Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics by Yuriko Furuhata (review)

The Japanese word eizo is central to an understanding of the significance of the interventions made into the cultural life of the nation by a relatively small grouping of artists and writers working between the 1950s and 1970s. Traditionally used as a phenomenological term in science and philosophy, the character connoted shadow or silhouette, later shifting to signify optical processes. Like the Greek term tehkne, creativeness and the tools used to achieve the outcome are relative, nuanced and complex.

The vitality of Japanese cinema has been ever present within cinephiles’ experience; actually attending a screening, though, is usually restricted to festivals. The historical bibliography is extensive, with a tendency to celebrate the frissons of sex and violence, an aspect dealt with in this volume but with a good deal more relevance and care. Studies that grapple with the complexities of cross-cultural analysis are few—Noel Burch’s notable work from 30 years ago is referred to here—and the author is well qualified to achieve an excellent addition to the literature, aided I suspect by the distance of time.

The theoretical scaffolding of the period, developed and initiated predominantly by Matsumoto Toshio, enable a realization of the aesthetic and historical issues and the progression of the protagonists, including most notably Oshima Nagisa, towards the development of a body of work distinct from the samurai and yakuza melodramas more familiar in the West at the time. The chronological development is illusive as the emphasis is on issues—image theory (eizo ron, images specifically made using machines); debates that moved away from riariti (reality) towards akuchuariti (actuality); and the incorporation of journalistic devices and performance events. The term avant-garde was applied to the emerging form of cinema, related more closely to documentary film than to art house or artists’ moving images. Perhaps this distinction could have been drawn more clearly in the book’s title by the use of the term nouvelle vague, thus aligning the avant garde movement with the French New Wave of the time, with which it shares many values.

The post-war generations of Japan were well-educated and, unlike the earlier regimented generations, restless for change. From the late 1950s onwards cooperative approaches to creative experiment of all kinds bloomed, unimpeded by the (Western) cult of the individual artist working alone. Likewise, in the streets students agitated and developed alliances with farmers and communities being forced into accepting the inexorable creep of a government “modernization program” of the nation’s resources, rallied and defended by corporate media organizations. (I remember local television news channels in the 1960s lapping up the extraordinary images of pitched battles of Japanese students, peasants and police, later repeated briefly by European and American comrades).

In this context of social fluidity, an established genre of pink film (erotica), which like international sexploitation movies are made quickly and cheaply, became the hothouse to which imaginative young men were drawn, (including the infamous right-wing nationalist Mishima Yukio). Wakamatsu Koji’s earlier work remediated the print and television journalism of the day, directing “our attention to the material gap between the cinematic image and the appropriated journalistic image.” within the spectacle of flesh and violence. The group of filmmakers often published discussions of each other’s work, linking through to the debates of leftist forces violently agitating against the grip of capitalist authority.

Another group of filmmakers took a different approach in response to events made sensational by the media. Documenting the life and death of a young serial killer, they visited the places throughout Japan from birth where he had lived, worked and committed murder, recording in a series of long takes the appearance of the landscape and the people found there, with a spoken narrative sparsely recounting...