REFIGURING ACTUALITY:JAPAN’S FILM THEORY AND AVANT-GARDE DOCUMENTARY MOVEMENT,
1950s-1960s

BY
YURIKO FURUHATA
B.A., INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY, 1996
M.A., UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO, 2001
A.M., BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2004

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
IN THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
AT BROWN UNIVERSITYPROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND
MAY 2009

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© Copyright 2009 by Yuriko Furuhata!

This dissertation by Yuriko Furuhata is accepted in its present formby the Department of Comparative Literature as satisfying thedissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date____________________________________________________Rey Chow, Advisor

Date____________________________________________________
Réda Bensmaïa, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date____________________________________________________
Mary Ann Doane, Reader

Date____________________________________________________
Thomas Lamarre, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date____________________________________________________
Sheila Bonde, Dean of the Graduate School

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VITA
Yuriko Furuhata (b. 1973, Kanagawa, Japan) received her B.A. in American Studies fromInternational Christian University in 1996, and her M.A. in Foreign Languages andLiteratures from University of New Mexico in 2001. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative
Literature from Brown University in 2009. She has taught at University of New Mexico and
Brown University. In 2008 she joined the faculty in the Department of East Asian Studies at
McGill University. Her publications in English and Japanese appeared in the following
journals and anthologies: New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, Screen, VOL, andWakamatsu Kôji: Hankenryoku no shôzô.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This project would not have been possible without the intellectual stimulation, constantencouragement, and lasting friendship of the following people. First and foremost, I wantto thank my dissertation advisors and readers, who generously offered their thoughtful
criticism and insight on this project, and always pushed me to expand my horizons: Rey
Chow, Réda Bensmaïa, Mary Ann Doane, and Thomas Lamarre. I also want to thankseveral notable Japanese scholars and filmmakers who helped my research in and outside
Japan: Hirasawa Go, Wakamatsu Kôji, Matsumoto Toshio, and Adachi Masao. There aremany others who extended their support in the spirit of solidarity throughout the courseof this project; in particular I want to thank my dear friends and fellow graduate students
at the departments of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media at Brown
University. Teresa Villa-Ignacio deserves special thanks for her excellent copy-editing
and feedback as well as her unwavering friendship. Thanks also goes to Tess Takahashi
for her insightful comments on earlier drafts. My deep gratitude also goes to my family inJapan and Canada, especially to my grandmother who passed away before this project
was completed. It was she who supported my graduate studies in the first place. Finally, I
wish to thank Marc Steinberg for spending countless hours listening to my ideas,
preventing me from frivolous meandering, and being my best and closest ally through ourmany adventures.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS……………..………………………………………......….vii
INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………...1
CHAPTERI. METAMORPHOSIS: THE ELLIPTIC-DIALECTICAL MOVEMENT OF THE
AVANT-GARDE AND THE DOCUMENTARY………………………………………..9The Genealogy of the Japanese Avant-garde ……………………………………...11
Metamorphosis.…………………………………………………………………….25
Plasticity of the Masses.……………………………………………………………33
Disney Animation and Marxism.…………………………………………………..44
II. THE RISE OF THE AVANT-GARDE DOCUMENTARY MOVEMENT AND THE
DEMISE OF PURE LITERATURE……………………………………………………..52
Freeze-Frame, Still Frame, and Extreme Close-Up………………………………..57
The Emergence of the Avant-garde Documentary Movement…………………….68
The Actuality of Pure Literature…………………………………………………...80
From Material Existence to the Temporal Presence of Actuality………………….92
III.THE WALL OF LANGUAGE AND THE MICROPOLITICS OFPERCEPTION……………………………………………………………….………103
The Generality of Language and the Specificity of the Mechanically Produced
Image……………………………………………………………………………...105
Naming and Metamorphosis……………………………………………………...122
Minute Perceptions and Woman in the Dunes……………………………………135
IV. ARTIFACTUALITY, PERIODICITY, AND CINEMA…………………………..151
Periodicity and Expiration………………………………………………………. 155
News vs. Archive…………………………………………………………………168
The Citation of Journalistic Actuality…………………………………………….174
The Art of Artifice………………………………………………………………..185
The Emergence of the Art Theatre Guild………………………………………...190
V. RETURNING TO ACTUALITY: FÛKEIRON AND THE LANDSCAPE FILM....195“Homogeneous Landscapes” and the Cartography of Power………………...…..203
Formal Appropriations of Actuality Films………………………………...……..216
The Landscape as Diagram…………………………………………………….....224
BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………230
ILLUSTRATIONS……………………………………………………………………..240vi

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1. A portrait of Hanada Kiyoteru (1909-1974)……………………....…………..10
Figure 2. A fantastic figure of rokurokubi by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849)……….48
Figure 3. An image of Sea Bonz (Umibôzu) by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861)……...51
Figure 4. The opening shot of Woman in the Dunes……………………………………..61
Figure 5. An extreme close-up of a woman’s throat in Woman in the Dunes…………...64
Figure 6. A weaver’s body in Nishijin…………………………………………………...65
Figure 7. A stonemason at work in The Song of Stone…………………………………..65
Figure 8. A shot of sand grains passing through a sieve in Woman in the Dunes...........147
Figure 9. A shot of the newspaper from Town of Violence…………………………….170
Figure 10. The opening shot of A Japanese Tragedy…………………...…………..….173
Figure 11. A shot from the opening credit sequence in Cruel Story of Youth.................176
Figure 12. Shiseido advertisement designed by Yamana Ayao………………………...176
Figure 13. A shot of newspapers and magazines from Secrets Behind the Wall……….180
Figure 14. One of the inserted stills from a manga in Go Go Second-Time Virgin…….186
Figure 15. Inserted image of Sharon Tate in the film Go, Go Second-Time Virgin……186
Figure 16. A landscape shot from A.K.A. Serial Killer. Courtesy Hirasawa Gô……….205
Figure 17. A landscape shot from The Secret Story of the Post-Tokyo War…………...226vii

INTRODUCTION
In the present day, the notion of the avant-garde seems to evoke a feeling of
nostalgia rather than a sense of urgency. An air of obsoleteness hangs around it.
Likewise, film, the quintessentially modern medium, has gained a reputation as being the
medium of twentieth century – and not the twenty-first. Its position as the principal objectof study is being threatened, even from within the discipline of cinema studies. The
elegiac voice that declares film’s purported obsoleteness is, moreover, often coupled withanother voice that remarks on the waning currency of “film theory” (the heyday of whichis said to be the 1970s). Summarizing this sentiment, D. N. Rodowick has recently
written: “Not only do many feel that film theory is much less central to the identity of the
field; within cinema studies itself the disappearance of ‘film’ as a clearly definedaesthetic object anchoring our young discipline is also the cause of some anxiety.”! If
Rodowick is correct in his assessment of the direction that the cinema studies is currently
taking, a dissertation that examines the 1950s and 1960s avant-garde and film theory inJapan may strike some readers as anachronistic.
I would argue that it is not so. To understand why this return to both avant-garde
art practice and film theory in Japan is an urgent and indeed “actual” task today, we
might consider the recent upsurge of leftist discourse that has many younger generationsof new media scholars and activists enthralled: the theory and the problem of “thecommon.” The concept of the common and the question of commonness have recently
gained theoretical currency through the works of Autonomist Marxists Michael Hardt andAntonio Negri, though there is also a parallel development of the concept of “thecommons” by environmental and media activists. The innovativeness of Hardt and1

D.N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 3.

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Negri’s theory of the common is, however, in their shift of focus away from older
understandings of the common framed in terms of the legal right over shared resources,
to an emergent form of “immaterial labor” that produces such commons under thechanging conditions of present day capitalism." Unlike traditional forms of labor that
produce tangible material goods, the products of immaterial labor (e.g. information,knowledge, service, and emotional care) are, according to Hardt and Negri, “immediately
social and common.” “Producing communication, affective relationships, andknowledges, in contrast to cars and typewriters, can directly expand the realm of what weshare in common.”# This mutual development of commonness unites otherwise disparate,
singular social agents, who in turn constitute what they call “the multitude.”This notion of the multitude proposes to replace an older Marxist conception: thatof the masses. The multitude is defined in relation to commonality or a commonness thatlies at the basis of contemporary forms of communication, social production and humanrelations. Networking and sharing (including the sharing of information) become key tothe construction of this commonness, of which the Internet provides an emblematic
model. Thus aligned with the age of digital media and new media practice, the theoreticalaffirmation of commonness has become an integral platform of new social movements,
including ones that are quickly spreading among youth and temporary workers in Japan.
2

While the term the commons has recently become popular among activists, media scholars, andanthropologists, Hardt and Negri differentiate their use of the term the common from that of the former. For
instance, in their explanation of the ontological uniqueness of the multitude they note: “Insofar as themultitude is neither an identity (like the people) nor uniform (like the masses), the internal differences ofthe multitude must discover the common that allows them to communicate and act together. The common
we share, in fact, is not so much discovered as it is produced. (We are reluctant to call this the commons
because the term refers to pre-capitalist-shared spaces that were destroyed by the advent of private
property. Although more awkward, ‘the common’ highlights the philosophical content of the term andemphasizes that this is not a return to the past but a new development)” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), xv.
3
Hardt and Negri also note, “The hegemony of immaterial labor creates common relationships andcommon social forms in a way more pronounced than ever before” (114).

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No longer identifying themselves as the proletariat (a category that inevitably bringsback the Marxist notion of the masses), these new generations of media savvy activists,
who affirm the commonness that unites them, self-assuredly call themselves the
precariat.$
Despite apparent dissimilarities, the current discourse on the common and theearlier discourse on the avant-garde have in fact fundamental points of intersection,
namely the utopian, activist dream of transforming society. What connects these two
discourses is their mutual valuation of the role of art and sense perception itself in theeffectuation of the political transformations they seek. One of the key elements thatdifferentiate these two types of discourses is, however, their divergent stances towards
mass communication media. While the discourse of the common tends to affirm forms of
media practice that have an “immediately social and common” appeal, the discourse of
the avant-garde keeps a critical distance from the communicative immediacy andvalorization of commonality found in the mass media. Indeed, avant-garde practice ingeneral displays a deep-seated distrust towards modes of communication based on thepresupposition of commonality, a distrust that manifests most keenly in its critical stancetowards journalism.
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The neologism precariat is formed from the amalgamation of the terms precarious and proletariat. The
term was first used by Italian and French activists, but has recently been adopted by Japanese activists aswell. I should note here that the rise of the common as an urgent problematic of the present is not limited tothe aforementioned terrain of contemporary Marxism. The increasing interest in the aesthetic and politicaltheory of Jacques Rancière attests to the appeal of a similar problematic of commonness. The common at
stake in Rancière’s theory is not immediately given, as it is in the case of Hardt and Negri. The
commonness at the basis of a community becomes a site of struggle and inquiry, since it directly links up
with what he calls the order of the “distribution of the sensible,” that is, a set of conditions of possibilities
that determine the horizon of what is visible, audible, and sayable in a given community. This horizon is, inturn, determined by what he calls police order, the order of the sensible given by and through the politicallydominant group. Hence comes his definition of politics as an interruption of “the order that determines thepartition of what is common” which includes even an act of disidentification. See, Jacques Rancière,
Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1999), and Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. GabrielRockhill (London: Continuum, 2000).

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But what we must ask here is whether the contemporary turn to the common, andthe parallel turn away from the traditional notion of the avant-garde have left somethingimportant behind? Is there not something amiss in the arguably unproblematicaffirmation of the common by some of the theorists engaging with this notion today?
Should we not go back to the avant-garde’s problematization of the givenness ofcommonality, even if in order to develop the current theories of the common further?
Indeed, I would argue that we can find a particularly instructive model of thinking the
emergent form of the common in the avant-garde’s tension with journalistic media. With
this intention in mind, I propose to turn, in this dissertation, to a particularly vibrantmoment in the history of intellectual thought and politico-artistic activism in Japan, amoment when the question of avant-garde’s relationship to the commonness affirmed andproduced by journalism and mass media practice came sharply into focus.
During the 1950s and the 1960s, not only did postwar Japanese avant-garde art
practice gain intellectual momentum and expressive intensity, but it also gave rise to apoliticized film theoretical discourse which took the problematic of “actuality” as its
basis of inquiry. This problematic of actuality haunts the writings and filmic works ofsome of the key intellectuals and artists from this period. Sometimes the concept ofactuality is articulated as the ontic dimension of the real, that is, as avant-garde art’s
relation to actually existent reality. Other times it is articulated as the problem of
temporality: the avant-garde’s timely relationship to the present. Other times yet, thequestion of actuality is posed as that of contemporary relevance: in short, the criticalrelevance of a given work to its contemporaneous social reality. All three senses of theterm “actuality” (akuchuaritii) played important roles in the discourse of the avant-garde

4and film theory in Japan at this time. Insofar as the problem of actuality may be restatedas that of the tension between avant-garde art practice and journalistic media practice,focusing on this term will allow us to rethink limits of the discourse of the avant-garde,
which affirms the dialectical interdependence between the masses and vanguard, in lightof limits of the discourse of the common, which dispenses with the notion of vanguard
altogether in its affirmation of the rhizomatic networking of the multitude.
Focusing on this problematic of actuality will thus allow us to rethink therelations between the avant-garde, politics, the media, and the masses. Importantly,
Japanese film theory and avant-garde art practices, particularly the filmmaking practiceof the 1950s and 1960s, shed light on the productive tension between the avant-garde’s
skepticism towards what goes by the name of commonality or commonness (fromcommon sense to the common masses addressed by the media) and its desire to emulate
journalism. This tension is most visible in the works of Japanese avant-garde critics andartists, who engaged with a genre of documentary art, particularly, with documentary
film and reportage. The strategic appropriation of the documentary by self-proclaimed
avant-garde critics and artists from a Marxist background in the late 1950s gave rise towhat I call “the avant-garde documentary movement” (Chapters 1 and 2).5
The works of the avant-garde documentary movement, such as the writings ofHanada Kiyoteru and Abé Kôbô, and the films of Matsumoto Toshio and Teshigahara
Hiroshi, also highlight a predicament of the avant-garde: its paradoxical desire tosimultaneously emulate and yet differentiate itself from journalism. Divergent
theorizations of the concept of actuality emerged in the process and different cinematic
5

The term “avant-garde documentary movement” is of my own coinage. Though these artists and critics
never consciously presented themselves as members of a unified movement, their works address same
issues and draw on same debates and materials, as I argue in this dissertation.

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techniques became prevalent at this time. The central site of the struggle for these avantgarde documentary artists and critics was the habituated order of sense perception,
including the perception of what appears as “actual,” that is, factual, real, and timely(Chapter 3). While generally not regarded as either avant-garde or Marxist, theexperimental works of independent filmmakers, such as Oshima Nagisa, Wakamatsu
Kôji, and Adachi Masao, evince the persistence of this same predicament. Unlike thepreceding generation of avant-gardists, however, the works of these filmmakers attest to
the difficulty of separating avant-garde practice from journalistic practice, and point tocinema’s complicity with journalism in its appropriation of what Jacques Derrida has
called the “actuality-effect” (Chapters 4 and 5).
Investigating this group of artists and theorists, and the problematic of actuality,
will also allow me to refute the widely held notion that film theory arose solely in theWest, or, more specifically, that there was no body of writings or thought that deserve to
be called “theory” in Japan. This misconception has been endemic to the study of film
and avant-garde art of Japan. Noël Burch, in one of the pioneering studies of Japanesecinema, famously argued that “the very notion of theory is alien to Japan; it is considered
a property of Europe and the West.” % By drawing on original source materials(periodicals, memoirs, films, and interviews), my dissertation project contests thispresumption, and in so doing provides an important corrective to previous studies ofJapanese cinema. & One of the aims of this dissertation is hence to bring to light6Noël Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1979), 13.
7
Exceptions are recent important works by Abé Mark Nornes’ Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era
Through Hiroshima (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and Forest of Pressure: Ogawa
Shinsuke Postwar Japanese Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) – and Aaron
Gerow’s “Writing A Pure Cinema: Articulations of Early Japanese Film” (PhD diss., Iowa
Univeristy,1996).

6

particularly innovative – and until very recently, thoroughly ignored – theoretical
discussions and debates on the concepts of documentary, actuality, and the “mechanically
produced image” (eizô). Moreover, this dissertation will bring to light importantconnections between theorists (such as Hanada Kiyoteru) and filmmakers (such as
Oshima Nagisa) that have not previously been explored, and yet help us understand theintersections of avant-garde discourse and independent filmmaking. Indeed, once theseconnections are historicized, we will be in a better position to examine the works of both
recognized (such as Oshima and Teshigahara) and relatively unknown filmmakers (suchas Wakamatsu) side by side. This historical contextualization will in turn allow us to see
postwar Japanese cinema in a novel configuration.
What makes Japanese avant-garde theorists and filmmakers considered in thisdissertation important to us today is the way they make perceptible the productive tension
between the politics of the common and the politics of the avant-garde. To schematize aperhaps more complicated history of this productive tension we might compare 1970s
film theory, which laid its emphasis on the avant-gardist strategy of self-reflexivity andpolitical critique, with contemporary media and activist theories of the common emerging
today. On the one hand, within the Marxism-inspired sphere of ’70s film theory the
position of the avant-garde was affirmed in relation to the critique of thephenomenological impression of reality and the mass appeal of mainstream narrative
cinema. On the other hand, within contemporary theories of the common, such as that ofHardt and Negri, the position of the avant-garde (and that of the vanguard) has beenabandoned along with the Marxist category of the masses. There is hence a distinct sense,7

as Rodowick suggests, that political film theory and the medium of film have past theirprime.
However, if the group of Japanese artists and intellectuals I examine in thisdissertation are so important to return to today, it is precisely because their works
combine the problem of the common with the problem of the avant-garde. If theshortcomings of ’70s film theory are that it could not extend its politics to the masses, thedangers of the theory of the multitude is that too quickly discards the avant-garde
contestation of commonness (and in particular of common sense), and thereby falls into
the trap of affirming a certain commonness as a given. The dangers of this trap are indeed
illustrated by the recently emergent branch of cognitivist film theory, which bases itself
on a kind of universal structure of sense perception. While the politics of the two arequite opposed, their affirmation of commonness risks plunging the theories of themultitude and the common into the apolitical stance towards sense perception that thecognitivist branch of film theory (or “post-theory”) advocates.' It is precisely the avantgarde’s distrust of the habituated order of perception that raises the question of the“givenness” of common sense perception, and allows us to re-politicize the category of
the common in direct relation to the media practices which continue to structure our sense
perception. This dissertation thus not only offers a historical contextualization of theworks of Japanese avant-garde theorists and filmmakers. It also attempts to rethink therelation between the avant-garde and the common by returning to an era when thisrelation was problematized by both filmmakers and theorists.

8

For an overview of “post-theory,” see David Bordwell, “Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudesof Grand Theory,” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, eds. David Bordwell and Noel Carroll(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).

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Chapter One
Metamorphosis: The Elliptic-Dialectical Movement of the Avant-Garde and theDocumentary
The principal characteristic of metamorphosis is that it takes time. Transformation
is not instantaneous, and its condition requires plasticity, a capacity to change form. This
much seems certain: metamorphosis is a concept that highlights this relation between
temporality and plasticity. What remains uncertain is, however, the question of agent or
medium. What kind of agent or medium can be responsible for this plastic movement ofmetamorphosis? For many left-leaning artists and thinkers the “avant-garde” has been thename of this medium that brings about metamorphosis, an all-encompassing
transformation of society. But if the avant-garde is the medium, or the catalyst of thistransformation, what would be the substance that makes up this form? According toMarxist avant-garde critic Hanada Kiyoteru (1909-1974), this substance with which theavant-garde needs to work in order to bring about social transformation is “the masses.”
In what would seem to be a counterintuitive position from the conventional
understanding of the avant-garde, Hanada advocated for the synthesis of documentary
journalism and avant-garde art in order to demonstrate the significant connection between
avant-garde art and the culture of the masses. He envisioned the avant-garde anddocumentary approaches to reality as complementary praxes of addressing, reporting, andtransforming present-day conditions. The aim of this chapter is to investigate Hanada’s
theorization of the avant-garde, metamorphosis, and the masses in order to lay the basis
for my argument in the next chapter, which will in turn analyze the impact of Hanada’s
theory of the avant-garde documentary in relation to key events that took place in the9separate areas of literary criticism, film theory, and filmmaking in the 1950s and 1960s.
As we will see more closely in the following chapters, postwar Japanese avant-garde
filmmakers, writers, and critics constantly negotiated two seemingly irreconcilable
approaches to reality: the avant-garde practice of defamiliarization and the documentary
practice of factual recording. Unpacking Hanada’s notoriously convoluted writings – thestyle of which gained him a reputation as a virtuoso rhetorician – will not only allow us
to appreciate his work in its own right, but also help us understand why his work left suchlasting impact on his contemporaries, including the writer Abé Kôbô, the filmmakerMatsumoto Toshio, and later generations of filmmakers such as Oshima Nagisa andAdachi Masao.
As writings by Oshima, Matsumoto and critics such as Takei Teruo, Haryû Ichirô,Sasaki Kiichi, Imamura Taihei, and Yoshimoto Takaaki suggest, Hanada consciously
played the role of an agitprop organizer, often deliberately provoking debates andsoliciting emotive reactions from his interlocutors (Figure 1). 9 His allies and foes alike
would readily admit Hanada’s towering presence in Japan’s postwar intellectual milieu.
Nevertheless, his work has not been given proper consideration by scholars of Japanese
avant-garde film, criticism, or theater (the three principal fields his work intervenes). His
critical and fictional writings are still waiting to be translated into English, and only a9Oshima did not belong to Hanada’s immediate circle of the avant-garde artists and filmmakers, but as heacknowledges in his autobiographical essays Oshima and his fellow filmmaker Yoshida Kijû frequented
study groups and meetings held by film critics and artists, who are in close contact with Hanada. Oshima’s
relation to Hanada was, however, often tinted with an antagonistic tone, as indicated by his passionate
denouncement of Hanada (because of his negative assessment of Oshima’s own film Night and Fog inJapan) in the essay titled “Art Movement and Modernism” (Geijutsu undô to modanizumu). This essay was
published in the March issue of Kiroku eiga in 1961. Others such as Abé, Matsumoto, and Takei also
disagreed with Hanada time to time. But as Matsumoto and Oshima’s famous rebuttal indicates,
disagreement was also a productive aspect of the criticism of this period. Adachi Masao, on the other hand,
noted the oblique but still important impact Hanada’s writings left on his generation of independent
filmmakers in a private conversation with the author.

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handful of theoretical assessments of his work have appeared in Japanese.10 While thischapter will by no means offer a comprehensive account of Hanada’s decades-longactivism and oeuvre, it attempts to shed light on the theoretical implications of histhought on the avant-garde, which directly relates to the problematic of actuality that is at
the heart of this dissertation project. In particular, I will focus on Hanada’s Marxist
interest in the role of the avant-garde, the dialectical movement of metamorphosis, andformal plasticity of Disney’s animation. In order to situate Hanada’s theory of the avantgarde, however, I would like to start by pointing to the close relation between the Marxist
notion of the political vanguard and Hanada’s understanding of avant-garde art.

The Genealogy of the Japanese Avant-garde
I want to begin by turning to his 1951 essay titled “Double Personality”(Nijûjinkaku) in which Hanada casually recalls how he learned the term avant-garde from
Lenin’s political treatise:
As you know, the term avant-garde [avangyarudo] means vanguard [zen’ei]. I
learned this word from Lenin’s text, What Is to be Done? What I call an avant-garde
artist is hence someone who pays attention to thriving folk art, which lives on as
tradition amongst the masses. This does not mean that I unconditionally affirm thisfolk art or praise it as the Japanese Romantics did during the Pacific War. Rather,what I have in mind is an artist who tries to completely re-create folk art with a clear

10

Two of Hanada’s essays (“The Logic of Delirium” [Sakuran no ronri] and “A Chart of the Heavenly
Bodies: On Copernicus” [Tentaizu]) have been translated J. Keith Vincent. However, they are only
available on-line from the tradukejo website. Representative criticism and monographs on Hanada inJapanese language include: Okaniwa Noboru, Hanada Kiyoteru to Abé Kôbô: Avangyarudo bungaku nosaisei no tameni (Tokyo: Daisanbunmeisha, 1980), Suga Hidemi, Suna no perusona (Tokyo; Kôdansha,
1982), Sekine Hiroshi, Hanada Kiyoteru: Nijusseiki no kodokusha (Tokyo: Libroport, 1987), Ishii Nobuo,
Tenkeiki ni okeru chishikijin no tatakaikata (Tokyo: Madosha, 1996), Doi Yoshihira, Ozaki Midori to
Hanada Kiyoteru: Yûmoa no seishin to parodi no ronri (Tokyo: Hokuto shuppan, 2002). Kogawa Tetsuo’scomment included in an anthology of Hanada’s essays, Hanada Kiyoteru hyôronshû (Tokyo: Iwanami,1993) is informative. As an indication of a renewed interest in Hanada is attested by the recent publicationof an anthology of his essays on film, Mono mina eiga de owaru (Tokyo: Seiryû shuppan, 2007).

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sense of purpose, that is, to create revolutionary art by carrying out an artistic
revolution.11

In this passage Hanada makes a deliberate use of the term “avant-garde” (avangyarudo)
to describe a Marxist-Leninist notion of political “vanguard” (zen’ei), which immediately
estranges the loanword avangyarudo from its conventional art historical sense. While thegist of his argument – revolutionary art and artistic revolution are not only comparable
but also complementary – is a banal one, the ways in which Hanada envisions thisprocess warrant attention for they point to a unique historical conjuncture of artistic andpolitical avant-gardism in postwar Japan, a conjuncture that becomes legible when we
pay attention to two kinds of metamorphosis (one visual and the other social) thatstructure Hanada’s thought.
The question of the mediation between revolutionary art and artistic revolution also
appears in his 1950 essay titled “A Thought on Apples” (Ringo ni kansuru ichikôsatsu),
which specifically addresses this question in terms of vision: “How do avant-garde artists
attain the eyes of avant-garde politicians?” In answering this question Hanada argues:
Of course avant-garde artists can transfigure [henbô] themselves as avant-garde[avangyarudo] politicians – only if they retain the gaze that has been directed to theinner world, and invert it to the external world. If I say this, some of those selfclaimed avant-garde politicians may sneer at me by saying: Don’t be ridiculous, weare not interested in geometric shapes or learning from children and primitives! But
for me, such politicians are nothing but typical naturalists, and hence they don’t
deserve to be called avant-garde.12

Hanada’s above statement about the transformability of artists into politicians incitedheated discussions among his fellow avant-garde critics (of which the confrontation
between Haryû Ichirô and Takei Teruo over the issues of artistic and political avant11

Hanada Kiyoteru, “Nijûjinkaku” [Double Personality], Hanada Kiyoteru Chosakushû [Collected Worksof Hanada Kiyoteru], Vol.3 (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1964), 133.
12
Hanada Kiyoteru, “Ringo ni kansuru ichikôsatsu” [A Thought on Apples], Hanada Kiyoteru Chosakushû
[Selected Works of Hanada Kiyoteru], Vol. 3 (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1964), 114.

12

gardes in 1956 is the best known). While Hanada does not name socialist realism as such,
his criticism of the “self-proclaimed avant-garde politicians” is clearly directed against
Japanese Communist Party officials. He mocks their facile dismissals of modernist art by
evoking hackneyed phrases such as “geometric shapes” and “children and primitives.”
But what is more striking about this passage is Hanada’s privileging of vision as an
instrument of transformation. Note the metonymic association of words: eyes, gaze,transfigure, geometric shapes. The very possibility of synthesizing art and politics is
articulated in terms of form and sight. And it is the process of metamorphosis understood
through the interlocking relation between the materiality of form and the visual
perception of form that underpins his idea of the becoming political of the avant-garde
artist.
Immediately following the above passage, we read: “Like naturalists, avant-garde
politicians constantly pay attention to the external world, but it’s only because they want
to deform it and not because they are interested in simply looking at it.” 13 Hanada’s
calculating use of the French word déformer (transcribed as deforume) underscores his
point. Historically speaking, the term déformation belongs to the vocabulary of modern
Japanese art discourse. It is a term that describes deliberate manipulations of pictorial
forms like cubist paintings or cartoon drawings. But deformation in this context stands infor Marxist political activism. Here again Hanada mixes heterogeneous discourses ofaesthetics and political philosophy to induce conceptual dehiscence. This move allows
the question of the conditions of revolutionary social change to link up directly with thequestion of visuality, that is, the conditions of visual perception. Transformation thenbecomes conceivable as an event that occurs in the field of visual perception as well as in
13

Ibid., 115.

13

the production of form. It simultaneously cuts through the base and superstructure,
aesthetic perception and material conditions of production. The form in this sense is nolonger reducible to a facile opposition of form and content; it encompasses bothsubstance and appearance.
Hanada’s peculiar framing of political transformation through the pictorialconcept of deformation can be better understood if we situate his writings in the larger
historical context of discourses on the avant-garde. In conventional usage, the term avantgarde generally refers to European art movements of the 1910s and 1920s (i.e. Futurism,
Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism). For art historians and theorists who follow the lead ofPeter Bürger, the term can be used only provisionally to describe artworks produced after
the “historical” avant-garde period of the 1920s.14 By contrast, the film historical sense of
the term is more extensive, encompassing North American as well as postwar
filmmaking.15 However, in spite of their usefulness, these established accounts of EuroAmerican avant-gardes are insufficient to analyze Japanese context. We may recall
Edward Said’s apposite remark that theoretical ideas and concepts, born out of specifichistorical situations, often travel to another place, another era, or another situation forreasons that are again historically specific. In the course of traveling ideas and concepts

14

The phrase “the historical avant-garde” is Bürger’s. For his theorization of the historical avant-garde seePeter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984).
15This view is represented by Peter Wollen’s now classical essay on the two avant-gardes. Wollen contrast
two distinct avant-garde tendencies. On the one hand, there is Co-op filmmakers’ self-reflexive attentions
to materiality of the medium, their propensity towards visual abstraction as well as their artisanal modes of
production; on the one hand, there are politically active filmmakers, represented by Godard, who pay
attention to the textual production of meaning and who inherit the insight of the Soviet avant-garde
filmmaking, though sometimes they paradoxically come close to the commercial system of filmmaking.
See Wollen, “The Two Avant-Gardes,” Readings and Writings (London: Verso, 1982), 92-104. For anambivalent position cinema occupies in Huyssen’s schema of the great “divide” between modernism andmass culture, which the avant-garde mediates, see Anne Friedberg Window Shopping: Cinema and the
Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993),165-166.

14

mutate in order to accommodate needs of critics in their given situations.16 The conceptof the avant-garde met a similar fate in twentieth-century Japan. It traveled from Europe
eastwards but on the way across the Eurasian continent it became intertwined with
political vanguardism of a particular kind. In order to grasp Hanada’s conception of theavant-garde, therefore, we need first to trace back the itinerary of the loanword
avangyarudo (“avant-garde”) in the twentieth century Japanese lexicon.
Today the loanword avangyarudo (or abangarudo) in Japanese language
generally refers to artistic movements or styles. Yet the historical introduction of thisword into modern Japanese lexicon is intimately tied to the use of another term, which
belongs to a different discursive register. This second term is zen’ei (or “vanguard”). The
use of the word zen’ei as a Japanese translation for the French word avant-garde and theRussian word avangard appears to antedate the use of the loanword avangyarudo.
Importantly, when the word zen’ei had begun to be used to describe European art (inparticular French surrealist films) around 1929-30, Japanese Marxist critics openly
expressed their discontent. 17 For the word zen’ei at the time was used almost exclusively
by the Japanese Communist Party and its associated critics to designate the MarxistLeninist conception of the proletarian vanguard. 18 Subsequently, Marxist critics
suggested either to describe surrealist films with the phrase “so-called vanguard”(iwayuru zen’ei) or put scare quotes around the word zen’ei in order to differentiate theMarxist-Leninist notion of the political vanguard from the aesthetic avant-garde.19 In the16

Edward Said, “Traveling Theory,” The World, The Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1983), 236.
17
Namigata Tsuyoshi, Ekkyô no abangyarudo [Border-Crossing Avant-Garde] (Tokyo: NTT Shuppan,
2005), 33-37.
18
The Japanese Communist Party was established in 1922 as part of the Third International (Comintern),
but was not legalized until 1945.
19
Namigata, 37.

15

course of this dispute, the loanword avangyarudo (or abangarudo) came to be used more
widely as an alternative to describe artistic movements devoid of ideological associations
with Marxism.
This brief overview of the Japanese historical context reveals an importantdifference between the European and Japanese situations. Precisely because the conceptof the avant-garde was first widely disseminated through the Marxist-Leninist discourse,
the Japanese genealogy of this concept does not align itself neatly with the establishedgenealogy of European avant-gardes. Indeed it has become a commonplace for thetheorists of European avant-gardes to trace a figurative use of the term avant-garde (withits militant connotation of politically radical artists) to the work of the nineteenth century
French socialist Henri de Saint Simon.20 With some degrees of difference, standard
accounts of the modern European conception of the avant-garde suggest that it waslargely shaped by the utopian socialism of the nineteenth century. In the words ofHuyssen, “Through the mediation of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier, [the idea of theavant-garde] found its way to socialist anarchism and eventually into substantial
segments of the bohemian subcultures of the turn of the century.”21
Huyssen’s narrative in particular traces continuity rather than discontinuity amongutopian socialist, anarchist, and bohemian tendencies. In so doing he emphasizes theavant-garde artists and thinkers’ contestations against the “cultural conservatism” of20

Huyssen and Egbert uphold this lineage. Poggioli, on the other hand, refers to the writing of a Fourieriste
Gabriel-Désiré Laverdant as a representative of the nineteenth century conception of avant-garde artists aspolitical radicals, while Calinescu finds an even earlier usage of the term in the French historian Etienne
Pasquier. See Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Donald D. Egbert, “The Idea of avant-garde in Art andPolitics,” Leonardo, 3.1. (January 1970), 75-86; Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-garde, trans.
Gerald Fitzgerald (New York: Harper & Row Publisher 1968); Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity:
Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University, 1987).
21
Huyssen, 5.

