BY BRIAN CORREIA
Being an American Geek, I know the ins and outs of American
pop culture like I know the ins and outs of the back of Luke Skywalker’s
prosthetic hand. Which is fine, except that most of the time I’m ignoring
gigantic chunks of culture from other countries. In lieu of taking the time to
delve into the cinematic worlds of countries like, say, France, Russia, and
Japan, I have developed a sort of pop culture shorthand -- a series of associations
that might impress at pub trivia but certainly wouldn’t knock anybody out here
at Network Awesome. France has Godard. Russia, whose manifold contributions to
cinema I have managed to boil down to one film, I associate with Battleship
Potemkin. Japan’s is Kurosawa (and you know I first heard about him from the
Barenaked Ladies1. Shameful). One and done. And that sucks! Because obviously
France and Russia and Japan, not to mention the rest of Europe, India, and, you
know what, pretty much everywhere else in the world, have made game-changing
contributions to film that are just as worthy of my time and obsession as
anything Hollywood (which was pretty much founded by immigrants in the first
place) has pumped out.
Sure, I know about the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague if
you’re nasty) but the Japanese New Wave? Forget about it! Well, it’s a thing.
And if Yoshishige Yoshida’s Woman of the Lake (no relation to King Arthur, as
far as I could tell -- my Eurocentrism is acting up again) is any indication,
it’s a great thing. Unfortunately, I’m not the only one from the U.S.A. who is
basically unfamiliar with the movement. Criterion needs to step their game up:
Despite the Japanese New Wave being rightfully revered in Europe and presumably
the rest of the film world, here many of the best known films from the Japanese
New Wave are still only available as expensive imports. Once again, though, The
Internet comes to the rescue!
Here’s what we’ve been able to piece together: The Japanese
New Wave came about at that same tumultuous decade as the French New Wave, the
1960s. It’s easy to draw parallels between the two movements (the Japanese New
Wave a.k.a. “nuberu bagu” did borrow a name from it, after all) but that would
be reductive. As scholar David Desser pointed out in his 1988 study of 60s
Japanese film, Eros Plus Massacre (Named after the Yoshida film of the same
name), understanding these films requires (or, at the very least, is largely
aided by) some knowledge of the political and social climates of the country.
OK, maybe we don’t need a scholar to point that out, but it can’t hurt. So,
here we go.
Japan in the 60s was in a period of economic flourish and
political unrest. The conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) was in the
first decade of their fifty-plus year reign. In 1960, an agreement called The
Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security (informally known as Ampo) was
reached between the United States and Japan and was met with increasingly
violent protest, especially from student communities. The corporation was king.
The New Wave filmmakers responded with avant-garde films celebrating rebellious
youth, outcast heroes, sexual awakening, and challenging the old guard. Here,
Desser nails the filmmakers’ motives more eloquently than I ever could:
The New Wave filmmakers responded to their situation as
post-war, post-humanist, alienated artists by attempting a thematic and
technical assault on previous film practice in an attempt to reveal and
overthrow the retrograde tendencies of Japanese culture. They sought themes and
techniques which would uncover and condemn the materialistic,
anti-individualistic, corrupt, hypocritical values becoming more and more
firmly entrenched as the ‘60s wore on2.
Prominent Japanese New Wave directors included Nagisa
Oshima, Masahiro Shinoda, Shohei Imamura, and the man at the helm of today’s
film, “among the preeminent masters of the modern Japanese art film,” according
to the Harvard Film Archive3, Yoshishige (a.k.a. Kiju) Yoshida. Many directors
from the movement had their own niche -- a particular theme they revisited in
most of their films, for example. Yoshida was no different. His recurring
theme? Distressed, unfulfilled women -- a challenge on the traditional role of
the woman in Japanese (and, unfortunately, many other cultures’) melodrama as
victims and objects of desire4. Desser calls them “feminisuto” films.
These films inevitably starred Yoshida’s beautiful wife and
creative partner, prominent Japanese actress and producer Mariko Okada (with
whom he founded their production company, Gendai Eigasha) as a woman on a
strange, erotic journey (No Rochelle, Rochelle) of self-discovery. In 1966’s
Woman of the Lake, an adaptation of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kawabata
Yasunari’s novel, Okada plays the wife of a wealthy, loveless businessman who
gets tangled up in a web of intrigue involving an affair with her interior
designer, a set of nude photo negatives, and a man who can only be described as
a stalker (though he is portrayed a little more delicately than that.) Apparently,
the film is not particularly notable among Yoshida’s work, though it is
beautifully shot and acted and seems as appropriate an introduction to the
art-house stylings of the Japanese New Wave as anything else.
Yoshida and Okada’s work continued to challenge the societal
and political conservatism in Japan. It reached what many consider its apex in
in 1969 with the couples’ Eros + Massacre, a groundbreaking exploration of the
history of radical Japan filtered through the biography of anarchist Sakae Osugi.
They have continued to make challenging and rewarding films, even as recently
as 2002 screening their Women in the Mirror at the Cannes Film Festival.
Slowly but surely, the Japanese New Wave looks to be getting
the respect it deserves from American cinephiles. Organizations like the
Harvard Film Archive are running film series of the masters. The Criterion
Collection does offer some Japanese New Wave titles after all, including the
important work of Seijun Suzuki5. Good! It’s clear that this movement is an
integral chapter in the history of film; one that’s worth absolute immersion.
Kurosawa’s great, obviously, but I have to flesh out my Western-centric
cultural shorthands! Maybe you do too. These films are a great place to start.
1 “Like Kurosawa I make mad films, OK I don’t make films,
but if I did they’d have a samurai.” - Barenaked Ladies, One Week
2Desser, David. Eros plus massacre : an introduction to the
Japanese new wave cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.
3http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2009marapr/yoshida.html
4http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2009marapr/yoshida.html
5http://www.criterion.com/explore/94-japanese-new-wave
Brian Correia is a budding computer scientist and aspiring
writer from Boston, Massachusetts who couldn't decide which hip-hop lyric to
put in his byline. The top three, in no particular order, were as follows:
“cooler than a cucumber in a bowl of hot sauce,” “spiced out Calvin Coolidge
loungin' with six duelers,” and “I got techniques drippin' out my buttcheeks.”
Source: networkawesome.com
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