is known as one of the leading figures in the renewal of cinematic language in Japan in the 1960s. During this decade, he made his most recognised works; fiction films that benefited from international distribution and obtained great prestige. In Japan, they were often ranked among the ten best films of the year by the film journal Kinema Junpō: She and He (Kanojo to kare) reached seventh position in 1963; The Song of Bwana Toshi (Buwana tosi no uta) was eighth in 1965; Bride of the Andes (Andesu no hanayome) was sixth in 1966; and Nanami: The Inferno of First Love (Hatsukoi: Jigoku-hen), which is his best known work, was sixth in 1968. 2 This essay focuses on his first feature film, Bad Boys (Furyō Shonen, 1960), which marked the beginning of a new cinema in Japan and the starting point of Hani's fiction films. While there have been attempts to rediscover the value of this work (Satō 1997: 3-12; Amit, 2004), this text proposes a new approach to Bad Boys, bringing into account its script, published by Kinema Junpō in April 1960, as well as Hani's theoretical contributions.Bad Boys is a work at the limits of reality and fiction, in which Hani implemented the method of filmmaking that he had developed during his earlier decade as a documentary film maker for Iwanami Eiga studios. This is a period that remains understudied, although in recent years, there has been a rediscovery of his two most successful documentaries Children in the Classroom (Kyōshitsu no kodomotachi, 1954) and Children Who Draw (E o kaku no kodomotachi, 1956). 3 The former won the Best Documentary at the Educational Film Festival (Kyōiku Eigasai) of 1955 and the Blue Ribbon Prize for "Best Film of Educational Culture"and the Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival. After this success, the documentary was screened at Nikkatsu commercial cinemas alongside fiction films, which was a rare distinction (cfr. Takefumi 2002, 61
The Western ‘discovery’ of Japanese cinema in the 1950s prompted scholars to articulate essentialist visions understanding its singularities as a result of its isolation from the rest of the world and its close links to local aesthetic and philosophical traditions. Recent approaches however, have evidenced the limitations of this paradigm of ‘national cinema’. Higson (1989) opened a critical discussion on the existing consumption, text and production-based approaches to this concept. This article draws on Higson´s contribution and calls into question traditional theorising of Japanese film as a national cinema. Contradictions are illustrated by assessing the other side of the ‘discovery’ of Japanese cinema: certain gendaigeki works that succeeded at the domestic box office while jidaigeki burst into European film festivals. The Taiyōzoku and subsequent Mukokuseki Action films created a new postwar iconography by adapting codes of representation from Hollywood youth and western films. This article does not attempt to deny the uniqueness of this film culture, but rather seeks to highlight the need to reformulate the paradigm of national cinema in the Japanese case, and illustrate the sense in which it was created from outside, failing to recognise its reach transnational intertextuality.
Film representation of the Ainu people is as old as cinema but it has not remained stable over time. From the origins of cinema, Ainu people were an object of interest for Japanese and foreign explorers who portrayed them as an Other, savage and isolated from the modern world. The notion of “otherness” was slightly modified during wartime, as the Ainu were represented as Japanese subjects within the “imperial family”, and at the end of the fifties when entertainment cinema presented the Ainu according to the codes of the Hollywood Western on the one hand; and Mikio Naruse proposed a new portrayal focusing on the Ainu as a long-discriminated social collective rather than as an ethnic group, on the other. However, Tadayoshi Himeda’s series of seven documentaries following the Ainu leader Shigeru Kayano’s activities marked a significant shift in Ainu iconography. Himeda challenged both the postwar institutional discourse on the inexistence of minorities in Japan, and the touristic and ahistorical image that concealed the Ainu’s cultural assimilation to Japanese culture. The proposed films do not try to show an exotic people but a conventional people struggling to recover their collective past.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.