16bourgeois society as well as the “technological determinism and scientism of Second
International Marxism.”22 Bürger in contrast limits the referent of the term avant-garde to
the early twentieth century phenomenon. He sees a radical rupture between the“historical” avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s and the preceding nineteenth century art
movements. Despite these differences what ties Huyssen to Bürger is their implicit
agreement that the avant-garde is fundamentally defined by its revolt against the cultural
heritage of bourgeois society. Importantly however, they equally downplay the MarxistLeninist interpretation of this concept.
Given their emphasis on the avant-garde’s revolt against bourgeois heritage, theirdisregard for the Marxist-Leninist interpretation seems puzzling. Huyssen in particular
frames his genealogy of the European avant-garde in terms of the historical avant-garde’s
direct opposition to the Second International Marxism (1889-1916). He relegates the
Marxist-Leninist conception of the avant-garde to the margin, further arguing that “thevital dialectic between the political and cultural avant-garde” disappeared in the 1930s.
His remark is supported by two epochal events of that decade: the official
implementation of socialist realism by the Soviet Union and the rise of National
Socialism in Nazi Germany. These events were pivotal, in his view, for destroying the“precarious balance of art and politics” that European avant-gardes had maintained since
the time of Saint Simon.23 In his critique of the instrumental subordination of art topolitical doctrines, Huyssen thus echoes Bürger who similarly keeps Lenin’s
appropriation of the concept at bay.24

22

Ibid.
Ibid., 6.
24
Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 22-23.
23

17

However, in the Japanese context it is crucial not to dismiss Lenin’s appropriationof this concept, which is explicitly marked by his decisive use of the Russian word
avangard in What Is to Be Done? (1902).25 For, as I have argued earlier, the genealogy ofthis concept of the avant-garde in Japan is inextricable from the earlier currency of
Marxist-Leninist discourse. Indeed, while neither Huyssen nor Bürger acknowledges it,
Lenin was following earlier Marxists when he appropriated this concept for his own
theoretical purpose. As Egbert writes, “By the 1880’s, at least, Marxists were becoming
accustomed to using avant-garde as a political term.”26 Lenin thus gave the term a newpolitical connotation: that of the proletarian dictatorship. This new connotation clearly
contradicts an older anarco-bohemian sense of anti-authoritarianism. Perhaps this
explains, at least partially, why historians and theorists of the historical avant-garde tend
to downplay the Marxist-Leninist connotation of this concept.27 When situated in thislarger historical context, Hanada’s passing reference to Lenin in his discussion of theavant-garde attains new significance.
Hanada was a bona fide Marxist when he began writing on issues of avant-gardeart. He converted to Marxism in the 1940s, joined the Japanese Communist Party, andeven served as the chief editor of the Marxist literary journal Shin nihon bungaku (NewJapanese Literature) in the 1950s. However, despite his commitment to Marxism Hanada
remained skeptical of the Japanese Communist Party’s dogmatic endorsement of socialist
realism. Instead of upholding the “correct” view of proletarian vanguard art, he advocated25

Egbert points out that the Russian word used by Lenin in What Is to Be Done? is avangard. See Egbert,
p.75.
26
Ibid., 80.
27
Lenin’s strongly authoritarian understanding of the concept can be glimpsed in his essay “On Proletarian
Culture” (1920). Here he argues that all educational work, including the avant-garde art, “should be imbued
with the spirit of class struggle” aiming at “the overthrow of bourgeoisie, the abolition of classes, and theelimination of all forms of exploitation of man by man.” V. I. Lenin, “On Proletarian Culture,” V. I. Lenin’s
Internet Archive. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/oct/08.html.

18

the creation of art that learns from, rather than rejects, the achievements of European
avant-garde art movements of the 1920s. He believed that the fundamental achievementof the avant-garde of the 1920s, especially that of cinema, was its attempt to visualize therealm of the unconscious and abstract intellect:Needless to say, the veritable novelty of the ‘avant-garde’ cinema lies in its bold attempt
to visualize our inner world: the world of the unconscious and the world of abstract
concepts. No doubt films like Un Chien Andalou and Diagonal Symphony were cuttingedge in this sense, definitely deserving the title of the avant-garde film. These films
attempted to realistically present the movement of the figurative-yet-irrational world of
the unconscious on the one hand, and the movement of the rational-yet-non-figurative
world of concepts. But, of course, both Dalí’s psychoanalytic method and Eggling’s
geometric method were still at their primitive stage.28

Curiously, despite their achievements, Salvador Dalí is criticized for paying exclusive
attention to images of the unconscious (and thus to the realm of “instinct”), and Viking
Eggling for focusing on the abstract movements of geometric shapes (and thus to therealm of “intellect”). This is due to Hanada’s adherence to the Marxist notion of
dialectical materialism. The task of the postwar avant-garde is not only to learn from thetechniques of the prewar avant-garde artists, but also to overcome their epistemic
limitations. Dalí and Eggling’s meticulous and daring visualizations of instinctual andintellectual activities of the mind are commendable, yet, in Hanada’s view, they were notdialectical enough. They do not re-direct the gaze that has been turned inward towards
the outside.
Elsewhere he suggests: “Existence includes both external and internal existence.
Of course the latter is determined by the former, but both contain not-yet-cognized realmsof darkness, which await to be illuminated by our search.”29 For the inner world of the28

Hanada Kiyoteru, “Nijûnendai no ‘avangyarudo’” [The “avant-garde” of the 1920s], Hanada Kiyoteru
chosakushû [Collected Works of Hanada Kiyoteru], Vol. 3 (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1964), 203.
29
Hanada Kiyoteru, “Warai neko” [Cheshire Cat], Hanada Kiyoteru chosakushû [Collected Works ofHanada Kiyoteru], Vol. 3 (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1964), 226.

19

unconscious corresponds to the pre-cognizant realm of the external world. Again Hanada
is following the protocol of dialectical materialism here, though he crucially extends theconcept of determination into the realm of the unconscious. He argues, “the external
world too is full of concretely figurative-but-irrational-images similar to those Dalí hasseen.” 30 Accordingly, the challenge for the postwar Japanese avant-garde becomes
twofold: to “synthesize dialectically” artistic approaches to internal and external worlds,
and to explore hitherto overlooked or pre-cognizant aspects of external social reality.31
Hanada’s reliance upon a series of binary oppositions notwithstanding, his
dialectical conception of the avant-garde helps us see how political and aesthetic
discourses of Marxism and avant-garde art dovetailed in the postwar Japanese intellectual
milieu. While prewar Japanese Dada and Futurist artists such as Murayama Tomoyoshi(1901-1977) – one of the founders of the legendary dadaist group Mavo, the central
organizer of the Proletarian theater movement and a member of Prokino (Japanese
Proletarian Film League) – tried to bring together artistic experimentations and Marxist
politics, arguably Hanada was the first Japanese critic to articulate the connection
between the two in the most persuasive theoretical manner. Moreover, it was Hanada
who first gave prominence to journalistic documentary practice and its relation topresent-day actualities within the discursive framework of the avant-garde in Japan.
Consider, for example, his discussion of French surrealism. Disregarding thecommonplace interpretation of Surrealism, he makes a rather bold claim that its principal
technique is a variant of documentary “reportage.” When surrealists deployed thismethod of “automatic writing” they recorded traces of innermost psychic activities and30

Hanada Kiyoteru, “Kagami no kuni no fûkei” [Landscapes of the Land of Mirrors], Hanada Kiyoteru
chosakushû [Collected Works of Hanada Kiyoteru], Vol. 3 (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1964), 150.
31
Ibid.

20

produced their raw “documents.”32 He thus draws an analogy between surrealists anddocumentary journalists based on their mutual interests in the documentation of the real.
They equally attempt to deliver first-hand reports on the real, though surrealists are far
more interested in events taking place inside the individual psyche, whereas documentary
journalists turn to events unfolding in the collective social milieu. Whether or not thisschematic comparison between the surrealist method of automatic writing and the
documentary method of reportage is historically accurate is beside the point. What ismore important is the fact that Hanada’s idea of the dialectical synthesis of the avantgarde and the documentary, which influenced numbers of postwar Japanese filmmakers
and artists, is already incipient in this analogy.
Hanada’s proposition to synthesize the avant-garde and documentary approaches
to reality may appear idiosyncratic and even heretic, if we understand by the term
documentary an established genre of photo-cinematic practice that foregrounds factual
reporting of socio-historical events, and by the term avant-garde an artistic practice that
foregrounds the formal effect of defamiliarization. However, if we take into consideration
Hanada’s commitment to Marxism and his manifest sympathy towards the Soviet avantgarde, it may not appear so eccentric after all. As his frequent references to Mayakovsky
and Soviet cinema indicate, Hanada held a strong interest in the works of the Russian andSoviet avant-gardes. While standard accounts of Japanese avant-garde art movements
tend to privilege connections between Japan and Western Europe (as in the cases of Dada
32

We may recall here Breton’s definition of surrealism as psychic automatism, which dictates thought inthe complete absence of intervention by the intellect. See André Breton, Manifestes du surréalisme (Paris:
Gallimard, 1962), 36. For a deconstructive reading of surrealism’s affinity with photography see Rosalind
Krauss “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism” October 19 (Winter 1981), 3-34. For Krauss, the cruxof Surrealist thinking is not in the documentary recording of the real but in the exposition of the paradoxthat the experience of the real is always already contaminated by representation. In focusing on surrealist
photography, she points out the importance of doubling (or spacing) that heightens the viewer’s awarenessof the photographic trace itself as a sign rather than an imprint of the real.

21

and Surrealism) or the United States (as in the case of Fluxus), a long history of vibrantinteractions between Japan and Eastern Europe, especially the Soviet region, needs to beacknowledged.
During the 1920s numerous works of futurists and constructivists poured into
Japan through the effort of Ukranian and Russian artists. David Burliuk (1882-1967), a
Ukranian futurist and founding member of the futurist group Hylaea of which Vladimir
Mayakovsky was another principal member, came to Japan in 1920. Victor Palmov(1888-1929), another Ukrainian futurist associated with the Moscow-based journal Lef(Left Front of the Arts), accompanied him. Burliuk’s intention was to promote the workof Russian Futurism. He energetically lectured on the topic and helped organize art
exhibitions during his stay in Japan.33 Burliuk stayed in Japan for two years, and Palmov
for one year. Burliuk and Palmov’s visits left considerable impact upon interwar Japanese
avant-garde artists, including the members of Japanese Dada and Futurist groups such as
Miraiha bijutsu kyôkai, Action, and Mavo.34 Meanwhile, the Russian painter Varvara D.
Bubnova (1886-1983), who was a member of INKhUK (the art institute founded byconstructivists), also went to Japan in 1921, and stayed for thirty-seven years. Upon her
arrival in Japan, Bubnova published articles specifically on the topic of Russian
Constructivism and introduced numbers of representative works of artists such as
Rodchenko and Popova to Japanese artists.35 There is little doubt that these historicalinteractions between the Soviet and Japanese artists of the interwar period helped

33

Ueno Rie, Rossia abangyarudo kara mita nihon bijutsu [Japanese Art Seen from the Russian Avantgarde] (Tokyo: Tôyôshoten, 2006), 8.
34
Ibid., 22.
35
Ibid., 26.

22

familiarize Hanada’s left-leaning avant-garde circle with the theoretical and formal
achievements of the Soviet avant-garde.
One of the key factors that may have contributed to Hanada’s reevaluation of
documentary is, I believe, the high regard that the Soviet avant-garde artists held for thejournalistic documentary forms of newsreel, photography, and literary reportage. As iswell known, Dziga Vertov pursued rigorous formal experimentations within thejournalistic genre of newsreel. He proposed to “substitute the document for ‘direction’(mise-en-scène),” and triumphed Kino-Eye (“the cinema which is not played”) overtheatrical cinema.36 But Vertov was not alone in his enthusiastic support of documentary
journalism. Productivist appropriations of documentary journalism became integral to thevisual and literary practices of the Soviet avant-garde during the late 1920s, as issuggested by the rise of factography among the Left Front artists associated with thejournal Novyi Lef.37 In his discussion of the factorgraphic works during this period, Devin
Fore notes: “The plurality of names by which this practice was designated in the Soviet
Union – factography, reportage, factism, documentarity – suggest that there was no single
methodology or conceptual model that could encompass all of the manifestations of thistentative practice.”38 Indeed, diverse artistic experimentations with mass-oriented formsof documentary photography, newsreel, and reportage literature occupy a significant
place within the Soviet avant-garde. This is to say that avant-gardist experimentations

36

Dziga Vertov, “Dziga Vertov on Kino-Eye: Excerpts from a Lecture Given in Paris in 1929,” Lines ofResistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties, ed. Yuri Tsivian, trans. Julian Graffy (Gemona, Udine: Le
Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004), 353-354.
37
For a detailed discussion of factography’s ambivalent relationship to language, see Devin Fore, “TheOperative Word in Soviet Factography,” October 118 (Fall 2006), 95-131.
38
Devin Fore, “Introduction,” October 118 (Fall 2006), 9.

23

with form and documentary-journalistic pursuit of factuality were not necessarily
contradictory in the eyes of the Soviet artists.39
The situation of the Japanese avant-garde of the 1950s invites a comparison withthe situation of the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s. There too, aesthetic and journalistic
approaches converged, and the question of documentary as a legitimate avant-garde
method rose to the fore. However, despite these similarities, it would be reductive toclaim that the Japanese avant-garde simply followed the lead of the Soviet avant-garde.
The historical and political conditions of 1950s Japan clearly differed from those of the
1920s Soviet Union, and the particularities of these conditions determined the ways inwhich methodological questions of the avant-garde and documentary were raised (seeChapter Three). It was not enough for Hanada, for instance, simply to combine thejournalistic documentary method of reportage and the surrealist method of automatic
writing. The postwar Japanese avant-garde needed to go one step further, which meant
exploring and analyzing underlying conditions of documented events and phenomena.
Citing Marx’s remark from the Grundrisse (“the concrete is concrete because it is
the concentration of many determinations”), for instance, he cautions artists not to trust
their immediate sensory perceptions.40 Under the influence of habit and ideology, reality
may appear concrete, obvious, even self-evident. However, it is such self-evidentiality ofperception that needs to be questioned in the first place. When Hanada argues that theconcrete yet irrational phenomena that Dalí observed in the unconscious region of the39

Nor is this to say that they agreed on executions of such artistic practice. For instance, Shklovsky openly
criticized Vertov’s disregard for plot construction. Shklovsky also notes that the boundary between fiction
and fact are disappearing in contemporary art. See Viktor Shklovsky, “On the Fact That Plot Is a
Constructive Principle, Not One from Daily Life,” in Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties,
266-269.
40
Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (NewYork: Vintage Books, 1973), 101.

24

mind also exist in the collective social milieu, he is thinking of something likecommodity fetishism. As Marx reminds us, the commodity’s function appears obvious at
first, but its structural relations to labor and value are by no means easily graspable.
Commodities are concrete objects, yet behaviors of humans towards them are
unreasoned, even irrational. Defamiliarizing what passes as concrete reality thus becomesan essential aspect of critical avant-garde activities, and the political desire to transform(or “deform”) the material conditions of society becomes inextricable from thisquintessentially avant-gardist device of defamiliarization.
Metamorphosis
While the idea of the politicization of the avant-garde art may not be necessarily
original, the singularity of Hanada’s thought lies in his dialectical, and strongly visual,interpretation of this process as a formal movement of metamorphosis (henkei). Hanadaemphasizes that the form of reality and the corresponding perception of the form arehistorically conditioned, and equally malleable. The problem of malleability or plasticity
of form recurs in many of his critical essays throughout the 1950s. From graphic
deformations in Disney’s animation to social theories of amorphous masses, and from theprotean quality of Ur-sand (his equivalent to Goethe’s Ur-plant) to shape-shifting aliensin science fiction, the problem of plasticity pervades his writings. Certainly, suchfascination with the plastic dimension of form was not limited to Hanada alone. His
fellow avant-garde writer Abé Kôbô also preoccupied himself with the theme of
metamorphosis in his fiction and plays. But it was Hanada who articulated the theoretical25

connection between dialectical movement conceived as metamorphosis and artistic
experimentations with formal plasticity.41
The earliest instance of Hanada’s writing on the topic of metamorphosis appears
in the January 1946 issue of the literary journal Kindai bungaku (Modern Literature). The
essay is aptly titled “Tales of Metamorphoses” (Henkeitan) which opens with a casual
remark on the episode from the Odyssey in which Circe turns Odysseus’ soldiers into
pigs.42 He lists a few more classic examples that narrate various instances of humans
transforming into non-humans. With regard to contemporary examples, he mentions only
three works: Guillaume Apollinaire’s The Disappearance of Honoré Subrac (1910),
Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), and David Garnett’s Lady into Fox (1922).
Selective reference to these works is excused by the following remark: “As it is wellknown, among contemporary writers who live in this trans-formative age there are too
many records of metamorphosis to enumerate.”43
At first sight the essay appears to be a brief historical overview of literarytreatments of metamorphosis as trope. Yet, as the cumbersome phrase “trans-formativeage” (tenkeiki) indicates, Hanada frames it within the Marxist view of history. The term
tenkei is an unusual word often used as a Japanese translation for the word
Transformation in Marx’s writings on political economy. The phrase tenkeiki (“transformative age”) also has a very specific connotation; it was previously used by Marxists,
including the well-known proletarian writer Kobayashi Takiji (1903-1933) who was41

It is worth noting that Hanada translated two of Kafka’s short stories into Japanese in 1946. He latertranslated three more stories, and put five stories into a slim edition of collected short stories (Kafuka
shôhinshû) in 1950. Hanada was responsible for introducing Kafka’s work to the postwar avant-garde
writers, including Abé.
42
Hanada Kiyoteru, “Henkeitan” [Tales of Metamorphoses], Hanada Kiyoteru chosakushû [Selected
Works of Hanada Kiyoteru], Vol. 1 (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1964), 176.
43
Ibid.

26

brutally tortured to death by the Japanese special police, to describe critical transitional
moments in history.44 Hanada’s use of this phrase hence immediately activates intertextual allusions to the discourse of Marxism, and forges a subtle relation between theliterary trope of metamorphosis (henkei) and the material historical process oftransformation (tenkei).45 Just as the divergent concepts of vanguard and avant-garde,deformation and defamiliarization are juxtaposed and conjoined in the previous essays,
the differing connotations of organic metamorphosis and political transformation are
strategically brought together here.46
Before I proceed with a close reading of this essay, I will briefly summarize thecontent of the three European texts Hanada mentions. Garnett’s story narrates a sad fateof Mrs. Tebrick, who turns into a fox while accompanying her husband on a hunting
excursion. Even after Mrs. Tebric becomes a fox Mr. Tebric cares for her as if she werestill human. But she gradually loses her manners; she starts running wild, hunting ducks,
and gnawing on bones at the dinner table. At the end dogs kill both Mr. and Mrs. Tebrick.
Kafka’s text in turn tells the tragic story of Gregor Samsa, who wakes up one morningand finds himself metamorphosed into a large insect. Samsa is no longer able tocommunicate with other humans. He dies from the infection of a wound inflicted by arotten apple thrown by his father. Apollinaire’s story too ends with the tragic death of
Honoré Subrac, who accidentally gains a “mimetic power” to blend himself into walls in

44

Since the Japanese word tenkei [!"] is also a neologism, I use a hyphen (“trans-formative”) to indicate
its status as a neologism in English. But it should be noted that a more colloquial Japanese equivalent for
the English word transformation would be either tenkan [!#] or henkei [$"].
45
For Hanada, the phrase connotes critical transitional moments in history. Kobayashi Takiji’s unfinishednovel, Tenkeiki no hitobito [People of the Trans-formative Age] was written in 1931-1932. See, forexample, Hanada’s discussion of Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance in “Kagami no naka no kotoba”[Words inside Mirrors], Hanada Kiyoteru chosakushû, 15-29.
46
In his deliberate juxtapositions of heterogeneous concepts we may detect a surrealist tendency, yet hisemphasis is on logical compatibility between these concepts rather than purely aesthetic shock-effects.

27

the manner similar to natural mimicries of butterflies and chameleons. He uses this power
to escape from numerous pursuits by jealous lovers of women whom he seduces. But one
day he is shot to death by one of these lovers. The narrator, who presents himself as afriend of Subrac, tells the reader that he only saw a vague contour of a human face on thewall, into which Subrac has mysteriously disappeared.
All these literary examples of metamorphoses, however, are unsatisfactory in
Hanada’s view because they are hopelessly “unscientific”:
My biggest complaint about these authors is that every one of them intentionally keeps
silence over the methodology of metamorphosis, while they provide detailed report on
the incidents of metamorphoses. How do humans change into non-human animals, plants,
and minerals? And how do they get back to their original human form after having
become animals, plants, and minerals?47

By adopting his signature ironic tone, Hanada treats these fictional literary episodes as if
they were factual reports on real incidents. For example he notes, “I guess Hauff offerssome hints on this matter.” He then relates how happy he was when he finally realizedthat the Latin word Mutabor means “I will be changed.” This Latin word functions as a
magic spell in the nineteenth century German writer Wilhelm Hauff’s fairy tale, The Taleof Caliph Stork. Next he evokes the ancient Roman author Lucius Apuleius’ The Golden
Ass (also known as Metamorphoses) and argues that he too has tried making a donkey eat
a rose as suggested by Apuleius. To his disappointment, the donkey fails to turn into ahuman. In another passage, he contends that Honoré Subrac’s method of mimicry is too
unreliable to imitate because Subrac’s mimetic power becomes effective only at the
moment of fatal crisis.
Hanada reluctantly praises Hauff and Apuleius for trying to provide feebly“practical” advice on the one hand, and criticizes Apollinaire, Kafka and Garnett for
47

Hanada, “Henkeitan,” 176.

28

completely ignoring this question of practicality on the other. Beneath the façade of suchbizarre assessment is his pointed critique of modern literature. For the aforementioned
three authors’ indifference towards methodological practicality is symptomatic of theepistemological incapacity of modern literature to understand the concrete phenomenonof metamorphosis. “Now is the time,” writes Hanada “that we discard every
preconception in order to establish a new method of epistemological inquiry which willallow us to grasp the very fact of metamorphosis.”48 And this is where he introduces an
unexpected alternative: Goethe’s natural scientific writings on plant morphology.
Although his literary achievement and his theory of color are more known than
his work on plant biology, Goethe left a considerable impact in this field as well. He
coined the term morphology, and developed the theory of plant morphology in his book
The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790).49 As it turns out, Hanada’s examination of literaryworks itself rhetorically performs a critique of literature that fosters certain
preconceptions about the phenomenon of metamorphosis. What are these preconceptions,and why is Goethe’s morphology more instructive in this regard? According to Hanada
literary treatments of metamorphosis tend to be both anthropocentric and metaphoric.
They relentlessly recount tragic episodes of humans transformed into non-humans.
Metamorphosis is usually treated as a trope, and fantastic tales of metamorphosis as mere
allegories or parables of human conditions.50 By contrast, Goethe’s morphology offers a

48

Ibid., 179.
Charles J. Engard, “Introduction,” Goethe’s Botanical Writings by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, trans.
Bertha Mueller (Woodbridge: Ox Bow Press, 1989), 3-7.
50
Hanada would have agreed with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s claim that “metamorphosis is thecontrary of metaphor.” In re-reading Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari also put forward a nonfigurative
understanding of metamorphosis in Kafka’s oeuvre. For Deleuze and Guattari, metamorphosis is linked to“a vital escape” or “a line of flight” (35). That is, metamorphosis is a resistance per excellence to theconventions of exegetic – “literary” – interpretations of Kafka’s texts. In their vitalist framework Deleuzeand Guattari thus rejects metamorphosis as a metaphor. I bring up this example of Deleuze and Guattari’s
49

29

theoretical understanding of metamorphosis as a non-anthropocentric phenomenon. It isconcerned with the physical and material transformations of organisms. Hanada isparticularly intrigued by Goethe’s conception of metamorphosis as a dialecticalmovement generated by constant interactions between two opposing forces. The dynamic
process is privileged over the static state, as is signaled by his model of formation(Bildung).51 For Hanada this dynamic conception of metamorphosis as a movement of
becoming (rather than being) offers a much needed “scientific” understanding of thisphenomenon.
A series of conceptual pairs are further introduced at this point. Formation andtransformation are linked to contraction and expansion. Contraction and expansion are inturn joined by one more conceptual pair: Henri Bergson’s evolutionary concept of “vital
force” (élan vital), which he links to expansion, and Irving Babitt’s conservative conceptof “vital control” (frein vital) which he links to contraction:
Astutely, Goethe does not only emphasize the process of transformation. Instead, heargues that the movement of transformation is nothing but a centrifugal force; its
efficacy must be supplemented by the centripetal capacity of things to adhere to theirrealized states. In other words, we have to equally accept the romantic concept ofélan vital proposed by Bergson as well as the classicist concept of frein vital
proposed by Babbitt. 52

Thus conceived, the dynamic movement of metamorphosis unfolds in the rhythmic
pattern of centrifugal and centripetal forces. What is crucial about Hanada’s otherwise
sweeping statement is his inventive appropriation of Goethe’s morphology as atheoretical framework to explain his Marxist understanding of history. History is thatreading of Kafka only to underscore the conceptual path taken by Hanada, who similarly departs from theproperly “literary” reading of authors such as Kafka, Garnett, Apollinaire, and Goethe. See Gilles Deleuzeand Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1986).
51
Hanada, “Henkeitan,” 180. The German word Bildung is used by Hanada.
52
Ibid.,180.

30

which dialectically moves through a series of constant interactions between two opposing
forces of life.
This dialectical conception of the movement of life as history is, moreover,
explained through a specific visual figuration: the ellipse. Unlike a circle, an ellipse
contains two focal points. It hence embodies formal consistency that is predicated upon
the difference between the two focal points.53 No matter how minute this difference may
be, as long as there is a degree of difference, the ellipse cannot be confused with thecircle. The circle is a figure of perfection, but for that reason it lacks generative tension.
Metamorphosis in contrast is an elliptic movement generated by the encounter between
opposing forces of contraction and expansion, formation and transformation.
Literary preconceptions about metamorphosis are inadequate in this regard
precisely because they do not provide this elliptic-dialectical understanding ofmetamorphosis as a constant movement:
Perhaps no other historical era has so ignored the question of dynamic equilibrium as thepresent one. Mrs. Tebric gradually returns to the wilderness. Samsa regards his beetlelike shell as an unbearable burden. And there is no doubt that Honoré Subrac would
earnestly wish to escape from the stone wall. They are all believers of élan vital, andhence ignore frein vital. However, life can be life precisely because it is organized,bound, and stabilized. Even the smallest organisms consist of infinitely complex
organizations that retain this dynamic equilibrium . . . and death is inevitable. No
organization can avoid disintegration.54

The point Hanada makes is that modern literature is too vitalist in the Bergsonian sense.
Emphasis is laid unilaterally on the impetus to change, to escape, to break out of a given
mold. This critique of one-sided celebrations of the transformative force is crucial to
Hanada’s dialectical conception of the avant-garde. While earlier avant-gardes, such as
Dada and Surrealism, emphasized rebellion and destruction, Hanada remains wary of
53

Hanada Kiyoteru, “Daen gensô” [Elliptic Fantasies], Hanada Kiyoteru chosakushû [Selected Works ofHanada Kiyoteru], Vol.1 (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1964), 173.
54
Hanada, “Heikeitan,” 182.

31

such Romantic conceptions of the avant-garde primarily through revolt.55 Time and again
he emphasizes the necessity of a dialectic of formative and transformative forces: élanvital and frein vital, impetus and restraint, dissolution and organization. Hence comes theimportance of “dynamic equilibrium” embodied by the figure of the ellipse. While thephrase dynamic equilibrium may misleadingly suggest stasis, it is indeed instability that
Hanada wants to emphasize here. !
The centrality of this particular figure of the ellipse for Hanada is already evident
from the title of his wartime essay, “Elliptic Fantasies” (Daen gensô), which was
published clandestinely in 1943. He argues that the ellipse is a deformed version of thecircle; it lacks proportional perfection, but for this reason it is truer to reality56:
Needless to say, the shape of an ellipse can come closer to a circle or to a straight line
depending on the placement of its two focal points. However, no matter how much its
form changes, as long as an ellipse remains an ellipse, it means sleeping while being
awake, being awake while being asleep, crying while laughing, laughing while crying,
doubting while believing, and believing while doubting.57

The ellipse embodies contradictions that abound in reality. In this sense it is far more“ordinary” than the perfect circle, which is after all an exception among myriad oval
shapes. Perhaps we should keep in mind that when Hanada was writing this particular
essay Japan was beginning to feel the repercussions of its colonial expansionism; theAllied Forces led by the United States were taking the upper hand in military offensives,
and the material and psychological strain upon the Japanese populace was intensifying. It
is also worth noting that Hanada led a dual life as a newly converted Marxist during the55

This is not to say that Hanada categorically rejects Romanticism. His frequent references to Goethe makeit clear that he is indebted to certain aspects of the German Romantic ideology.
56
For Hanada, the distance between two focal points must be kept rather than cancelled out. No matter how
minute is the distance between two points, the distance is necessary for ellipse to be differentiated fromcircle. Hanada’s theory of an elliptic movement thus prioritizes the irreparable disparity between two
forces, neither of which is deemed higher or superior.
57
Hanada, “Heikeitan,” 172.

32

war. He worked as one of the editors for the right-wing journal Higashi tairiku (The
Eastern Continent) during 1940-1941, but he also organized a clandestine resistancethrough the publication of a leftist review titled Bunka soshiki (Cultural Organizations)from 1940 to 1943.58 The figure of the ellipse – a deformed circle – stayed with him for along time even after the war was over. The ellipse not only expresses his understandingof life as a constant process of metamorphoses, but also emblematizes his self-criticalview of his own political activism. I draw readers’ attention to this particular figure
because it also informs his idea of dialectically synthesizing avant-garde anddocumentary practices.
Plasticity of the Masses
As Hanada’s appropriation of Goethe’s morphology indicates, his understandingof metamorphosis is decidedly non-metaphoric. It is a concept that partakes in the
epistemological inquiry of the world, and moreover, it is a concept that allows him to
introduce an elliptic-dialectic understanding of history. Next I want to turn to his 1947
essay titled “On the Desert” (Sabaku ni tsuite), which similarly expresses his dialecticalunderstanding of history. The concept of metamorphosis once again plays a pivotal role.
The essay begins with a general observation about the destructive force of sand. Fromquicksand to the desertification of the earth, sand appears to pose danger and harm toliving organisms. However, he quickly reverses his argument in order to question suchgeneralized impressions:
Of course the sand crumbles easily, its form immediately changeable and ephemeral. Yet
precisely because of these qualities, sand also follows any type of vessel just like water.
If we were to take advantage of the fragility of sand, we could make a mold by58

Hanada Kiyoteru, Hanada Kiyoteru zenshû: Bekkan II [The Complete Works of Hanada Kiyoteru:
Supplementary Volume II] (Tokyo: Kôdansha, 1980), 146-150.

33

compressing it. And if we were to pour liquid iron into this mold, we could make rocksolid iron products in the exact shape of the original mold . . . . Sand thus holds an
infinite power to destroy as well as an equally infinite power to create.59

Now sand is regarded as the infinite source of creation as well as destruction. Its inherent
plasticity is celebrated.
This example of the capability of molding provides a most appropriate
characterization of the inherent plasticity of sand. As Catherine Malabou argues in her
recent study of Hegel, plasticity by definition bespeaks of duality. It signifies the dual
capacities of giving and receiving form. The formal versatility of sand – to constantly
change its form and to be molded into a fixed form – is “plastic” in this sense defined by
Malabou: “‘Plastic’, as an adjective, means two things: on the one hand, to be‘susceptible to changes of form’ or malleable (clay is a ‘plastic’ material); and on theother hand, ‘having the power to bestow form,’ the power to mould’, as in theexpressions, ‘plastic surgeon’ and ‘plastic arts.’”60 In pointing to the logical connection
between Hegel’s idea of the dialectical process (as the movement of self-determination)and the concept of plasticity, she notes:
The dialectical process is ‘plastic’ because, as it unfolds, it makes links between the
opposing moments of total immobility (the ‘fixed’) and vacuity (‘dissolution’), and thenlinks both in the vitality of the whole, a whole which, reconciling these two extremes, isitself the union of resistance (Widerstand) and fluidity (Flüssigkeit). The process ofplasticity is dialectical because the operations which constitute it, the seizure of form and61
the annihilation of all form, emergence and explosion, are contradictory.

Hanada’s plastic conception of sand similarly hinges upon its dialectical modalities. Its
capacity to be molded into any shape is inseparable from its capacity to become a mold
59

Hanada Kiyoteru, “Sabaku ni tsuite” [On Desert], Hanada Kiyoteru chosakushû [Collected Works ofHanada Kiyoteru], Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1963), 247.
60
Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During(London: Routledge, 2005), 8. Malabou also notes that things that are plastic tend to preserve their shape,“resisting deformation.” Yet, as her discussion of Hegelian dialectics as an essentially plastic movement ofpreservation and dissolution indicates, plasticity and deformation are not mutually exclusive concepts.
61
Ibid., 12.

34

itself. Perhaps this is where he comes closest to Hegel, on this point about the dialecticalunderstanding of plasticity.62 Yet the theorist he evokes in this essay is not Hegel; it isagain Goethe.
With feigned astonishment, Hanada speaks of his imaginative ability to see
instantaneous transformations of sand (from fragmented debris to a gushing mud, from asoft lump of clay to grains of sand) comparing its vivid imagery to the visual effects oftime-lapse cinematography. This time-lapse imagery is further compared to Goethe’skaleidoscopic experience of seeing the primordial Ur-plant (Urpflanze): “I wonder if I am
gifted with a unique talent much like that of Goethe – or more precisely, the talent thateven Goethe did not have. If he were to have this talent, he would have named this sandthat appears to his mind’s eye – this sand which becomes the basis of every possible
geological formation – the Ur-sand, following his coinage of the Ur-plant.”63 What thispassage highlights is the generative potential of primal sand. As the primal form ofplasticity the Ur-sand contains “every possible geological formation.” The Ur-sand is afigure of pure plasticity.64
Importantly, however, Goethe’s morphology is not the end of his argument.
“What is wrong with this idea of the Ur-sand?” asks Hanada. “It is wrong not because itemphasizes movement. No, it is wrong because the movement starts with a single grainof sand. Why not think of the movement of an infinite number of grains of sand – that is

62

It is arguable that Hanada does not mention Hegel because Hegel collapses the subject and the object of
this plastic process into a single entity: the Absolute Spirit. The plastic process of giving and receiving
form in Hegel might be called auto-poietic. The spirit affects itself and being affected by it in the constantprocess of self-differentiation and dissolution. Hanada’s conception of the sand as the primal form ofplasticity does not involve this closed circuit of auto-affection.
63
Hanada, “Sabaku ni tsuite,” 248.
64
If Hanada was drawn to Goethe more than Hegel, one of reasons is Goethe’s manifest interest in theplastic dimensions of form. Goethe believed that “[f]orm is something mobile, something becoming,
something passing” (13). Quoted by Charles Engard in “Introduction” to Goethe’s Botanical Writings.

