After a high-school girl is raped by a thuggish student, she agrees to seduce older men so that he can shake them down. When she becomes pregnant, the student gets money for her abortion by sleeping with an older woman. As the student is beaten to death by a gang, the young woman, riding with a man who has picked her up, tries to escape and is dragged to her death.
Aptly titled Cruel Story of Youth (1960), this film by the young Nagisa Oshima would scarcely have been recognizable as Japanese to western connoisseurs of Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujiro Ozu. Yet it is a typical product of the Japanese New Wave. The movement is all the more remarkable in being one of the few new cinemas deliberately created by a film industry.
The Japanese studios had jumped on the youth bandwagon early. During the mid-1950s, the newly revived swordfight movie catered to adolescent boys, while romantic melodramas were aimed at teenage girls. In 1956, Season of the Sun, adapted from a scandalous best-seller, brought forth a series of taiyozoku (“sun-tribe”) movies, which depicted spoiled young people living an amoral, licentious lifestyle. Crime thrillers, rock-and-roll musicals, and swordplay films were ground out relentlessly, particularly at less prestigious studios like Nikkatsu and Toei. to the new strategy, 1958 movie attendance rose to just over a billion, a postwar high.
Shochiku, the most conservative Japanese studio, noted its rivals’ triumphs with youth fare and observed the box-office success of French Young Cinema. The company decided to launch a Japanese New Wave. In 1959, the firm promoted a young assistant director, Nagisa Oshima, and allowed him to direct his own scripts. The success of his first films led Shochiku to promote other assistants. Nikkatsu followed suit, giving newly appointed directors substantial assignments.
At first, New Wave films attracted critical praise and proved somewhat popular with young audiences. But they could not halt a downturn in the box office. By 1963, the popularity of color television had pulled attendance to half its 1958 level. The studios tried desperately to win back the audience by lowering ticket prices, by making more violent swordplay films (e. g., the Zato-ichi “blind swordsman” series), and by pioneering new genres—the yakuza (gambler-gangster) film and the “pink film” (soft-core pornography). Some of the New Wave directors contributed interestingly to these trends, but soon most of the filmmakers quit their studios.
Only a few years earlier this would have meant leaving filmmaking. Unlike European countries, Japan had a strong, vertically integrated studio system, and until the 1960s no one could easily work outside it. Moreover, the government did not encourage new talent through subsidies and prizes. But theaters’ habits of showing double features created a larger appetite for releases than the studios could profitably satisfy. As a result, many New Wave directors were able to create independent production companies. While young directors’ films were sometimes distributed by the big studios, a central role was played by the Art Theater Guild (ATG), a chain of specialized theaters. In 1964, the ATG began financing and distributing films, and it became the mainstay of the New Wave generation.
Like young cinemas elsewhere, the Japanese New Wave attacked mainstream cinematic traditions. Complex flashback structures, intrusions of fantasy and symbolism, and experiments with shot design, color, cutting, and camerawork became common. Directors splashed jarring compositions across the wide screen, and the hand-held camera and disjunctive editing came to the fore. But since mainstream Japanese films had explored such techniques before, they were perhaps less disruptive than the subjects, themes, and attitudes portrayed in the New Wave works.
No films had so savagely criticized Japanese society, revealing oppression and conflict behind the image of a tranquil, prosperous nation. Theft, murder, and rape were rendered casually. The directors flaunted the vulgarity of their heroes and heroines, and often the critique was framed in political terms. The Japanese directors went further than even their German contemporaries in showing that authoritarian forces continued to rule their country long after democracy had supposedly come.
All these qualities are evident in the work of Nagisa Oshima. Like his contemporary Truffaut, before getting into directing he wrote inflammatory film criticism. But, as a former student activist, he gave his articles a political slant alien to the French auteur critics. Oshima complained that Japanese society stifled the individual in the name of superficial harmony. He called for a personal cinema of the “active subject,” in which the director expressed his deepest passions, anxieties, and obsessions. This view, a cliche in the West and one basis of postwar art cinema, was a breakthrough in Oshima’s group - and tradition-dominated nation. He and his New Wave peers created Japan’s postwar modernist cinema.
