Japanese Directorial History Part V: Embracing Postmodernism (1980s Onwards)

The 1980s saw the momentum of the Japanese New Wave dissipate. Nagisa Oshima moved on to explore other areas, including the homosexual equivalents of many of his earlier themes in films like Taboo (2000), and Shohei Imamura even went on to win his second Palme d’Or at Cannes with 1997’s The Eel, but the directors no longer possessed the camaraderie of a cohesive movement. For fresh talents to rise up, new strategies had to be adopted. Within the postmodern milieu of the early 1990s, new talented directors found their own paths to artistic realization through such diverse methods as shock cinema, anime and television crossover.

One niche market that rose out of the 1980s and achieved wide-spread commercial success was anime. The unique style of Japanese animation frequently focused on science fiction themes like space travel and “mecha” (giant robots with human pilots), but quickly branched out to include genres like the school drama and samurai epics.

The concept found fertile ground on both TV and the big screen, where it held a special attraction for the male teen demographic. Anime also found an American audience with the international success of Akira (1987). While the film was fictional, it nevertheless revealed that the specter of the atomic bomb still haunted Japan and continued to capture the imaginations of popular culture. By the mid-1990s, anime had already developed a unique vernacular of conventions and stereotypes, with films only rarely subverting audience expectations. This was not the case, however, with Satoshi Kon, a director who brought provocative messages and unusually mature themes to the anime industry.

Perfect Blue (1997) takes an exhilarating but frightening look at a young girl’s pop music success and the dangerous byproducts of celebrity status. Tokyo Godfathers (2003) turns three homeless social-outsiders into unlikely heroes, in a sensitive retelling of the Nativity. The finely-crafted Millennium Actress (2001) follows an actress through her remarkable life and starring roles as she seeks an illusive love she met briefly as a child. This post-modern, nonlinear retrospective of Japanese political and cinematic history told through the eyes of a dying individual, encapsulated the ease (thanks to VHS and DVD) with which directors could mine the past for modern purposes.

Before the advent of home video technology, directors (and audiences) were restricted in their influences and their understanding of film history as a cultural lineage to only those films they saw in theaters. The 1990s saw the rise of a new generation of filmmakers who were familiar with Japanese films from before their births as well as international cinema not considered profitable enough for domestic theatrical screenings.

Next to anime, one of the most successful niche markets of the late 20th century was shock cinema. This trend in Japan (and Asia at large) is, in many ways, the logical successor of the envelope-pushing 1960s and 1970s. However, far from merely including controversial levels of sexual frankness and blood as a means of artistic expression, shock cinema fore-grounded controversy as its essential goal. Interpreting shock as anything from sudden movements and loud noises to eye-searing images of torture, mutilation and rape, the movement largely flaunted its disturbing taste and indigestible material.

By 1995 director Takashi Miike had already became an international icon for shock cinema, but with Audition (1999), he also gained critical success for his biting satire of reality television and his blend of Lynch’s style and Suzuki’s genre irreverence. He would become Japan’s most prolific contemporary director with a string of cult hits that included Dead or Alive (2000), Ichi the Killer (2001), The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001), Gozu (2003) and The Great Yokai War (2005).

Clearly directors in the 1990s had to concern themselves with television, whether they loved it (anime) or hated it (Audition). Thanks to cable and satellite, TV had become the most powerful media format in Japan. It is therefore not altogether surprising that one of Japan’s most recent directorial talents came from a television background.

“Beat” Takeshi Kitano started with a comic debut on TV’s “Rival: Big Laugh” in 1975, and by the late 1990s, he could be seen on as many as seven primetime shows per week. From 1990 to 1995, he was voted Japan’s most popular celebrity by NHK’s annual broadcasting poll [Abe, xiii]. With money to burn and a remarkable amount of energy, Kitano made deliberate, moody yakuza films like Violent Cop (1989), Sonatine (1993) and Fireworks (1997) that switch disconcertingly between slow meditation and blinding action.

Although Kitano often directed, produced (through his company, Office Kitano), starred, wrote, edited and provided artwork for his films, they never received much respect or attention within Japan, where he was still considered a TV star first and foremost. Internationally, Fireworks won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and Kitano became highly admired in the West for his provocative stories of urban alienation and violent pursuits of redemption.