35

to say, the movement of desert which consists of infinite waves of sand?”65 Evoking
Marx, Hanada contends that it is necessary to move from the concrete to the abstract andback again to the concrete. This reference to Marx marks a pivotal point in the essay,
which similarly proceeds from the vague impression of sand to the abstract concept of the
Ur-sand and back to the dynamic movement of innumerable grains of sand. In opposition
to Hegel’s abstract thought process, Marx posits that the concrete is “a point of departurefor observation.” However, thought needs to take this observation of the concrete to thelevel of abstract comprehension, and “from there the journey has to be retraced” backuntil thought itself arrives at the concrete.66 Hanada follows Marx’s advice and begins
with the commonsensical view of sand as dry, loose, inanimate matter. He thencontemplates its paradoxically destructive and creative nature, which leads to the abstract
concept of the Ur-sand. From there he returns to the dynamic movement of innumerable
sands that incessantly generate the ripples and waves of a boundless desert.
This dynamic conception of sand as a privileged figure of plastic potentiality
returns with a twist in his 1957 essay titled “Sand-like Masses” (Suna no youna taishû).
Written ten years later, this essay begins with topical references to the concept of Art
Informel (l’art informel) and the theory of mass society both of which were in vogue
when the essay was published. The essay opens up with the following remark:The reason why the word formless [informe] was suddenly recovered from the bottom of
my memory is because so many theorists of mass society, such as Maruyama Masao, aredescribing the masses with the phrase ‘sand-like masses,’ and not because I wasinterested in the avant-garde art movement – so called Art Informel– promoted by Michel
Tapié. To be honest, I have regarded Art Informel as a trivial phenomenon that appearedin the process of the disintegration of abstract art. But for some reason this word formless[informe] doesn’t leave my mind.67
65

Hanada, “Sabaku ni tsuite,” 250.
Marx, Grundrisse, 100.
67
Hanada Kiyoteru, “Suna no youna taishû,” Hanada Kiyoteru chosakushû [Collected Works of Hanada
Kiyoteru], Vol.3, 140.
66

36

This opening passage ushers in the central theme of this essay: a sociological simile
figuring the masses as formless or amorphous sand. Michel Tapié’s Art Informel is used
as a rhetorical lever to up-end the prevailing discourse on mass society. During the 1950s,
theories of mass society and mass culture gained enormous popularity among Japanese
intellectuals, including social theorists such as Maruyama Masao and political scientists
such as Matsushita Keiichi.68 But it was around 1956-1957 that the “mass society theory”(taishû shakai ron) gained its momentum.69 It is also worth noting that 1956 was also theyear that both the Japanese translation of Daniel Bell’s “The Theory of Mass Society”
appeared and Tapié visited Japan to curate an exhibit. A number of essays written by
Japanese social theorists on the issues of Japanese mass society appeared thereafter. In
this regard, Hanada’s essay was perfectly timed. What is his view of the masses and how
does it relate to his previous theorization of form?
Hanada starts by suggesting that the idea of the masses as something amorphous
is nothing new. It is already present in Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses(1930). According to Ortega y Gasset, the term “the masses” refers to an assemblage of“the average man.” The masses consist of men who are “undifferentiated” from one
another; they embody “a generic type.”70 Hanada takes issue with this definition of themasses as a generic type. He compares Ortega y Gasset’s conception of the masses to aformless state of sand (the “raw material”), receptive to any form imposed from the68

I should point out the complexity surrounding relation between sociological theories of mass society andMarxism, which arose to the fore during this period. As Ryusaku Yamada argues, while “[m]any Western
theories of mass society tended to describe mass society as an amorphous ‘classless society,’ Matsushita
did not deny the capitalistic class relationship but rather built it into his mass society theory” (7). See
Ryusaku Yamada, Democracy and Mass Society: A Japanese Debate (Tokyo: Gakujutsu Shuppankai,2006).
69
Imamura Hitoshi, Gendai shisô o yomu jiten [A Dictionary for Contemporary Theory] (Tokyo:
Kôdansha, 1988), 407.
70
José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1932), 13-14.

37

outside. Such undifferentiated masses are like formless sand; they can be uniformly
molded into a generic type. Given Hanada’s commitment to Marxism, it is not surprisingthat he is resistant to Ortega y Gasset’s view of the masses as a passive receptacle and thelatter’s rejection of class as a defining factor in the formation of the masses. For Hanada
the concept of the masses is first and foremost political. It does not exist outside theform-imposing class structure. But this is not the sole reason why he is skeptical of
Ortega y Gasset’s view of the masses as an undifferentiated generic type. As we saw
earlier, sand is a privileged figure of plasticity. It has the potential to give form as muchas receive form. If the masses are to be compared to sand, this dual aspect of plasticity
needs to be acknowledged: “I think that the masses already possess certain forms,
whether they are self-generated or imposed by the others, and that class structure is what
exerts the most influence upon the formation of their forms. ”71 In other words, themasses are endowed with a capacity for action; they are not an amorphous passive entity.
They actively desire to shed their old forms, revert back to the state of formlessness, andwillingly take up new forms. The masses exist or come into existence through thisincessant, plastic movement of formation and deformation. Clearly, the “form” here
signifies something more than sociological typology. It points to the generative desire of
the collective, and this collective desire, in turn, is inseparable from the inherently plastic
structure of class.
We can now see how Hanada’s critique of the sociological simile of the “sandlike masses” is delivered with certain ambivalence. The simile is inadequate if we thinkof sand as an inert substance. Yet if we take sand to be the primal form of plastic
potentiality, as Hanada does, then the simile is quite apt. Two observations can be made71

Hanada, “Suna no youna taishû,”142.

38

here. First, Hanada’s emphasis on the plasticity of the masses could be compared to the
Hegelian conception of plasticity of substance. Hegel’s dialectical movement of selfdetermination through which substance “affirms itself as at once subject and predicate ofitself” presents a striking resemblance to the dialectical movement of the masses’ selfformation.72 For both Hanada and Hegel plasticity is closely linked to the capacity “toreceive form and give form.” 73 However, this is not to say that Hanada’s elliptic
conception of metamorphosis is reducible to Hegel’s circular conception of selfdetermination. Although both models are dialectical, each lays its emphasis differently;
the former highlights elliptic tension and the latter absolute unity. Hanada begins with
two focal points that never merge into one, while Hegel begins with the single spirit,
which undergoes internal self-differentiation.
Second, Hanada’s critique of Ortega y Gasset finds its precedence in the work of
Marxist philosopher Tosaka Jun. While the connection between Hanada and Tosaka israrely pointed out, there is clear evidence that Hanada was an avid reader of Tosaka’s
philosophical writings.74 Tosaka’s 1930 treatise The Logic of Ideology (Ideorogii noronrigaku), for example, presents a similar critique of sociological theories of the masses
from a Marxist standpoint. Distinguishing between the political concept of the “masses”
and the sociological concepts of the “crowd” and the “public,” Tosaka suggests that themasses need to be thought in relation to the political concepts of “multitude” and“people.” Drawing on the numerical connotation of multitude (tashû) as majority, hepoints out its fundamentally democratic connotation. Meanwhile the concept of the72

Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 11.
Ibid., 12.
74
After the war, a publishing house, Ito shoten, where Hanada’s wife worked, compiled the first postwar
collected works of Tosaka Jun (who died in prison in 1945). This project was made possible because
Hanada owned the complete volumes of Tosaka’s published works from the 1930s.
73

39

people conjures a structure of subjection and rule. The people designate a class of those
who are ruled or governed. However, both concepts fail to account for a key trait of themasses: its self-organizational impetus. He writes, “The masses are not only a multitude
who are already organized or being organized, but also that which organizes itself. . . themasses remain the masses only through this constant self-organization.”75 Here Tosaka
explicitly defines the masses as the organized multitude. Moreover, this organization of
the multitude is understood to be processual: “An organization can remain as such only inthe real process of organization. Otherwise it becomes a static system.”76 The difference
between the continuous process of organization and the completed system is crucial. This
dynamic understanding of the masses finds a curious counterpart in the contemporary
Autonomist Marxist theorization of the multitude. This concept of the multitude has along history in the discourse of political philosophy that goes back to Machiavelli and
Spinoza, but it has recently gained theoretical currency through the works ofcontemporary Marxist theorists such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, whose
similarities and differences with Tosaka and Hanada make these two concepts worth
comparing.
Unlike Tosaka who views the multitude as a pre-organized state of the masses,
Hardt and Negri make an ontological distinction between the multitude and the masses:
The multitude is composed of innumerable internal differences that can never be reduced
to a unity or a single identity – different cultures, races, ethnicities, genders, and sexual
orientations; different forms of labor; different ways of living; different views of theworld; and different desires. The multitude is a multiplicity of all these singulardifferences. The masses are also contrasted with the people because they too cannot be
reduced to a unity or an identity. The masses certainly are composed of all types andsorts, but really one should not say that different social subjects make up the masses. The
75

Tosaka Jun, “Ideorogii no ronrigaku” [The Logic of Ideology], Tosaka Jun zenshû [Complete Works of
Tosaka Jun], Vol.2 (Tokyo: Keisô shobô, 1966), 85.
76
Ibid.

40

essence of the masses is indifference: all differences are submerged and drowned in themasses.77

I want to highlight the last sentence: all differences are submerged and drowned in themasses. Such definition of the masses through indifference is not too far from Ortega yGasset’s sociological view of the masses as a generic type. To quote Hardt and Negriagain: “The components of the masses, the mob, and the crowd are not singularities – andthis is obvious from the fact that their differences so easily collapse into the indifferenceof the whole.” 78 The masses in their definition thus appear formless, amorphous,undifferentiated.
Hardt and Negri’s affirmation of the multitude as an alternative political concept
to the orthodox Marxist (and sociological) concept of the masses derives from theirrejection of political vanguardism. Yet their critique of vanguardism associated with the
Marxist-Leninist concept of the masses does not nullify Tosaka and Hanada’s dynamic
conception of the masses as an entity that seeks constant metamorphosis. The masses as
they appear in the writings of Tosaka and Hanada are, indeed, opposed to the staticsociological conception of the masses as homogeneous and undifferentiated.
The point I want to make here is that all four Marxist thinkers agree on theimportance of the self-generative political organization of the masses or the multitude,
and yet, they also part ways on one crucial point: the defining role of the vanguard (forTosaka) or the avant-garde (for Hanada). For Tosaka the organization of the masses ismade possible by the very existence of the vanguard: “The vanguard [zen’ei] does notexist outside the process of organizing the masses . . . thus the vanguard should not

77
78

Hardt and Negri, Multitude, xiv.
Multitude, 100.

41

differentiate itself from the masses, and they are conjoined in the name of the masses.”79
Similarly, Hanada values the concept of the avant-garde precisely because of its
structural correlation to the masses. As Ishii Nobuo puts it, the masses and the avantgarde constitute two focal points of Hanada’s elliptic thought.80 By contrast Hardt and
Negri dispense with the concepts of vanguard and avant-garde. There is no such thing as
the vanguard of the multitude. Its topology lacks a definite frontline for it organizes itself
through “collaborative social interactions” of singular subjects from multiple dimensions
at once.81
While it is useful to keep this contemporary Marxist rejection of vanguardism in
mind, I want to emphasize the two-tiered structure of avant-gardism in Hanada’s
conception of the masses because it critically informs his idea of bridging art and politics.
Arguably, this idea of bridging art and politics has become something of a cliché in the
study of the avant-garde, be it film, literature or visual art. However, it is important to pay
attention to historical and cultural specificities surrounding this idea. Without suchspecificities we are in danger of perpetuating a hegemonic view of the avant-garde that
constantly downplays the Marxist conception of the dynamic masses, which figuresinstead only as the inert masses of consumer society. In order to avoid this, I am taking
extra time to delineate specificities of Hanada’s thought, which resides in his Marxist
79

Tosaka, “Ideorogii no ronrigaku,” 85-86.
Ishii Nobuo, Tenkeiki ni okeru chishikijin no tatakaikata [An Intellectual’s Fighting Style in the Transformative Age] (Tokyo: Madosha, 1996), 18. It would be also helpful to quote Okamoto Tarô, an abstract
painter and a close collaborator of Hanada. During the 1954 round-table discussion titled “Challenges for
Actuality” (Akuchuariti no tame no kadai) Okamoto tells Hanada: “The avant-garde of the interwar period
did not need to work as a team. The main body of its army was the bourgeoisie. Since the bourgeoisie still
held power at that time, its destruction was the avant-garde’s task; that is, it had to spit on its own mainarmy. This means you could become an avant-garde artist, even if you were a loner. The situation isdifferent today . . . the present-day avant-garde is coexistent with its main army ” (24-25). See Okamoto
Tarô, “Akuchuariti no tame no kadai,” Bijutsu hihyô 25 (January 1954): 15-31.
81
Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 222. Their rejection of vanguardism is strongly colored by the Communist
idea of the Party leadership.
80

42

emphasis on the structural interdependence between the avant-garde and the masses. Thisis evinced by his idea of a political alliance between these two constituents that in turnled him to engage seriously with the mass-oriented forms of documentary journalism andpopular culture.
This structural interdependence between the avant-garde and the masses also
sheds light on Hanada’s frequent references to contemporary popular culture and media.
He believed that politically effective avant-garde activism (whether through artwork or a
criticism) must retain this journalistic topical referentiality to mass culture, or better still,to the culture of the masses. Indeed, from television, cinema, and manga(cartoons/comics), to graffiti, detective fiction, and science fiction, Hanada and hiscohorts showed voracious interests in the most current forms of the culture of themasses.82 This cultural sphere in the 1950s was already saturated with and structured byvarious forms of mass media (especially through the periodical circulation of films,
magazines, and television programs), yet was not reducible to the monolithic idea of themass consumer society. Hanada’s essay “Sand-like Masses,” which interweaves his
critique of the sociological conception of the inert masses with topical references topopular culture, including American science fiction writer Robert Sheckley’s short story(which is aptly titled “Shape” and was translated into Japanese in 1956) is exemplary inthis respect. 83 That is, the publication of this essay attests to the fundamental
disagreement between the Marxist conception of the masses as a self-generativecollective agent affected by class structure, and the non-Marxist, sociological conception

82

For the sake of clarity, I am using the term “popular culture” interchangeably with “the culture of themasses.”83
The essay goes on to offer a timely critique of Japanese cultural anthropologist Umesao Sadao, whose
polemical book, Bunmei seitaishikan (A View of Ecological History of Civilization) also came out in 1957.

43

of the masses as amorphous consumers, which had begun to displace the former in theJapanese intellectual milieu of the 1950s.84
Disney Animation and Marxism
I have lingered on the essay “Sand-like Masses” because of its exemplary quality.
Whether explicitly or implicitly, Hanada’s critical writings consistently address elementsof contemporary popular culture and topical events that had received media attention.85
Another pertinent example of Hanada’s engagement with contemporary media culture isin his interest in the animated films of Walt Disney. This interest, moreover, leads back to
one of the principal points explored in the previous section: plasticity.
In his 1954 essay titled “Cheshire Cat” (Warai neko) wherein Hanada proposes a
new kind of synthesis between documentary filmmaking and avant-garde filmmaking, hefinds an instructive, though failed, model in Disney’s animation. At first sight hisargument strikes the reader as odd, since Disney’s animation is not something generally
considered to be either documentary or avant-garde. Hanada begins his essay with theobservation that contemporary Japanese horror and fantastic films fall short of reaching
the level of criticality he expects from them; they lack an analytical side of theimagination that is necessary to think outside the conventional representational codes of
the horrific and the fantastic. Hanada, believing that a new mode of criticality can be84

I should also note that 1956 was a particularly important year for the Japanese Marxist intellectuals
because it was the year of Hungarian Revolution, that is to say, the year when serious critique of Stalinism
began. While many disillusioned Japanese intellectuals turned their back on Marxism, Hanada remained
supportive of the Soviet Union and China throughout the 1960s, even after his close friends including Abé
Kôbô abandoned Marxism.
85
Certainly, the journalistic topicality of his work derives, at least partially, from the fact that many of his
essays were published in monthly periodicals. Yet the publication venue alone does not explain Hanada’s
interest in journalism.

44

found in the dialectical synthesis of the documentary and the avant-garde, sees a glimmerof hope in Disney’s animation.
Disney’s animated films, in his view, are based upon a dialectical process offormation and deformation. The first stage of Disney’s animating technique, he argues, isthe observation of the dynamic movements of animals and humans. Actual filmic
recordings often aid this observation. The second stage involves the imaginative
deformation of these observed movements. Disney’s animated films thus follow ananalytical trajectory of documenting real movement, dissecting it into discrete frames,
and reconstructing this movement with the important surplus of pictorial deformation andexaggeration.86 In this particular reading Hanada borrows from an argument made by
Imamura Taihei, a Marxist film theorist with whom Hanada worked on the film journal
Eiga Bunka (Film Culture) in the early 1950s.
Imamura’s 1941 book, Manga eiga ron (A Theory of Animation Films) argues:“The animating technique of Disney refers to the work of decomposing motions throughphotography, and then re-drawing these decomposed motions into pictures. The newimagination of animated films is thus founded upon photographs of the real; it does notcome into being without the mediation of the camera.”87 While I should note that Disney
did not use this technique in all his animated films (but limited it to particular segments
or works), there is no doubt that Imamura’s theorization of Disney’s animating techniqueinfluenced Hanada’s interpretation of Disney. According to Imamura, despite thefantastic appearances of animated images, Disney’s films are based on the analyticalobservation of motion as mediated by the camera. Hence comes a paradox: “the fantastic
86

Hanada Kiyoteru, “Warai neko” [Cheshire Cat] Avangyarudo geijutsu [Avant-garde Art], Tokyo:
Kôdansha, [1954] 1994, 279.
87
Imamura Taihei, Manga eigaron (Tokyo: Studio Gibri, [1941] 2005), 31.

45

nature of animated films has as its basis photorealistic representation [shajitsu].”88 This
intervention by the camera, and the subsequent analytical decomposition of live
movement is what Hanada stresses in his own reading of Disney, though he places equal
emphasis on the process of recomposition as well. Indeed, for Hanada, Disney’s avantgarde potential lies in the crucial transition from photorealistic images to drawn images.
In this transitional stage the analytical imagination (rather than the mechanical device ofthe camera) intervenes in order to adequately “deform” what has been mechanically
documented. He writes: “If Disney were to make an animated film about folkloric
monsters and supernatural figures, such as the Japanese cat monster (bakeneko), he would
first shoot a documentary footage of a real cat. Disney would then scrutinize its
movement frame-by-frame in order to grasp the objective law of its motion. From there,
he would start afresh by embarking on a synthetic process in order to concretize this lawof the motion by drawing cartoon pictures frame-by-frame.”89
As noted earlier, the dialectical movement of metamorphosis for Hanada starts
with the observation of the concrete phenomenon, reaches an abstract understanding, andthen returns to the concrete phenomenon. His interpretation of Disney’s animation
follows a similar trajectory; it starts with the mechanical recording of a concrete
movement, analyzes this movement through still frames, and re-creates this movement bydrawing each frame and projecting the animated film. However, the key to this dialecticalsynthesis in Disney’s animation lies in the graphic difference between the initial and the88

Ibid., 92. Disney himself corroborates Imamura and Hanada’s appraisal of such analytical aspect ofDisney’s films. In discussing qualities of a good animator, he notes: “The list would start with theanimator’s ability to draw; then, ability to visualize action – breaking it down into drawings and analyze themovement, the mechanics of the action” (43). See Leonard Maltin, Of Mice and Magic: A History ofAmerican Animated Cartoons (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company,1980).
89
Hanada Kiyoteru, “Warai neko,” 224.

46

final sequence of motion. The initial recording of the motion and the final execution of
the animated motion cannot be the same, and the difference between the two must be
manifested visually. If Hanada lays such an emphasis on the process of pictorial
deformation, it is because he appreciates Disney’s ability to optimize this visualdifference between documented and animated movement. Moreover, this difference is amaterial indicator of the conjunction of two distinctive techniques of filmmaking, andthus inspires a new kind of art that is documentarist and avant-gardist at once. It is forthese reasons that Hanada find Disney’s work particularly instructive.90
Importantly, there was another Marxist theorist who was also interested in thesame questions of metamorphosis, plasticity, and Disney’s animation. This was theSoviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948). Though it is possible that Hanada knew
about Eisenstein’s enthusiasm for Disney (if not his writings on Disney), Hanada’s
assessment of Disney’s work differs from Eisenstein’s on several key points.91 One suchdifference is Hanada’s insistence that Disney’s films make use of the documentary
technique of recording real motions. The other is Eisenstein’s interest in animism andmagico-religious roots of our attraction to metamorphosis, which Hanada does not share.
Nevertheless, they do share keen interests in the visual phenomenon of metamorphosis
conceived as a dynamic movement of formation and deformation. Moreover, for boththinkers this movement is exemplified by the protean quality of drawn images in
Disney’s animated films.

90

Ultimately, for Hanada, however, Disney’s animation fails to achieve this veritable dialectic of the
documentary and the avant-garde because it engages with metamorphosis stylistically, not theoretically.
Disney’s animated films in this regard are said to be the “products of compromise” (227).
91
Some of Eisenstein’s film theoretical writings on film were translated into Japanese and published before
and in 1952, the year when Hanada published this particular essay, “Cheshire Cat.” But the Japanesetranslation of Eisenstein’s complete works was not published until the 1970s.

47As is well known, Eisenstein was fascinated by the quality of what he called“plasmaticness” in Disney’s animation. Just as Hanada was drawn to the potential
plasticity of the Ur-sand, Eisenstein was drawn to a protean form (such as fire) that“behaves like the primal protoplasm, not yet possessing a ‘stable’ form, but capable ofassuming any form.”92 As we saw earlier, this plastic capacity to assume any form iswhat Hanada foregrounds in his theorization of the masses. Eisenstein’s enthusiasm
towards visual practices that give concrete expression to the primordial desire of mankind
to assume any form (“to become ‘whatever you wish’”) resonates well with Hanada’s
analysis of the masses. And this resonance further points to the centrality of popular
culture, of which Disney is representative, for these Marxist thinkers.
By linking the irresistible attraction of Disney’s animated films to the attractionsof the German cartoonist Walter Trier’s illustration of a boy with elastic arms and to theattraction of the Japanese woodblock prints that depict folkloric figures of elastic
monsters, Eisenstein argues that the attraction for such images is inseparable from thecollective desire to escape from the rigid, stratified social order, be it twentieth century
United States and Germany or eighteenth century Japan (Figure 2). Beneath theimmediate attractiveness to the protean form is the deep-seated “rejection of once-andforever allotted form.”93 Similarly, what Hanada emphasizes is the masses’ desire to
reject their allotted forms and adopt forms of their own choice. This point is raised
sharply in his reference to Sheckley’s science fiction about shapeless aliens called theGlom. Because of their unique, “shapeless” bodily constitution, each Glom is given a

92

Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda, trans. Alan Upchurch (London: Methuen, 1986),
21.
93
Ibid.

48

prescribed shape at birth in accordance with the caste of their ancestors. 94 Not
surprisingly, Hanada’s reading of this short story highlights the Glom aliens’ final
rejection of their caste-bound shapes. Neither is it surprising to find Eisenstein and
Hanada elaborating on the transformative potential of visual form. For them the visualdynamics of metamorphosis expressed in popular culture is inseparable from the Marxist
question of social transformation. The rejection of the “once-and-forever” allotted form at
the perceptual level of visuality is akin to, and inseparable from, the political rejection of
the stratified social order.
In other words, for Eisenstein and Hanada the question of visual or aesthetic
metamorphosis must be linked to the problem of social or revolutionary metamorphosis.
The question of why this might be so is a fraught one, but one might point out the definite
influence of Marxist revolutionary thought as well as the importance of dialecticalthinking for Eisenstein and Hanada. As I pointed out earlier, Hegel’s very concept of thedialectic can be read in terms of plasticity. If the idea of dialectic is predicated upon theconnection between temporality and plasticity (that is to say, changes unfolding in time)then metamorphosis is a concept that bespeaks of both form and time. The question oftime for these two Marxist thinkers on the other hand is ineluctably linked to the questionof history. There is no such thing as abstract conceptual time cut off from the concrete
temporality of history in the Marxist idea of time. Hence comes the insight of Eisensteinand Hanada to bring metamorphosis to bear upon the Marxist affirmation of thecollective desire for change, the desire that fuels the locomotion of history.
But perhaps what we need to ask is not why but how they link these two poles ofvisual metamorphosis and collective transformation. And to what materials do they turn94

Robert Sheckley, Untouched by Human Hands (New York: Ballantine Books, 1954), 32.

49

to in order to create this link? As I have emphasized above, it is to popular forms ofvisual art and culture that these two writers turn in their search for the continuum
between aesthetic and social transformation. Moreover, it is in these popular forms thatthese thinkers find the close relation between aesthetic and social metamorphosis alreadyexpressed. Eisenstein, to turn to his writings, finds that the protean quality ofplasmaticness, “permeate[s] folktales, cartoons, the spineless circus performer and theseemingly groundless scattering of extremities in Disney’s drawings.”95 Though different
in medium, geographical locale or historical period, these popular cultural practices allgive vibrant expression to the desire of the masses for possibilities of metamorphosis.
Disney’s animated characters that effortlessly change their forms and constantly flaunt
their elastic bodies give voice to the “protest against the metaphysical immobility of theonce-and-forever given.” 96 Similarly, what Hanada stresses in his critique of thesociological conception of the masses is the desire of the masses to shed imposed forms
and adopt forms of their own choice. It comes as no surprise that these two theorists turntheir particular attention to folktales, cartoons, and the animated film, a vast field of
popular culture filled with numerous images of metamorphosis.
In the aforementioned essay, “Cheshire Cat,” Hanada too discusses merits ofJapanese folktales. Unlike Eisenstein’s positioning of Japanese folklores, however, hisemphasis is on their potential to inspire future productions of the avant-garde
documentary film. He writes, “Many of us immediately think of France when we hear theterm avant-garde art, but there is no other country as blessed as Japan for its abundance in95
96

Eisenstein, 21.
Ibid., 33.

50

abstract and surrealistic art forms.”97 Referencing Eisenstein’s fascination with Japanese
Kabuki theater, Hanada goes on to suggest that contemporary Japanese artists shouldmake use of their native resources, especially folklores that parade “such fantastic figures
as the sea bonze, the one-eyed monk, and the faceless monster” (Figure 3).98 A particularkind of folklore on which Hanada places importance is, moreover, the old chronicles thatinterweave factual reports on historical events with fantastic accounts of ghosts, monsters,
and supernatural phenomena. When appropriated by contemporary filmmakers, argues
Hanada, these ostensibly anachronistic chronicles and folktales could offer a fertile
ground for producing a new mode of cinematic experimentation. Hanada would later callthis new mode of cinematic experimentation sur-documentary. It is fitting in this respectthat Hanada describes this essay, which deals with Disney and Japanese folklore, as a
discussion of “documentary art” (kiroku geijutsu). And it is this question of new
documentary art, understood as the elliptic-dialectical synthesis of the documentary andavant-garde approaches, to which I will turn in the next chapter.

97
98

Hanada, “Warai neko,” 222.
Ibid.

51

CHAPTER TWO
The Rise of the Avant-Garde Documentary Movement and the Demise of Pure
Literature
In 1963, experimental filmmaker Matsumoto Toshio (1932- ) published a booktitled Eizô no hakken: Avangyarudo to dokyumentarii (Discovery of the MechanicallyProduced-Image: Avant-garde and Documentary). The timely publication of the book is
noteworthy because of the following two points. First, it deserves attention because
Matsumoto included the term eizô (“mechanically-produced-image”) – a term that wasquickly gaining a discursive currency among Japanese film theorists and critics at thetime – in his main title. As Matsumoto often acknowledges in his interviews, he was thefirst filmmaker to use the appellation eizô sakka (a moving image auteur or a“mechanically-produced-image” auteur) to present himself. The appellation brings to theforefront the general, material foundation of visual media rather than the particularity of
the cinema, and prefigures his later career as a pioneering experimental film and video
artist in Japan.99
More importantly, however, the book is noteworthy because of its supplementary
subtitle, which reveals Matsumoto’s theoretical indebtedness to the work of Marxist
avant-garde literary critic Hanada Kiyoteru. To place seemingly heterogeneous terms
such as avant-garde and documentary side by side as Matsumoto did at the time was a
provocative gesture. Yet the very idea of synthesizing the avant-garde and the
documentary approaches was not entirely original to him. While many critics today
regard Matsumoto’s theoretical vision of dialectically synthesizing avant-garde

99

Author’s interview with Matsumoto conducted on February 16th, 2007 in Tokyo.

52

filmmaking and documentary filmmaking as uniquely his own, it is in fact a variation ofan earlier theory proposed by Hanada.100
A concept of the dialectic based on the figure of the “ellipse,” as we saw in thelast chapter, constitutes the kernel of Hanada’s thought. The transformative process of anelliptic-dialectic movement forms the central logic of his argument. To discern this logicof the elliptic-dialectic in the vast corpus of his critical essays is like discerning awatermark wrought into the surface of a paper; we begin to see variants of the ur-pattern
beneath the texture of individual essays. Idiosyncratic as it may seem, however, Hanada’s
theory of the dialectic between the avant-garde and documentary art forms thoroughly
influenced his contemporaries. The theoretical and practical implications of his logic thus
go far beyond the content of his essays. As I hope to show in this chapter, Hanada’s
conceptual model of the ellipse – and especially his understanding of the elliptic-dialectic
relation between avant-garde and documentary – proves essential for the analysis ofseveral key intellectual and artistic events of the late 1950s and early 1960s. While theavant-garde’s theorization of documentary art, filmmaking practice, and literary criticism
would seem to have taken place separately, in fact they have a common determinant
which comes to light if we take heed of Hanada’s dialectical theory of the avant-garde
and the documentary. Once we put Hanada’s theory into play, connections among thesedifferent developments will be clear.

100

For instance, in the foreword for the recent reprinted edition of Matsumoto’s Eizô no hakken (2005),
contemporary film critic Chûjô Shôhei praises Matsumoto for ambitiously bringing together theheterogeneous genres of the documentary film as “the objective record of the exterior world” and the avantgarde film as “the subjective expression of interiority” (3). These quoted phrases used by Chûjô, which
recapitulate Matsumoto’s argument in his book, clearly testify to the influence of Hanada’s theoreticalframework. See, Chûjô Shôhei, “Kagayaki o ushinawanai shin no kotentekimeicho” [A Truly Classical
Masterpiece with Ever-Shining Brilliance] in Eizô no hakken: Avangyarudo to dokyumentarii [TheDiscovery of the Mechanically-Produced-Image: The Avant-garde and Documentary] (Tokyo: Seiryû
shuppan, 2005), 1-9.

53

What were these events? Namely, the emergence of what I call an “avant-garde
documentary movement” initiated by Hanada’s group at the end of the 1950s; the wellknown “Debate over Pure Literature,” which took place in 1961-1962; and finally, theincreased use of the extreme close-up, the freeze-frame, and the still photograph, whichbecame conspicuous among the works of notable Japanese filmmakers in the 1960s. The
aim of this chapter is to explore the relations among these three events, relations which
are by no means reducible to a linear, chronological order of causality. The conceptual
thread I will use to explore the connections between these events is that of actuality.
Actuality is the expression of the elliptic-dialectic, which contains two focal points; thefirst focal point is “journalistic currency” of the mass media and the second focal point is
the “avant-garde” as an artistic practice that emphasizes defamiliarization. Together,
these two poles, their tension and the ellipse they form give rise to a new sense of“actuality” that is not reducible to the sensation of journalistic topicality and fashionable
up-to-dateness, nor to the claim to factuality; rather, the third sense of actuality generated
by the elliptic-dialectical tension is what we might provisionally call “critical relevance.”
This critical sense of actuality has been articulated by avant-garde critics and artists suchas Hanada Kiyoteru, Matsumoto Toshio, and Abé Kôbô, and will be explored further inthis chapter.
The three events cited above are different responses to the prominence of the
documentary genre and the lure of its “actuality-effect” in mainstream Japanese society
starting in the 1950s.101 Looking at these three events together enables us to situatehistorically the apparently abrupt turn of the postwar Japanese avant-garde critics, writers
101

I am using the term “actuality-effect” to designate the sensation of having access to the current, up-todate, or timely information and events, which the media constructs and relays. I hence differentiate thisnotion of the actuality-effect from a multifaceted concept of actuality.

