personal choice and self-discovery, and
Yoshishige Yoshida's A Story Written with Water and Akitsu Springs where the
maternal symbol of water serves as a metaphor for eroticism and idealization.
In the subsequent chapter, Shinjuku Thieves, Desser further
expounds on the issue of gender disempowerment by examining the broader issues
of ingrained social injustice that has been enabled by the cultural rigidity of
monoethnic sameness and codified behavior. The first example involves the
systematic discrimination of the burakumin, an archaic feudal caste designation
for people whose ancestral occupations were touched by death (such as butchers,
leather workers, and undertakers) and whose residences were segregated from the
local population through isolated hamlets to avoid contamination. Although
abolished during the Meiji Restoration, the stigma ofburakumin persist in
insidious ways that inhibit social mobility away from these "outcast communities"
through such seemingly innocuous tasks as screening job applicants and martial
prospects, where background investigations reveal their community (and
inferentially, caste) association. Another is the racism and persecution
inherent in the treatment of Koreans (and foreigners in general) in Japan,
where a tainted history of occupation and enslavement (especially with respect
to the forced recruitment of comfort women during the Pacific War) have
engendered a cultural arrogance towards their once "conquered" ethnic
minorities. It is this reinforcement of dehumanizing stereotypes that Nagisa
Oshima incisively confronts in such films as The Diary of Yunbogi, Three
Resurrected Drunkards, and Death By Hanging, where society's projection of
Korean identity contributes to the corrosive realization of a demoralizing,
self-fulfilling prophesy.
Moreover, as Dresser illustrates in Forests of Pressure,
beyond the sad universality of racism and socioeconomic marginalization, even
more irreconcilable is the intra-ethnic discrimination that is emblematic in
the segregation of survivors from two man-made disasters: thehibakusha who
survived the atom bomb (a recurring subject in Kaneto Shindo's body of work and
in Shohei Imamura's Black Rain), and subsequently, those afflicted with
Minamata disease, a neurological condition caused by severe mercury poisoning
from industrial pollution. Stigmatized by virtue of arbitrary exposure, their
plight not only reflects a social rejection of alterity and imperfection, but
more importantly, provides insight into the Japanese postwar psyche by exposing
its deeply rooted cultural anxiety over the unreconciled consciousness of its
own self-inflicted victimization, whether through unquestioned allegiance that
led to a senseless war and international humiliation, or through irresponsible
industrial policies in the aggressive pursuit of economic recovery (and
profitability) that have led to a large-scale environmental catastrophe.
Contrasted against Shinsuke Ogawa's culturally immersive, profoundly committed,
and groundbreaking environmental documentaries (most notably, Forest of
Pressure and the epic Sanrizuka series), the widely divergent approaches to
political filmmaking reflect the disorientation and uncertainty of a people
struggling to define its essential postwar identity between the rapidly
bifurcating lifelines of tradition and modernization, conformity and humanity,
victimization and culpability.
Source: filmref.com
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