Description
- Abstract:
- The aim of this dissertation is to bring to light innovative ? and until recently, thoroughly ignored ? theoretical discussions of the concepts of "actuality" (akuchuaritii), documentary, and the "mechanically produced image" (eizô) by Japanese avant-garde critics and filmmakers. Drawing on original source materials, my work also challenges one of the most persistent presumptions in Cinema Studies: the belief that Japanese writers and filmmakers have never produced a body of writings that deserve to be called "theory." More concretely, I map out critical connections between avant-garde theorists (such as Hanada Kiyoteru and Abe Kôbô) and filmmakers (such as Oshima Nagisa, Matsumoto Toshio, Wakamatsu Kôji) that have been neglected in the standard accounts of Japanese cinema. During the 1950s and the 1960s, not only did avant-garde art practice gain intellectual momentum and expressive intensity in Japan, but it also gave rise to a politicized film discourse, which took the problematic of actuality as its basis of inquiry. Alongside the discursive currency of this concept and in dialogue with it, Japanese filmmaking also saw a sudden explosion of particular cinematic techniques, such as citational uses of journalistic media (e.g. newspapers, press photographs, comics), freeze-frames, and extreme close-ups. I argue that the postwar Japanese avant-garde engagement with film theory and practice offers a particularly fertile ground to examine the productive tension between avant-garde and journalistic media, and by extension, allows us to revisit the Marxist notion of vanguardism in light of the current leftist discourse on the "common." My investigation begins with the emergence of what I call the "avant-garde documentary movement." This movement owed its theoretical basis to the Marxist avant-garde critic Hanada's proposition to dialectically synthesize avant-garde and documentary filmmaking. After examining the filmic works of Matsumoto, Teshigahara, Oshima, and Wakamatsu from the 1960s, I conclude my investigation with an analysis of the fûkeiron ("theory of landscape") and two "landscape" films, which mark the endpoint of this form of politico-aesthetic vanguardism.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D.) -- Brown University (2009)
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Citation
Furuhata, Yuriko,
"Refiguring Actuality: Japan's Film Theory and Avant-Garde Documentary Movement, 1950s-1960s"
(2008).
Comparative Literature Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z07S7M25
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Comparative Literature Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Comparative Literature department....