54and filmmakers towards the practice and concept of documentary. Moreover, it enables
us to draw a more accurate genealogy of postwar Japanese filmmaking, one that is open
to the inter-medial connections and interactions. Lastly, examining these three events
together allows us to see how Japanese intellectuals and artists variously responded to theincreasing prominence of visual media over print media. The anxiety of literary critics
involved in the Debate over Pure Literature is symptomatic of this historical tension
between visual and print media.
Another point I want to make in this chapter concerns the bifurcating tendencies
in interpretations of the key concept of actuality, and by extension, in the divergent
means by which Japanese critics and artists attempted to articulate the relationshipbetween artistic and journalistic practices. Importantly, for the participants of the Debate
over Pure Literature the relation between literature and journalism was essentially static.
An either/or schema determined this relation; either journalism appeared as its foe, or it
was its double. Within this scheme the self-evidentiality of the categories of literature andjournalism was left unquestioned. In contrast, the avant-garde documentary movement
began by questioning the self-evidentiality of the categories of art and journalism. In sodoing the participants of this movement activated Hanada’s elliptic-dialectic scheme.
This produced a far more dynamic relation between artistic and journalistic practices.
Indeed, as I will show more in detail, avant-garde documentarists refuted both theaestheticist isolationism of art from mass culture, and journalism’s axiomatic claim tofactuality and common sense. As its etymology suggests, journalism has a strong affinity
with everydayness. Its intelligible appeal resides in the common, quotidian, andhabitually enforced perceptions of reality: journalism in its widely accepted form affirms

55common sense. Moreover, journalism at its basis affirms mass distribution; its practice isthus inseparable from the apparatuses of mass media. In contrast, since Russian
Formalism various avant-garde movements have taken the commonsensical modes ofhuman perception as their principal objects of criticism and subversion. The avant-gardepractice of the twentieth century has held the view that commonsensical judgment islearned through habits. Hence comes the difficulty of defining the avant-garde’s political
position in relation to mass culture, a difficulty that Marxist critics such as Hanada tried
to overcome by appropriating the Marxist theory of interdependence between thevanguard and the masses (see Chapter One).
In short, the practices of journalism and the avant-garde have traditionallyappeared antithetical in their respective relations to habits and commonsense. However,they are not antithetical in their avowed engagement with the temporality of the present.
The avant-garde and journalism both affirm a relevance of their practice to contemporarysocial, political, and cultural conditions. The question then becomes: how could theavant-garde practice differentiate itself from practices of journalism and mass media
without giving up its timely engagement with the present? Is the temporal sense of
actuality construed as journalistic currency applicable to the practice of avant-garde art
and criticism? If so, what becomes of the strategy of defamiliarization that undergirds theavant-gardist contestation of habits and common sense? These are questions that theparticipants of the avant-garde documentary movement inevitably faced in their endeavor
to appropriate and criticize existing modes of documentary practice. In what follows, I
will examine how they negotiated the demand for and negation of journalistic actuality intheory and practice, paying particular attention to the filmic work of Matsumoto Toshio,56the activities of the avant-garde group Kiroku geijutsu no kai (Association forDocumentary Art), and the contrasting response of pure literature critics, which will serve
as a counterexample to the works of the Kiroku geijutsu no kai.
Freeze-Frame, Still Frame, and Extreme Close-Up
I want to begin my investigation by turning to the rise of certain visual andstylistic characteristics in the filmmaking practices of the 1960s in Japan. Althoughchronologically these tendencies appear after the rise of the avant-garde documentary
movement and the Debate over Pure Literature, it is helpful to start with this readily“visible” event. In fact, despite their visibility, it is not easy to understand the historicalsignificance and implications of these visual and stylistic changes. Their significancebecomes only legible when we draw connections between their concurrent appearance as
constituting an innovative event in history of filmmaking in Japan and the other two
aforementioned events. What are these visual and stylistic changes that took place in thefield of filmmaking practice in the 1960s? They derive from the increased use of two
particular cinematic devices: the use of freeze- and still-frames on the one hand, and theuse of extreme close-ups on the other.
As is widely acknowledged, at the beginning of the 1960s Japanese cinema
underwent remarkable changes not only in terms of its industrial structure (the collapse of
its studio system), but also in terms of its formal style. The most conspicuous stylisticchanges first appeared in the field of commercial narrative film. It is a commonplace forfilm historians to attribute this change to the rise of the postwar generation of studiofilmmakers, such as Nakahira Kô, Masumura Yasuzô, and Ichikawa Kon, who began
experimenting with formal elements (such as fast cutting, the 360 degree pan, abrupt

57

editing, the long take, and the freeze-frame), and narrative elements (such as stories ofcontemporary youth and delinquents) in the 1950s. However, the generation commonly
credited with most significantly altering the path of Japanese cinema is the next
generation of the filmmakers generally known as the “New Wave”: namely, Oshima
Nagisa, Yoshida Kijû, Shinoda Masahiro, and Imamura Shôhei. To this list of we canalso add the names of leftist documentary filmmakers, such as Ogawa Shinsuke,
Tsuchimoto Noriaki, and Kuroki Kazuo, who form the documentary counterpart to thisNew Wave generation.
The problem with this standard (and hegemonic) film historical narrative is,however, that it leaves out the critical achievements of filmmakers such as Matsumoto
Toshio and Wakamatsu Kôji, who only get passing remarks as filmmakers of the artistic
avant-garde or the profit-driven “pink” film genre. Their works rarely figure intheoretical or historical writings on Japanese cinema, and when they do, they are treatedas isolated sparks of achievement from experimental spirits. But if we were to put thishegemonic perspective aside, a different constellation of Japanese cinema becomesvisible.
First, we should note that some postwar commercial filmmakers’ formal
experiments directly intersected with experiments by independent avant-garde
filmmakers and documentary filmmakers of the same generation. For instance, if we
focus on the use of the freeze-frame we can find definite formal affinities among Oshima,
Imamura, Matsumoto, and Teshigahara – affinities that would not be clear if we were toadhere to the traditional boundary between the commercial “New Wave” and noncommercial experimental and documentary filmmaking. Matsumoto and Oshima, in

58

particular, made highly comparable experimental shorts by using only still photographs:
Matsumoto made Ishi no uta (The Song of the Stone, 1963) using photographs shot by a
LIFE magazine cameraman, and Oshima made Yunbogi no nikki (The Diary of Yunbogi,1965) using photographs shot by himself during his trip to South Korea. By the mid1960s, this trend towards the use of photographic stillness became more conspicuousamong commercial filmmakers: Fukasaku Kinji and Wakamatsu Kôji often open theirnarrative films with lengthy sequences composed of journalistic still photographs, such as
Fukasaku’s Hokori takaki chôsen (The Proud Challenge, 1962) or Wakamatsu’s Teroru
no kisetsu (The Season of Terror, 1969).
Topical references to then current social issues, such as the closing down ofcoalmines, migrant workers, and radicalizing student movements also became extremely
frequent among the narrative, non-documentary filmmakers during this period. In somecases, these references were made by directly “citing” press photographs published innewspapers and magazines, as in the case of Wakamatsu’s Okasareta Byakui (Violated
Angel, 1967), or Oshima’s Shônen (Boy, 1969). In other cases, a stylistic homage tophotojournalism is made through the use of grainy snap shots, as in the case of a still
frame sequence in Teshigahara’s Tanin no kao (The Face of Another, 1966) and
Wakamatsu’s Kyôsô jôshikô (Running in Madness, Dying in Love, 1969), or the repeateduse of freeze-frames in Imamura’s Nippon konchûki (Insect Woman, 1963). Whilescholars often attribute the increased use of the freeze-frame in Japanese cinema to theimpact of French nouvelle vague, especially that of François Truffaut – the canonicalreference usually given to the final shot of Les quatre cents coups (1959) – it seems thatthe widespread cultural obsession with documentary in postwar Japan already paved the59

way for these Japanese filmmakers to pick up this formal technique. It is no coincidence
that their use of the freeze- and still-frames is overwhelming journalistic in its content. It
was thus not the French nouvelle vague that solely influenced the sudden increased
appropriation of the photographic stillness in Japanese cinema. Neither could its
increased use of the freeze- and still-frames be explained by reference to cinema’s
purportedly ontological fascination with death and stillness.102
It would be more productive, and thought-provoking, to relate the sudden
explosions of freeze- and still-frames in 1960s Japanese cinema to the intensified
journalistic-turn of intellectuals and artists in the postwar period, of which the avantgarde documentary movement and the Debate over Pure Literature are symptomatic
examples. In all three cases what we witness is an increased demand for journalistic
actuality in art, and the subsequent tension created therein. These three events are notisolated from one another; rather they arise from the same historically conditioned
epistemic and cultural milieu: they belong to the same historical strata. However, this is
not to say that the participants of these events responded to this demand for actuality in
art in a uniform manner. As we shall see shortly, some responded in a pro-journalisticmanner and others in a counter-journalistic manner.

102

Recently, film theorists such as Garrett Stewart and Laura Mulvey have put forward this connection
between cinematic stillness and death. For Stewart and Mulvey, who represent what might be called theontological theory of the cinematic appropriation of the photographic stillness, the trope of death –mediated by Roland Barthes’s theorization of photography, André Bazin’s theorization of cinema, andFreudian psychoanalysis – figures predominantly. The problem with this vein of theorizing cinema’s
relationship to photography by privileging the trope of death (analogically linked to stillness) is its
generality. The trope of death is not always useful in analyzing particular instances of the cinematic
appropriations of photography. In the case of 1960s Japan, it is the tradition of photojournalism and news
photography (not photography in general) that played the most significant role in this appropriation of thephotographic image. See, Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and theMoving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006).

60

The use of the freeze- and still-frames in the aforementioned films appears as amore or less pro-journalistic appropriation of the “actuality-effect” of the media,
especially that of photojournalism. That is, the frequent use of freeze- and still-frames in
1960s Japanese films appear to emulate the actuality-effect characteristic of journalistic
media. Yet, extreme close-ups, which flourished concurrently with this journalistic-turnof the Japanese filmmaking represents a decidedly counter-journalistic approach to thedemand for actuality.
The extreme close-up, like the freeze- and still-frames, appears prominently in
1960s narrative and documentary films. Its sudden visibility is as conspicuous as that ofstill images. Unlike the freeze- and still-frames, however, these extreme close-ups are notcoded as “journalistic.” That is to say, they do not refer back to the formal stylistics of themass media and photojournalism, as it is the case with many of freeze- and still-frames.
Instead of evoking journalistic referentiality, the extreme close-ups in fact counteract
referential functions of filmed images: they defamiliarize the referent.
Take the iconic example of the opening shot of the film Suna no onna (Woman of
the Dunes, 1964), a work of collaboration between Teshigahara and Abé, which I will
analyze further in the next chapter. The image of a glittering jagged shape in black andwhite appears (Figure 4). At first glance, it is difficult to identify what the object is. The
image is visible, but it is not immediately recognizable. It turns out that the image is a
microscopic close-up of a grain of sand. The film cuts gradually from this microscopic
view of one grain of the sand to several grains, and from a flurry of sand forming ripples
to an expansive view of soaring sand dunes. These gradual changes in scale materially61

demonstrate how the desert is an aggregate of countless sand grains. The stereotyped
image of the desert as a vast smooth landscape is rejected from the very beginning.
In the essay titled Sabaku no shisô (“The Thought on Desert”), Abé discusses thedifficulty of filming the desert. He warns filmmakers not to fall into the trap of filming
stereotyped images of the desert landscape, which would end up serving only as the plain
backdrop for narrative actions. “It is difficult not to resort to generality when one depicts
such plastic landscapes as those of the desert,” writes Abé. “Everywhere you turn yourcamera, the same monotonous look of the desert appears, and the image starts to look likethe desert in general, like the desert in the picture frame.”103 According to Abé, in orderto escape this trap of representational generality or stereotyping, which classicallandscape paintings have instilled in us, it is necessary to find an alternative method thatallows the filmmaker to get as close as possible to the desert.104 It should come as no
surprise, therefore, that the technique of the extreme close-up is used at the opening
sequence of Woman of the Dunes.
Since the advent of cinema, the visual effect of the close-up has been linked to aparticular epistemic function: it allows human eyes to discern aspects of reality that
otherwise elude them. The close-up has been thus regarded as particularly apt fordestabilizing habituated modes of visual perception. As Béla Balázs reminds us, theclose-up captures, frames, and reveals the “little things” in life that go unnoticed:[T]he magnifying glass of the cinematograph brings us closer to the individual cellsof life, it allows us to feel the texture and substance of life in its concrete detail. It
shows you what your hand is doing, though normally you take no notice when it
strokes someone or hits out at them. You live in it and pay no attention to it. The
magnifying glass of the film camera will show you your shadow on the wall,
103

Abé Kôbô, “Sabaku no shisô” [The Thought on Desert], Sabaku no shisô [The Thought on Desert](Tokyo: Kôdansha, 1973), 268.
104
Ibid., 269.

62

something you live with without noticing, and it will show you the adventures andthe ultimate fate of the cigar in your unsuspecting hand, and the secret – because
unheeded – life of all things that accompany you on your way and that taken together
make up the events of your life.105

There is no doubt that Teshigahara and Abé were aware of these perceptual effectsof the close-up. Abé’s avant-gardist obsession with the effects of defamiliarizationis, as I will argue more in depth in the next chapter, inseparable from his interest invisual media. He often claimed that artists must “discover new meanings of reality
through the process of decomposing reality into naked things and reconstructing
them.”106 It is precisely this decomposition of familiar reality into defamiliarizedstates of naked “things” that the technique of the extreme close-up allows. As one
Japanese critic puts it, Teshigahara’s use of the extreme-close up in Woman in theDunes “turns the filmed object into an objet by severing it from conventional
system of signification.”107 That is to say, Teshigahara’s use of the extreme closeup destroys conventional circuits of signification between the sign and the referent.
It reveals, in other words, hitherto overlooked aspects of ordinary “things,” making
them visible as if for the first time.
As is often pointed out, the defamiliarizing effect of the extreme close-up
becomes most palpable when it is applied to the human figure. It was the French
Surrealists who first experimented with this effect; the best example is Jacques-André
Boiffard’s famous photograph that accompanied George Bataille’s “The Big Toe.” If it istrue, as Rosalind Krauss suggests, that “[p]hotographic cropping is always experienced as
105

Béla Balázs, “Béla Balázs, Visible Man, or the Culture of Film (1924),” trans. Rodney Livingstone,
Screen, 48.1 (Spring 2007), 103.
106
Abé Kôbô, “Mazu wa kaibô tô o,” 147.
107
Tomoda Yoshiyuki, “Fûkei to shintai: Abé Kôbô/ Teshigahara Hiroshi eiga ‘Suna no onna’ ron” [TheLandscape and the Body: Abé Kôbô and Teshigahara Hiroshi’s film, Woman of the Dunes], Nihon kindai
bungaku [Japanese Modern Literature], 74 (May, 2006), 274. Tomoda is using the French word objet here
in the artistic sense, in particular the sense given by Surrealists.

63

a rupture in the continuous fabric of reality,” then, we may surmise that the extreme
close-up intensifies this effect.108 One shot in the film Woman in the Dunes particularly
exemplifies this defamiliarizing effect of the extreme close-up upon the human body. It
begins as a leisurely pan over a woman’s facial profile. The camera slowly moves along
her parted lips down to the gentle slope of her neck. The undulating movement of her
throat and the uneven texture of her skin fill up the entire screen. Cropped and magnified,
the object inside the frame no longer presents any resemblance to what we know as thehuman face (Figure 5).
Similar instances of the excessive magnification of ordinary objects can be foundin the works of Imamura and Kuroki, as in the case of the opening sequence of Insect
Woman and recurring extreme close-ups of a caterpillar in Kuroki’s Silence Has No
Wings.109 In the films of Imamura and Kuroki, however, the use of extreme close-ups
does not extend to human figures; they remain at the level of insects and thus evoke thestylistic conventions of the scientific or nature documentary. By appealing to such
conventions, these films diminish the perceptual threat otherwise generated by the closeup. In contrast, the films of Teshigahara and Matsumoto notably extend the use of
extreme close-ups to human figures. For instance, in his experimental documentary film,
Nishijin (Nishijin, 1961) Matsumoto makes a deliberate effort not to show faces or entire
bodies of the weavers in their entirety. Partial framing crops bodies, faces are hidden; if
the heads of human actors appear, only their backs or partial profiles are shown.

108

Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1985), 115.
109
This was Kuroki Kazuo’s first narrative feature. The original title in Japanese is Tobenai chinmoku(1966).

64Moreover, as Matsumoto acknowledges in his interviews, Nishijin deliberately
avoids having establishing shots inside the workshop, and thus discourages spectatorsfrom spatially orienting their gaze. Instead of establishing a normative sense of space thecamera relentlessly crops and fragments human bodies and machines (Figure 6). The
camera takes decidedly unconventional angles, and closes in on the hands, feet, and hipsof the weavers. The film also utilizes the colliding effects of montage. Compositionallydynamic shots of traditional wooden looms and mechanical looms alternate, andgeometric shapes and diagonal lines predominate the screen, evoking the stylistics ofearlier avant-garde films such as Léger’s Ballet Méchanique and films of Sergei
Eisenstein. Despite its predominance, moreover, the close-up is not the only componentof the film’s characteristic visuality. It is also punctuated by the more normative use oflong and medium shots from the images of children playing in alleys to those of old
residents piously praying at a local shrine to annual exhibitions of traditional textiles. In
this film as well as in his other experimental shorts, Matsumoto strives to achieve an
elliptic-dialectical tension between the documentary recordings and avant-garde
defamiliarization of reality stylistically.
A similar but more complex process of activating the tension between recording
and defamiliarization appears in his next film, The Song of the Stone. Here Matsumotouses only the still photographs shot by LIFE cameraman, Ernest Satow. Satow took
hundreds of photographs documenting Japanese stonemasons on the island of Shikoku(Figure 7). Initially, Matsumoto was asked to make a TV documentary program about
Satow, using these photographs shot in the Japanese quarry. However, instead of simply
presenting Satow’s work in the conventional expository documentary style, Matsumoto

65decided to re-shoot Satow’s still photographs frame-by-frame. Matsumoto put the film
together by meticulously using the techniques of in-camera-editing, and asked Akiyama
Kuniharu, who belonged to the artistic collective, jikken kôbô (“experimental
workshop”), to create the soundtrack. Akiyama used the sounds recorded in the quarry to
make a musique concrète piece for The Song of the Stone. The result is an astonishingly
dynamic animation film, which uses all kinds of visual techniques – stop animation, pan,zoom, rotation, dissolve, fade, loop, and solarization – as well as “documentary” sounds
distorted to the point of unrecognizability, to transform these static photographs into
visual elements that produce an overall impression of movement. Overcoming thechallenge of the twofold stillness and silence – of stone and of still photography –through the technique of animation (frame-by-frame shooting), Matsumoto thus turned
photographs into a motion picture replete with sound. According to Matsumoto, in
describing the processes of cutting and polishing stonecutters say, “the stones are coming
to life.” Like stones, he says, the still photographs came to life; he calls this experimental
documentary short a cine-poem.110
The elliptic-dialectical process of recording and defamiliarization, which alreadycharacterized Nishijin, is thus strengthened and doubled in The Song of Stone. The
photojournalistic materials, which are themselves documentary recordings ofstonemasons, are first decomposed into fragments (still photograms), and thenreassembled into movement (animation film) by Matsumoto. The filmed photographs ofSatow retain their original photojournalistic quality, but no longer in the same manner as
they would if they were printed in the pages of the LIFE magazine. The Song of the Stone110

From Matsumoto’s voice-over commentary in Matsumoto Toshio, Jikken eizôshû [Experimental Film
Works], DVD-BOX (Tokyo: Uplink, 2005).

66

thus attests to Matsumoto’s will to translate his own theory of neo-documentarism into
practice.
In Matsumoto’s work the tension between avant-garde and documentary proves
productive, and the stillness of the frame and the extreme close-up complement one
another. Arguably, the logic of the elliptic-dialectic as envisioned by Hanada finds its
highest cinematic expression in The Song of the Stone. In this underappreciated work by
Matsumoto, the avant-garde documentary’s counter-journalistic approach to actuality
comes to the fore. The film retains the journalistic referentiality of the original
photographs, but the overall appearance of the film no longer resembles that ofphotojournalism. The film is neither a documentary about stonemasons nor about Ernest
Satow; instead it presents itself as a new kind of document: it is a document that itself
documents the discursive and the non-discursive processes of re-defining documentary as
an avant-gardist practice. The film’s critical relevance derives from its particular status as
the exemplary document of the avant-garde documentary movement. It functions as
visible evidence of critics and artists’ collective efforts to find alternative ways ofappropriating and incorporating documentary traditions into avant-garde artistic
practices. But how did Matsumoto arrive at this point? What does his “counterjournalistic” approach to the dominant practice of documentary journalism tell us about
the avant-garde documentary movement as a whole? In order to answer these questions,
we need to return to the formative years of the late 1950s, when a number of avantgardist critics, writers, and filmmakers turned to the documentary genre as a method of
critical engagement with their present.

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The Emergence of the Avant-garde Documentary Movement
While Matsumoto’s Song of the Stone may be the most successful case of
dialectically synthesizing documentary and avant-garde techniques and stylistic
conventions, Matsumoto was certainly not the only one to attempt to carry out thisproject. Though different in degree, filmmakers such as Teshigahara Hiroshi, Oshima
Nagisa and Wakamatsu Kôji also carried on comparable projects of incorporating topicaljournalistic materials into the realm of fiction in ways that similarly highlight the tension
between the actuality-effect constructed by the mainstream media and the avant-garde
effects of defamiliarization. They did so not because they happen to adopt the same
stylistic conventions, such as the use of freeze- and still-frames and extreme close-ups,
but because they come out of the same cultural milieu, where Hanada’s theorization of
the dialectical synthesis of documentary and avant-garde had already taken root.
In order to investigate this historically specific cultural milieu, we need first to
turn to the formation of the exemplary avant-gardist group: Kiroku geijutsu no kai(Association for Documentary Art). Kiroku geijutsu no kai not only brought together
notable intellectual and artistic figures such as Hanada Kiyoteru, Abé Kôbô, Teshigahara
Hiroshi, Sasaki Kiichi, and Haryû Ichirô, but also it gave rise to the discourse on“actuality,” which produced a considerable impact outside their immediate group. The
initial impetus for its creation came from their monthly group discussions of film, whichwere published serially in the Marxist literary journal Shinnihon bungaku (New Japanese
Literature). The association was officially launched in May 1956. From the very
beginning, the association was known for building an inter-medial community of artists
and critics. It enlisted a variety of writers, poets, filmmakers, photographers, painters, and68critics. In this sense its organizational policy was a continuation of earlier postwar avantgarde collectives such as Yoru no kai (also founded by Hanada together with abstract
painter Okamoto Tarô). What was unique about this new group, however, was its avowedinterest in documentary.111 Its statement of purpose published in 1957, specifies that the
Association for Documentary Art is an artists’ collective based on the “spirit of
documentary.” The spirit of documentary is, moreover, defined as “a consciousness of
methodology” that aims “to fight any attempts to fixate art, to destroy conventional ideas
about beauty, to revolutionize, reorganize, and expand artistic means in order to explore
ever-new artistic terrains.” The statement also adds that its methodology, though based on
documentary, “does not exclude fictional devices in art.” What it rejects is, however,“aristocratic aestheticism.”112
As one of its members Tamai Goichi puts it, the principal aim of the association
was to reinvent the concept of documentary itself. As they saw it, there was a problem
with the “booming popularity of documentary” in postwar Japanese society, which was
instilling stereotyped conceptions of the documentary and other non-fiction genres in the
public consciousness. During the 1950s and early 1960s mainstream Japanese society
embraced mass media’s representation of the “real” world. Literary reportage and nonfiction literature made a big comeback, and productions of documentary programs on
television soared. Meanwhile, as pure literature critics have grudgingly acknowledged,
crime fiction based on real life incidents swept through the literary market. In short,
documentary journalism was in the midst of its heyday. People were fascinated with the111

By “documentary” these writers refer not only to documentary film but also to reportage writing.
Tamai Goichi, “Kiroku geijutsu no kai: Geijutsu undô shôkai I” [The Association for Documentary Art:
Introductions of Artistic Movements I], Shinnihon bungaku [New Japanese Literature], 12.11 (October1957), 127.!

112

69

lure of actuality and the actuality-effect constructed by the media became the key
ingredient in Japan’s booming culture industry. The media latched onto the public’s
desire for the factual – and sensational – accounts of real life incidents. In short, theactuality-effect constructed and relayed by the media was becoming a renewed attraction
for the entertainment as well as journalistic sectors of the culture industry. It is probablethat the intensified mediatization of actuality owes a lot to the rise of television, whose
capacity for live broadcasting undoubtedly contributed to the public’s heightened interestin the unfolding of unscripted reality in front of the camera. But the television could nothave been the sole cause of it. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to pin down exactly
which cultural and social factors contributed this widespread obsession with the real.
Instead, what I want to do is to analyze different artistic responses to this historicalsituation. The emergence of artist collectives, such as Kiroku geijutsu no kai, was one
such response. The aforementioned stylistic change in 1960s filmmaking (i.e. theappropriation of the documentary technique of incorporating still photographs and the
direct citation of topical journalistic materials by filmmakers, such as Matsumoto,Teshigahara, Oshima, and Wakamatsu) was another such response. Similarly, I regard aliterary critic Hirano Ken’s appeal to the notion of “novelistic actuality,” whichconstituted the kernel of the Debate over Pure Literature, as a different kind of responseto the same historical situation. (I will come back to Hirano’s argument and the relevanceof this literary debate later.)
Against the grain of the mass media facilitated cultural obsession with actuality,
those involved in the Kiroku geijutsu no kai remained suspicious of the self-evidentialityof fact implicit in the journalistic presentation of actuality. Instead of riding along with70

the general sentiment, avant-garde critics and artists hence proposed a rethinking of thevery concepts of actuality and documentary. For instance, in his 1958 essay titled Shinkiroku shugi no teishô (“In Support of the New Documentarism”) Abé Kôbô defends theactivities of Kiroku geijutsu no kai by noting how the members of this group are opposed
to “the existing concept of documentary.” Curiously, instead of emphasizing the factual,
in his definition of documentary Abé draws readers’ attention to the primacy of theaccidental and the unpredictable, that is, to events that evade the control of humanconsciousness. In this manner he foregrounds the elements of chance rather thanfactuality in documentary:
If I were to simplify it, the spirit of documentary is a respect for the accidental
elements that fall outside our consciousness. When this method was exclusively
targeting the interior world, it was called the method of Surrealism. Hanada Kiyoteru
predicted a long time ago that the development of a new realism is possible if we
inverse the direction of this special method of Surrealism; that is, if, instead ofaiming at the interior world, we aim towards the exterior world in the corresponding
manner. The documentary method today needs to follow Hanada’s earlier
suggestion.113

What he calls the “spirit of documentary” is thus defined here first and foremost by its
respect for the accidental, the contingent, and chance. Abé metonymically links theelements of chance, which French Surrealism valued, to the method of documentary, andhe does not seem to see any discrepancy between the practice of documentary and that ofsurrealism. The method of documentary thus defined in terms of unpredictability isfurther linked to the world beyond the control of human consciousness. It is not hard to
detect in this definition Abé’s deep-seated distrust of the habitual – and hence predicable– understanding of reality. Not surprisingly, instead of affirming documentary’s claim forthe factual, he therefore posits the defamiliarization of habitual, familiar, and predictable
113

Abé Kôbô, “Shin kiroku shugi no teishô” [In Support of the New Documentarism], Shisô (July 1958),
98.

71

experiences as the fundamental characteristics of documentary. The concept of the
documentary is thus severed from the positivist task of pursuing facts, and grafted onto
the typical avant-gardist mode of destroying perceptual habits. This dislocation of theconcept of the documentary, from the generic terrain of the non-fictional presentation offacts to the avant-garde contestation of perceptual habits, constitutes both the strength
and weakness of Abé’s theory, and by extension, of the avant-garde documentary
movement.
However, instead of simply pointing to the theoretical limitations of this avantgardist reconceptualization of the documentary, I want to historicize the significance andtiming of this reconceptualization of documentary within the larger context of Japan’s
postwar avant-garde movement and film practice. Here, Abé’s direct reference toHanada’s theory of the avant-garde in his discussion of the documentary proves crucial.
As I have suggested earlier, Hanada promoted the idea of a dialectical synthesis of theavant-garde and the documentary in the early 1950s. Unfortunately, however, he neverpresented his theory in a systematic manner. He wrote about it sporadically in dozens of
his critical essays. As a result, the examples of avant-garde and documentary art he uses
vary from time to time. Sometimes Hanada refers to the surrealist love for objets trouvés,or British documentary films of the 1930s; other times he refers to Disney’s animationand photojournalism. Occasionally he even discusses Japanese graffiti of the Edo period
and Mayakovsky’s poetry as examples of the documentary spirit. The examples he uses
to explain the tension between the avant-garde and documentary thus vary, but the basic
tenet of his theory remains consistent. It always emphasizes the importance of keeping an
elliptic-dialectical tension between what he sees as avant-garde elements and72

documentary elements. Specifically, the kernel of Hanada’s argument concerns anelliptic-dialectical tension between the process of defamiliarization and the process ofrecording. As I argue in the previous chapter, Hanada’s conception of the dialectic should
be understood as a dynamic-differential process, which does not arrive at a complete
unification of the opposing terms. There is no moment wherein the opposing forcesdissolve into a single focal point. Instead Hanada understands the dynamics of thedialectic through the tension-filled poise of the ellipse. The constant differential
movements of two opposing forces hence sustain the elliptic-dialectic, forcing each tooccupy the separate focal points of an ellipse. According to this understanding of theelliptic-dialectic, the avant-garde technique of defamiliarization must be always
accompanied by the documentary technique of recording and vice versa. Neither
technique can stand alone. It is what might be called “differential-complementarity” thatcharacterizes Hanada’s vision of the avant-garde documentary.
The 1950 essay titled Kagami no kuni no fûkei (“Landscapes in the Land of
Mirrors”) sets this theoretical vision to work. In this essay Hanada elaborates Breton’s
definition of surrealism as “pure psychic automatism.” He compares the surrealist methodof automatic writing, which presumably “records” the trace of the unconscious, to thefactual reporting of the natural world by travelers. Both are said to be documentary
recordings of two complementary realities: one psychic and the other physical, one
interior and the other exterior. Hanada draws his analogy between the surrealist methodof automatism and the documentary method of travelogue from Breton’s own analogy ofpure psychic automatism as “dictation,” the act of faithful recording word by word.114

114

Breton, Manifestes du surréalisme, 36.

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In his 1953 essay on European avant-garde films of the 1920s, Hanada again
compares the automatic method of surrealism to that of documentary. This time he calls
the surrealist approach to psychic reality “reportage.” 115 The general tendency ofEuopean avant-garde art of the 1910s and 1920s is further described in terms of “internal
realism.” Yet Hanada’s understanding of realism here is not reducible to that of thenineteenth century literary and the pictorial practices grouped under that term.
Documentary, reportage, and realism – terms which carry the conceptual baggage ofnineteenth century positivism – are redefined in relation to what is generally thought aspositivism’s adversary: the historical avant-garde of the early twentieth century.
Hanada’s vision of the dialectical synthesis of avant-garde and documentary was
given a new name in 1958: sur-documentarism. He coined this term in his essay titled“On Sur-Documentarism” published in the February issue of Eiga hihyô (Film Criticism).
The timely publication of this essay must also be noted. It came out two years after the
Kiroku geijutsu no kai was launched, and in the same year when two other important
essays on similar topics were published. One was the aforementioned essay “In Supportof the New Documentarism” by Abé Kôbô, published in the July issue of Shisô(Thought). The other was Matsumoto Toshio’s essay, “A Theory of the Avant-garde
Documentary Film,” published in the May issue of Kiroku eiga (Documentary Film). All
three advocated a rethinking of the documentary from the avant-garde perspective, andthe creation of an innovative kind of documentary art. Taken together these three essays
attest to the historical emergence of what I have been calling the avant-garde
documentary movement.

115

Hanada Kiyoteru, “Nijûnendai no ‘abangyarudo’” [The ‘Avant-garde’ of the 1920s], Hanada Kiyoteru
chosakushû [Selected Works of Hanada Kiyoteru], Vol.3, 203.

74

While Matsumoto was not an official member of Kiroku geijutsu no kai, he
clearly belongs to Hanada’s circle of avant-garde critics and artists. In the
aforementioned essay, Matsumoto writes:
To use the expressions of Hanada Kiyoteru, the avant-garde films [of the 1920s]
boldly visualized the movement of the non-concrete but rational world of ideas on the
one hand, and the movement of the concrete but irrational world of the unconsciouson the other. But there is a definite limit to this historical avant-garde method. Given
the various transformations that took place both in the social realm and in artists’subjectivities since the 1930s, the method of the historical avant-garde is no longer
relevant to the problems that contemporary avant-garde artists face today.116

Not surprisingly, when Matsumoto published this essay in the documentary film journal
it was greeted with skepticism. Japanese documentary filmmaking at the time was still
following the dominant stylistics of Griersonian realism and the propagandist “culturefilm” (bunka eiga) of the wartime period. His suggestion that documentary filmmakers
must pay attention to the psychic realm of the unconscious was groundbreaking, but it
was not easily acceptable.
Echoing the view of Abé, Matsumoto also argues for the importance of
defamiliarizing familiar perceptions of reality. Documentary, he argues, needs to become
the artistic method of “unveiling” the veil of conventional meanings attached to things.
Facts are not to be embraced, but interrogated. Discovering “the naked state of things”
and destroying the perceptual stereotypes that cover them over must become the primarytasks of documentary filmmaking. He contends, “If we strip off commonsensical causeeffect relations from the surface of reality, I guarantee that our contemporary reality willappear surreal.” 117 Clearly, Matsumoto’s understanding of the documentary and its
capacity to “unveil” the pre-signifying (“naked”) state of things approximates the116

Matsumoto Toshio, “Zen’ei kiroku eiga ron,” Eizô no hakken [The Discovery of the MechanicallyProduced-Image] (Tokyo: Seiryû shuppan, 2005), 58.
117
Ibid., 62.

75

argument put forward by the Russian formalists. For instance, in his discussion of
Shklovsky’s famed concept of defamiliarization (ostranenie) Boris Éjxenbaum claimed,“Art is conceived as a way of breaking down automatism in perception.”118 The aim ofart as understood by the Russian formalists was to bring about “a special perception of athing” by breaking down the automatism of habituated perception. Matsumoto too holds
a similar view that documentary filmmaking is an artistic mode of undoing perceptual
automatism. Its aim is to enable its spectator (and filmmaker) to perceive “things” in their“naked states.” But the question is how one can take down the automatized façade ofcommonsense and habit, and bring about this special perception – a perception that does
not recognize, but only prehends – all the while claiming to be critically relevant tocontemporary society. In fact, defamiliarization alone is not enough to make a work of art“actual” to the specific historical situation or to make it politically relevant. Excessive
destruction of perceptual habits would simply recede into abstraction, causing a work tolose any referential anchorage necessary to comment upon the given present-day
actualities.
Matsumoto clearly grappled with this dilemma of how to induce such pre-signifying
perceptual states through the processes of filming and editing, while retaining thefundamental trait of documentary practice: referentiality. He not only wrote about thedifficulty of synthesizing avant-garde and documentary practices, but, as we saw earlier,
he also experimented with it in his own work. However, while The Song of the Stone
might be a successful instance of this synthesis, not all of his works are. Given thearduous challenge of synthesizing the avant-garde and the documentary, it is not
118

Boris M. Éjxenbaum, “The Theory of the Formal Method,” in Readings in Russian Poetics, eds.
Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorka (Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press, 2002), 13.

76

surprising that Matsumoto’s experimental documentary filmmaking practice graduallyshifted away from a politicized mode to a more aestheticized mode. In the late 1960s and1970s, Matsumoto began experimenting with multiple-projection, video, and thecomputer; his work increasingly centered on the task of manipulating the legibility ofimages generated by filtering processes made possible by optical printers and computers.
His eventual interest in the materiality of cinematic and electronic media led him to leavebehind his earlier interest in the relation between visual media and journalistic actuality;
but this transformation falls outside the purview of the present dissertation project. My
task here is to uncover Matsumoto’s earlier theoretical interest in the elliptic-dialecticaltension between the avant-garde and documentary through his writings and filmic works.
At the beginning of the 1960s, Matsumoto, Hanada and Abé, were still hopefulabout avant-garde documentary’s potential to record reality and defamiliarize it at thesame time.119 In asking what elements in filmmaking would help us challenge perceptual
stereotypes, Matsumoto answers “framing, montage, and construction.” These three
aspects are essential in his view because they are the most basic elements of thecinematic form that pertain to the processes of recording and defamiliarization. However,according to Matsumoto, the existing traditions of documentary and narrative filmmaking
failed to challenge perceptual stereotypes because of their inability to interrogate theways in which cinematic form reinforces habituated modes of human perception. He

119

Given their overemphasis on the technological foundation of visual media’s intervention into humanperception, one may be tempted to compare their enthusiasm to that of the European and Japanese futurists;
however, their interest in visual media was accompanied by their acute awareness of the structuringfunction of language in the process of human cognition, a point to which I will come back in the next
chapter. If they insisted on the notion of “things,” it is because for them the central concern was theunlearning of habit, as mediated by language, in human perception. Their interest in visual media was thus
directed neither at the technologically induced shock-effects nor at the aesthetic and visceral fascinations
with the speed of machines but rather at the undermining of perceptual automatism through the technicalmediation of another kind of automatism: mechanical recording.

