Introduction to Matsumoto Toshio: A Theory of Avant-Garde Documentary

Matsumoto Toshio was a documentary filmmaker, director of "the first experimental film in postwar Japan," and one of a new cohort of theorists in the late 1950s who inspired the work of ambitious film and television documentary makers as well as becoming a key theoretical inspiration for the Japanese new wave. In addition to his own documentaries, he made groundbreaking experiments in expanded cinema and video art, and he combined those various aspects of his work in his famous feature Funeral Parade of Roses (Bara no sōretsu, 1969). Born in Nagoya in 1931, Matsumoto graduated from the Art History section of the Literature Department of Tokyo University in 1955. At university he was a member of the communist-affiliated student union, Zengakuren, and took part in the 1952 Bloody May Day protests. After graduation, Matsumoto joined documentary producer Shin Riken Eiga in 1955 and directed the recently rediscovered Silver Wheels (Ginrin, 1955), simultaneously the earliest example of postwar Japanese experimental cinema and a film promoting Japanese bicycle exports. Ironically, public relations films made by companies such as Iwanami Films and Tokyo Cinema, the audiovisual background of high economic growth, were made by the most leftist filmmakers in Japan: a combination of prewar veterans of the proletarian cinema movement, refugees from the occupation-era purges of the studio ranks, and politically active students who had found it difficult to enter the conservative film studios in the 1950s.

After joining Shin Riken, a film company that specialized in science documentaries and industrial promotion films, Matsumoto attended the study group of the Kiroku Kyoiku Eiga Seisaku Kyogikai (the Documentary and Educational Film Producers Conference, known in Japanese by the contraction Seikyo), run by left-wing documentarists such as Atsugi Taka and Noda Shinkichi. The group went on to found Kiroku eiga (Documentary film), the journal in which Matsumoto first published "On the Method of Avant-Garde Documentary" in June 1958. Postwar Japanese intellectual life in the arts revolved less around universities than "study groups" such as this. Further research on these important institutions would greatly enrich our understanding of Japanese film culture. In addition to Seikyo, Matsumoto was also associated with the Ao no Kai (Blue Group) of filmmakers at Iwanami Films, the Kiroku Geijutsu no Kai (Documentary Arts Group) with critic Hanada Kiyoteru and novelist Abe Kobo, and the Eiga to Hihyo no Kai (Film and Criticism Group), which also published new-wave assistant directors such as Oshima Nagisa and Yoshida Kiju, as well as Tokyo critics and amateur members of film-study circles.

In an interview with Sato Yo, Matsumoto explained his intellectual formation as a kind of postmodern critique of the metaphysics of presence since Plato: in place of absolute principles and an idealism that insisted on clear hierarchies in art, he rejected the privileging of original over copy, principle over consequence, and preferred the tense "oppositism" or dialectics of Okamoto Taro (in his writing on the avant-garde around 1950) or the "elliptical thinking" of Hanada Kiyoteru (a style of thought that like the ellipse maintained two foci, never collapsing into a single center). Rather than a self-contained subject describing a stable object, Matsumoto conceived of subject and object in dialectical relation, in orbit around each other. Whatever the philosophical standing of Matsumoto's argument, it should be clear both how it informed his theory of avant-garde documentary and how rebarbative it would have seemed to most practical filmmakers engaged in making documentaries and educational films. As Matsumoto argued in a video presentation to the Visual Underground conference (Montreal, September 2011), his generation's frustration with existing films and film criticism led them to create new journals in which to promote new theories that were often attacked by senior filmmakers. In particular, Matsumoto had polarized the readers of the Seikyo newsletter in December 1957, in the article " The Subjectivity of the Author," which he quotes in "A Theory of Avant-Garde Documentary."

After leaving Shin Riken in 1959, Matsumoto was active in both experimental film and documentary circles, organizing film series at the Sogetsu Arts Center (an important exhibition site...