While politics had previously been suppressed and marginalized in Japanese films - partly due to state censorship and partly due to the fact that leading authors naturally tended towards different themes - in the 1960s it entered the cinema of the Land of the Rising Sun in a big way. Whether it was realized within the mainstream (primarily as a subversive authorial act), through Nuberu Bagu (new wave) poetic channels and avant-garde rhetoric that showed a desire for ideological confrontation, and even within the genre framework of sexploitation, political discourse greatly aided the modernist tendencies of Japanese film culture in the sixties.
It is no coincidence that he started the open discussion Oshima Nagisa who was conceptually most inclined to ideological engagement: Nihon no yoru to kiri (Night and Fog in Japan, 1960) is the director's ruthless confrontation with the illusions, hopes and practices of the Japanese leftist movement. The film is a direct 'response' to the failure of the mass demonstrations of 1959-60 to prevent the renewal of the agreement between the USA and Japan on the continued American military presence on the island, but Oshima places things in a more comprehensive perspective, trying to make the traumatic occasion the most significant framework for the elaboration of all those deficits of the left that would manifest themselves even more dramatically in 1968.
Varying three timelines and different interpretations of the same events, Nihon no yoru to kiri scrupulously presents what the 'background' of great and thunderous emancipatory ideas actually is. The far-reaching nature of Oshima's criticism is particularly emphasized by the fact that his film procedures are, by their very nature, oriented towards polemics: by clearly rejecting mimetic copying, the director opts for an 'artificial' reconstruction that immediately introduces the present into the space of analysis. The hall in which the wedding takes place, disturbed by unresolved tensions from the past, ensures the absolute dominance of a long shot that not only shapes the ambience of social claustrophobia, but also underlines the temporal-spatial narrowness of that political option that pleads to break and overcome existing social norms.
Left-wing reconstruction from Nihon no yoru to kiri u Kôshikei (Death by hanging, 1968) moves to re-creation, which not only changes the author's rhetorical position (serious intonation inevitably shifts to humorous), but also redefines the quality of Oshima's critical engagement: the resignation from the first work becomes a furious recognition of absurdity in the second.
It is about an 'improved' allegoricality, a new resoluteness of the director's mise-en-scène which notes the disproportion between the Law (its literal application) and life. This sudden disproportion in Kôshikei means that the fundamental laws are disrupted, so it remains to note the effects of this slippage, which are as dark as they are comical and vice versa: after the execution of the Korean R (Do-yun Yu) survives but suffers from amnesia, so police and court officials are forced to restore his memory so that the execution can be carried out once more.
The fact that the representatives of the Law begin to play (negative) roles from R's life and thus take upon themselves both his desires and guilt is not only a means for the director to establish the complicity of the system and the criminal individual, but also to highlight his discursive treatment in the foreground : for Oshima, the ultimate degree of realistic interpellation is reflected in the process that leads from reconstruction to deconstruction.
It was also inevitable that a person who decisively marked Japanese literature and, in general, culture in the post-war period would leave his mark in this space: Yukoku (Patriotism, 1966), the only film he directed Yukio Mishima, the most controversial Japanese artist of the 20th century, is a work that focuses on the ritualized nature of politics, this time in a thanatological context. It is the story of a Japanese officer (played by Mishima himself) who - unwilling to betray his friends who attempted a coup d'état in 1936 - decides to commit suicide with his wife, which is depicted in very graphic detail.
A prophetic announcement, bizarre wish fulfillment or poetic staging of the end, in Yukoku Mishima's rhetoric is maximally intensified, primarily because - with painful nakedness - the author's fundamental fantasy is revealed, which contains and 'specifies' his cultural, militaristic and nationalistic, and generally political priorities: a complete and mutually illuminating intertwining of love and violent death, erotic excitement and violence, sexuality and the death drive, ideology and praxis.
Located on stage No. theaters, with reduced scenography suggesting puritanical political focus and discipline, with an 'idealized' design in which the power of Eros and Thanatos manifests with the power of the archetype, Yukoku radicalizes Mishima's right-wing vision, which focuses on the performative, cultural, but also existential and aesthetic character of the very ritual of facing death.
Without dialogue, only with captions that do not explain but situate the episodes, or rather the chapters, Yukoku is self-consciously shot as a silent film: this 'anachronism' implies a new visual energy, a new penetration of Mishima's political and personal 'message' as it moves unstoppably towards a brutally bloody finale that will be effected five years later in an actual seppuku.
An illustrative example of how politics could be effectively translated into far-reaching satire in Japanese cinema is given by Nikudan (Human Bullet, 1968) Okamoto Kihachija, a scathing review that is necessary if one wants to shed multidimensional light on the militaristic consciousness that has brought the Land of the Rising Sun to the brink of collapse.
The story of a young soldier (Terada Minori) who is preparing to become a kamikaze - his task is to sit on a torpedo at sea and wait for enemy ships - in Okamoto's hands turns into an absurd parable about the aimlessness of a huge mobilization in which the individual (here first reduced to survive like a cow, then treated like a pig, only to be promoted to a divine suicide bomber) is ultimately always reduced to cannon fodder.
Two films from the end of the decade significantly indicate the specific intertwining of politics and the avant-garde. In Bara no soretsu (A Funeral of Roses, 1969) conveys a direct trace of a specific Japanese moment, a particular social and political situation that the film seeks to reflect: formalistic unorthodoxy. Matsumoto Toshija It can be seen as a cinematic application of the psychedelic spirit of the late sixties, various usurpations and interpolations within the plot flow that prevent a smooth reception are an echo of the anarchist and rebellious diversion of the student movement, while the selection of homosexuals and transvestites as protagonists radicalizes the long-suppressed sexual politics of classic national film.
If there is an urgent penetration Bara no soretsu was based on this actuality, on the subversiveness that went along social, ideological and sexual lines, then the film retains its relevance even outside of that context because its analytical scope is based on rigorous Brechtian strategies. Violent, excessive, parodic, (un)substantiatedly pretentious, aggressively political, Bara no soretsu constantly argues with the concept of transparency of the film image and, thus, any other ideological conformity.
Eros + gyakusatsu (Eros + Massacre, 1969) Yoshide Yoshishigea is, in turn, a staging of the life of a famous Japanese anarchist Osugi Sakaea (Toshiyuki Hosokawa) through his relationship with three women, each of whom may represent a particular aspect of his philosophy of 'free love' with its associated ideological repercussions.
What Yoshida constitutionally emphasizes is that the staging of an interesting but largely marginal historical Japanese figure forwarded i imagined by film students who would identify a specific historical moment and a specific historical phenomenon in order to point to a significant parallel, to the similarity of periods that call for unorthodox political solutions, to the necessity of radical thinking and behaviorism in a critical time.
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