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argues that the conventional codes of filmmaking rest too comfortably upon themechanical reproduction of phenomenological impressions of reality. In so doing film
uncritically accepts mechanical realism as the given and, as a result, the cinema continues
to mimic our everyday perceptual experience. When documentary filmmaking falls preyto this mimetic reproduction of perceptual reality, it naïvely affirms the self-evidentialityof the mechanically produced image. However, it is precisely the self-evidentiality of theimage that needs to be interrogated first.120
Hence, in order to interrogate this self-evidentiality, argues Matsumoto, thefilmmaker must attain self-reflexivity. The process of making a documentary film could
then become a dialectical process of recording external physical reality as well as internal
psychic reality. He writes, “What I call documentary is . . . to record the trajectory of thefilmmaker’s gazing, that is to say, the gazing of reality with naked eyes devoid ofpreconceptions.”121 Elsewhere Matsumoto calls this dialectical process of recording anddefamiliarization “neo-documentary.” The neo-documentary filmmaker is someone who
is endowed with the awareness that “reality can be recorded only as the document of thefilmmaker’s will to ‘see’ it.”122 To put it differently, neo-documentary filmmaking would
incorporate the elliptic-dialectical tension between the self-evident appearance of reality
and the filmmaker’s negation of it.
This is where Matsumoto comes closest to Abé Kôbô. Both thinkers regard theavant-garde documentary processes of recording and defamiliarization as ways ofdestabilizing established circuits between perception and signification. From time to time120

Matsumoto Toshio, “Hôhô to imêji” [The Method and the Image], Eizô no hakken [The Discovery of the
Mechanically-Produced-Image] (Tokyo: Seiryû shuppan, 2005), 66.
121
Matsumoto Toshio, “Neo-documentarizumu to wa nanika” [What is Neo-Documentarism?] Eizô nohakken [The Discovery of the Mechanically-Produced-Image] (Tokyo: Seiryû shuppan, 2005), 74.
122
Ibid., 75.

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Matsumoto’s vocabulary overlaps with that of Abé. The questions of automatized humanperception, language, mechanically-produced-images (eizô), and “things” are elementsthat recur in both of their writings. As I will discuss more in depth in the next chapter, for
Abé the term “things” stands in for a not-yet-named state of existence. Similarly, for
Matsumoto, “things” are also that which eludes the double snares of signification andhuman consciousness:
When we use the expression such as external “things” or internal “things,” it means“reality consciously perceived for the first time.” This naked reality becomes anobject of consciousness for the first time when the consciousness encounters the notyet-conscious reality of the external world or the internal world. Because this is the
not-yet-named and the not-yet-experienced reality, it cannot help but to destroy
conventional ideas and perceptual stereotypes. As a result, the correspondent relation
between consciousness and reality gets transformed; this transformation occurs
because the fissure opened up between consciousness and reality needs to becorrected with critical awareness.123

I want to highlight phrases, such as “naked reality,” “the not-yet-experienced reality,”“things,” and “stereotypes.” These are exactly the same phrases that appear in thewritings of Abé Kôbô. Because of their disciplinary difference – Matsumoto being afilmmaker and Abé being a writer – their theoretical similarities have hardly attracted theattention of scholars (whether in literary studies or in film studies). However, thediscursive connection between Matsumoto’s and Abé’s theorization of the avant-garde
documentary must be acknowledged and investigated in order to understand theinterlocking strata of postwar Japanese literary and film theories. This connection
between the literary and filmic discourses can be even more clearly understood if we turnto the Debate over Pure Literature, which erupted at the beginning of the 1960s.

123

Ibid., 80.

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The Actuality of Pure Literature
The term junbungaku is often translated as “pure” or serious literature, andgenerally designates a canon of modern Japanese prose writings regarded as worthy of
being called art. But the taxonomic efficacy of this term remains suspect today. As
Edward Seidensticker puts it, “The expression junbungaku (pure literature) is as shifty
and elusive as most critical terms, but it obviously has reference to something admired by
the critic who makes serious use of it.”124 I am evoking this term here neither to debunkits ideological implications (that is, its indebtedness to eighteenth century European
aesthetics and its advocacy of art’s autonomy), nor to affirm it by rehashing a textbook
history of the modern Japanese literary canon (which is too often conflated with thedevelopment of the pure literature). Instead, what I want to provide here is a context andvocabulary to understand the argument for the “novelistic actuality,” put forward by the
postwar literary critic Hirano Ken, which gave rise to the historical event of the Debate
over Pure Literature. As we shall see shortly, Hirano’s argument borrows its most crucial
terms from Hanada’s earlier theorization of documentary. In fact, Hirano appropriates theconcept of actuality, but only in order to advance an argument quite different from that ofHanada. Their shared interest in the concept of actuality notwithstanding, the disparity
between these two theorists must be acknowledged and carefully examined.
As its adjective indicates, the concept of pure literature has its definitive correlate:mass or popular literature (taishû bungaku). Over the years, however, the purported
difference between pure and mass literatures has been repeatedly questioned, discarded,
resurrected, and rejected again. Today, it is often argued, the difference between the two

124

Edward Seidensticker, “The ‘Pure’ and The ‘in-Between’ in Modern Japanese Theories of the Novel,”
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 26 (1966), 175.

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– qualitative and otherwise – is a topic only academics discuss, and is something writers
are no longer concerned about, as they had been in the prewar period. It is indeed
tempting to dismiss this category of pure literature as an outmoded discursive
construction altogether; yet its historical development is worth review, since it informs
the full implications of the Debate over Pure Literature, itself a memorable discursive
event in the history of Japanese literary criticism.
While the idea of literary purity had existed since the Meiji period (1868-1912),
when arguably the modern conception of literature as art took root in Japan, it was during
the massive urbanization of the 1930s that the literary establishment (bundan) pitted theaesthetic autonomy of pure literature against the growing market for mass literature. But
the boundary between the two was never absolute, and writers and critics at the time wereconstantly divided in their opinion over this ideological distinction. Just to give someexamples, eminent writers, such as Tanizaki Jun’ichirô (1886-1965), prioritized the
intrigue of plot and thus the entertainment value of the novel over its purported purity.
Others such as Yokomitsu Riichi (1898-1947), another canonical writer, promoted acompromise with the idea of the “in-between” novel (chûkan shôsetsu).
In principle, the classification of a novelistic work as “pure,” “in-between,” or“mass” literature depended upon its publication venue; literary coterie magazines wereusually reserved for pure literary works, and general-interest magazines and newspapers
for in-between and mass literature. Yet as Hirano points out in the Debate over Pure
Literature, the material basis for this distinction had long been inaccurate by the
beginning of the 1960s, since most pure literature writers did write for newspapers and81general-interest magazines.125 The exponential expansion of the publishing industry in
the postwar years, not least in the area of weekly magazines, contributed to thisaccelerated professionalization of pure literature writers.126 By the end of the 1950s it
became painfully clear to most that pure literature writers – like mass literature writers –made their living by selling their writing: pure literature was a commodity, just like anyother product. Added to this already dubious status of pure literature in the postwar
period was the unabashed commercialism of younger generations of writers, such as
Ishihara Shintarô.127 Ishihara’s career is just one of many examples that attest to theglaring ideological contradictions surrounding the purported purity of pure literature. Outof this climate came Hirano’s statement that the concept of pure literature was alreadybankrupt.

125

Hirano Ken, “‘Gunzô jûgoshûnen ni yosete” [For the 15th Anniversary of Gunzô], Sengo bungaku ronsô[Postwar Literary Debates], eds. Usui Yoshimi, et.al. (Tokyo: Banchô shobô, 1972), 475-476.
126
In the Meiji and Taisho periods prominent pure literature writers often held jobs in academia or thepress. Of course, there were also writers who enjoyed the fortune of inheriting large sums of money and did
not have to work. For this reason, some critics have argued that the best pure literature should beconsidered a product of avocation rather than vocation. The flipside of this argument entailed the idea thatthe production of pure literature should not become a means of earning income. The most widely known
argument in this vein is Kume Masao’s essay, “Junbungaku yogisetu” [A View on Pure Literature as
Avocation], published in the literary journal Bungei shunjû in 1935. Kume proposed this view in order towarn pure literary critics and writers who were stuck in the double bind of trying to professionalize pureliterature (as a means of making living) on the one hand, and to differentiate pure literature from mass
literature on the other. See, Kume Masao, “Junbungaku yogisetu,” Gendai nihon bungaku ronsôshi [AHistory of Modern Japanese Literary Debates], Vol.1, eds. Hirano Ken, et. al. (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1956),
132-134.
127
Ishihara received the prestigious Akutagawa prize for his bestselling novel Taiyô no kisetsu (Season of
the Sun) in 1956. While he was elevated to the level of pure literature writer, he also entered into a contract
with the Nikkatsu film studio to make its filmic adaptation. To the dismay of the older generations of pureliterature critics and writers, Ishihara’s work succeeded in attracting widespread support from youth,
literally expanding the market for pure literature. Ishihara was both chastised and admired for his audacity.
He once even claimed that if he made some money off selling his novels, he would “give up writing novels
and play the stock market instead.” What was particularly offensive in this comment was that the amount ofmoney he cited (five million yen or approximately fifteen thousand U.S. dollars) was not a large sum. In
the words of critic Togaeri Hajime, “Such a manner of speaking invited antipathy from the grownups in theliterary establishment” since the old moral of spending one’s entire life writing novels – not writing novels
to make one’s living – was still persistent among the Japanese literary establishment. See Togaeri Hajime,
Bundan no hôkai [The Breakup of the Literary Establishment], Tokyo: Murayama shoten, 1957, 55. He
indeed gave up writing, and became a politician at the end of the 1960s. Ishihara has been the mayor ofTokyo since 1999.

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In December 1961, Hirano published an essay in the literary coterie magazine,
Bungakukai (The Literary World), wherein he introduced the concept of “actuality” into
an on-going discussion of pure literature. This essay was originally part of his serialized
survey of the literature of the 1930s. Through this essay Hirano attempted to respond to
his critics, who were already taking issue with Hirano’s statement (made a few months
earlier) that the concept of pure literature was obsolete. In this follow-up essay, however,instead of simply doing away with the concept of pure literature, Hirano proposed to rethink the historical development of the category of pure literature. Drawing on the literaryclimate of the 1930s, the era already marked by the full-fledged appearance of massconsumer society in Japan, Hirano suggests that there are indeed three competing ways ofdefining prose literature.128 The concept of purity is just one kind, which is primarily
supported by those who believe in art for the sake of art. Against this view of “the novelof purity,” he argues, there also exist two other kinds, one of which is the view of “thenovel of amusement,” and the other is the view of “the novel of actuality.”
Hirano claims to have drawn this third model – the novel of actuality – from thewritings of Kikuchi Kan and Hirotsu Kazuo, both of whom argued in the mid-1930s thatthe most important value of the novelistic writing lies in its proximity to “life, reality, andsociety.” According to Hirano:
Kikuchi and Hirotsu liberated the literary genre of the novel from the existing
theories of art in general. In so doing, they tried to find the defining characteristics ofthe novel in its adherence to life, reality, and society. Hirotsu defined the novel assomething that is adjacent to life, and Kikuchi emphasized the value of subject matterover everything else. This was, in a way, a non-artistic view of the novel. This viewis completely opposed to today’s conception of pure literature.129
128

For an extensive analysis of the historical emergence of mass culture in Japan, see Marilyn Ivy,
“Formations of Mass Culture,” Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1993), 239-258.
129
Hirano Ken, “Chûkan no shimekukuri” [An Interim Wrap-up], Sengo bungaku ronsô [Postwar Literary
Debates], eds. Usui Yoshimi, et.al. (Tokyo: Banchô shobô, 1972), 492. The emphasis is mine.

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Hirano makes great effort to emphasize the importance of Kikuchi and Hirotsu’s nonartistic conception of the novel in this essay. Instead of positing the value of artistic
purity or entertainment, this way of conceiving the novel centers on its journalistic
referential capacity; that is, it prioritizes the novel’s ability to depict, report, and analyze
present-day actualities. Importantly, neither Kikuchi nor Hirotsu used the specific term
“actuality” (akuchuariti) to describe their views of the novel. As Hirano acknowledges inpassing, the term itself is “a contemporary idiom,” which he is only borrowing in order tomake sense of Kikuchi and Hirotsu’s positions.
Importantly, Hirano’s subtle reference to the contemporaneity of this term has
been glossed over by the scholars of Japanese literature. However, despite scholarly
dismissals of this reference, it proves indispensable for the analysis of Japanesetheoretical discourses on literature and visual media in the postwar period. First, it helps
us to see how the entire debate over pure literature was historically conditioned by theprior avant-garde discourse on actuality, which Hanada’s group generated in the late
1950s. Second, it makes clear that actuality is a transversal concept, which straddles theheterogeneous discourses of avant-garde art and pure literature. As I mentioned above,
this historical connection between the avant-garde and pure literature has been
overlooked in the established literary history of Japanese literature, which dogmaticallypolices its disciplinary boundaries. The avant-garde discourse circulated by Hanada’sgroup, with its heavy focus on visual media (film in particular), is hence excluded inadvance from the proper domain of Japanese literary history. However, we could gain amore nuanced understanding of the intellectual and artistic climate of postwar Japan,

84when we take an interdisciplinary approach to it. Before I comment further on this point,
however, a brief examination of key responses given to Hirano’s theory is in order.
Understandably, many critics raised objections to Hirano’s claim that actuality
could be considered the most important factor for revitalizing pure literature, and thatpure literature writers should learn from the writers of crime fiction and political novels,
which take real life incidents as their primary referents. One of those who squarely
opposed this suggestion was Nakamura Mitsuo. According to Nakamura, actuality is only
a temporary attribute of a literary work, which evaporates over time. He suggests thatworks such as Shinjû ten no amijima (The Love Suicides at Amijima) by Chikamatsu
Monzaemon or Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert were “actual” at the time of their
publications because of their topical references to then current social situations. To thereaders of their time the novels would have appeared timely and relevant, but not to those
who came after. But the fact they remain admired by posterity means that the true literaryvalue of these works resides elsewhere.130 Nakamura writes: “For me actuality means
factuality, or reality in its most basic sense. Actuality also means topical sociality, oreven sensational novelty. This is why I do not think this could become such an importantelement, which constitutes the ‘central axis’ of the history of the novel, as [Hirano]suggested.”131
As is evident from Nakamura’s argument, the focus of the Debate over Pure
Literature quickly shifted from the initial question of whether or not pure literature still
existed, to the question of whether or not this journalistic concept of actuality could be
used to define pure literature. Other critics followed Nakamura’s lead and debated the130

Nakamura Mitsuo, “Kenka dewa naku giron o” [Let us debate instead of fighting], Sengo bungaku ronsô[Postwar Literary Debates], eds. Usui Yoshimi, et.al. (Tokyo: Banchô shobô, 1972), 515.
131
Ibid.

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inappropriateness of this concept. One of those who rejected it outright was Yoshimoto
Takaaki, a left-wing literary critic and poet known as the intellectual foe of Hanada
Kiyoteru. In his 1962 essay titled Sengo bungaku no genjitsusei: Ackuchuariti wa kanôka(“Realness of Postwar Literature: Is ‘Actuality’ Possible?”), Yoshimoto directly attacks
Hirano’s use of actuality as a criterion for literary judgment. For Yoshimoto novelistic
actuality is dependent upon fact-based truth claims. But the valorization of facts overother elements, such as literary style and the self-reflexivity of the author, would be
simply “regressive.” For it would mean forfeiting the autonomous, “internal” reality of awork of literature. He writes, “Whether you call it actuality or documentary does notmatter; the dissolution of expressive consciousness into raw materials means a regressionof pure literature. But for pure literature to go through a positive ‘alteration,’ expressive
consciousness must be elevated beyond the knowledge of given conditions. In otherwords, it should lead to revolutionary changes in literary style itself.” 132
Yoshimoto’s objection thus presented the orthodox view of literary criticism: awork of literature should be judged by its intrinsic quality, especially through its formal
elements, and not by its topical relevance or factual accuracy.133 Importantly, however,
Yoshimoto was not alone in pointing out the inadequacy of Hirano’s theory. Hirano
himself wavered about his own argument. As early as December 1961, Hirano admitted
that he was not entirely comfortable with his initial remark. For instance, in a publisheddialogue with the writer Haniya Yutaka, Hirano expresses his ambivalence as follows:

132

Yoshimoto Takaaki, “Sengo bungaku no genjitsusei: Akuchuariti wa kanôka” [“The Realness of
Postwar Literature: Is ‘Actuality’ Possible?”], Mosha to kagami [The Copy and The Mirror] (Tokyo:
Shunjûsha, 1976), 7.
133
It is worth noting that American New Criticism reached its height in the 1950s, and was introduced toJapan in the early 1960s by critics such as Etô Jun.

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On the whole, I dislike what has been referred to as actuality. I have been feeling that
actuality is a problem that belongs to the stage prior to what might be called the momentof artistic filtration, and we critics should discuss what has been artistically filtered. You
know, in recent years young critics have been saying this and that about actuality, which I
never liked. But somehow, under the circumstances, my argument ended up that way.134

I want to highlight the passage wherein Hirano suggests that actuality is a concept that“young critics” have been using before he introduced it. This comment deserves attention,
since it solves the riddle why he has referred to the term as “a contemporary idiom” in thefirst place. Elsewhere he also notes, “I initially was of the opinion that Hanada Kiyoteru
and others in the Kiroku geijutsu no kai should handle the issues of actuality anddocumentary.”135 In other words, Hirano admits that he was directly borrowing his key
concept of actuality from contemporary avant-garde discourse.
This may appear to be a deceptively simple point to make, but it contains key
information that overturns past interpretations of the pure literature debate. To pay
attention to Hirano’s reference to Hanada is not a matter of philology; it is a matter ofunearthing the historical conditions of possibility for his statement. Here I am using theterm “statement” in the specific sense defined by Michel Foucault. A statement is acomponent of a discourse that is “neither visible nor hidden.” There is nothing hidden
behind the statement (Hirano means what he says: actuality is a useful concept for therevitalization of pure literature). But to analyze its epistemological significance requires
something more than the usual hermeneutic digging for meaning. As Foucault suggests,

134

Haniya Yutaka and Hirano Ken, “‘Teitai no naka no kanôsei” [Possibilities in the State of Stagnation], inHaniya Yutaka zenshû by Haniya Yutaka. Vol. 13 (Tokyo: Kôdansha, 2000), 55.
135
Hirano quoted by Satô Izumi in “1960 nen no akuchuariti/ riariti” [Actuality/Reality of 1960], Gendai
shisô [Contemporary Thought], 33.3 (March 2005), 188.

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to analyze a statement’s historically determined epistemic conditions “requires a certainchange of viewpoint and attitude to be recognized and examined in itself.”136
If Hirano’s deployment of the term “actuality” had long puzzled some of theparticipants of the debate as well as scholars of Japanese literature, it is because they did
not dare to go beyond the prescribed boundaries of literary criticism. Seidensticker, forinstance, is perplexed over the ambiguity of the term, but reassures English language
readers that neither Hirano nor his interlocutors seemed to know what the term reallymeant. He writes:
It cannot be said that Hirano is a paragon of lucidity, and the foreign reader may takecomfort in the fact that Japanese readers seem to have trouble too. In a dialogue
between Hirano and Matsumoto Seichô, published in Gunzô for June 1962,
Matsumoto asked Hirano to define once and for all what he meant by actuality.
Hirano answered that it was very simple and talked on for a closely printed page,concluding his discourse thus: ‘I but use ‘actuality’ tentatively to refer to the problem
of how to discover something more universal, something that does not immediately
fall into patternization.’ And so the problem begins and ends in a peculiar AngloJapanese jargon, for the last word is the English ‘pattern’ made abstract by theJapanese suffix ka.137

The semantic difficulty posed by the term is similarly addressed by Matthew Strecher,
who writes: “Clearly Hirano wishes to use the term ‘actuality’ as something related to,
but not synonymous with, ‘realism’; the term ‘actuality’ seems to encompass both
realism in terms of probability and plausibility (that is, people who fall off mountains die),and also the accurate representation of the actual world, including real people andplaces.”138
As is evident from Hirano’s aforementioned comment that actuality is somethingthat exists prior to the artistic process of “filtering” raw materials, realism may not be the136

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse of Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan
Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 111.
137
Seidensticker, 184.
138
Matthew C. Stretcher, “Purely Mass or Massively Pure? The Division Between ‘Pure’ and ‘Mass’
Literature,” Monumenta Nipponica, 51. 3 (Autumn 1996), 361.

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best way to explain his understanding of this concept. Elsewhere Hirano also suggeststhat the only way to revitalize pure literature is to “socialize” it; pure literature writers
must attain “actual interests” in their society. 139 It is not difficult to detect a similarity
between Hirano’s call for the socialization of literature and nineteenth century “realist”
literature, especially the work of Balzac. We may recall how Balzac made great use ofjournalistic coverage of topical scandals, social issues, and up-to-date cultural trends(gleaned from the newspaper repository of fait divers). If the term realism were to be
used to describe Hirano’s position, then, it should be made clear that it is not probability
and plausibility that matter, but rather journalistic interests that matter. Strecher’s second
interpretation (“the accurate representation of the actual world”) seems to fare better, but
this also needs modification. It should be made explicit that “the actual world” at stake in
Hirano’s argument is located in the present, not the past.
Pushing his argument that pure literature must socialize through its engagementwith actuality, Hirano further suggested that politics is the most “actual” matter. Thisreliance on politics as the criteria of defining pure literature infuriated many of hiscolleagues, who interpreted Hirano’s argument as a strategic attempt to subordinate
literature to politics. As Yoshimoto’s objection demonstrates, critics found Hirano’s
overvaluation of the factual (what they called “documentary”) elements in literatureunacceptable, and as Nakamura’s reference to the work of playwright Chikamatsu
indicates, they particularly disliked Hirano’s elevation of the topical sensational elements
in literature.140

139

Hirano Ken, “Chûkan no shimekukuri,” 493.
Chikamatsu’s jôruri (puppet) play, The Love Suicide at Amijima, is said to have been written in thewake of a tragic double-suicide, which became the news of the day in 1720. The fact that the play was
written within a few weeks after the real incident was important in the publicity as well as the popularity of

140

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If Hirano’s theory of novelistic actuality caused such negative reactions among
literary critics of his time, it was not because he simply endorsed “realism” but because
he virtually affirmed political journalism as the model of pure literature. His repeatedemphasis upon the medium specificity of prose thus makes sense only when this absent
term of journalism is inserted. Although the direct reference to journalism is
symptomatically absent from the whole debate, it is the promise of the temporal
immediacy and mass appeal of the journalistic mode of communication (something thatthe purported aesthetic timelessness of pure literature negates) that looms large.141 In
order to understand the full implications of Hirano’s argument, however, we need to lookbeyond the limited scope of the pure literature debate, and go back to the avant-garde
documentary discourse of the 1950s.
Despite Hirano’s conscious borrowing of the term from Hanada’s group, theconcept of actuality did not signify the same thing for these two parties. In fact, theirinterpretations are diametrically opposed. I will call Hirano’s theory “pro-journalistic.” Itis pro-journalistic not because it simply appropriates journalistic elements but rather

the work. Its temporal proximity to the real event was as important as its factual reference. It should also be
noted that already in the early eighteenth century, when Chikamatsu wrote this play, Japan enjoyed aconsiderable circulation of printed news. Although Chikamatsu’s work belongs to the Edo period (16001867), that is to say, the period prior to Japan’s modernization, his work is clearly journalistic.
141
The relevance of journalism to this debate becomes even clearer when we take into consideration thegeneral intellectual climate at the beginning of the 1960s. Within fifteen years or so after the end of WWIIJapan has undergone dramatic changes, among which was the accelerated pace and the expanded scale ofits mass media. From weekly magazines to weekly screenings of films, from hourly radio shows to daily
broadcasts on television, the pace life in postwar Japan was firmly set by the media. If the 1930s was thefirst phase of Japan’s transformation into a media society, the 1950s was the second. Added to this was the
public’s renewed interest in documentary genres, a point that will shortly be discussed further. Intellectuals
and artists responded to this changing media environment; some nervously, and others enthusiastically. As
in the 1930s, Japanese intellectuals and artists of the 1950s underwent what I have called the journalisticturn. The Sartrean ideal of social engagement found sympathetic supporters among Japanese intellectuals
and artists, who, like their French counter-parts, felt a pressing need to break away from the socially inept
traditions of aestheticism and academicism. The relation between art and the journalistic media became thequestion of the day. Given this historical context the seemingly sudden intrusion of documentary
journalism into the discourse of pure literature is not as surprising as it may first appear.

90

because he sees the journalistic mode of reportage as the model of pure literature. As hiscomment that prose literature is by nature adjacent to reportage suggests, he sees therelation between literature and journalism in terms of resemblance.142 Pure literature’s
relation to journalism hence remains mimetic, and the actuality-effect of journalism istransposed onto the realm of literary production. In contrast, I will call Hanada’s
theoretical model of actuality “counter-journalistic,” in which the affirmation of actuality
as the “critical relevance” of a work of art to its contemporary social conditions displaces
the sensation of the mediatized actuality-effect.
As we saw earlier, the avant-garde discourse on documentary, which Hanada
initiated in the 1950s, did not simply affirm journalistic referentiality. Instead, it
questioned existing modes of documentary film and literary reportage. In particular, it
rejected the self-evidentiality of fact and commonsense. While affirming the referential
capacity of journalism to address the immediate present-day actualities, this group ofavant-garde documentarists therefore remained skeptical of the overall actuality-effectconstructed by the mainstream media. Arguably, it is their skepticism towards the lure of
the actuality-effect that pushed them to re-define the concepts of actuality anddocumentary. After all, the question of documentary composed only half of their
theoretical and practical concerns; it occupied one pole of their elliptic-dialectic vision of
the avant-garde activism.

142

Hirano Ken, Shôwa bungaku no kanôsei [Possibilities of Shôwa Literature] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten,1972), 26.

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From Material Existence to the Temporal Presence of Actuality
But how, one may ask, did the concept of actuality enter into avant-garde
documentary discourse in the first place? As Hirano acknowledges, the popularity of theterm “actuality” (akuchuariti) largely owes its circulation to the works of Hanada’s grouploosely associated with the Kiroku geijutsu no kai in the 1950s. To understand why thisconcept became so important among this particular group of avant-garde critics andartists, I will provide a historical perspective from two different angles: the first is thework of Marxist philosopher Tosaka Jun, and the second is the reception of the British
documentary film theory by Japanese film critics.
As I suggested in the previous chapter, Hanada and Tosaka share Marxist
concerns with the interdependence of the avant-garde (or the vanguard) and the masses, a
concern that also manifests in their shared interests in journalism and the mass media.
Against the grain of Japanese philosophers immersed in their pursuit of “timeless” truths,
Tosaka often argued that philosophy must share a historically situated perspective onjournalistic practices, since criticism is what constitutes the kernel of philosophy. He
argued: “Whether the period lasts for a day or for a century does not matter, but[philosophical] criticism can function as criticism only when it takes as its point of
departure the current-ness (jijisei) rooted in a certain period of time or a season. In thissense all criticism – insofar as its value lies in its social function – is a topicalcommentary upon current affairs.” 143 Echoing Tosaka, Hanada too emphasizes theimportance of re-conceptualizing the avant-garde critic through the figure of thejournalist in contradistinction to the transcendent figure of the academician or aesthete143

Tosaka Jun, “Nichijôsei ni tsuite” [On Everydayness], Tosaka Jun zenshû [Collected Works of TosakaJun], Vol. 4 (Tokyo: Keisôsha, 1966), 140.

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who remains aloof to worldly affairs. 144 Tosaka’s distinction between journalism andacademicism indeed warrants close attention, as it sheds light on Hanada’s conception ofavant-garde activism.
In his critique of the institutional academic discipline of philosophy, Tosaka
argues that philosophy needs to be “actual,” and must make itself relevant to the time ofthe present. Writing in the 1930s against the rise of ethnocentric fascism in Japan, Tosaka
fervently argues that the discipline of philosophy must begin to integrate the criticality ofjournalism, instead of allowing philosophers to avert their gaze from the current politicalsituation and retreat into the safe haven of ideational abstraction. For Tosaka,academicism and journalism form two principal ideological apparatuses, which can be
dialectically synthesized to produce a viable critique of existing conditions that will leadto social transformations.145 He therefore defines philosophy first and foremost as apractice of timely criticism situated in the present.146
Like his European Marxist contemporary Theodor Adorno, Tosaka’s interest in
historically situated philosophical criticism was also accompanied by his distrust of thetranscendental idealist dispositions of a phenomenology that was in vogue at the time.
“All branches of phenomenology remain a-historical,” writes Tosaka in his On Japanese
Ideology (1935).147 In a similar vein Tosaka criticizes Heidegger’s philological approachto phenomenology: “Of course nothing is wrong with the existence of philology as adiscipline, but the actuality of the present world cannot become an object of philological

144

Ibid.
Tosaka Jun, “Ideorogii gairon” [General Remarks on Ideology], Tosaka Jun zenshû [The Collected
Works of Tosaka Jun], Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Keisôsha, 1966), 118.
146
Tosaka Jun, “Jaanarizumu to tetsugaku no kôshô” [The Encounter between Journalism and Philosophy],
Tosaka Jun zenshû [The Collected Works of Tosaka Jun], Vol. 4, 148.
147
Tosaka Jun, Nihon ideorogiiron [On Japanese Ideology] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1977), 46.
145

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inquiries.” 148 Here he deliberately uses the loanword akutuaritii (“actuality”) to
underscore his point. As his earlier works on newspaper journalism and literature makeclear, the loanword akuchuaritii for Tosaka encompasses both the temporal immediacy
and practicality characteristic of journalism. Tosaka’s critique of phenomenology andphilology and his affirmation of journalism thus complement one another. Neither
phenomenology nor philology offer a philosophical mode of critique that allows criticalengagement with present-day actualities.
The dialectical synthesis of philosophy and journalism in turn becomes possible
when the critic takes his or her historical relationship to actualities as the necessary
condition of criticism. In his writings this particular term “actuality” is hence used inconjunction with related terms, such as “quotidian,” “practical,” “current,” and“topical.”149 It is a term that is strongly associated with Marxist critiques of present-day
conditions. Pointing out Tosaka’s Marxist preoccupation with the temporality of thepresent, Harry Harootunian also comments upon this concept of actuality and its temporal
specificity:
To envisage the current situation – the now – philosophically opened the way toevaluating and even judging those “journalistic phenomena” that concentrate on daily
eventfulness (jijisei) and to explaining why, therefore, they are necessarily a problemof actuality for both literature and philosophy. Hence, the problem of everydayness
was intensely bonded to the question of the “situation” (jikyoku), implying, of course,
the recognition of a specific temporality.150

Though Harootunian does not elaborate here, Tosaka draws his temporally specificconcept of “actuality” from contemporary academic discourse on newspaper journalism,
which was quickly taking shape around 1930.
148

Ibid., p.48. The emphasis is in the original.
Tosaka, “Jaanarizumu to tetsugaku no kôshô,” 150.
150
Harry D. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 132.
149

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Indeed it is crucial to note that Tosaka devotes several paragraphs in this 1934
essay to explicating this elusive concept of actuality, which he describes alternately byusing the Japanese loanword akuchuaritii and the English word actuality. While
Harootunian focuses solely on the Japanese translation (jissaisei) for the English word
actuality used by Tosaka in this essay, it is worth pointing out that Tosaka suggests a
more appropriate translation for this English word actuality is not jissaisei but jijisei(“topicality” or “eventfulness” in Harootunian’s translation).151 Tosaka writes: “If weequate the term akuchuaritii with the term jissaisei [‘practical-facticity’], it unnecessarily
invites arbitrary metaphysical interpretation. But if we write it in a more quotidianmanner as jijisei [‘topicality’] or jikyokusei [‘current affairs’], its intended meaning
becomes clearer.”152 My cumbersome literal translation notwithstanding, what I want tohighlight in this particular passage is that Tosaka brings up notions of topicality andcurrent affairs that bear strong journalistic overtones. At stake here is the centrality ofjournalism and its attendant concept of actuality (understood here as timeliness andtopical relevance) in Tosaka’s re-conception of the philosophical practice of criticism.
As the historian of journalism Wada Yôichi points out, the academic study ofjournalism in Japan flourished at the beginning of the 1930s, and Tosaka was one of thefirst among his contemporaries to write theoretical essays on the topic of newspaper
journalism. Another point of interest here is the discursive influence of the German
Zeitungswissenschaft (newspaper science) upon this generation of Japanese intellectuals

151

I translate jijisei (%&') as “current-ness” or “topicality” in order to emphasize its distinctly temporaland journalistic connotations instead of following Harootunian’s translation (“eventfulness”).
152
Tosaka, “Nichijôsei ni tsuite,” 138.

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and media critics.153 It is no accident that almost all the bibliographical references in
Tosaka’s essays on newspaper journalism are German, and that Tosaka uses the German
word Aktualität interchangeably with the English word actuality and the Japanese
loanword aktuaritii in these essays.
In fact, the concept of actuality was indispensable for many prewar Japanese
intellectuals and scholars of the mass media, though its currency weakened when the newgeneration of the media scholars trained in American theories of mass communication
displaced the previous generation that was conversant with the German discourse of
Zeitungswissenschaft. Tosaka was among the older generation that paid heed to theconcept of Aktualität. 154 More importantly, he also developed his own Marxist
conception of philosophical criticism around this particular concept of actuality. In sodoing Tosaka brought together the journalistic concept of Aktualität (timeliness andcontemporary relevance) and the materialist concept of Wirklichkeit (the actually existentreality) in order to express his conviction that the philosopher-critic must engage withtemporally present and materially existent reality.155 The loanword akuchuaritii is thus
used to convey this view of critical engagement with the present-day reality.

153

Wada Yôichi, “Meiji/Taisho ki no jaanarizumuron” [Theories of Journalism During the Meiji andTaisho Periods], Shinbungaku hyôron [Newspaper Studies Review] 18 (March 1969): 70-75.
154
It is worth pointing out here that this particular concept of Aktualität also occupies an important place inthe philosophical writings of Walter Benjamin, another Marxist critic who was interested in the politicaluse of journalism and the rise of mass media in the 1930s. Another Marxist critic who evoked this conceptof Aktualität in relation to philosophy is Theodor Adorno. We find a comparable repositioning ofphilosophy in Adorno’s 1931 lecture delivered at the University of Frankfurt, which is aptly titled “TheActuality of Philosophy” (Die Aktualität der Philosophie). Like Tosaka, Adorno offers a historicalmaterialist critique of Husserlian phenomenology and Heideggerian ontology for their shared disposition
towards a-historical approaches to being and reality. See Theodor Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,”
The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), 29.
155
Tosaka uses these German terms to clarify his ideas. For instance, he argues that academicism (a term
which includes the professionalized fields of literature and art for Tosaka) functions in a contrastingmanner to journalism, and is said to embody the quality of Unaktualität. It is characterized, in short, by its
in-actual engagement with reality. Tosaka Jun, “Shinbun genshô no bunseki,” 125.

