Is It a Breakthrough? (The Modernists of Japanese Film)
Essay
Is It a Breakthrough? (The Modernists of Japanese Film)
By Nagisa Ōshima
Nagisa Ōshima’s 1958 assessment of the rebellious crop of filmmakers then-emerging in Japan—including one Yasuzô Masumura.
The Yasuzô Masumura Series plays at Metrograph until December 9.
In July 1956, Nakahira Ko breezed onto the scene with Crazed Fruit, boasting, “Season of the Sun glorified the sun tribe and Punishment Room criticized it; I sneer at the sun tribe.” In the rip of a woman’s skirt and the buzz of a motorboat, sensitive people heard the heralding of a new generation of Japanese film. Then in May of the following year, with The Betrothed, a wholesome, rational depiction of adolescence, Shirasaka Yoshi proved that scripts of exceptional style can transcend the strengths of the director and determine the style of the entire film. At that time, even more people became aware that this new element could not be ignored when talking about the Japanese film. In September of that year, when Masumura Yasuzô used a freely moving camera to depict a pair of young motorcycle-riding lovers in Kisses, this new generation had assumed a place in Japanese cinema as an intense, unstoppable force that could no longer be ignored.
The camera does a 360-degree pan, following the youths at work in a car wash, who are running around the cars in order to wash them ever faster and more thoroughly. Characters looking down from the window of a building or walking on the street are also captured by the camera. A woman stares at a man, saying, “I have had an affair with that person,” and another woman sees a man off to the station, screaming, “I’ll be your mistress, your concubine. … I’ll be waiting for you!” Quick speeches, dynamic action. Violent changes of scene, extreme ellipses. Active heroes, ultramodern settings, the establishment of events. Dispassionate depictions sustained by a richly modern spirit that unites all of these elements. In filming “things” in particular, Nakahira was at his best, using as his most powerful weapon the sharply critical spirit that views people as objects. Masumura has the force, the strength of thought to twist the subject of a script into a Masumuraesque subject, and he has the expressive courage to assert that subject by entrusting it to a character’s human instinct. Shirasaka’s genius lies in his ability to stylize the images of his rich, modern sensibility with a skillful critical technique. The formal innovations of these filmmakers’ forms extended so brilliantly in so many directions that they created comic situations; people acknowledged that they definitely were onto something new, although they couldn’t quite grasp the essence of it. Now, however, their newness must be analyzed, examined, strengthened, and publicized, because it probably represents the biggest breakthrough in the wall of the Japanese film.
The most fundamental characteristic of these new artists is their determination to create works that break with the traditions of the premodern Japanese film. The two established types of Japanese film were the period drama (jidaigeki), which drew on the Kabuki tradition, and the modern melodrama, which drew on the New Wave (Shimpa). These forms and their requisite content were the most acceptable to Japanese film audiences; they were closely tied to the consciousness of the Japanese people, centered in the premodern Japanese social structure and in the premodern human relationships engendered by it. Of course, most filmmakers rebelled against these traditional forms. In the prewar period, the most effective form of rebellion was the naturalistic realism that reached its peak in the work of Ozu Yasujirō. After the war, the tendency known as realism developed among left-wing independent production companies. However, because they were always conscious of the audience’s receptiveness to the traditional forms—and because they could not resist their attraction—the realists were not able to generate a fundamentally new form. Kinoshita Keisuke and Imai Tadashi, the most promising among them, maintain a balance between innovation of form and content and audience receptiveness. The former does this by relying on his naturally sharp perceptions, while the latter sustains his persistent, desperate efforts with his tough, rational spirit. The results are The Tower of Lilies, Twenty-Four Eyes, Rice, and Times of Joy and Sorrow. These works demonstrate a harmony both fortunate and unfortunate between the artists’ content and form on the one hand, and the audience’s receptiveness on the other. It is unfortunate because these films engendered not a single substantively new element. In this way, the existing relationship between the traditional form of the mainstream Japanese film and the Japanese consciousness and view of life is based on a strong conservatism.
Their newness must be analyzed, examined, strengthened, and publicized, because it probably represents the biggest breakthrough in the wall of the Japanese film.