Conclusion

Modern television, shock cinema and anime might seem to have very few similarities with the films of Ozu and Mizoguchi, but Japanese directors throughout the last century have all shared the drive to perfect a personal and meaningful art form. Their history is a long chain of workings and reworkings of the filmic medium to suit new generations and individual visions. They have frequently resisted studios, fickle audiences and generic labeling.

For maintaining their artistic integrity, history (and film scholars) will remember them. Glorified combinations of financial and critical success have been rare, but it is impossible to see these directors as failures: they managed to bring so many masterpieces to the screen under varied and difficult conditions. It is impossible to predict what will come next in the development of Japanese film, but certainly there are still unexplored artistic regions to map and willing talents yet to be discovered.

Japanese Directorial History Part IV: Exploring Explicit Content (1962 Onwards)

In 1962, the Art Theater Guild was founded with the goal of helping support independent directors making artistic but controversial films [Domenig]. It provided capital through donations (often from the studios, but never from the government) and raised money by distributing Western (particularly European) art films. Even after it could no longer afford to produce new material, it remained one of the only independent means of distributing films within Japan’s vertically integrated industry. Since the studios owned their own theater chains, they could often prevent rival films from getting to domestic audiences, stonewalling competition even if acclaim had been found abroad.

The Art Theater Guild and other independent companies ultimately propelled the Japanese New Wave (even though it was initially contrived by the studios to compete with television for the youth market). Members of the Japanese New Wave still maintained, and often intensified, their social and political commentary (Imamura’s Insect Woman [1963] indicts the over-commercialization of post-war Japan, while Oshima’s Death by Hanging [1968] savages capital punishment and Korean racism), but now they introduced a whole new level of unprecedented sexual content as well.

Shohei Imamura provoked controversy with his bitterly nihilistic, but undeniably brilliant, explorations of prostitution (Insect Woman), pornography (The Pornographers [1966]) and incest (The Profound Desire of the Gods [1968]), changing the landscape of creative expression around him.

As taboos fell, independent ventures capitalized by churning out “pinku eiga,” a genre of soft-core porn. By the late 1960s, it had become the dominant genre in Japan, accounting for more than half the pictures made each year. Likewise, the violence that had at one time been shocking in the New Wave’s oeuvre quickly became a heavily-marketed convention for yakuza (gangster) films, the second most successful genre.

Yakuza films shared many features with the earlier (and still popular) samurai jidaigeki: lone amoral protagonists, glorified violence and a questionable sense of honor dictated by a strict personal code. Also, like jidaigeki, these “yakuza flicks” tended to rely heavily on formulas and clichés, remaining uninspired in structure, narrative and style. Thus, what had once been daring and powerful material was quickly assimilated by the system and drained of all artistic pretenses.

Studio director Seijun Suzuki made more then twenty such forgettable pinku eiga and yakuza films for Nikkatsu before boredom led him to start modifying the clichéd scripts he was sent. Strange tweaks in his first attempts at experimentation (like replacing a cocaine-based crime ring with a knitting conspiracy in 1963’s Youth of the Beast) initially went unnoticed by his producers. By the release of Tokyo Drifter (1966) with its flashy pastel palette, patchy black-masking (covering portions of the image during the development of the footage to leave obtrusive black shapes) and bizarre character quirks, he had earned himself a cult following.

However, the hallucinatory story of an assassin with a rice fetish who is haunted by butterflies in Branded to Kill (1967) was too weird for the studio to handle. He was fired and blacklisted for ten years. As Suzuki’s career shows, even after the struggles to expand content had been integrated into the mainstream, the unique style of a director could still make the material a personal experience and subvert mainstream expectations.

Nagisa Oshima, unable to find much financial backing in the environment that he had inadvertently helped to create, took the cycle to its inevitable culmination. His 1977 In the Realm of the Senses presents an erotic drama in which an ordinary couple plummets into a nightmare of sexual obsession and perversion. Shocking international audiences and blurring the line between pornography and art, Oshima had his leads actually perform the onscreen sex scenes (of which there were many).

As Oshima’s film seemed to suggest, the era when sexual content alone could be used as a way to test artistic boundaries and establish a distinct directorial persona had reached its conclusion. As the 1970s came to a close, the New Wave directors shifted their focus away from purely content-focused experimentation.