Oshima saw flickers of active subjectivity in the wave of late 1950s student demonstrations against renewing the U. S.-Japan Security Treaty (known as “Ampo”). For the first time, the Japanese abandoned their time-honored role of obedient sufferer and saw themselves as able to change their fate. But Oshima quickly came to believe that the Ampo demonstrations led only to disillusionment. He traces this process in Night and Fog in Japan (I960), a scathing critique of the Communist party and the student left. Oshima intercuts student political activities from the 1950s with Ampo treaty demonstrations during 1960, rearranging their order to bring out parallels. He frames the two time schemes within a wedding ceremony that symbolizes a cynical surrender of political ideals. Shochiku shelved Night and Fog in Japan almost immediately after release, claiming that it was failing, but Oshima charged that the studio bowed to political pressures after the recent assassination of a Socialist leader. In protest he quit Schochiku, though several of his later films were produced with the company.
Throughout these films and others, Oshima pursued the question of how individual desires of the active subject, however warped, reveal the rigidity of political authority. His two major representations of these desires—criminality and eroticism—films that remain disturbing today. Moreover, Oshima refused to cultivate an identifiable style. Cruel Story of Youth frames most scenes in medium shots and tight, decentered close-ups (20.80). Night and Fog in Japan, comprising only forty-five shots, relies on disorienting camera movements that whip across theatrically poised tableaux (20.81). Violence at Noon (1966), by contrast, uses naturalistic staging and around 1,500 shots. Each film’s style, Oshima maintained, sprang from his feelings and attitudes of the moment.
Other directors created more conventional methods of stylization while still expressing a degree of social criticism. Hiroshi Teshigahara, associated with a surrealist group and the novelist Kobo Abe, found international success with Woman in the Dunes (1963). This tale of a man trapped in a gigantic sandpit with a mysterious woman was widely interpreted as an allegory of how an arid society could be overcome by a primal eroticism (20.82).
More central to the New Wave was Yoshishige Yo-shida, whom Shochiku promoted to director when Oshima’s earliest work became successful. Yoshida admired Resnais and Antonioni, whose emphasis on pictorially
20.82 In Woman in the Dunes, the protagonist’s attempt to dig his way out of a sandpit results in an impressive avalanche.
20.80 Just before the ending of Cruel Story of Youth, with the heroine’s face split by the wide frame.
20.81 The quarreling leftists, framed in cramped, telephoto shots (Night and Fog in Japan).
Striking images shows up in his work. His sensuous camera movements in Akitsu Springs (1962) owe less to Oshima than to Last Year at Marienbad. The film’s concerns, however, remain resolutely historical, suggesting that, in the postwar era, Japan lost its chance for true democracy. Another Shochiku alumnus was Masahiro Shinoda, an assistant to Ozu and an admirer of Mizo-
Guchi. Shinoda’s films have a fastidiousness of visual design that echoes 1930s Japanese classicism (20.83).
Closer to Oshima’s political perspective was the other major director to emerge from the New Wave, Shohei Imamura. Declaring his interest in “the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social struc-ture,”l4 Imamura sought to record Japan’s forgotten regions, oppressed classes, and lustful impulses.
As a young director at Nikkatsu, Imamura became identified with the New Wave principally through his outrageously satiric Pigs and Battleships (1961). This story of a teenage thug whose gang raises pigs on black-market garbage is less stylized than Oshima’s work of the period, but the political critique remains sharp. Presenting a society of petty racketeers, prostitutes, and mothers anxious to sell their daughters to GIs, Imamura equates the Japanese with the pigs feeding off refuse from U. S. warships. The hero dies in a moment of rebellion, cut down as he machine-guns a row of buildings (20.84).
Like Oshima’s men, Imamura’s are typically driven by perverse antisocial desires, but he often regards his heroes more mockingly, as in The Pornographers (1966). The final scene of Pigs and Battleships establishes the central Imamura character as the tough woman who fights for herself in a world dominated by men. The Insect Woman (1963) celebrates the pragmatism of three
20.83 This shot from Shinoda’s Assassination (1965), echoes the poise of Mizoguchi displayed in the swordfight film.
20.84 Pigs and Battleships: the rage of youth against the world.
Generations of postwar women who use prostitution and theft to win a measure of independence. In Intentions of Murder (1964), a woman, impregnated by her rapist, abandons him to death and lives for the sake of her son.
The Japanese New Wave brought recognition to many other filmmakers, both older directors like Kaneto Shindo (notable for The Island, 1960) and younger talents like Susumu Hani (Bad Boys, 1960; She and He, 1963). In addition, it created a climate of acceptance for experimentation. Koji Wakamitsu exploited the “pink” genre in gruesome, stylized films like Violated Women in White (1967). Seijun Suzuki’s Nikkatsu films, with their eccentric black humor and comic-book exaggerations, made him a cult figure with young audiences. Executives were distressed to find that the New Wave they had created led young audiences to expect outrageous formal innovations and attacks on authority in even routine studio products.
World History