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Hanada’s frequent deployment of the loanword akuchuaritii (“actuality”) in his
discussion of the avant-garde and documentary suggests the influence of Tosaka’s earlier
theorization of actuality. What unites these two Marxist thinkers is their particularunderstanding of cultural criticism; it is a historically determined, time-bound act
addressing the present. Neither of them takes criticism to mean simple commentary or
exegetic acts performed in the abstract realm of theory. Their shared interest in theconcept of actuality indicates their Marxist conception of criticism as a mode of praxis
firmly rooted in the present.
Secondly, but also in a related manner, “actuality” (akuchuariti) became a key
word among the postwar avant-garde critics and artists gathered around Hanada becauseof its semantic difference from the word “reality” (riariti). The term reality was too close
to the connotations of philosophical idealism and socialist realism, from which theseavant-garde critics and artists wished to move away. They thus enlisted the term actuality
in order to part ways from the existing discourses on artistic realism while they ventured
to redefine the concept of documentary.
In a roundtable discussion held in 1957, for instance, Hanada suggests that a clear
distinction must be made between “reality” and “actuality.” He notes, “There has been atendency to contrast reality to actuality; in order to shatter socialist realism we should
focus more on the latter aspect of actuality.”156 In the early 1950s Hanada also took issue
with the well-known film critic Tsumura Hideo’s interpretation of British documentary
film theory. 157 In his essay on the British documentary film theorist Paul Rotha, Tsumura

156

Abé Kôbô et. al. “Haado boirudo: Genzai no me” [Hardboiled: the Eyes of the Present], Abé Kôbô
zenshû [The Complete Works of Abé Kôbô], Vol. 7 (Tokyo: Shinchôsha, 1998), 25.
157
Hanada Kiyoteru, “Gûzen no mondai” [The Question of Chance], Hanada Kiyoteru chosakushû
[Selected Works of Hanada Kiyoteru], Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1963), 35.

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argued that Rotha deliberately used the word “actuality” instead of “reality” in his
definition of documentary film as the “creative dramatization of actuality.” Heproclaimed, “Rotha does not use the expression dramatization of reality; instead he says
dramatization of actuality.”158 At first sight, this may appear to be a pointless argument,
since Rotha was directly quoting this phrase from John Grierson, who indiscriminately
used both “reality” and “actuality” in his definition of documentary. But in the course of
Tsumura’s (mis)reading, a heavily philosophical interpretation of documentary wasproduced. In his interpretation of Rotha, Tsumura introduced the philosophical categories
of reality and actuality; he argued that the conceptual difference between reality andactuality (made by Rotha, according to Tsumura) can be better understood if we translatethese English words into German: Realität and Wirklichkeit.159
As Tsumura points out, the term Realität in German philosophy signifies themetaphysical realm of “truth” or “essence.” By contrast, the term Wirklichkeit signifies
reality in the sense of concrete material or sensual “existence.” Marx, for instance, used
the term Wirklichkeit to discuss his materialist understanding of reality in Theses on
Feuerbach (1845). The intellectual history surrounding these two German words is quite
complicated, as Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant suggests.160 It is not my intention here
158

Tsumura Hideo, Zoku eiga to hihyô [Revised Film and Criticism] (Tokyo: Koyama shoten, 1940), 144.
Ibid. These two German words were indiscriminately translated into Japanese using the same word
genjitsu during the prewar period. It was Tosaka Jun who put an end to this indiscriminate mixing of two
terms– Wirklichkeit and Realität –from a Marxist point of view. As Harry Harootunian suggests, “For
Tosaka, genjitsu acted as a code for idealist philosophers who envisaged reality at a higher plane ofexistence than at the level of mere, actual occurrences of society” (Overcome by Modernity: History,
Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan, 129). Tosaka thus began using the loanword akuchuariti
instead of genjitsu in order to attenuate the philosophical baggage of idealism attached to the latter word.
160
In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Martin Heidegger warns “not to take the Kantian term ‘reality’[‘Realität’] in the same sense as modern ‘epistemology’ does, according to which ‘reality’ [‘Realität’]means the same as ‘actuality’ [‘Wirklichkeit’] – which Kant indicates with the terms ‘Dasein’ or ‘existence’[‘Existenz’]” (61). In other words, while a finite human existence (Dasein) pertains to the existing
phenomenal world of “actuality,” pure reason can transcend the limit of empirical knowledge (derived fromthe phenomenal world) by means of pure concepts. That is, the analytical power of pure reason tries to15998

to recount all the philosophical debates pertaining to the difference between Realität andWirklichkeit. But this distinction is important here, since Tsumura’s argument became a
direct object of critique in Hanada’s theorization of the documentary genre. To sum up,
the concept of actuality in Japanese film theory was already heavily inflected byphilosophy by the time the avant-garde documentary movement arose.
Importantly, when Hanada challenged Tsumura’s interpretation of Rotha’s theory
in the 1950s, he provided a new interpretation of the key concept of actuality. For Hanada
the difference between reality and actuality was not only existential, but also temporal. In
his discussion of documentary film theory and its usefulness for avant-garde art, Hanada
brought to the forefront the journalistic connotations of actuality as timeliness andrelevance, connotations that are present in the German word Aktualität. In so doing hefollowed the suit of Tosaka, redefining the concept of actuality in direct relation to theexisting conditions of the present time.
The present is, in turn, defined by chance or accidentality, the potential for anutterly unpredictable change. Explaining this view of the present, Hanada writes, “I think
we can regard actuality as accidentality. Reality is what dialectically synthesizes
possibility and necessity, but accidentality would be the middle term that mediates
both.”161 Actuality here is thus envisioned in relation to the openness of the present tounpredictable changes in the future; it becomes the mediating term for the Marxist
dialectical conception of history.

“know the supersensible being rationally” by demonstrating the “objective reality” of the conceptual
categories, which belong to ontological knowledge and not empirical knowledge. See Martin Heidegger,
Kant and The Problem of Metaphysics. Fifth Edition. trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1997), 61.
161
Hanada Kiyoteru, “Eiga kantoku ron” [On Film Directors], Bungakuteki eigaron [Literary Theories ofFilm], eds. Noma Hiroshi, et. al. (Tokyo: Chûôkôron, 1957), 76.

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However, the theoretical implication of this concept of actuality for the avantgarde documentary movement does not end here. For it brought forth another problem:the perception of actuality. As Hanada suggests in the 1954 roundtable discussion aptly
titled Akuchuariti no tame no kadai (“The Challenge For Actuality”) it is not enough for
artists and critics to simply pay attention to their immediate present, to the “here andnow.” 162 For the human perception of this immediate present is always already mediatedby automatized perceptual habits, ideologies, and technologies of perception. The task ofavant-garde documentary thus becomes an interrogation of what immediately appears
actual to our sense perceptions. This is why the elliptic-dialectic process of recording anddefamiliarization becomes necessary. Documentary practice understood in this way nolonger affirms journalistic modes of engagement with the present in a wholehearted
manner. Instead it takes what passes as actuality as its object of critique, and byextension, the actuality-effect produced by journalism and the mass media. It is for thisreason I call the avant-garde documentary approach to actuality “counter-journalistic.”
Here it is instructive to contrast Hirano’s pro-journalistic defense of pureliterature and Hanada’s counter-journalistic critique of documentary again. In Hirano’s
circular theory of novelistic actuality journalism and art are simply superimposed to forma single static center. In Hanada’s elliptic theory of the avant-garde documentarist
actuality journalism and art constitute a veritable dialectic. The secret of the dialecticalcritique of the present thus resides in the elliptic tension between the journalistic pole of
documentary practice and the artistic pole of avant-garde practice.

162

Hanada Kiyoteru, et. al. “Akuchuariti no tame no kadai” [The Challenge for Actuality], Bijutsu hihyô[Art Criticism], 25 (January 1954): 15-31.

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As I argued earlier, this elliptic-dialectical tension between the journalisticdocumentary pole and the artistic-avant-garde pole also helps us understand sudden
stylistic changes occurring in the filmmaking practice of the 1960s. The sudden explosionof the use of the freeze- and still-frames on the one hand, and the use of extreme closeups on the other, are indicative of this tension. Not all filmmakers attempted to build theirwork upon this tension, but, as demonstrated, this tension proves productive in the worksof Matsumoto Toshio and Teshigahara Hiroshi, two filmmakers who belong to the avantgarde documentary movement. In a different manner, this tension also proved productive
for filmmakers who are not directly associated with the avant-garde documentary
movement (see Chapter Four and Chapter Five). Importantly, the members of the avantgarde documentary movement articulate this tension more forcefully in their writings
than in their artistic works. While this movement did not produce many concrete works
that actualized their theoretical viewpoints, their discourse is worth returning to because
it addressed the challenges of making avant-garde art “relevant” to its present-day, social,
cultural, and political conditions.
The next chapter will turn to the literary and filmic works of Abé Kôbô, anotherkey member of this avant-garde documentary movement, in order to approach thisquestion of the critical relevance of avant-garde practice from a different angle. While
this chapter focused on the centrality of documentary practice for this group, the next
chapter will focus on the problematic of perceptual habits that constitutes the other poleof the elliptic-dialectic of the avant-garde documentary. In doing so, we will revisit thequintessentially avant-gardist question of habit in relation to the micropolitics of101perception; that is, politics that operate at the molecular level of organizing anddelimiting the horizon of our sense perceptions.

102CHAPTER THREE
The Wall of Language and the Micropolitics of Perception
In this chapter, I want to examine the question of habit in relation to themicropolitics of perception, and in so doing revisit the most contested notion associatedwith the practice of avant-garde art: defamiliarization. This notion of defamiliarization
has become, arguably, a clichéd tactic belonging to the bygone eras of avant-garde
activism and film theory. There are two reasons for revisiting this apparently outmoded
tactic: one is historical and the other is theoretical. First, while defamiliarization is often
categorically aligned with the legacy and the conceptual limits of the “historical avantgarde” of the 1920s and the politicized film theory of the 1970s, its attendant questions ofhabit and sense perception appear relevant to current discourses on the correlation
between the aesthetic and the political. The recent upsurge of academic interest in theaesthetic theory of Jacques Rancière offers a case in point.
Rancière’s principal notion of the “distribution of the sensible” (partage dusensible) emphasizes the policing and ordering of our sense perception, which
subsequently delimit what is “visible” and what is “sayable,” and in turn attests to thehaunting presence of the seemingly outmoded concept of defamiliarization. In its
radically democratic stance of affirming the common, Rancière’s theory of the sensible
revisits the question of perceptual habit from the other side of the avant-garde. Instead ofsimply equating the notion of commonness with the dominant structure of control andregulation over what is sensible or perceptible (as the historical avant-garde did), histheory brings it to the side of its contestants: the common is no longer the object of
critique and skepticism, but the site of struggle and an object of affirmation. In this sense

103his theory presents an inverted model of the historical avant-garde’s affirmation of
defamiliarization, in which the very notion of commonness was aligned with habituatedorders of sense perceptions (e.g. common sense), and therefore the target of subversion
rather than affirmation. But Rancière’s reformulation of perception as the ground ofpolitics is not necessarily opposed to avant-gardist contestations of perceptual habit.
Though differently inflected, it grapples with the same set of problematics that surrounddiscourses of avant-garde art practice and political vanguardism. For the distribution of
the sensible ultimately brings the question of “the common” back into the discourse of art
and politics. In so doing, Rancière’s theory reformulates the political contestations of theavant-garde in their efforts to disrupt the perceptual habits that support the existingorder.163
Keeping in mind this renewed interest, on the part of recent leftist theories of art
and visual media, in the problematic of sense perception, I want to examine the works of
Abé Kôbô from the 1950s and early 1960s, the period when he was involved in what I
call the avant-garde documentary movement, whose critical relationship to journalism(the practice that affirms the notion of commonness at its foundation) was discussed in
the last chapter. The works of this seminal postwar avant-garde writer provide us with theopportunity to probe some of the actual products of the avant-garde documentary
movement, especially of its literary wing. This is the second reason for taking up thenotion of defamiliarization and going back to the problem of perceptual habit. Abé’s

163

For Rancière’s conceptualization of politics in relation to commonness, democracy, and policing, see
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999). For his discussion of different regimes of art and attendant distributions of thesensible, see Jacques Rancière, The Politics of the Aesthetics: the Distribution of the Sensible, trans.
Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), and Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans.
Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007).

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work in particular demonstrates how avant-garde contestations of perceptual habits arefundamentally linked to the problem of language. Since, as we will see in this chapter,
habit was aligned with the order-giving function of language, visual media became acentral mode of exploring alternative modes of perception for this group of postwar
artists and critics. Abé’s work particularly attests to this type of exploration.
However, as we saw in Chapter One, the elliptic-dialectical understanding ofavant-garde activism does not envision the dismissal of order as such; the process offormation as much as that of deformation is necessary. Abé’s works attest to the difficult
theoretical necessity of sustaining the elliptic-dialectical tension between the formation of
habit and the deformation (or defamiliarization) of it. In order to highlight the trajectoryof Abé’s gradual involvement in visual media, which occurred alongside his involvementin the avant-garde documentary movement, I will start with an analysis of his literary andtheoretical writings, and then move onto a close reading of the film, Suna no onna
(Woman in the Dunes, 1964). This exemplary film provides a concrete platform forinterrogating the micropolitics of perception that informs Abé’s avant-gardist interest in
defamiliarization. Particular attention will be paid to the film’s obsession with minute,microscopic modes of perceptions.
The Generality of Language and the Specificity of the Mechanically Produced
Image
In the short story titled Itansha no kokuhatsu (“Prosecution of the Heretic,” 1948),
Abé makes the self-proclaimed “jury of humanity” character ask the “I” character thefollowing question: “Do you believe in the existence of things which humans cannot

105

name?”164 A few pages later, the “I” defiantly asserts his solidarity with “things andbeasts that lurk inside an existence which has yet to become a verb.”165 According to thelogic of this story, the existence that is yet to become a verb remains outside the snare oflanguage. It is yet to be determined, designated, and divided by the copular verb. The
existence that is yet to become a verb, in short, belongs to the state of indeterminacy.
Crucially, however, Abé aligns this not-yet-named existence with an artistic potentiality
on the one hand, and a cognitive threat on the other.
One of Abé’s short essays from 1964, the year when he made the film Suna no
onna (Woman in the Dunes) with his long-time filmmaker friend Teshigahara Hiroshi,
briefly returns to this question of naming. While it is safe to say that Abé was concernedwith the nominal dimension of language throughout his career, the particular timing of
this brief essay warrants attention. In it Abé remarks on the power of language to tame anotherwise threatening existence. Language is a medium by which indeterminate “things”
get transformed into determinate objects. Taking the example of a lion, he writes: “At thetime when the animal we usually call lion was not yet given this particular name, it musthave remained a strange monster . . . every time someone encountered it, it appeared as
an unknown entity.”166 Only when humans introduced generality through language todesignate “it” as a “lion,” were they able to overcome their fear of this unnamed beast.
Language for Abé thus not only provides a grid of intelligibility but also enables
one to subsume otherwise dissimilar things under the general category of the same. The
price of generalization through language is, of course, the disappearance of the164

Abé Kôbô, “Itansha no kokuhatsu,” Abé Kôbô zensakuhin, Vol. 1 (Tokyo: Shinchôsha, 1972), 154. My
translation.
165
Ibid., 140.
166
Abé Kôbô, “Kareobana no jidai” [The Era of Dried Pampas Grass], Abé Kôbô zenshû [The Complete
Works of Abé Kôbô]. Vol.18 (Tokyo: Shinchôsha,1999), 273.

106

immediate, material, sensual traits of each individual thing: language replaces sensual
materiality by conceptual generality. Indeed, the generalizing tendency of language is so
ingrained in us that we may no longer perceive the immediate materiality of things. Take
the example of a cup on the table. When I recognize it as a cup, with which I habituallydrink my coffee every morning, it loses its subtle sensuous materiality; the sensation
imparted by its color, form, and texture recede into the background as the concept of “acoffee cup” comes to the fore. The relation between words and things for Abé isfundamentally affected by this tension between generality as the habituated mechanismof recognition and the singularity of the sensuous materiality of the not-yet-named. Oncetaking on the names given by humans, things lose their sensual materiality as if wearing
veils. Perceptual habits are precisely that: imperceptible veils thrown over the sensuous
bodies of things. Language is what enables perceptual habits to form; language is the veil
thrown over things. Photographic or cinematic images, on the other hand, and as we will
see in this chapter, offer the tantalizing possibility of making the immediate sensation ofthings perceptible again.
Ever since the Russian formalists’ suggestion that art is a contestation of theautomatism of perception, various avant-garde movements have emphasized the artistic
disruption or destabilization of perceptual habits. In his inaugural essay “Art asTechnique” (1917) Viktor Shklovsky famously argued: “Habitualization devours works,
clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war . . . And art exists that one may recover
the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The
purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are107known.”167 The famed technique of ostranenie (“making-strange” or “defamiliarization”)
was thus theorized in order to promote art that was capable of destabilizing the perceptual
automatism formed through habits. Elsewhere Shklovsky suggests, “A phenomenon,
perceived many times, and no longer perceivable, or rather, the method of such dimmed
perception, is what I called ‘recognition’ as opposed to ‘seeing.’ The aim of imagery, theaim of creating new art is to return the object from ‘recognition’ to ‘seeing.’”168 To see
something without recognizing it, to see it as if it were not-yet-named, is an experience
Abé also believed that art was capable of bringing forth. The artist is someone who resists
the temptation of naming and the security it provides, and who embraces “herds of ghosts
and nameless lions in spite of their fearfulness.”169
As we can see from the above brief examination, habit undergirded by thegenerality of language appears as a principal object of criticism and artistic disruption forboth Abé and Shklovsky. Habitualization is the process that is diametrically opposed tothe process of artistic production. But what is habit? How do we understand this banalconcept of habit in relation to techniques of art, such as defamiliarization? Provisionally,
we may call habit a micro-technique of perception that imperceptibly forms through theprocess of repetition, and that supports our global or macro perceptions of reality.170
Abe’s conception of language as a system of generality, which erases material, sensual
specificities of “things” brings forward the question of a difference between what might
be called the global macro-perceptions of reality and the fragmentary micro-perceptions
167

Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemonand Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965),12
168
Viktor Shklovsky, Mayakovsky and His Circle, trans. Lily Feiler (New York: Dodd, Mean & Company,1972), 114.
169
Abé Kôbô, “Kareobana no jidai,” 274.
170
I am using the term “global” in the general sense of encompassing or relating to the whole rather than
the specialized sense of relating to the whole world, which has become more common throughcontemporary political and cultural theories of globalization.

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of it. Defamiliarization can be then redefined as a counter-technique to habit: both aretechniques of perceptions but their functions and effects are opposite. This problem of
defamiliarization and its relation to different scales of sense perceptions will be further
examined through a close reading of the film Woman in the Dunes.
Perhaps there is no other Japanese film that has solicited more allegoricalinterpretations from scholars than Woman in the Dunes. Joseph Anderson and Donald
Richie call it “an existential parable.”171 Noël Burch calls it “a sumptuous adaptation of
Abe Kobo’s symbolic fantasy.”172 David Desser notes how various film scholars read thisfilm as an allegory of everything from existentialism to Japan’s supposedly traditional
cooperationism. 173 Abé’s identically titled original novel has invited similarinterpretations. 174 My aim here is not so much to discredit this massive body ofallegorical readings, but rather to approach this film from a different angle, that is, fromthe angle of the aforementioned techniques of perception: defamiliarization and habit.
Before I embark on the close reading of the film Woman in the Dunes, however, I
want to offer a brief historical contextualization of his works and close reading of his key
literary and theoretical texts. In the late 1950s Abé became involved in Kiroku geijutsu
no kai (Association for Documentary Art), and started to write more prolifically on
cinema and visual media. After four years of prolific activity, Kiroku geijutsu no kai
171

Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1982), 469.
172
Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema, 347.
173
David Desser, Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1988, pp.78-79. As Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano points out, some film scholars go as
far as to read the film through the dichotomy of “Eastern” metaphysics versus “Western” metaphysics. See
Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, “Ethnicizing the Body and Film: Teshigahara Hiroshi’s Woman in the Dunes(1964),” in Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts, eds. Alastair Phillips and Julian Stringer (London:
Routledge, 2007), 183.
174
For instance, Mutsuko Motoyama sees a direct causal correspondence between the narrative of Woman
in the Dunes and Abé’s rejection of communist ideology in early 1960s. Motoyama notes how other critics
have variously interpreted the “symbolism” of sand. See Mutsuko Motoyama, “The Literature and Politics
of Abe Kôbô,” Monumenta Nipponica, 50.3 (Autumn 1995), 305-323.

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disbanded in 1961. In the following year, the novel version of Woman in the Dunes was
published, and Abé’s first filmic collaboration with Teshigahara was released.175 A filmic
version of Woman in the Dunes, which came out in 1964, was their second collaborative
work. In 1959-1960, Abé also participated in a series of debates over the difference
between language and the “mechanically produced image” (eizô); these debates are
generally known as the eizô ronsô.
While Abé’s writings on cinema and visual media are neither widely known nor
available in English translation, they offer crucial insights into his otherwise well-known
collaboration with Teshigahara. Equally important is Abé’s ambivalent attitude towards
the representational generality of language and its complicity in the formation ofperceptual habits, which manifests most acutely in his conceptualization of naming as a
linguistic modes of capturing and subjecting of “things” to the measurement of thehuman. In contrast, he offers the possibility of escape from the entrapment of language,
and by extension, from perceptual habit, through two contrasting methods ofdefamiliarization. The first is an intensification of the abstracting power of language,
which reveals the incorporeal dimension of sense severed from the empirical referent.
This play on the abstract, incorporeal dimension of language is best expressed in his shortstories that engage with the theme of metamorphosis. The second method is visual. The
cinematic device of the close-up and its ability to focus on details rather than a whole
becomes crucial for his theorization of this second mode of defamiliarization. As we shallsee shortly, Abé’s interest in fragmentary details that do not add up to the whole
175

This is the film Otoshiana (Pitfall, 1962), which is based on an actual incident that occurred in a
declining mining community of Southern Japan in 1960. Abé first dealt with this historical incident in his
script written for a television drama called Rengoku (Purgatory). Teshigahara saw the program, andsuggested remaking it into a film, because he thought the visual quality of the original televisual version
was inadequate to Abé’s story. !

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antedates his involvement in the practice of filmmaking; however, it was his theorizationof the mechanically produced image that gave him the opportunity to develop and refine
his idea of disrupting power of details.
While Abé’s conception of art resonates well with Shklovsky’s theoretical insight,
it is not fair to say that he simply followed the path of this Russian formalist. Abé’sbackground in the field of medicine and his lifelong interest in science uniquely inflect
his understanding of the artistic process of defamiliarization. It is not accidental that he is
known in the West first and foremost as a science fiction writer. Abé was particularlydrawn to the study of language dysfunction and perceptual disorders caused by theconditions of aphasia, agnosia, and schizophrenia. Also, one of his stable points ofreference is the work of a Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, whose idea of humanlanguage as the second-order signal system he much admired. Throughout his oeuvre
Abé makes repeated references to Pavlov’s conception of conditioned stimulus as a signal
and his idea of language as a secondary system of learned signals, which are built upon
the primary signal system (i.e. an organism’s conditioned responses to external sensory
stimuli). According to one of his friends and a fellow member of the Kiroku geijutsu nokai, Abé turned to Pavlov in the 1950s because he was convinced that scientificapproaches to language and human perception offered an indispensable insight torevitalize avant-garde art. Abé even persuaded his friend to raise a dog in order topractice Pavlovian reflexology at home. 176
Medical studies of aphasia, agnosia, and schizophrenia, on the other hand, offered
him opportunities to rethink the purported normality of habituated modes of human176

Masaki Kyôsuke, “Jôkenhansha” [Conditional Reflexes], Nisegeppô [A Fake Monthly Report] included
as an appendix in Abé Kôbô zenshû [The Complete Works of Abé Kôbô]. Vol.8 (Tokyo: Shinchôsha,1998).!

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perception. Abé was of the opinion that language inevitably intervened in the process oforganizing our sensory perceptions and greatly affected our everyday apperceptions ofthings. Our ability to assemble fragmentary bits of sensory impressions into a coherent
whole, according to Abé, hinges upon the syntactic structure of language. Language iswhat offers a fundamental order to our perceptual and cognitive syntax, with which weconstantly but unconsciously navigate through our everyday activities. As Abé’s 1948
short story titled Na mo naki yoru no tame ni (“For Nameless Nights”) illustrates, when
this grid of language is lost even the most banal act of reaching out to a teacup becomes
an excruciating experience. This cup is no longer a familiar instrument, but a strangely
monstrous “thing.”177
In the slightly revised version of the 1960 essay, titled Eizô wa gengo no kabe ohakai suruka (“Do Mechanically-Produced-Images Demolish the Wall of Language?”)published in 1965, Abé writes: “Humans have given a name to almost every kind ofexistence. Not only did they give names, but they have also expressed various relations
among things through the articulation of words. An evolution of grammar is then nothing
but the evolution of natural, cognitive faculties of human.” Conversely, when thisessentially syntactical nature of language is disrupted by language disorders, one may
lose a sense of even the most basic spatial coordination: “In the severe case of aphasia it
is said that patients lose their sense of angles and can no longer use a ruler to cut a piece177

Abé makes the narrator of the story say that the man in question who cannot reach and grasp a teacup
because he suffers from “the excess of existence” (558). See Abé Kôbô, “Na mo naki yoru no tame ni” [ForNameless Nights], Abé Kôbô zenshû [Complete Works of Abé Kôbô]. Vol.1 (Tokyo: Shinchôsha, 1997),
486-558.

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of wood at the right angle.” 178 The validity of this seemingly “scientific” information is
open to debate, but this passage helps illuminate Abé’s decidedly unromantic conceptionof language.
In a similar manner Abé discusses the difficulty of experiencing a pristine state ofperception that is not yet or no longer mediated by language. In order to underscore thispoint, he makes a further comparison between the perceptual experiences of infants andthose of aphasiacs and schizophrenics:
Robbed of the armor of language, patients who suffer from aphasia become as vulnerable
as infants. To put it differently, a frightening world composed of naked things that are nolonger mediated by language appears. These naked things lack meanings; there is nocausality, no connection, no association or induction of ideas. We can only imagine theeerie outlook of these naked things through an analogy of the world of infants, made up
of disconnected fragmentary impressions that are experienced as an extension of theiroral sensations, or through an analogy of the world of schizophrenia, which isfragmented, deformed, and has lost connections among objects and events.179!
The perception of “naked things” dislocated from the grid of language is here presented
as not only threatening, but also sensual. It is a kind of perception that falls short ofreaching apprehension. We may use the word prehension to describe this immediate stateof perception that is not yet anchored in the grid of language. The sensual immediacy of
the world experienced by pre-linguistic infants and overwhelmingly fragmentary
perceptions of schizophrenics is said to approximate this state of prehension. Nakedness
is a trope that stands in for such sensual immediacy of being immersed in the state ofprehension rather than apprehension. It is not difficult to hear the resonance between thisnotion of naked things and the notion of the not-yet-named existence mentioned earlier.

178

Abé Kôbô, “Eizô wa gengo no kabe o hakai suruka” [“Do Mechanically-Produced-Images Demolishthe Wall of Language?”], Abé Kôbô zenshû [The Complete Works of Abé Kôbô]. Vol.11 (Tokyo:
Shinchôsha, 1998), 451.
179
Ibid., 452. This comparison may appear uncannily Lacanian in its insistence upon the order-giving
nature of language.

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This suggests that the trope of nakedness operates closely with the trope of namelessness
in his lexicon.
Importantly, Abé published the original version of this essay on the image as adirect response to the claim made by some of the Japanese film critics and filmmakers in
1959-1960. During this time several members of the Kiroku geijutsu no kai – a media
critic Okada Susumu, a documentary filmmaker Hani Susumu, and a literary critic Sasaki
Kiichi and Abé – engaged in a series of debates, which came to be known as eizô ronsô.
Against those who suggested that image-based media, such as cinema, allowed
immediate and sensuous communication of thoughts by way of images alone, Abémaintained that every image-based medium activates language without fail. As we saw
earlier, language for him is what mediates immediate receptions of sensual data and its
subsequent cognition. The moment when the content of an image is recognized, forinstance, the image has already solicited language. The imperceptible operation of
language infiltrates every medium, including “even the silent 8 mm film that records a
simple movement of an insect without the help of an inter-title or a benshi[commentator].”180 Even when it is silent, spectators are able to recognize or identify animage projected on the screen because they are already equipped with therepresentational grid of language. And this moment of recognition is the indication ofspectators’ reliance on the interface of language to sort out and make sense of otherwise
amorphous beams of lights and shadows flickering on the screen.
Since perception and signification operate in such an inextricable manner Abé
opposed those who believed that cinema instantiates a purely visual mode ofcommunication, in which images speak like words and transmit thoughts and ideas
180

Abé, “Eizô wa gengo no kabe o hakai suruka,” 453.

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without the mediation of language as such. 181 In particular he disagreed with Okada who
posited the autonomy of “language” of visual media, suggesting that his view of visualmedia was merely analogical. “Most theorists of mechanically produced images,”
complained Abé, “stop at the level of an analogical understanding of language and image,trying to set the mechanically produced image on even ground with language.” 182 Then,
what is language for Abé? He defines language as a mechanism of “synthesis,” which
structurally ensures perceptual and cognitive receptions of sensual stimuli: “What I calllanguage is of course neither dialogue nor intertitle, but a deeper and more essential kindof mechanism that is immanent, albeit in the potential form, in all artistic expressions.”183
Curiously, however, Abé’s argument becomes noticeably ambivalent when it
comes to the potentially disrupting – or defamiliarizing – power of the mechanically
produced image. This ambivalence positively distinguishes him from his fellow film
critics associated with the Kiroku geijutsu no kai, but at the same time, reveals certain
limitations of his theorization of the image that comes dangerously close to valorizing
defamiliarization as an end in itself. His is essentially a position that refuses to posit thecomplete autonomy of visual media separate from the influence of language, while
asserting the unique capacity of the image to induce a state of prehension. In short, Abéremained suspicious of the idea that image-based media create a completely autonomous
181

Abé’s criticism is directed against other members of Kiroku geijutsu no kai who espoused the view thatcinema, as a purely visual and gestural mode of communication, could convey thoughts and ideas without
the intermediation of language. His principal opponent was Okada Susumu, who insisted on the autonomyof the visual communication from spoken or printed language with an enthusiasm reminiscent of early film
theorists, in particular, Béla Balázs. Perhaps it should be added that Sasaki Kiichi, who showed sympathy
with Okada’s euphoric view of visual media, was a translator of Balázs and one of the first Japanesetheorists to make reference to the work of Walter Benjamin. For Balázs’ discussion of cinema’s capacity toresurrect “the language of gestures” of visual media that threatens to replace the print-based “culture ofwords,” see Béla Balázs, “Béla Balázs, Visible Man, or the Culture of Film (1924), Screen 48:1 (Spring2007): 91-108.
182
Abé, “Eizô wa gengo no kabe o hakai suruka,” 452.
183
Abé Kôbô, “Jikken eiga no shinario” [A Script for An Experimental Film], Abé Kôbô zenshû [TheComplete Works of Abé Kôbô], Vol.11 (Tokyo: Shinchôsha, 1998), 448.

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system of communication, but he supported the idea that the mechanically produced
image may escape the representational generality of language through its capacity to
defamiliarize reality: “When a mechanically produced image does not narrate and justthrows grotesque fragments of images it becomes a pure mechanically produced image. If
an image starts narrating, however, from that moment on it becomes a mere medium that
only solicits language.”184 In other words, it is difficult but not impossible for themechanically produced image to strike a viewer in its sensuous immediacy, even if
momentarily. The mechanically produced image retains this potential for halting or
suspending the signifying operation of language. A rare event, perhaps, but nonetheless a
possible one.
Therefore, while Abé maintained his view that film and visual media theorists
could not afford to ignore the constitutive nature of language for the human perception,
he equally insisted that filmmakers must explore the maximum potential of the cinematic
image to destabilize spectators’ perceptual habits. An essay titled Jikken eiga no shinario(“A Script for An Experimental Film”) also published in 1960 advances this line ofargument: “The reason why I took an oppositional stance towards [Hani Susumu andOkada Susumu], who advocate for mechanically produced image media, is that I wanted
to show that I took these images more seriously than they did. They contend thatmechanically produced images can construct the world of abstraction just as language
constructs it. But this is not possible. In fact, the power and strength of the mechanically
produced image resides in not speaking like language.”185

184

185

Abé, “Eizô wa gengo no kabe o hakai suruka,” 452.
Abé, “Jikken eiga no shinario,” 447. The emphasis is mine.

116Throughout its history, continues Abé, humanity has indeed repeated the same
dialectical process, which has propelled its perceptual and cognitive syntax to change andgrow over time. This is due to a desire to ward off anxiety and threats posed by the
unknown. When we encounter images that disrupt our perceptual and cognitive habits,
our natural reaction is to secure and habituate these threatening images. Naming is one ofsuch defense mechanism against the threats of the unknown. This dialectical conceptionof disruption and habituation – the unknown and the named – constitutes the kernel of
Abé’s theory of language and image. In fact he would go as far as to argue that thedisrupting power of the mechanically produced image is indispensable for the
rejuvenation of literature, which is increasingly caught in a stale cycle of rehashing
shopworn conventions.
The following remark with which Abé ends the revised version of the 1960 essay,“Do Mechanically-Produced-Images Demolish the Wall of Language?” is particularly
noteworthy in this regard. It reveals his skepticism towards a contemporary state ofliterature. Content with the repetition of conventions and ignorant of the changing media
environment, he argues, this old language-based medium has fallen into an apparent
deadlock. Its reliance on language also compounds the problem; its medium provides thevery condition of possibility for the imperceptible process of habituation to take place.
The ending remark of the essay goes as follows:
Regardless of the genre, the original task of artistic creation is to plunge a scalpel into theadhesion between language and reality – the comfort zone of stereotypes fortified by thewall of language – and to produce a different kind of a language system. This is of course
applicable to prose art as well. In order for the novel to recover its energy enough toshock and rejuvenate language (and consciousness), it needs first to depart from theestablished framework of the novel and attends this common task of art in general.186

186

Ibid., 454.