Japanese television networks such as NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) continued to rise. While American TV suffered many handicaps against Hollywood movies, such as low resolution and stricter censorship, the same was not true in Japan. Japanese TV had a high market penetration of top-quality color TVs, shared the same (relatively lax) content rules that studios maintained and attracted more commercial investment than their American equivalents. Experiments on MUSE (Multiple Sub-nyquist Sampling Encoding) as early as 1979 even allowed Japan to pioneer HDTV (High-Definition Television).

All this enabled Japanese television to compete on nearly equal footing with film, but without the cost of tickets. Faced with the triple threat of television, imported productions (now with higher budgets then ever and no quota laws limiting their intake) and a thriving pornography industry, the studios became minor entities that possessed less than 10% of the market share combined. Their decline continues to this day, with the three largest studios distributing less than one fifth of films [Domenig, 1]. Meanwhile, the major independent producers have sought out niche markets.

Artistic directors in the 1980s found themselves struggling to survive. Even Kurosawa had to find international funding for Kagemusha (1980), Ran (1985) and Dreams (1989) [Richie 2, 80]. Without the backing of studios, major independents or even audiences, directors often had to find new ways to protect their artistic integrity.

Japanese Directorial History Part III: Extolling Social and Political Statements (WWII Onwards)

Throughout the 1930s a repressive atmosphere of conservatism and nationalism prevented the film community from actively critiquing the contemporary social and political situation. Theater attendance was severely reduced by the war, and the major studios (Toho, Shochiku, Daiei and Nikkatsu) found success only with escapist entertainment and period pieces that emphasized national pride. There was little room for directors with dissident social or political notions.

After WWII, the US occupation laid down nearly equally repressive rules on the studios and increased the power of trade unions. Topics that were censored included critique of Allied countries and the constitution, militarism, communism, anarchism, the atomic bombs, censorship (ironically) and references to relationships between American soldiers and Japanese women. In response, a large number of directors left the studios to pursue independent production (some even founded the rival studio Shintoho, meaning literally “new Toho”), where they could be more free from government censorship and reprisal.

Kenji Mizoguchi’s feminism is only the most obvious early example of a newfound social awareness amongst important directors and their films. Although initially suppressed, the dropping of the atom bomb and its aftermath became an indelible preoccupation of Japanese culture. By 1950, “hibakusha” cinema (literally, “survival cinema”) came to define the films that tackled the event and its aftermath. Far from the angry, bitter or vengeful response expected by the West, these films are often characterized by a Japanese quality called “mono no aware” or the awareness of the transience of all things. The films were often sad and sympathetic, but rarely accusatory. A less sophisticated and heavily coded alternative treatment can be found in the successful Godzilla monster-movie series of the early 1950s.

1963’s Mantango: Attack of the Mushroom People, like Godzilla, is also highly allegorical. A band of marooned sailors find themselves transforming after contact with mushrooms (read: mushroom cloud), complete with peeling skin, oozing sores and swelling tumors. The film ends with the harsh indictment that despite Tokyo being outwardly aglow with neon lights, inside it is as dead as “the mushroom people.” While the film was still heavily coded and makes plenty of concessions to entertain general audiences, it shows a willingness to wrestle with a cultural subconscious. Later works, culminating in Shohei Imamura’s Black Rain (1989), struggled to deal with the fallout in either a more political or more humanistic ways.

In the immediate post-war period, ruminations on the strictly military consequences of the war were actually far rarer than critiques in other areas, partially due to censorship. Even Akira Kurosawa, later famous in the West for his samurai films, found his first critical successes in the late 1940s and early 1950s with thoughtful dramas that confronted serious social issues. His Stray Dog (1949) presents a prescient advocacy of gun control. Ikiru (1953) confronts inefficiency and corruption in the Japanese bureaucracy. Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1951) even questions the nature of objective reality.

While tackling such issues, Kurosawa also managed to make bold breaks from established narrative methods. Stray Dog incorporates elements of film noir and thrillers, unusual in Japan at the time. Halfway through Ikiru, Kurosawa makes a jarring switch in both time and viewpoint, killing off the main character in the process. Most influential, however, was Rashomon, which tells the same story four times, each from a different subjective perspective that biases a tale of rape and murder in the favor of the current narrator. It became an international success after playing in the Venice Film Festival, opening up the export market for future Japanese films.