New filmmakers like Nakahira, Shirasaka, and Masumura naturally rebelled against the traditional forms, injecting their films with the newforms that arose from their commitment to their own perceptions. Moreover, to make their work easier, they dared to ignore the old premodern side of their audience. This is their chief characteristic, and they are thus inevitably called modernists. These men therefore occupy positions as innovators in Japanese film today.
The modernists of the film world are conscious of method; this is what sets them most radically apart from earlier filmmakers, who were without consciousness or method. These men not only realize their method within their films, but they also take every opportunity to explicate and publicize their works and elucidate their methods. Earlier filmmakers did not use these strategies. Japanese cinema’s confrontation with the social structure, its escape from a space of closure to one of openness, meant seizing the first opportunity to leave behind the premodern craftsman in his world of secrets; it also meant the renewal of artistic method.
The modernist Nakahira issues pronouncements against the solemnly serious faction. It is obvious, as he himself says, how disadvantageous this sort of stance is in the context of Japanese film today. Nevertheless he says, “I had to speak out.” He talks frankly of his resentment that only the films he endowed with “the social as theme (plausibility), lyricism in the story (sentimentality), and composure and dignity (dullness)” were highly regarded by the critics. He thus expresses his resentment not only toward film journalism but also toward the Japanese social structure, which forms the basis for those films that win critical approval. This is clearly a losing battle, and it presents all the more reason for Nakahira to fight effectively, by limiting the problem to method. Using “a variety of things as weapons, such as narrative, power of description, artistic sense, purity, refinement, and lightness,” he must capture in his works the ultramodern customs that have broken off from the premodern elements of Japanese society; he must carve out one kind of modem world.
For the modernist Shirasaka, it is the “gonorrhoea theory of the old film world”: working in the film world is like sleeping with a woman who has gonorrhoea. He boasts that, even so, his blood does not become infected. His weapon is his differentiation between his “sharp senses and strong spirit”: he says that he has “always worked guided by his senses.” He has aspired to “depict cultural confusion and social contradictions by borrowing the form of the lucid, full-bodied comedy of manners.” Like Nakahira, he captured a transient social phenomenon and created a new style of comedy. This aspect of his work is definitely a product of his “senses.” He knows, on the other hand, that "novelty is a problem of the spirit." And his spirit, which was “ignored” where works are created, pronounces Times of Joy and Sorrow “the worst film ever.” He would have no recourse, however, if someone were to say, following up on his reaction to Times, that the efforts to formulate a prescription for the gonorrheic woman—who represents the vast Japanese society that supports this film—have been forsaken. His only response to date has been to continue to inject into his superbly stylish scenarios superficial social criticism based exclusively on his modernist sensibility.
The modernist Masumura turns his back on the overriding lyricism, reality, and atmosphere of the Japanese film and the society that produces it: “My goal is to create an exaggerated depiction featuring only the ideas and passions of living human beings.” Masumura, possessor of the sharpest sociological perceptions of the three, understood the inevitable: "In Japanese society, which is essentially regimented, freedom and the individual do not exist. The theme of the Japanese film is the emotions of the Japanese people, who have no choice but to live according to the norms of that society. The cinema has had no alternative but to continue to depict the attitudes and inner struggles of the people who are faced with and oppressed by complex social relationships and the defeat of human freedom.” He made a decision: "After experiencing Europe for two years, I wanted to portray the type of beautifully vital, strong people I came to know there, even if, in Japan, this would be nothing more than an idea.” Although reflecting that, “As for whether or not this is the right thing to do—in fact, the answer will probably be negative,” he pelted the screen with a series of intense images: the young lovers of Kisses, the maid’s daughter in A Cheerful Girl, and Ishiwatari Gin in Warm Current. The posture of the modernists is most discernible in the stance of Masumura.
All three despise and reject the premodern status of the Japanese film’s traditional form. They recognize, however, that this form is inevitably sustained by the surviving premodernity of Japan. They also know that they must ultimately fight against the link between the two. At the same time, they are aware that many of their respected predecessors, who did understand their opponents’ strength, fought and were defeated nevertheless. They thus rejected the idea of challenging the premodernity of Japanese society in favor of direct attack through the content of their films. They decided to shock their audiences, rather than persuade or move them, by film ing images of people created on the basis of concepts that had no connection to that social reality and its forms.