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This common task of art is to destroy what he calls “the wall of language.” The force of“shock” is necessary, because the whole point of art is to induce rupture, interruption,
crisis. And it is precisely through the process of interruption that art opens up a space of
critique.187
Given the fact that Abé is a writer by profession, his suggestion that literatureneeds to break away from its own comfort zone (because it has already lost its criticalpower to rejuvenate language) and thus needs visual media to assist its survival may
come as a surprise to some. But, like Hanada Kiyoteru, with whom he had many
theoretical and artistic interests in common, Abé supported the idea that Japan wasundergoing a radical change in its media environment, namely, a new cultural hegemonyof audio-visual media (or mechanically produced image media) was quickly displacing
the old cultural hegemony of print media, and that writers needed to respond to thishistorical condition.188
It is precisely at this historical juncture that Abé turned to the notion of the“documentary” as an umbrella term that encompassed both literary and filmic
productions. In the original version of the 1960 essay, he notes that his promotion of“documentary art was nothing but an attempt to destroy existing systems of language that
fortify our perceptual habits.” 189 Here the method of documentary and the notion of themechanically produced image are treated as if they were conceptual equivalents. But then187

As it is often pointed out, the philosophical notion of critique, whose etymological root lies in the Greek
word krinein, carries the connotation of crisis.
188
Abé was the first professional Japanese writer to use a word processor to write his novels. He also wrote
a number of screenplays for films and television programs and eagerly incorporated his own photographs toillustrate his novels. Furthermore, he was a professed cinephile and a semi-professional photographer on
top of being a director of his own theater company. His voracious interest in newer technologies and media
forms is fairly well documented, yet its significance is rarely acknowledged. Exceptions to this trend arerecent works by two Japanese scholars: Toba Kôji and Tomoda Yoshiyuki.
189
Quoted by Toba Kôji in Undôtai: Abé Kôbô [Abé Kôbô: A Body of Movement] (Tokyo: Ichiyôsha,2007), 259.

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a question arises: why would he treat the documentary and the mechanically produced
image as conceptual equivalents? What led him to confer the effects of defamiliarization(i.e. destabilization of perceptual habits) upon these two notions, which are not usuallyassociated with or treated in the same manner in the discourse of avant-garde art praxis?
As we saw in the last chapter, for Abé and others who participated in theactivities of Kiroku geijutsu no kai, the notion of documentary refers neither to
Griersonian documentary filmmaking nor to conventional journalistic reportage, but isredefined in accordance with their avant-gardist goal of overturning perceptual habit.190 It
is therefore worth going back to an earlier instance of Abé’s first non-fiction “reportage”(about the brutal suppression of the workers’ May Day protest in 1952), which alreadyindicates his desire to situate what he calls reportage and documentary in opposition to
the conventional practices of factual reporting.
The first half of this reportage piece incorporates quotations gleaned fromnewspaper articles. Commenting on this stylistic strategy, Toba Kôji writes: “Abé createdcollisions among quotations in order to emphasize their internal contradictions. The firststrategy he used was, therefore, to construct a reportage in the form of a collage of
quotations, a strategy which exposed the invalidities of these newspaper reports.”191
Through the constructivist strategy of creating a collage out of direct quotations, Abé thus
succeeds in foregrounding the internal contradictions among these news reports.
Subsequently, the news media’s timely construction of actuality, presumably based on

190

As phrases such as sur-documentary (Hanada), neo-documentary (Matsumoto), and new-documentarism(Abé) suggest, their understanding of documentary is dialectical. Yet precisely because they oftenemphasized the elliptic-dialectic tension between two kinds of automatism – the automatism of mechanicalrecording and the automatism of habituated perception – it is arguable that their conception of the avantgarde documentary does not escape the trap of technological determinism.
191
Toba,172.

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the faithful documentations of facts, is called into question. As we shall see in the next
chapter, later generations of filmmakers such as Oshima Nagisa and Wakamatsu Kôjitake up this avant-gardist strategy of directly quoting journalistic materials in order tointerrogate the actuality-effect produced by the media.
If the notions of the documentary and the mechanically produced image became
conceptual equivalents in Abé’s writings, it is because his interest in the documentary
genre directly arose from his Marxist engagement with the reportage movement. This
vital connection between his theorization of documentary in the late 1950s and his
involvement in the production of literary reportage in the early 1950s must not be
overlooked.192 Albeit in incipient form, the idea that art needs to restore its criticality
through the method of documentary is already present in his 1955 essay titled Mazu
kaibôtô o (“First A Scalpel”), an essay that specifically addresses challenges faced by thewriters of the literary reportage movement. Comparing the scalpel, a medical instrument,
to the method of reportage, he writes: “I imagine the role the scalpel played in therevolutionary development of medicine; it cut open the everydayness called skin in order
to expose the darkness beneath it.”193 These metaphors of incision and skin clearly alignreportage with the avant-gardist contestation of perceptual habit. True reportage, heargues, relies neither on “the skin of the common sense” nor does it privilege timely news
192

Even after Abé’s commitment to Marxism had subsided his interest in documentary did not simply
disappear. Even films such as Woman in the Dunes, which appear to be detached from contemporary social
situations and events, are in fact in dialogue with the journalism of the time. Abé suggests that the originalidea for the novel Woman in the Dunes came from a journalistic photograph reporting on the damage
caused by windblown sand. In the 1965 interview, he notes: “While I was heading to Hirosaki to lecture at
a local university, I bought a weekly magazine. A photogravure included in the magazine reported on thewindblown sand damage in the city of Sakata. Something was sparked inside me at that moment” (209).
See Abé Kôbô, “Suna no onna to shousetsu sahou” [Woman in the Dunes and the Method of Writing
Novels], Abé Kôbô zenshû [The Complete Works of Abé Kôbô], Vol.19 (Tokyo: Shinchôsha, 1999), 207210.
193
Abé Kôbô, “Mazu kaibôtô o: ruporutaaju teishô to dasoku ni yoru sono hitei” [First A Scalpel], AbéKôbô zenshû [Complete Works of Abé Kôbô], Vol.5 (Tokyo: Shinchôsha, 1997), 283.

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values. Rather, it is a means to “disrupt habituated responses in order to heighten oursensibility to a hitherto unknown level.”194 His conception of reportage is here clearlyenvisioned along the line of the avant-garde technique of defamiliarization.
“My promotion of documentarity [kirokusei] in every genre and form of art
including fiction means something more than a mere respect for facts. We need first to
sever these facts from their surrounding meanings and concepts, differentiate them into
the grotesque world of meaningless ‘things,’ and from there reconstruct the plane ofmeanings once again.” 195 Seemingly heterogeneous notions, such as reportage,
documentary, and the avant-garde indeed form intrinsic connections in Abé’s theory. I
want to conclude this section with the following quotation: “In order to restore actuality[akuchuaritii] to art, let us discover new eyes and new words. If an ordinary celluloid
film proves insufficient, we must invent an infrared film, and if a light-sensitive telescope
proves insufficient, we must invent a radio-wave telescope.”196 In accordance with thediscourse of actuality generated by the avant-garde documentary movement, we mayinterpret what Abé calls actuality to mean “critical relevance” rather than “journalistic
topicality.”197 Importantly, Abé frames his call for the restoration of critical relevance ofart to present-day social reality as a dual search for “new eyes and new words.” This
194

Ibid., 284.
Ibid. There seems to be a logical connection between the notion of meaningless things and that of naked
things, which appears in his later writing on the mechanically produced image. One may ask: why puts
such an emphasis on this notion of the “thing” [mono]? For one, the word mono is a kind of placeholder, anempty signifier whose signified is yet determined. It is like what Roman Jakobson called a “shifter,” whose
meaning is only determinable in the context in which it is used, and includes words such as “this,” “now,”“here,” “I,” and “you.” In Japanese, the word mono functions like the English word “thing,” a kind of anempty placeholder. Yet, as is evident from classical expressions such as mono no aware [the pathos of theephemeral things] and mononoke [unknown spirit], which are frequently used in classical prose literatureand poetry, the word mono written in hiragana (Japanese syllabic orthography) tends to connote beings thatare unidentifiable, unnamable, even other-worldly. Historically, then, the word “thing” [mono] hasfunctioned as a signifier that exposes a veritable fissure between language and reality. To say something is“unnamable” is an acknowledgment of the failure of the representational function of language.
196
Ibid., 285.
197
For the discussion of this interpretation of actuality as “critical relevance,” see Chapter Two.
195

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twofold conception of vision and language deeply informs his own artistic practice,including his fictional writings and later filmic collaborations with Teshigahara.
Naming and Metamorphosis
But how does Abé introduce the question of vision or a visual mode of perception
into writing? His treatment of the problematic of naming, which variously appears in his
essays and fictional pieces, offers one answer. In many instances, challenges posed by the
linguistic operation of naming appear alongside those posed by the visual operations ofperceiving distortion and metamorphosis. In an essay published in 1955, Abérearticulates the critical link between art and crisis by turning to the exemplary crisis ofmadness. The bulk of this essay explains the strategic reasons behind his use of“materially non-existent things” in his plays; namely, ghosts in Seifuku (Uniform),animals that look like humans in Doreigari (Hunting Slaves), and a drug that can makeany dream come true in Kaisokusen (A Fast Sailing Boat). Again evoking Pavlov’s
notion of “stereotype,” Abé discusses a precarious equilibrium between sensibility andreason. When this state of equilibrium is completely lost, a pang of madness may hit.
“Symptoms of madness are distorted reflections of the external world in the internal
world,” writes Abé. “And because the axis linking the inside and the outside for humans
is language, the human madness represents the unique instance of the collapse oflanguage.”198 Clearly, that which lies outside language’s control poses an imminent
threat to cognition, and thus constitutes something fearful.
An exemplary literary “description” of this fear is, according to Abé, Jean-Paul
Sartre’s classic text, Nausea (1938). Again the 1960 essay on the mechanically produced
198

Abé Kôbô, “Shinin no tôjô: jitsuzai shinai mono ni tsuite” [An Entrance of the Dead: On Not-Actually
Existent Things], Abé Kôbô zenshû, Vol. 5, 200. The emphasis is in the original.

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image offers an insight: “Sartre described the impact and distress inflicted upon a man by
the not-yet-named thing (i.e. actual existence).”199 In Nausea, Sartre has the protagonist
Antoine Roquentin says the following lines: “Never, until these last few days, had I
understood the meaning of ‘existence.’ I was like the others, like the ones walking along
the seashore, all dressed in their spring finery. I said, like them, ‘The ocean is green; thatwhite speck there is a seagull,’ but I didn’t feel that it existed or that the seagull was an‘existing seagull’; usually existence hides itself.”200Clearly, Sartre is opposing what he calls “existence” to the copular verb “to be”
here. Moreover, this difference between “existence” and the copular verb “to be”
corresponds to the difference between the frightening perception of the world outside the
comfort zone of language and the habituated perception of reality through concepts.
When one says, “The ocean is green,” does he or she really experience the greenness ofthe color green? Or is it the word green supplanting, standing in for the immediate
sensation of greenness? These are the questions which Abé shares with Sartre, and whichhark back to Shklovsky’s call to restore the sensation to life, “to make the stone stony.”“The existence which is yet to become a verb” – the phrase from Abé’s shortstory “Prosecution of the Heretic,” with which I opened my investigation of his works
concerns this ontic dimension of reality that escapes the grasp of clichéd statements suchas “the ocean is green.” To put it differently, the ontic existence Abé is concerned withhere is an existence that has yet to be incorporated into the order of language, wherein the
copular verb to be divides and connects a subject (e.g. ocean) and its attribute (e.g.
green). Language flattens and diminishes concrete sensations of life – be it the greenness

199
200

Abé, “Eizô wa gengo no kabe o hakaisuruka,” 451.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1964), 171.

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of the color green or the stoniness of the stone. Naming, in Abé’s view, is the first step
towards the destruction of such immediate sensations, for it is the most basic way of
securing our epistemic hold over the actually-existing, ontic dimension of reality.
As we saw earlier, what Abé calls “the wall of language” corresponds to thishabitual conditioning of perceptual reflexes. And such habituation of human perceptions
begins with the inaugural act of naming: “Humans could subjugate, domesticate, andrender safe the external beings by naming and thus incorporating them into the order oflanguage.” 201 Consequently, general nouns start to operate like the universal under which
one can subsume particulars. “Humans gave a piece of stick the name ‘stick,’ andthenceforward recognized it as such. They thus succeeded in attaining an abstract conceptof ‘stick’ in general (that is, an infinite numbers of sticks).”202
The 1949 short story titled Yume no tôbô (“A Runaway Dream”) presents anothervariant of this same problematic, that is, the problematic of subjugating the singularexistence of “things” under the generality of “names.” It opens with an explicitly biblicalreference to Adam’s act of naming, that mythical origin of the irreparable rift between
words and things. The prologue notes: “You who insist that happiness exists only in the
Garden of Eden know nothing about the misfortunes of wearing an unsuitable costume.
You do not know we are just beasts wearing constricting costumes . . . and how names,
which are provisional and trivial conventions, bring great sorrow to our daily life.”203 On
the surface the story recounts the mishaps of a boy who is accidentally given a “wrong”
name. The prologue leading up to the main body of the narrative, however, makes it clear

201

Abé, “Eizô wa gengo no kabe o hakaisuruka,” 451.
Ibid.
203
Abé Kôbô, “Yume no tôbô” [A Runaway Dream], Abé Kôbô zenshû [The Complete Works of AbéKôbô], Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Shinchôsha, 1997), 297.
202

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that he never had a “correct” name in the first place. Since everyone around him
recognizes his proper name as not properly his (because it is his neighbor’s nickname),
this protagonist comes to embody the arbitrariness of naming. “Everyone hesitated to call
his name. If an occasion demanded that one call his name, everyone got angry andfrowned.” 204 His very existence becomes an unpleasant reminder of the arbitrary
relationship between words and things.
As he grows older, his sense of the inadequacy of his own name increases. “His
inner beast avoided the name, and the name which only had the power of a borrowed
name . . . was too weak, too fragile, to hold this beast soaked in the color of shame; it
constantly escaped him like the water spilling out of a broken jar.”205 While his inner“beast” strives to escape the shackles of his borrowed “name,” the protagonist’s body
begins to lose weight, as if the only way to sever itself from language is to make itself
disappear. Paradoxically bearing the unbearable lightness of his inadequate existence, hefinally succeeds dispelling his name from the inside. When his name vanishes, however,his body also disappears. No longer grounded in its concrete material substance, his“beast” becomes a materially non-existent “dream.” Having become a nameless existence
without substance, he is now destined to “run through a myriad of endless and infinite
nights.”206
A similar concern is expressed in another short story entitled Dendorokakariya(“Dendrocacalia”) published in 1949. This story introduces a protagonist named Mr.
Komon who constantly suffers from unspecified seizures that cause him to experience thestrange sensation of becoming a plant. Whenever a seizure suddenly overtakes him, he
204

Abé, “Yume no tôbô,” 298.
Ibid.
206
Ibid., 326.
205

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feels the uncomfortable sensation of his face turning inside out. When this happens Mr.
Komon desperately grabs onto his face with his hands in order to prevent it. “Becoming aplant means . . . your face turns inside out, and your consciousness constantly falls overto the other side of your face.”207 Curiously, moreover, when his consciousness and his
face turn inward, his body loses its human form:
Just as it had happened the year before, the fault line of his consciousness – a very highwall – was rising up, a face vaguely reflected on its surface. When he looked closely, it
appeared to be his face turned inside out. Moreover, his whole body had become a plant.
A strange plant: it was neither a grass nor a tree. Fingers became chrysanthemum-shaped
leaves. It was both unattractive and unfamiliar looking.208!

!
One day an old man finds Mr. Komon in his bushy plant form. The man tries to thrust a
military knife into the ground to uproot Mr. Komon. Startled, Mr. Komon reverts back to
his human form and narrowly escapes. But the old man seeks him out and sends a letter,
introducing himself as the director of a botanical garden. To Mr. Komon’s chagrin the
director insists on calling him Dendrocacalia, the taxonomic name of a tropical plantfamily, and invites Mr. Komon to live in the corner of his botanical garden. The story
ends with Mr. Komon’s final capture by the director. Under director’s watchful gaze, Mr.
Komon undergoes a complete metamorphosis. When Mr. Komon is transformed into aplant, the director jots down the name Dendrocacalia crepidifolia on a piece of paper,and nails it onto the stem of the plant.
Not surprisingly, this fascinating fable has invited various critical and scholarlyinterpretations. The reading I want to offer here is the story of resistance against naming,
which by no means excludes other kinds of interpretations. It is crucial that the wholeprocess of Mr. Komon’s metamorphosis into a plant is underscored by a series of207
208

Abé, “Denderokakariya,” Abé Kôbô zenshû, Vol.2, 235.
Ibid., 242.

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linguistic captures. His archenemy, the director of the botanical garden who collects rare
specimens of humans-turned-plants for the Japanese government, is the authorized namegiver. As Hegel reminds us, the act of naming has long been understood as an instance ofexerting power. Naming is first and foremost a means of subjugation: “The first act, bywhich Adam established his lordship over the animals, is this, that he gave them a name,i.e., he nullified them as beings on their own account.”209 As we saw earlier, the explicit
reference to Adam’s name-giving act appears in the short story “A Runaway Dream.”
The story of “Dendrocacalia,” in contrast, turns to Greek myths to stage another drama of
linguistic capture and resistance.
It is significant that it is the authoritative character of the director who draws
connections between plant and language. When he first sends a letter to Mr. Komon, henotes that Mr. Komon is a type of a tropical plant called Dendrocacalia crepidifolia,
which grows only in the remote region of Ogasawara islands. This signals the first stageof Mr. Komon’s entrapment by the linguistic system of classification. The second time
when the director speaks to Mr. Komon he analogizes plants to schizophrenia, calling
schizophrenia “a hope of the contemporary age.” This time it is not plant taxonomy but
medical classification that is mobilized. It is worth recalling here that Abé explicitly links
schizophrenia to the collapse or dysfunction of language. The final analogy of plants tolanguage occurs when the director asserts that the plant is a root of logos.210 As Mr.
Komon gradually realizes, his metamorphosis into a plant does not, therefore, represent
salvation from his illness (the presumed cause of his seizures) but rather a permanent

209

G. W. F. Hegel, System of Ethical Life and First Philosophy of Spirit, trans. and eds. H. S. Harris and T.
M. Knox (Albany: State of University of New York Press, 1979), 221.
210
Abé, “Denderokakariya,” 250-251.

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entrapment.211 Through this series of analogies, “Dendrocacalia” clearly highlights theintimate connection between the politics of subjugation and the subject’s taxonomic
capture by language.
The 1951 short story titled S. Karuma shi no hanzai (“The Crime of Mr. S.
Karuma”) is another fable that highlights the correlation between linguistic capture andthe politics of subjugation. While this story problematizes naming, it further satirizes thecomplete reversal of the power relationship between “things” and “humans.” If naming iswhat instantiates the subjection of non-human things to the authority of humans, as Hegelsuggests, this story takes as its point of departure the revolt of things themselves against
this subjection. Recall that in the story of “Prosecution of the Heretic,” the “I” who calls
himself an enemy of humanity declares his alliance with “things and beasts” that resist
being named and becoming “useful” to humans.212 In “The Crime of Mr. S. Karuma”
mundane objects that have already become useful reject their usefulness and revolt
against their subjection to the protagonist named Mr. Karuma. The story begins with Mr.
Karuma finding out that his business card has become his doppelganger. This businesscard appears as a mere piece of paper when Mr. Karuma looks through his left eye, but
211

Mr. Komon comes to believe that the director is a modern incarnation of a mythological vulture that
tormented Prometheus for stealing fire from Zeus and identifies with Prometheus punished for his hubris
Mr. Komon decides to liberate others who are trapped inside the botanical garden, but he fails. The narrator
then interjects this note: “Mr. Komon, you were wrong. You didn’t know that your seizure was not just an
indication of your illness. You didn’t know that the whole world is infected by this illness!”(“Dendrocacalia,” 253). The failure of Mr. Komon’s attempt to resist linguistic capture thus derives fromhis inability to affirm commonality, a very quality that is expressed by his own name (“Mr. Common”). As
Toba Kôji has recently suggested, the commonness of Mr. Komon is also linked to historical memories ofJapan’s colonial legacy. Toba calls attention to the fact that the director says, “It is rare to findDendrocacalia in domestic territory [naichi].” The word naichi is often used in tandem with the word
gaichi (external territory). These words belong to the vocabulary of Japan’s colonial period. The exotic
status of the tropical plant Dendrocacalia crepidifolia to which Mr. Komon metamorphoses thus conjures
the memories of colonial expansion. Mr. Komon’s subjection to the director who is an agent of theJapanese government is an acute reminder of Japan’s military and political subjugation of Asian nations
during the war, a war that had just ended four years before the story was published. See Toba Kôji,
Undôtai: Abé Kôbô, 95-96.
212
Abé, “Itansha no kokuhatsu,”140.

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when looking through his right eye the card appears as his double. Furthermore, every
single object that used to belong to Mr. Karuma (e.g. business card, hat, notebook, jacket,
pen, and tie) becomes animated and obtains subjectivity:‘Our materiality has degenerated,’ muttered the tie in a husky voice, ‘Just like me – sucha despicable degeneration, all because of the humans. Damn it! Why don’t I let themknow what it means to choke a neck?’ Then other personal belongings got excited andbegan shouting. ‘Even if we are useful to them, they are useless to us!’ ‘One sided
exploitation . . . we cannot compromise!’ ‘Yes, we material things should recover our
subjectivity.’ ‘Take back our right to live. From dead organic matter to living inorganic
matter!’ ‘Let’s sing our revolutionary anthem.’213

While the revolt of these anthropomorphized objects against the human character Mr.
Karuma conjures the Marxist concept of reification (“thing-fication” [versachlichung]),
the story does not advance a straightforward interpretation of it.
Take the example of Mr. Karuma’s relationship to his business card. The businesscard tells him how ashamed “he” is for being related to someone like Mr. Karuma.
Hearing this, Mr. Karuma thinks to himself in amazement: “It is pretty ridiculous thatthings look differently from the right eye to the left eye: it must be the influence ofMarx.” 214 This tongue-in-cheek reference to Marx offers an insight into theaforementioned passage, wherein Mr. Karuma’s personal possessions mount theircomplaints against humans for causing their degeneration. One of the complaints voiced
is that even though they (the inanimate objects) are useful to humans, humans are uselessto them. Their imminent revolution, in other words, is predicated upon their rejection of
being useful to humans. In so doing, the inanimate objects resist their subjection tohumans and challenge their proprietary rights over them; these objects reject their“objecthood” and assert their autonomous “thinghood.”213

Abé Kôbô, “Kabe: Dai ichi bu, S. Karuma shi no hanzai,” Abe Kôbô Zensakuhin. Vol.1 (Tokyo:
Shinchôsha, 1972), 43. My translation.
214
Ibid., 11.

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In Capital, Marx notes, “The utility of a thing makes it a use-value.”215 As it isoften pointed out, this concept of use-value is underpinned by anthropocentrism. Thevery concept of “use” is defined from the point of view of human: a thing is useful for ahuman and not vice-versa.216 It is precisely the complicity between the anthropocentric
view of the world and the subjugating power of naming that “The Crime of Mr. S.
Karuma” satirizes. In referencing Marx’s use of the metaphor of the table mysteriouslytransforming into a commodity (which is, of course, doubled with the reference to thespiritualist practice of “table-turning”), Jacques Derrida calls the mystical transformationof “things” into commodities a Coup de théatre, a dramatic turn.217 The theatricality
implicit in this process is literalized in the anthropomorphication of Mr. Karuma’s
personal belongings. The most dramatic turn of Mr. Karuma’s life occurs, of course,when the inanimate object of his business card sheds its use-value and assumes anapparent autonomy. In this manner, the story plays on the “literalization” of metaphorsand analogies used by Marx in order to expose the operations of commodity fetishism.218
However, the critical import of this story goes beyond the playful appropriation ofMarx’s theory of commodity fetishism. Abé pushes the dramatic effect of personificationa step further in order to expose the abstracting tendency of language. When his business
215

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition. ed. Robert C. Tucker (NewYork: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 303.
216
Jacques Derrida writes, for instance, “If one keeps to use-value, the properties (Eigenschaften) of thething (and it is going to be a question of property) are always very human, at bottom, reassuring for thisvery reason. They always relate to what is proper to man, to the properties of man: either they respond tomen’s needs, and that is precisely their use-value, or else they are the product of a human activity that
seems to intend them for those needs” (150). See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt,
the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).
217
Derrida writes: “ For example – and here is where the table comes on stage – the wood remains wooded
when it is made into a table: it is then ‘an ordinary, sensuous thing [ein ordinäres, sinnliches Ding].’ It isquite different when it becomes a commodity, when the curtain goes up on the market and the table plays
actor and character at the same time, when the commodity-table, says Marx, comes on stage (auftritt),
begins to walk around and to put itself forward as a market value. Coup de théatre: the ordinary, sensuous
thing is transfigured (verwandelt sich), it becomes someone, it assumes a figure” (Specters of Marx, 150).
218
Toba, Undôtai: Abé Kôbô, 129.

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card “steals” Mr. Karuma’s name, Mr. Karuma is suddenly struck by a strange sensationof hollowness in his heart. His feeling of hollowness, furthermore acquires a concretematerial existence, since his heart begins to generate “negative pressure,” as if to reversea law of physics. It turns into a vacuum, and starts “sucking” material objects. The logicalabsurdity of such an event nonetheless highlights language’s ability to generate “sense”
independently of any empirical referent.
As Gilles Deleuze suggests in his study of Lewis Carroll, sense is an“incorporeal” event that arises on the surface of language. Let us take the example of theCheshire Cat from Carroll’s Alice in the Wonderland.219 As Alice recognizes, it is easy to
imagine a cat with a grin, but not the grin without the cat. The grin without the catbelongs to what Deleuze calls impossible objects (e.g. “square circles,” “matter without
extension,” “mountain without valley,” and so on). Mr. Karuma’s feeling of hollowness,that is, his feeling of negative physical pressure similarly belongs to this category of
impossible objects. Mr. Karuma’s inner void sucks in a photograph of a desert landscape.
This photographic desert, in turn, begins to expand inside his chest, attracting all the wild
animals at a neighborhood zoo. The “crime” of Mr. Karuma finally takes place when acamel at the zoo gets sucked in and disappears into his inner desert. Mr. Karuma is
accused of theft and brought to trial. The story ends with Mr. Karuma turning into a wallthat grows infinitely in the midst of a silent desert. The whole narrative hinges upon an
impossible object, his feelings turning into a literal vacuum. The absurdity of this event isfurther linked to the absurdity of mundane objects revolting against the human219

Gilles Deleuze writes, “Extracted from the proposition, sense is independent of it, since it suspends its
affirmation and negation, and is nevertheless only its evanescent double: Carroll’s smile without the cat orflame without a candle” (32). Critics have commented on Abé’s similarity to Carroll. See Gilles Deleuze,
The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1990).

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protagonist. Yet precisely through these absurdities, the story sheds light on language’s
complicity in the subjection of things to humans.
Importantly, “The Crime of Mr. S. Karuma” also insists on incorporatingreferences to cinema and proto-cinematic media. These recurrent references to cinema
and proto-cinematic media point to Abé’s thematic preoccupation with visual media long
before his turn to filmmaking practice. For example, let us turn to Mr. Karuma’s
description of his encounter with his business card, which has become his doppelganger:
The other ‘I’ heard my voice. He looked back with a stern expression in his eyes, and met
my gaze. At that moment I saw right through his disguise; it was my business card. Once
I realized it, there was no way of mistaking that business card for something else. It
couldn’t have been anything but the business card. I quickly closed my right eye and thenmy left eye in turn to discover the double nature of this shadow image [eizô]. With myright eye, it was clearly my reflection [utsushie] as if it was in the mirror, but with my left
eye, it was unmistakably just a piece of paper.220

I want to draw attention to the devices of optical illusion alluded in the above quotation:
stereoscope, camera obscura, and magic lantern. As is well known, each human eye sees
objects from a slightly different position; this produces an effect of binocular parallax.
This binocular parallax allows human eyes to create the perception of depth, an effectthrough which the optical device of the stereoscope functions. When Mr. Karuma seeswith his left eye, the business card appears as it is: a piece of inanimate paper. But, when
Mr. Karuma uses his right eye, it appears as an animated double of his self.221 The
parallactic distance between the two eyes is thus used to illustrate his business card’s twomodes of appearance.
Two more particularly proto-cinematic terms are used here to describe Mr.
Karuma’s parallactic experience. For instance, the word eizô [()], which I translate in220

Abé Kôbô, “Kabe: Dai ichi bu, S. Karuma shi no hanzai,” 10. My translation.
As the aforementioned reference to Marx makes it clear, this play on “left” and “right” seems
intentional; while the right sees hallucinatory appearance of the business card as his doppelganger, the left
eye sees it as its “false” appearance.

221

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the above quotation as “shadow image” is written here with the Chinese character for“shadow.” It is an old term that is usually used to describe a mental image or a pictorial
representation, such as an image of god or Buddha as well as the inverted image
generated by the camera obscura. After the invention of the cinema, however, thehomonymic word eizô [*)] using the Chinese character signifying “projection” or“reflection” has become more popular. This second term is explicitly tied totechnologically mediated visual images (such as images produced by cinema, television,and video), and hence my translation of it as “mechanically produced image.” Here in thestory, however, Abé opts for the first word (“shadow image”), alluding to the up-sidedown image generated by the camera obscura. The inversion connoted by the camera
obscura is particularly illuminating in this dramatic confrontation wherein Mr. Karuma isousted by his own business card. For the chiasmic inversion between Mr. Karuma and hisbusiness card is indicated by the word “shadow image,” evoking the camera obscura,which is the metaphor Marx and Engels use in The German Ideology, to describe theworking of ideologies.222 The former stability of Mr. Karuma’s life – one might call it its
stereoscopic unity – is shattered when he can no longer suppress the material disparity
inherent in binocular parallax. 223
This visual effect of parallax (which etymologically means “to change, alter, or
alternate”) offers another insight.224 In Abé’s story, the literal alteration of Mr. Karuma
222

Marx and Engels write, “If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in acamera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of
objects on the retina does from their physical life-process” (47). See Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, The
German Ideology: Part One, ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970).
223
As Toba suggests, the story effectively “literalizes” the Marxist analysis of commodities, in particular,
the idea that a commodity is both sensible and supersensible thing, since Mr. Karuma grudgingly
remembers how much money he had to pay to purchase his business card (Undôtai, 128).
224
The word parallax comes from the Greek word, parallassein, “to change, alter, or alternate” (para“beside” and allassein “to change or exchange”). From the online Oxford English Dictionary, and The

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and his business card occurs concomitantly with Mr. Karuma’s ability to see things
differently with his left and right eyes. This supplanting of Mr. Karuma’s social identity
by his card is followed by his physical transformation into a wall, an inanimate object
that he used to inspect as an employee of an insurance company. Importantly, it is cinemathat sets up this second phase of his metamorphosis. Mr. Karuma is invited to a film
screening one night. The film consists of only two shots; the first is an image of the desert
and the second is an image of his room. Mr. Karuma is pushed into the screen and passes
through it. Once he passes through the screen, he returns to his room. He stares at thewall, which gets sucked into Mr. Karuma’s inner desert, which, as we recall, was only thephotograph before it started growing inside his chest. Mr. Karuma’s final transformation
into a gigantic wall growing on the desert completes the whole process of inversion, an
inversion which is underscored by a series of references to visual media: stereoscope,camera obscura, magic lantern, photography, and cinema. Importantly, however, thesereferences to visual media remain at the level of motif and metaphor, and are thus
subordinated to the operation of language. At this point in Abé’s oeuvre, a properly
dialectical relation between language and vision has yet to be established.
In the aforementioned 1960 essay, “A Script for An Experimental Film,” Abéspeaks of his methodology of artistic experimentation in the following manner: “My own
method can be schematically summarized as follows: to destroy the old, stable system oflanguage through the use of mechanically produced images, so that the impact of thisdestruction stimulates and activates new potentials in the function of language.” 225
Although this statement needs to be read in its specific historical context (i.e. his plan toAmerican Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition (New York: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 2000), 1274.
225
Abé, “Jikken eiga no shinario,” 448.

134write an experimental film script), we can extrapolate a methodological principle
apparent in his filmic works: the actualization of the potential of language must takeplace through the mediation of the defamiliarizing image. As Abé conceives of thisprocess, the mechanically produced image actualizes a dialectical transformation of
language by constantly destroying and reconstructing its modes of operation. Crucially,
the mechanically produced image must function as the medium of this dialecticaltransformation. In the last section of this chapter I will examine the film Woman in theDunes in relation to this theoretical framework as well as the question of the
micropolitics of perception.
Minute Perceptions and Woman in the Dunes
In the 1960s Abé and Teshigahara collaborated on five films: Otoshiana (Pitfall,1962), Suna no onna (Woman in the Dunes, 1964), Shiroi asa (Ako/White Morning,1965) Tanin no kao (The Face of Another, 1966), and Moetsukita chizu (The Ruined
Map, 1968). Except for the short film, White Morning, the rest of the films were featurelength. I am focusing on Woman in the Dunes not because it is the most well known, but
because it helps illuminate Abé’s conception of the dialectical tension between the
disruptive power of the image and the order-giving power of language. Following
Hanada’s theory of the avant-garde documentary, we may call it an elliptic-dialecticaltension between the image and language.226 The film follows the trajectory of the elliptic-

226

It is also worth pointing out an apparent connection between Abé’s interest in the thematics of sand andHanada’s theoretical interest in them (e.g. his essays on plasticity of sand and “sand-like masses”).
However, this is not to suggest a simple influence model. It would be more accurate to say that Abé and
Hanada shared thematic and theoretical concerns about the formal plasticity of sand. It is indeed
fascinating to see so many of Abé’s and Hanada’s writings communicate and complement one another. For
instance, as the novel and the film of Woman in the Dunes clearly indicate, Abé’s focus is on different
modes of perceiving sand rather than different modalities of sand (which is the concern of Hanada). We canobserve a similar complementarity in their treatments of metamorphosis.