Despite the success of such challenging material, the studios regained their foothold in the late 1950s. By 1959 independent production had been entirely eliminated within Japan. Although ticket sales temporarily peaked, studio dominance would not last long, as a new and rebellious generation of filmmakers was soon vying for attention. In 1960, rising director Nagisa Oshima would leave Shochiku after they refused to release his radical, post-anarchic Night and Fog in Japan. Shohei Imamura would leave Nikkatsu the following year after his dark brand of nihilism was rejected by the studio. Oshima’s brutally sexual Cruel Story of Youth (1960) foreshadowed what was to come, ushering in a new era of challenging material, namely: sex and violence.

Japanese Directorial History Part II: Establishing a Personal Style (1926 Onwards)

Japanese film leading up to the 1920s remained largely derivative of other art forms. Films based on Kabuki theater and geisha dancing flooded the market. Western influences led to “shingeki,” literary adaptation of classic works, both domestic and imported. At this time, accurately presenting the text was the ultimate goal. The power of authorship was thought to rest in the hands of the original writer, not the director. Very little experimentation was done in Japan to explore film as a unique medium. Rarely was it felt that film merited material tailored specifically to its form of presentation.

This stagnation began to give way in the 1920s as “jidaigeki,” fictionalized period pieces, became a popular genre [Richie 2, 24]. Masterless samurai, called ronin, developed as popular, if rebellious, protagonists. While relatively violent and often nihilistic, these samurai films were still essentially genre movies. They were shot in a fairly conventional manner that blended traditional Japanese and established Western techniques. It would not be until 1926 with Teinosuke Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness that a personal style, rather than simply a “Japanese” or “Western” aesthetic would assert itself as a viable mode.

Kinugasa was too experimental to be tolerated by the already dominant studio system in Japan, and the film had to be financed out of his own pocket. A mild critical success, the film was still a financial disappointment and Kinugasa would only be able to make one other film, 1928’s Crossroads, before being subsumed by the studio system. Despite a mere two-film run of independent movies, Kinugasa had established a unique style that incorporated Japanese culture, German expressionism, Russian montage editing and American special effects. Crossroads continued Kinugasa’s themes of madness and further experimented with uncanny imagery. Although his films were lost for almost 45 years, today they are seen as definitive evidence of a burgeoning movement towards directorial authorship; a movement that would grow further in the 1930s.

One of Japan’s first great directors, Yasujiro Ozu, started his career in 1929, but it wasn’t until his I Was Born, But… (1932), about youths seeking a father figure, that he started gaining attention for his signature style. Although influenced by Chaplin and Lubitsch, Ozu gained renown for consciously rejecting many of the tenets of Hollywood filmmaking (or, for that matter, filmmaking anywhere). By the 1940s and 1950s, Ozu was well known for filming in 360 degree space, shooting from unusually low levels, filming with a single 50mm lens (creating a flat, uniform quality) and highlighting graphical relations and transitional shots devoid of characters [Kijo]. He also refused to pander to international audiences and their short attention spans. By the early 1930s, he had eliminated pans, dissolves, fades and most camera movement from his films, allowing him to focus on beautiful static compositions and humanistic character development.

His plots shifted from highly American-influenced slapstick comedies to “shomen-geki,” quiet, meditative tales of simple, everyday characters, such as small children in I Was Born, But… and Good Morning (1959), middle-class families in Late Spring (1949) and Tokyo Story (1953) or traveling actors in Floating Weeds (1959). Ozu’s oeuvre was one of first in Japan to be representative of a particular directorial style and tone without restrictive ties to genre or nationality.

Around the same time as Ozu, director Kenji Mizoguchi also established himself. Mizoguchi’s films were characterized by extremely long takes (“one scene, one shot”), 90 degree editing (making him one of the few directors in the world other than Ozu to oppose the Hollywood-perfected 180 degree system) and a focus on the downtrodden and suffering (The Life of Ohara [1952], Ugetsu [1953] and Sansho: The Bailiff [1954]).