And in this they succeeded. For the film people who had been nodding off and resting complacently within the traditional form of the Japanese film (and the stagnation of Japanese society that was its background), these were truly shocking events.
The emergence of these modernists within the Japanese film world was due not merely to their artistic temperaments or their social consciousness. Their sensitive reactions to Japanese society and the state of the film industry in the late 1950s made their emergence inevitable.
For some years after the war, the struggle against the premodern system and for human freedom and human rights was carried on passionately in the midst of a chaotic Japanese society. The film industry, too, retained works with the traditional premodern form and content on the one hand, while making films whose content struggled against the traditional on the other. At that time, artists like Kinoshita, Imai, and Kurosawa won the immeasurable support of the young film audience. Immediately after the war, however, the power of the government, in the form of a democracy-promoting institution, once again began to defend openly the premodern tendencies of Japanese society. A little later, such a defense occurred in the context of film as well. However, the quest for human freedom and human rights continued. Supported by that quest, artists like Kinoshita, Imai, and Kurosawa continued to fight a splendidly beautiful retreating battle from around 1950 onward. Until the Day We Meet Again, lkiru, A Japanese Tragedy, The Tower of Lilies, and The Garden of Women are brilliant monuments to this battle. However, from the latter half of the 1950s, a decade after the end of the war, the chaos of that time initially receded and things basically stabilized materially. Politically, too, the balance of power between conservatives and revolutionaries became established, as did the opposition of the two major international power blocs, ushering in a period of a kind of mutual stabilization. In the film world, too, the young audiences, which had supported the violent struggles of Kinoshita, Imai, and others against the premodern, were now becoming entwined in the premodernistic structure of Japanese society and immersed in the conservative sensibility. Thus, these outstanding filmmakers, who were continuing their quest for human freedom and human rights in the context of a society that oppresses that quest, lost the base of support for their ideas. Kinoshita Keisuke, the possessor of sharp senses, promptly tried to retain the sympathy of his audience in the world of chronicles. Kurosawa Akira, true to his own philosophy, tried to nurture it genuinely in the context of the period drama. Imai Tadashi, whose eyes never strayed from reality, ultimately sought a new dramaturgy in the world of Chikamatsu. The sufferings of these, the most talented artists in the Japanese film world, were evinced in their desperate efforts to rid themselves of the frightening stagnation of the innovative aspect of the Japanese film.
As innovation stagnated, there were fewer viewers of the melodrama, the traditional form of the Japanese film. Obviously while Japan’s postwar democratization had only reached a certain point, it was also solidly successful up to a certain point. The way to find a new direction in the midst of this strange peace and harmony—the way to break through—had not yet been discovered.
During this miserable period, a strong rival to the film industry appeared: television. Film people were haunted by a vision of Hollywood’s turning into a petroleum plant. The influence of television became apparent. The battles of Rikidozan and the Sharp Brothers, boldly slapstick comedies, and the confrontation between Kaneda and Nagashima started to draw more viewers than foolish films.
Exactly at this time, the modernists appeared. Nakahira, in his first release, Crazed Fruit, created an incomparable depiction of the three S’s—speed, thrills, and sex. This was a well-rounded response to the demands of the film industry as it sought to oppose television. At the same time, his spirit as a modernist critic made possible that form of expression. He used the three S’s to his advantage as material for his critical stance, and this made him a champion in the defensive battle against television. Nakahira carved out his artistic stance by always taking transient, superficial social phenomena and serving them up with his cynical, critical spirit.
Shirasaka’s comedies started off having to be funnier than television comedies: if television had to be interesting at any given moment, so had Shirasaka’s comedies. And so Shirasaka’s scripts were completely stylized: every speech and every action was imbued with his modernist sense. Shirasaka could not take into consideration the fact that Japanese audiences, who lived in the climate of the first-person novel, were not comfortable with these stylized ideas.
The heroes created by Masumura also struggled with the heroes of television, whose conspicuous personalities and modes of behavior were needed to give the audience a sense of stability. Masumura put this necessity to use while struggling with it. He achieved shocking effects by creating characters with completely free hearts and bodies and heroes who behaved freely. And he continued to ignore the social realities of these human images as well as the composition of his audience.
