The Shochiku Nouvelle Vague Dick Stegewerns IKOS
The Starting Shot of the Japanese Nouvelle Vague • Fragment 1 • Oshima Nagisa, Ai to kibo no machi (A Town of Love and Hope), Shochiku, 1959
• The Japanese New Wave / Shochiku Nouvelle Vague = “Films produced in the wake of Oshima’s A Town of Love and Hope, which take an overtly political stance in a general way or towards a specific issue, utilizing a deliberately disjunctive form compared to previous filmic norms in Japan. It is an avant-garde movement both in the sense of that it is in the vanguard of a new social movement and in the sense that it is utilizing artistic strategies of a new and challenging nature.” (Desser)
• Cinema as a weapon in the cultural struggle. Politics and class war in the Shochiku Studio, the vestige of tradition and melodrama. • The postwar genre of youth movies. Predecessors Hani Susumu (1928- ), the Taiyozoku (Sun tribe) films (1956), and Masumura Yasuzo (1924-1986). • No more resignation. Realism and politics. Rage against society. Class struggle.
Background • Conjunctural: 1958 as the peek of Japanese cinema. Rapid decline (-1998) due to the introduction of television. • Structural: the revolt of the postwar generation of young and intelligentsia directors
The Directors • Oshima Nagisa (1932- ) ‘Godard’. • Fragment 2 Seishun zankoku monogatari (Cruel Story of Youth/ Naked Youth), 1960 • Radical student movement. Film as resistance.
• Against both the wartime generation and the old communist left. • Agitprop avant garde cinema. The cinema in the streets and vice versa. • Fragment 3 Nihon no yoru to kiri (Night and Fog in Japan), 1960 • Shochiku pulled the plug. End of the Shochiku Nouvelle Vague.
Yoshida Kiju (1933- ) • Juvenile delinquency in stylish shots • Fragment 3 Roku de nashi (Good for Nothing), Shochiku, 1960 • From youth and violence to women and water. ’Antonioni’
Imamura Shohei (1926-2006) • Man as beast. The Japanese as pigs around the US military bases. • Fragment 4 Buta to gunkan (Pigs and Battleships), |Nikkatsu, 1961 • Insect women. Film as anthropology. The other (lower-class) Japan.
Themes and Style • Realism, speed, locations, handheld camera, documentary elements, the intruding camera. • Youth! Identity, sexuality and politics. The impossibility of political protest. Alienation, nihilism. • Resistance in the form of sex and violence (and death) as the only outlets of identity within an oppressive social and political structure.
• Strong, sexually active women. No mere victims, sometimes even killer women. No object but subject in the struggle for power and survival. Woman as the true Japan. • Wife-actresses that financed the nouvelle vague directors.
Impact • Fragment 5 Yoshida Kiju, Akitsu onsen (Akitsu Springs), Shochiku 1962. Back to normal (melodrama)? • One year, thirteen films. Movement? Wave? • Young and angry postwar generation. Auteurs with political objective.