Unlike Ozu, Mizoguchi often favored wide-angle lenses (24-35mm) to lend depth and distinct layering to his compositions. Mizoguchi’s life and films became deeply associated with a traditional Japanese aesthetic (his set design and lighting intentionally recall famous works of Japanese art), but his technique remains definitively his own. His frequent concern with issues of the treatment of women and their role in Japan makes him one of the first directors to be repeatedly associated with a progressive or controversial theme.

A sensitive advocate of feminism, Mizoguchi would return to the plight of women as a subject throughout his career: Sisters of Gion (1936), Osaka Elegy (1936), Utamaro and his Five Women (1946), The Life of Oharu (1952) and A Geisha (1953). Although we shall continue to address the issues of personal style, Kenji Mizoguchi serves as an excellent point to begin a discussion of the second form of directorial resistance: taking a social or political stance

Introduction to a JDH (Japanese Directorial History)

This post will be the first of five parts in a series on Japanese directorial history, looking at the development of Japanese cinema from a historical perspective informed by auteur theory. It is meant to be a general introduction and not an exhaustive account either in breadth or depth. Individual reviews of Japanese films (some of which can be found here) are also helpful as well as detailed biographies.

History may be the only thing that has been consistently kind to Japanese directors. Certainly Japanese Studios, Hollywood imports, television, the sex industry and even native audiences have not always been kind to great (often declared in retrospect) directors. A reoccurring theme across the careers of many of the most famous Japanese directors has been resistance: to studios compromises, Hollywood competition, economic imperatives and the temptation to take the easy way out.

There are very few Japanese directors who have found success in Japan and internationally, or amongst critics and audiences. There are no Spielbergs in Japan (Even Kurosawa had infamous financing difficulties in his late career). Yet, when one looks back over Japanese film history from the 1920s to today, one finds countless great films, and there is little doubt that Japan has developed an impressive legacy of important directors.

This series will take a look at Japanese cinematic history as it affected the artistic maturation of directors, paying particular attention to the three main forms of their resistance: style, social and political statements, and content.

‘Style’ concerns how a director films a story and is generally the first mark that distinguishes a director as unique. Here, resistance means creating a style that is personal to a director and which may ignore the tastes of either domestic or Western viewers.

‘Social and political statements’ tell us what a film means and provide insights into a director’s beliefs. Resistance in the form of social and political messages can be very overt, and generally rejects traditional values, laws or widespread practices.

Finally, ‘content’ is everything that is actually caught on film. Prominent Japanese directors have often pushed the envelope in terms of depicting violence, sex and offensive material. Although, historically speaking, these three resistant trends emerged roughly in sequence, they are not restricted merely to finite periods. Rather, it can be shown that they are cumulative and that all three continue to this day.

In covering the history of Japanese cinema, the scope of this series has been restricted to ten directors: Teinosuke Kinugasa, Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Akira Kurosawa, Nagisa Oshima, Shohei Imamura, Seijun Suzuki, Satoshi Kon, Takashi Miike and “Beat” Takeshi Kitano. This selection does not presume to cover all, or even the majority, of challenging directors who have left their mark on Japanese cinema, but it does provide a wide variety of examples. Their careers and films can serve as a basic introduction to the rise of Japanese cinematic authorship and Japan’s role in film culture and counterculture.


The following work cited applies to this series:

Abe, Casio. “Beat Takeshi vs. Takeshi Kitano.” Kaya Press, 1994.

All Movie Guide. 2005. All Media Guide, LLC. Oct. 1, 2005. http://www.allmovie.com/

Cazdyn, Eric. “The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan.” Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002.

Domenig, Roland. “The Anticipation of Freedom: Art Theater Guild and Independent Cinema.” Midnight Eye. Vienna. June 24, 2004.

Field, Simon and Rayns, Tony. “Branded to Thrill: The Works of Seijun Suzuki.” London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1994.

Kiju, Yoshida. “Ozu’s Anti-Cinema.” Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan, 2003.

“Multiple Sub-nyquist Sampling Encoding” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved Nov. 12, 2005, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

Nolletti, Arthur Jr. and Desser, David. “Reframing Japanese Cinema: Authorship, Genre, History.” Indiana University Press, 1992.

Ritchie, Donald. “The Films of Akira Kurosawa.” Third Edition. Berkely: University of CA Press, 1996.

Ritchie, Donald. "Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film." 1996

Richie, Donald. “Japanese Cinema: An Introduction.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.