The modernists thus raised the fiery hand of innovation against the stagnation of the art of the film. At the same time, they responded to the primary demands of the contemporary film industry.
In June 1958, the modernists began to throw themselves into a more difficult effort. The team of Masumura and Shirasaka released Giants and Toys, written by Kaiko Takeshi. This film grapples with a brave theme: humanism destroyed by a huge capitalist mechanism. In spite of the fact that the form of this film is an extension of their previous work, it clearly and solemnly introduced a new element of content—the social structure—that brings forth changes in form as well. How do they manage this? Is Masumura possibly trying to keep his faith in human beings by giving his characters a violent energy that is repeatedly regenerated, even as the characters are destroyed by the mechanism? How does this interact with Shirasaka’s coolly sarcastic attitude? This work is a major experiment cast into the future by these two filmmakers.
Nakahira will release Niwa Fumio’s The Four Seasons of Love after more than six months of silence following The Wavering of Virtue. For the first time, Nakahira’s critical spirit attempts to progress from depicting frothy social phenomena to penetrating the psychology of human physiology, a realm in which Naruse Mikio and Toyoda Shiro excel. How will Nakahira express himself as he takes on this genre? And what kind of new world will he establish in Japanese film? This work, too, is an important crossroads at which we will ask whether Nakahira’s critical spirit is indeed genuine.
While the modernists’ foundation with respect to both content and form was becoming confused in the context of a relatively stabilized Japanese society, the Japanese film was exposed to the threat of television. The modernists were engineering a breakthrough by means of an innovation in form. Their next challenge is to progress further, to the level of content, innovating and modernizing as they confront the premodernity of Japanese film and society.
They will inevitably face that challenge because mere innovation in form will not earn them the overwhelming support of the audience, which is living in a partially premodern Japan and has premodern elements in its consciousness and view of life. At present, these filmmakers have only the support of a segment of stateless intellectuals and Japanese youths who are not yet completely integrated into the social structure. This doesn’t compare with the national trust that Kinoshita, Imai, and others have attained as artists. But now even these trusted artists are confused, along with the people. Chushingura is breaking box-office records. This film features Ishihara Yujiro, who made his debut in Nakahira’s Crazed Fruit as a symbol of rebellion, now transformed into a symbol of stability and good sense in his role as a devoted son and loyal younger brother.
The modernists are at a crossroads. One road would lead to gradual degeneration of their innovations in form into mere entertainment, bringing about their surrender to the premodern elements that are subconsciously included in the content of their films. In that case, they would simply live out their lives as mediocre technical artists. Another road requires them to exert all of their critical spirit and powers of expression in a persistent struggle that strongly and effectively pits the content of their works against the premodern elements of Japanese society.
We don’t know what form that struggle will take; they probably don’t know themselves. However, if they had been thinking of Giants and Toys and The Four Seasons of Love as the first big steps along that road, then at least the germination of that method may be said to be in evidence. That they will select this, the road to innovation, rather than the former one, to degeneration, is highly probable. It is the only possible point at which the Japanese film can break through, and it is impossible to think of a breakthrough point as remaining closed. In some situation, at some time, the right innovator will certainly emerge to break through to a new situation, a new time. The form of the innovator will vary depending on the time and the situation. Compared to Kinoshita, Imai, and Kurosawa, who completed their preparations during the war and established themselves as innovators during the postwar age of emerging democracy, the modernists are unfortunate and their form may be inferior. However, as Jean-Paul Sartre said, “No matter what he does, there is no road on which the artist can escape; what we want is for artists to solidly embrace their own era. The artists’ own age is his only opportunity. That age was made for that artist and that artist was made for that age.” The burden of the glory and misery of today’s Japanese film truly belongs on the shoulders of the modernists. Critics and viewers who desire the innovation of the Japanese film must shower their works with warm understanding and criticism. If the modernists don’t maintain their innovative stance and continue to progress, it will be unfortunate not only for the Japanese film and Japanese society of today but also for the Japanese film and Japanese society of the future.
This 1958 article by filmmaker Nagisa Ōshima, translated by Dawn Lawson, appears in Cinema, Censorship, and the State (1992), edited by Annette Michelson. It has been republished with the permission of The MIT Press.