135dialectical movement that oscillates between the defamiliarizing operation of the image
and the familiarizing operation of the narration. In so doing the film enacts andsubstantiates Abé’s theory of language as that which gives an overarching syntactic orderand generality to perception, and his theory of the mechanically produced image as thatwhich disrupts this syntactic order and generality through the presentation of details.
The two elements or stages are involved in this elliptic-dialectic: first, thedefamiliarization of habituated, general perception; and second, the reintegration of theunfamiliar into a new perceptual order of generality. The notion of the dialectic is
indispensable here because, as we have seen in this chapter, Abé is not content with themere presentation of images that disrupt general modes of habituated perception; he isequally invested in the process of rejuvenating language. A similar process is at work in
Woman in the Dunes, whereby the aim of the film is not simply the disruption of
habituated perception, but rather the reorganization of perception through a newframework. This process takes place both on the narrative and the formal levels of thefilm.
No doubt most viewers would notice the particular emphasis given to haptic
sensations derived from sharp-focused textures and details of filmed objects in Woman in
the Dunes. At first sight the film appears to be concerned with the sheer magnification ofminiscule objects: grains of sand, bodies of insects, skin pores, beads of sweat, fingers,
glass beads, water droplets. These close-ups effectively function to make familiar objects,
such as human fingers, appear unfamiliar and monstrous. As Mary Ann Doane points out,136

various film theorists have indeed linked the close-up to “the invocation of an otherwise
unknown dimension, a radically defamiliarized alterity.”227
Abé himself often acknowledges the importance of the close-up insofar as its
defamilarizing tendency disrupts the mechanism of recognition. In 1954, for instance, hepublished a brief essay on cinema in which he discusses the power of “meaninglessobjects,” which threaten to “remove the veil of meanings.”228 One disruptive image hementions is the opening close-up of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film Le salaire de la peur
(Wages of Fear, 1953). The film begins with a few seconds of a static close-up of
cockroaches wiggling on the ground. According to Abé, during these few seconds ofduration the viewer is momentarily prevented from grasping the meaning of the image. It
is only when the film cuts to a medium shot of a boy playing with these cockroaches thatthe diegetic setup of the film is disclosed.
Given the prominence of the close-up images of insects in Woman in the Dunes
and given Abé and Teshigahara’s professed interests in surrealist filmmaking, it isdifficult not to draw a connection among the close-ups of insects in Woman in the Dunes,
the opening close-up in Le salaire de la peur, and numerous instances when close-ups ofinsects appear in Luis Buñuel’s films, as in the case of scorpions in the celebrated
opening sequence of L’age d’or (1930). But Abé’s interest in the defamiliarizing force ofthe close-up is neither limited to the images of insects nor to cinema. In fact, the close-up
often appears as the metaphor of an extraordinary perceptual experience in his fiction andessays.

227

Mary Ann Doane, “The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema,” differences: A Journal of Feminist
Cultural Studies, 14:3 (Fall 2003), 91. This essay inspired my argument for this section of the chapter.
228
Abé Kôbô, “Obuje zakkan” [Miscellaneous Thoughts on Objet], Abé Kôbô zenshû [The Complete
Works of Abé Kôbô], Vol.4 (Tokyo: Shinchôsha, 1997), 343.

137

A notable reference to the close-up appears in the short story “Dendrocacalia”
when Mr. Komon experiences a rare moment of ecstatic happiness: “Perhaps every thing
looks larger at moments like this; it’s like looking through a magnifying glass.”229 The
extraordinary perception of things in minute detail is further linked to the breakdown of
language in the 1966 essay titled Eizô to gengo (“The Mechanically Produced Image andLanguage”). Abé discusses the anxiety caused by the fragmentary perception of details
that do not add up to a coherent whole or totality. When routine habits suddenly break
down due to some kind of disorder, such as amnesia or aphasia, “the details of images
swell up beyond the threshold of the global whole.” In other words, detail overwhelms
and shatters totality. Noting the generalizing and totalizing tendency of language in
opposition to the specific and singular details of mechanically produced images, he asks:
What is this fear or anxiety that the mechanically produced images generates? It speaksof the discovery of the unusual because [these images] force us to gaze directly, in closeup, at things that are habitually processed. Sartre’s Nausea too describes an extreme stateof such fear arising from this condition, wherein language collapses and things that used
to be controlled by conceptualization come to the surface. In other words, by suddenly
severing the image from the language that tames and stabilizes it, and by bringing thisimage into a close-up, we can discover unexpected and hitherto overlooked aspects
within everyday processes.230

I want to highlight the last sentence, in which Abé turns to the device of the close-up to
talk about the sudden defamiliarization of quotidian objects and routine habits. Here thecollapse of the order of language is explicitly equated with the device of the close-up.
A similar use of the close-up as the principal metaphor of defamiliarization also
appears in the writings of other members of Kiroku geijutsu no kai. Sasaki Kiichi in his
1958 essay titled Kirokuteki houhou ni tsuite (“On the Documentary Method”) turns

229

Abé, “Denderokakariya,” 239.
Abé Kôbô, “Eizô to gengo” [The Mechanically Produced Image and Language], Abé Kôbô zenshû [TheComplete Works of Abé Kôbô], Vol.20 (Tokyo: Shinchôsha, 1999), 140.

230

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specifically to the close-up to discuss his idea of documentary as the critical method forcontesting stereotypes and preconceptions. Documentary for Sasaki is, just as it is for
Abé, Matsumoto, Hanada and others involved in the Kiroku geijutsu no kai, inseparablefrom the avant-gardist contestation of perceptual automatism. In order to support hisargument, Sasaki turns to Masaki Kyôichi’s reading of the close-up in the genre of thethriller film. Since the device of the close-up transforms familiar objects into “horrid
things,” when used in documentary it functions to undermine the apparent factuality offilmed objects. Sasaki concludes that the demand for documentary is therefore
ineluctably linked to the demand to break away from such perceptual automatism. 231
As I have already mentioned in the last chapter, the film Woman in the Dunes
frequently resorts to the extreme close-up, which threatens to undermine the legibility
and recognizability of filmed objects. From monstrously enlarged fingers peppered withdark grains of sand to microscopic views of water droplets and sand grains, the film selfconsciously and insistently deploys the device of the close-up. Yet, this move towards
defamiliarization is only one aspect of the film’s overall strategy of contesting perceptual
habits reinforced by the anthropocentric measurement of scale.232 Set in the midst of aremote rural beach area, surrounded by vast sand dunes, the film lacks the familiar
architectural cues that metonymically function to signal the human body as themeasurement of scale. Sometimes the film deliberately plays on this lack of visual cues.
For example a shot may begin with the image of ripples of sand, which confound the231

Sasaki Kiichi, “Kirokuteki houhou ni tsuite” [On the Documentary Method], Geijutsuron nôto [A Noteon Art], Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Gôdôshuppan, 1968), 227. Sasaki cites Henri Bergson’s comment on theautomatism of perception from Matière et mémoire in this section. An in-depth analysis of the apparent
similarity between Bergson’s interest in perception, memory, and habit and the Russian formalist-inspired
understanding of perceptual automatism is beyond the scope of this chapter.
232
As Doane suggests, the scale is “a concept in general [which] can only be understood through its
reference to the human body” (“The Close-Up,” 108).

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viewer who is unsure of the actual scale of the scenery. It is only when the tiny figure of
the protagonist enters the frame that the viewer becomes spatially oriented in her
imaginary relation to the diegetic world and able to gauge the scale of the landscapepresented on screen. Other times the film prolongs confusion by preventing the viewer
from recognizing the human body – the very measurement of the scale – disembodied
and fragmented in extreme close-ups. To wit, it is not the close-up as such that
contributes to the overall defamiliarization effects of the film, but rather abrupt andconstant oscillations between differently scaled shots that produces these effects.
As many critics have noted, the film version of Woman in the Dunes also makes
conscious efforts to convey the sensuous textures and haptic sensations produced by the
sharply focused images of skin, sand, and water. The images of these textured materials
are often superimposed or graphically matched in composition and framing, giving rise toa state of indiscernibility. The differences between flows of sand and flows of water, or
undulating bodies and undulating sand dunes, become indistinguishable at the level of
haptic sensation. This indiscernibility of otherwise heterogeneous objects contributes tofurther confound the viewer and defamiliarize filmed objects. The sensual immediacy of“things” dislocated from the grid of language – and perceptual and cognitive habits – isrecovered therefore in exchange for the discernibility and recognizability of each image.
We may recall here how Abé opposed the generalizing tendency of language, especiallythe function of naming, to the sensual immediacy of material “things” in his 1960 essay.
The film’s play on indiscernibility and unrecognizability of the image is clearly strategic.
If the strength of the cinematic image lies, as Abé argues in his essays, in its potential to140actualize the prehension of things in their pre-signifying (“not-yet-named” or “naked”)
state, Woman in the Dunes appears to maximize this potential.
Importantly, however, the film does not remain at this level of the immediateprehension of things. It also has an analytical trajectory that aims to show the correlation
between prehension and apprehension. Instead of resting upon the defamiliarization offamiliar objects, the film draws attention to the workings of what German philosopher G.
W. Leibniz termed small or “minute perceptions” (petite perceptions). While many critics
interpret the story of Woman in the Dunes as an existential allegory of the man who istrapped in a sandpit, I believe that there is also an underlying narrative of the discovery ofminute perceptions and their relations to what might be called “global perceptions” thatmake up our consciousness. The film might be read, in this respect, as an allegory of
becoming conscious of the relationship between minute and global perceptions.
Moreover, it is through the alternating uses of the close-up and the long shot that the film
guides the spectator through the shifting scales of its filmed objects. Not only does thefilm take the spectator through different scales of vision, it also thematizes this differencein scale as a movement of going below or beyond the threshold of “natural” perception,that is, perception unmediated by the camera. One particular thematic element that plays
a key role is the protagonist’s discovery of the capillary action of sand and water. It isprecisely when the protagonist gives up his preconceived ideas about sand and water that
he is able to shift the scale of his perception to the molecular level.
Turning to the writing of Leibniz illuminates the operation at work here. Leibniz,in his New Essays on Human Understanding, writes that our conscious perception ofreality is composed of countless minute perceptions of elements that usually go141unnoticed, as in the case of the roaring noise of the ocean. “To hear this noise as we do,
we must hear the parts which make up this whole, that is the noise of each wave,
although each of these little noises makes itself known only when combined confusedlywith all the others, and would not be noticed if the wave which made it were by itself.”233
In order for our conscious perception of hearing the sound of roaring waves to take place
we have to first perceive little noises that make up this sound, though this level ofperception may remain unconscious. The sensations of these little noises are registeredthrough what Leibniz calls minute perceptions that in turns compose conscious or global
perceptions.
Yet the relation between minute and global perceptions is a relative one insofar as
even global perceptions can become unconscious or imperceptible through the process ofhabituation. As Deleuze writes: “[A]lthough Leibniz states the point in terms of totality,
the question involves something other than a sum of homogenous parts. We are notdealing with a relation of parts-and-wholes because the totality can be as imperceptible as
the parts, as also when I do not sense the grinding noise of the water mill to which I am
overtly accustomed.” 234 In other words, habits can turn conscious perceptions into
unconscious perceptions irrespective of antecedent composing elements. Our perceptionsof noise, color, and other sensations emanating from a familiar environment become
imperceptible precisely because of our habituation to them.235

233

Quoted by Nicholas Rescher in his G.W. Leibniz’s Monadology: An Edition for Students (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh, 1991), 95.
234
Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), 87. The emphasis is in the original text.
235
Balázs also notes in his discussion of the close-up, which makes the territory of “little things of life”
make visible, “even the biggest things of life consist of these ‘little things,’ individual details and single
moments, while the larger contours are mainly the result of the insensitivity and sloppiness with which we
ignore the little things and blur their outlines. The abstract picture of the big things of life arises mainly
from our myopia” (Balázs, Visible Man, or the Culture of Film, 103).

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Deleuze’s point about the inadequacy of the parts-and-wholes model inunderstanding various modalities of perceptions is useful in thinking through Abé’sinterest in details that do no add up to a whole. When the syntactic grid of language is inplace, details become parts that constitute a whole. But without being buttressed by thisgrid of language, these details remain disconnected and fragmentary. Taking the example
of amnesia, he writes, “Because the quotidian process loses its everydayness under thiscondition one is forced to start everything again from concrete details.”236 The loss ofmemory produces anxiety because memory helps to connect fragmentary perceptions ofdetails and organize them so that reality appears as a meaningful, coherent whole.237
If cinematic images are more prone to generate such anxiety about details thanliterature, as Abé suggests, it is because cinema is capable of presenting reality inconcrete specificities rather than abstract generality. Not only is cinema capable ofpresenting fragmentary details of reality through the use of the close-up, the use of
discontinuous editing can maintain these fragments as fragments. Details in this sense are
no longer subsumable to the model of parts-and-wholes. These details do not provide a
coherent apprehension of the whole, but rather, they plunge the spectator into a state ofprehension. Cinematic details that do not add up to a whole thus actualize the disrupting
potential of the mechanically produced image to defamiliarize, a potential that Abé links
directly to the destabilization of the order-giving function of language.
So how does this observation help us understand the visual strategies of Woman
in the Dunes? As I mentioned earlier, the film opens with a microscopic close-up of sand
236

Abé, “Eizô to gengo,” 140.
As Leibniz notes along with other philosophers such as Hegel and Bergson, memory and habit allows
one to organize perceptual experiences according to the order of similarities. Even animals are capable offorming habituated perceptions. Leibniz writes in his Monadology: “[W]hen one shows a stick to dogs, theyrecall the pain that it has caused them and whine and run off” (G.W. Leibniz’s Monadology, 20).

237

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grains. In this opening sequence, the film gradually cuts to shots of sand in larger scales,
ending with the long shot of expansive sand dunes. It thus moves from the minisculedetails of sand grains to the whole of a desert. This sequence visually and narratively sets
up the film’s subsequent play on the relation between minute perceptions and global
perceptions. Crucially, the film stages its visual play on differently scaled perceptions
along the line of its narrative development. That is, the film parallels its own visual playon different scales of images with the protagonist’s discovery of the capillary action ofsand and water. This motif of discovering the capillary action is key to the overallnarrative development of the film.
To better understand the narrative significance of this motif of the capillaryaction, I will briefly summarize the plot of the film. After the opening sequence the film
introduces its protagonist, an amateur entomologist. He is dressed in hiking gear, and islooking for a rare breed of tiger beetles. At dusk he seeks a lodging for the night, and the
local villagers take him to the decrepit house of an attractive widow. The house is
decayed and half buried in sand at the bottom of a huge sandpit. The only way to get outof the house is to use a ladder, which villagers take away in order to capture theunfortunate entomologist. Confined in a sandpit evocative of the meager glass jars where
he keeps his captured insects, the entomologist is forced to live with the widow, who
appears to be resigned to repeat the futile, Sisyphean task of digging and emptying
buckets of sand every night in order to keep her house from being completely buried
under the sand. The entomologist tries to escape, but fails several times. However, one
day he accidently discovers a device that allows him to collect pure water by taking
advantage of the mechanism of capillary action, that is, the attraction of water molecules144to sand particles. He buries a leaky wooden bucket in the sand, covers it with a lid, andinserts bait in the hope of catching a crow. This simple, crude trap, turns out to be amarvelous water-collecting device. This discovery completely transforms his perceptionof his environment, which he initially considered to be dry, barren, and lifeless.
While the film presents this Copernican moment of the protagonist’s discovery ofcapillary action through a series of visually striking close-ups, the novel version of
Woman in the Dunes resorts to a lengthy and explicit explanation of it:
There was only one answer he could think of. That was the capillary action of the sand.
Because the surface sand had a high specific heat, it was invariably dry, but when you
dug down a little the under part was always damp. It must be that the surface evaporation
acted as a kind of pump, drawing up the subsurface water . . . . In short, the dryness ofthe sand was not due simply to a lack of water, but rather, it would seem, to the fact thatthe suction caused by capillary attraction never matched the speed of evaporation. In
other words, the water was being constantly replenished. But this water circulated at a
speed unthinkable in ordinary soil.238

With hindsight, we realize that the microscopic close-ups of sand grains in the opening
sequence of the film have already foreshadowed this molecular level of understanding of
the sand. But it is only after the protagonist struggles and learns to live with the sand that
he finally arrives at this molecular level of perception.
Interestingly, the novel version of The Woman in the Dunes, which lacks theimmediate visual means to convey different scales of sense perception, explicitly states
this problem of scale. Take the passage where the protagonist realizes the significance of
his discovery. No longer afraid of being cut off from his supply of water by manipulative
villagers, he is filled with happiness and begins to laugh: “Turning around, he could see
the whole scene. You can’t really judge a mosaic if you don’t look at it from a distance. If
you really get close to it you get lost in detail. You get away from one detail only to get

238

Kobo Abé, The Woman in the Dunes (New York: Vintage International, 1991), 233-234.

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caught in another. Perhaps what he had been seeing up until now was not the sand but
grains of sand.”239 Clearly, the novel suggests that the protagonist’s discovery of capillaryaction is analogous to his recovery of global perceptions. Until then, he saw his
immediate surroundings as if they were all in close-up. That is to say, he was caught inmicro-perceptions of details that did not add up to the whole.
It is not coincidental that the novel analogizes the myopic perception of detail tothe microscopic perception of sand grains: fragmentary details that do not add up to thewhole are analogous to grains of sand. This emphasis on the analogy between details andsand grains explain why the filmic version of Woman in the Dunes opens with amicroscopic close-up of sand grains. In a 1965 interview with Teshigahara and Abé,
Teshigahara comments on the difficulty of translating Abé’s novels into visual terms of
the film. He notes how Abé’s novels “cannot be represented through quotidian
experiences or very simple, ordinary experiences.” Precisely because Abé’s novels often
play on the gap between the most ordinary situations and extraordinary conceptual
absurdities, films that simply rely on dialogue would fail to translate his novels. The
attraction and challenge of Abé’s work, argues Teshigahara, derive from the demand it
puts on the filmmaker to translate abstract conceptual issues into concrete visual
images.240
An excellent example of such translation appears in the scene where theprotagonist knocks over several boxes of glass beads in frustration. Tiny glass beads
scatter on the ground. In order to separate the beads from the grains of sand, the widow
takes out a sieve, bends down, scoops up handfuls of sand, and pours them into the sieve.
239

Ibid.
Abé Kôbô, “Bungaku no sekai / Eizô no sekai” [The World of Literature and the World of the
Mechanically Produced Image], Abé Kôbô zenshû, Vol.19, 321.

240

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The fixed camera holds the sieve in close-up and shows sand the grains shifting throughit (Figure 8). A mound of sand quickly diminishes and glittering beads remain on thesurface of the sieve. The process is repeated several times, and through this repetition thefilm draws the spectator’s attention to the minute difference between the size of sandgrains and the size of glass beads.
Although this scene occupies a very small space in the novel, it becomes animportant visual analogy for the molecular composition of sand and water, and hence theanalogous to the capillary action in the film. Just as water molecules pass through grainsof sand, grains of sand get filtered through the mesh of a sieve, leaving behind grains ofbeads too large to pass. Lacking the eloquence of the novel, the film nonetheless presents
the workings of these molecular forces through the sensual immediacy of the visual
image. In so doing the film allows the spectator to experience the protagonist’s gradual
understanding of sand beyond the threshold of the habituated global perceptions. Thesenumerous grains of sand, which the film relentlessly and insistently presents, are thevisual equivalents of the minute perceptions that constitute our global perceptions of thesand. Yet, it is only when the film takes us through the dialectical process of movingfrom the microscopic to the macroscopic, and back to the microscopic again we finallyrealize the interlocking relation between minute perceptions of miniscule details andglobal perceptions of the whole.241“Microperceptions” according to Deleuze, “are minute, obscure, confused
perceptions that make up our macroperceptions, our conscious, clear, and distinct

241

It is crucial that the film relies on the device of the close-up to guide the spectators through this process.
As Balázs once noted, the close-up is “the art of emphasis” (Visible Man, or the Culture of Film, 104).

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apperceptions.” 242 What the film Woman in the Dunes makes “sensible” and“perceptible” is precisely this interlocking relation between global macroperceptions andminute microperceptions. The perceptibility of this relation is, however, inseparable fromthe order-giving function of the film’s narrative, which anchors the spectator’s overall
sensory experience of the film. Here I want to go back to my opening remark about thecontemporary relevance of the avant-gardist contestations of perceptual habits.
At the beginning of this chapter I questioned the view that takes defamiliarization
to be a politically obsolete tactic belonging to the bygone eras of avant-garde activism
and film theory. Against this view I also suggested that current academic interest in
Rancière’s aesthetic theory indicates that, to the contrary, the question of
defamiliarization is in fact a very current concern. The problems of sense perception andhabit, as Rancière and the current interest in his work suggest, are still worth thinking
through. If the ordering and policing of sense perceptions are still part of our politicalstruggles today, as Rancière suggests, what Abé’s work shows us is the way there is apolitics to be found in the artistic process of making “perceptible” the relation between
macroperceptions and microperceptions, a process that I analyzed through my reading of
the film Woman in the Dunes. That is to say, what Abé points out is not only the politics
of perception, but also the politics of the very relation between the perceptible andimperceptible elements that make up perceptibility itself. In this sense, Abé’s artistic
work urges us to intervene in politics at the “molecular” level, and to engage our senses

242

Deleuze, The Fold, 86.

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at a level and with a strategy that accords with what Deleuze and Guattari have called themicropolitics of perception.243
As we turn to the next chapter, and back to the question of the relation between
journalism and avant-garde art practice, the similarity between the imbrication of thesetwo practices and the imbrication between microperceptions and macroperceptions
highlighted in this chapter will also become important. As I will show, the relation
between journalism and the avant-garde is not a simple opposition, but is rather
concerned with making the imperceptible, or, the habituated order of “common” sense,
perceptible. In this sense, the relation between the avant-garde and journalism is amutually constitutive one. The next chapter will turn to the filmic works of Oshima andWakamatsu, who stage encounters between journalism and the avant-garde in order toapproach the problems of commonness and sense perception. Their approaches to these
problems notably emphasize the mediatized sensation of actuality and the production of
actuality-effects by the media. The works of Oshima and Wakamatsu, two filmmakers
who are on the margin of the postwar avant-garde movements, will help us think throughthe relation between the journalistic sensation of actuality and the avant-garde’s demand
for actuality to exceed the level of mere sensation. In short, the next chapter will return tothe micropolitics of perception as it appears in the form of competing practices of243

In their discussion of politics and social relations, Deleuze and Guattari differentiate what they call“molar” and “molecular” levels of organization or segmentation of elements. Societies, political regimes,
individuals, and even perceptions and feelings are fundamentally affected by these two modalities oforganization. The molar segmentation refers to a rigid, centralized, and totalizing kind of organization,
while the molecular segmentation refers to a supple, diffused, and often an unconscious kind oforganization. What I have been calling the global, macro-perceptions of the whole belongs to the molar
level of organization, and the minute, micro-perceptions of details belongs to the molecular level oforganization. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the difference between “macropolitics” and“micropolitics” of forces and relations corresponds to this difference between the molar and the molecularlevels of organization. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism andSchizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), especially 213217.

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engaging with actuality, understood in a broader sense of what is happening – or in actu(“in the very act”) – in the present.

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CHAPTER FOUR
Artifactuality, Periodicity, and Cinema
Midway through the commercial narrative film, Rokudenashi (Good for Nothing,1960) directed by Yoshida Kijû, a short sequence of actuality footage abruptly appears. It
shows what has come to be seen as an icon of the Japanese sixties: college students
protesting against the imminent renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (ANPO). The
students move in clusters, streaming through the streets: anonymous faces, none of which
is looking back at the camera. On the soundtrack, we hear the voice of an unidentified
lecturer, presumably an archeology professor, discussing the apparent difficulty ofpartitioning historical time into distinct periods: what are the criteria by which we divide
history into a succession of epochs and periods? When the periodization of the historicaltime is associated with what would later become the iconic images of the Japanese
sixties, it acquires a significance that spills over this film’s narrative edge. Viewed
decades later, the image of this former present exerts a force of historicity. Its value asarchival footage of the past compensates, however, for the loss of its immediate sensationof actuality, of its journalistic currency. !
Because of its dual status as a journalistic document of present-day actuality and anarchival document of the past that has become history, this brief footage forces us toreflect upon the ontological indeterminacy of the present in relation to the conception oftime that is based on historical periodization, without which categories such as “thesixties,” “postwar,” or “postmodern” do not exist. The notion of periodization bydefinition posits a time punctuated by breaks on both sides. Like the grammatical markerof the same name, the temporal concept of the period presupposes an act of arresting, an151

interruption. Yet if, as Fredric Jameson suggests, “the present is not yet a historicalperiod,” how might we reconcile a periodic conception of time with that unique temporaldimension called the present?244 Is it even possible to speak of the present within theconceptual framework of periodicity?
In this chapter I want to return to the questions of the elliptic-dialectical tension
between journalism and the avant-garde and the increased demand for actuality in art. As
we saw in previous chapters, figures associated with what I called the avant-garde
documentary movement (i.e. Hanada Kiyoteru, Abé Kôbô, Teshigahara Hiroshi,
Matsumoto Toshio) problematized this demand for actuality – or the temporal currencyof a work of art in relation to contemporary social reality – through their efforts toredefine the concept of documentary. This chapter and the following chapter will expand
the scope of investigation from the works of these self-proclaimed Marxist avant-garde
critics and artists to the works of filmmakers who called themselves neither avant-garde
nor Marxist. The filmmakers whose works I would like to focus on in this chapter are
Oshima Nagisa (1932- ) and Wakamatsu Kôji (1936- ).
In spite of their willingness to push the envelope of narrative cinema towards anexperimental pole and their commitment to vanguard – and often militant leftist –politics, the works of Oshima and Wakamatsu critically differ from those of the avantgarde documentary group: the difference is marked, first and foremost, by their proximity
to the film industry. Yet, they too responded to the demand for actuality, to the demandfor contemporary relevance and timeliness within a given work in relation to its“present,” or, the historical moment of production. Moreover, the strategies they took to

244

Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essays on The Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002),
25.

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respond to this demand expose a particular aspect of actuality, which remained latent in
the works of the avant-garde documentary critics and artists: that is, the artifice at theheart of actuality.
While the works of the avant-garde documentary artists, such as Matsumoto andAbé, rely on the technique of defamiliarization, the works of Oshima and Wakamatsu, as
we will see, deploy instead the techniques of citation, recycling, and even piracy. A
certain repetition with difference marks Oshima and Wakamatsu’s exposition of what
Jacques Derrida calls “artifactuality” and cinema’s complicity with it. Instead ofquestioning the order of sense perception and the formation of perceptual habits, theworks of Oshima and Wakamatsu make explicit the artifice of the actuality-effectproduced by journalism and commercial cinema, and in so doing bring to the fore thequestion of temporality. This in turn will enable us to approach the problem of actuality
from a different dimension, that of time. In this chapter, we will thus engage with theworks of these two filmmakers which, in contrast with the artists from the avant-garde
documentary movement, cleave more closely to the side of journalism and its particular
temporality, even as they maintain a critical stance against the common practice ofjournalism.
Let us return to the film with which we opened this chapter. The placement of theaforementioned brief actuality footage in Good for Nothing catches our eyes in the midstof an otherwise formulaic story of a group of delinquent youths. Yet this film is not alone
in incorporating actuality footage into narrative fiction. There is in fact a small but
significant body of postwar Japanese films that not only incorporate actuality footage, butalso include a wide range of newspaper clippings, press photographs, cartoon images

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published in weekly magazines and newsreel sequences.245 Materials directly lifted off
the pages and reels of journalistic media contribute to these films’ distinct visualcompositions. Moreover, thanks to the legibility of these grafted materials, we are evenable to pinpoint the exact dates of the events referenced in the fragments of news reports,
or, by noting the periodicals’ publication dates.
At first glance, this exactitude would appear only to serve the films’ “realityeffects.” It makes fiction look like the documentary reproduction of reality. Certainly,
some of the films that directly incorporate journalistic materials do this purposefully: they
mimic the look of the documentary film to achieve the effect of verisimilitude. However,a closer look at various films from the 1960s shows the situation to be otherwise. Films
by Oshima and Wakamatsu, in particular, evince a citational usage of journalistic
materials whose significance is not reducible to the production of reality-effects.
Above all, the direct incorporation of journalistic materials brings into play two
principles that characterize the general practice of journalism: timeliness and periodicity.
My objective in this chapter is hence twofold: to examine the effects produced by Oshima
and Wakamatsu’s cinematic citations of journalistic materials, and to use the examinationof these effects as the basis from which to further reflect upon narrative cinema’s
relationship to the particular temporality of journalistic actuality. As we will see shortly,
the historical timing of the spread of this citational strategy within narrative cinema, andthe films of Oshima and Wakamatsu in particular, is critical. This timing is criticalprecisely because this citational strategy corresponds to a structural crisis, which had
befallen the existing system of production, distribution, and exhibition of narrative films
245

I distinguish here between “actuality” footage and “newsreel” footage. While newsreel footage refers toimages that are part of news film, or film used on the TV news, actuality footage refers to any filmic
recording of unscripted events, and does not require this document to be used for news purposes.

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in the 1960s, and its aftermath.
The particular dimension of actuality I want to discuss in this chapter, therefore,
hinges upon the journalistic conception of it. One of the senses of the term “actuality”
designates this journalistic temporality, which can be variably expressed by terms such as“newsworthy,” “current affairs,” and “up-to-dateness.” As I discussed in Chapter Two,
while these temporal connotations are less explicit in English, the sense of “happening in
the present” is strongly expressed in the Japanese loanword, akchuaritii, as well as in the
French (actualité) and the German (Aktualität). The “actual” in this journalistic sense
designates what is current, topical, and newsworthy. As we know from the generalpractice of journalism, moreover, this sense of actuality prizes the novelty of information,
the topicality of events and the up-to-dateness of trends. From political scandals to thelatest fashions, the primary concern of journalistic media is what is happening in thepresent moment, that is to say, the present that is yet to become history. Yet, this alone
does not explain why journalism must always concern itself with the present and theever-faster logic of expiration. In what follows I will thus examine the logicalpresuppositions that underpin this temporally bound conception of journalistic actuality,
and then move on to a close reading of several films of Oshima and Wakamatsu in which
we find exemplary instances of the cinematic citation of this journalistic actuality.
Periodicity and Expiration
In order to understand the implications of the citation of journalistic materials forcinema’s relation to actuality, it is necessary to pay attention to two distinctive, if not
opposing, ways of conceiving periodicity. The first concerns the historical orarchaeological model of periodization, which divides time into segments that are not155

equidistant. One period or era may last more or less time than the other. An importantcharacteristic of this model is this: each segment remains non-equidistant and the interval
is determined retroactively. For this reason the determination of a historical era or period
is irreducible to cyclical order. An era is often determined retroactively by its content, by
events taking place within its time frame.246 In contrast, the cyclical order of natural
seasons and the punctual order of journalistic publications such as newspapers andmagazines follow a different logic of periodicity, that of the programmatic kind. In thissecond model, segments remain equidistant, and the arrival of the next interval is always
already anticipated. Periodicity in this case hence connotes an empty form, a predetermined program.
Whether its subject matter is politics, fashion, or crime, or whether its
communicative venue is print, film, or electronic media, the second model ofprogrammatic periodicity underpins the basic practice of journalism. Admittedly, not all
forms of journalistic reporting operate within a strictly periodic cycle. On-line
journalism, for instance, certainly has revolutionarized the speed and the circulation of
information, to which traditional models of periodic cycles are, arguably, no longer
applicable. Nevertheless, as its etymology makes it clear – the word journal derives froma Latin word diurnalis, meaning “daily” (or diurnal) – journalism at its most fundamental
level presupposes a cyclical conception of time. When journalistic information isconsumed, it creates anticipation for the arrival of the next round. The attitude implied bythis conception of periodicity is, however, by no means the same as the attitude involvedin the historiographic conception of it. A historical era is determined ex post facto. It is
246

Tosaka Jun, for example, articulates this conception of a historical period. See Tosaka Jun, “Nichijôsei
no genri to rekishiteki jikan” [The Principle of Everyday and the Historical Time], Tosaka Jun zenshû [TheCollected Works of Tosaka Jun], Vol. 3 (Tokyo: Keisô shobô, 1966), 98.

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not given programmatically. 247 This distinction between the two conceptions ofperiodicity is crucial in putting into perspective the citational strategies used by Oshima
and Wakamatsu.
As it is often argued, journalistic information loses its value as time passes, andquickly becomes obsolete. Walter Benjamin puts it succinctly: “The value of information
does not survive the moment in which it was new.”248 What defines the obsoleteness ofjournalistic information is, first and foremost, its status of being out-of-date. That is tosay, journalistic actuality is governed by its expirability. The possibility – and threat – of
expiration is hence constitutive of its existence. Journalistic actuality is, by extension,
defined primarily by its capacity to expire. For this reason, saying that something is“dated” in the journalistic context has implications that are twofold; it means bothbearing a date and having undergone the erosion of time (and thereby becoming
obsolete). Within the innocuous use of this idiom we can thus discern a certain epistemic
presupposition, that is, a presupposition of this logic of expiration. In short, journalistic
actuality (in which informational novelty is prized) operates in a particular mode of
temporality defined by the potential expirability of its terms.
Crucially, it is through visual citations or quotations of journalistic materials thatthe films of Oshima and Wakamatsu expose the hidden anxiety of narrative cinema, ananxiety that the cinema too is haunted by its potential to expire, to become obsolete. Yet,at the same time, these films make perceptible the difference between the temporality ofcinema and that of journalism. The effect of repetition produced by the quotational use of247

Though it should be said that the zeal of many historians and cultural critics for periodization betrays aformal impulse, rather than a pure interest in the content-based differences between particular periods.
248
Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” Illuminations, trans.
Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 90.

157journalistic materials is key to this operation. As Niklas Luhmann points out, thetemporal structure of repetition is detrimental to journalistic information.249 It follows,
then, that Oshima and Wakamatsu’s appropriation of journalistic materials do not carry
the same informational values as the originals. Quotation, by definition, implies
repetition; it reproduces a passage or an image lifted from elsewhere. The parentheticalstatus of the reproduced text or image as repetition is often grammatically and visuallymarked. Oshima and Wakamatsu’s cinematic citations operate in a comparable manner.
Unlike the experimental breed of found footage cinema, which similarly appeals to thestructure of repetition, Oshima and Wakamatsu’s citational use of journalistic materials(newspapers, magazines, newsreels) does not forfeit the referential ties to the originalcontexts from which the images are taken.
Moreover, instead of recycling archival footage (as most of found footage
filmmakers do), Oshima and Wakamatsu choose to focus on materials whose production
dates are not so distant from the production dates of their films. This tendency is more
pronounced in the works of Wakamatsu. For instance, his experimental “pink” film, Yuke
yuke nidome no shojo (Go, Go, Second Time Virgin, 1969) makes extensive use ofimages taken from tabloid-style weekly magazines, many of which reference the murderof an American actress Sharon Tate that took place in August, 1969. The film wasreleased one month after this much publicized murder. The time lag between the releaseof Wakamatsu’s films and the media events cited in his films become even shorter withthe film, Segura magura: shinitai Onna (1970), which takes on another media event: thespectacular suicide of writer Mishima Yukio. The death of Mishima took place in
249

Luhmann writes, “A news item run twice still has its meaning, but it loses its information value” (19).
See Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media, trans. Kathleen Cross (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2000)

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November 25, 1970. Wakamatsu and his scriptwriter Adachi Masao finished writing thescript by November 29, shot the film, and released it by early December. In this case, theinterval between the time of the production of quoted journalistic materials and the timeof the film’s release is less than a month. As one Japanese critic puts it, the speed of
Wakamatsu’s filmmaking is almost on par with the turnover of the weekly magazines.250
What do we make of this close temporal proximity between the time of the original
construction of the event by the media and the time of its cinematic repetition? If thesensation of actuality or temporal immediacy is so crucial to the operation of journalistic
media, what happens to this sensation when the information is repeated? Does theaffective valence of actuality wane in the course of cinematic repetition because theinformation value of the original expires, as Luhmann suggests, as soon as it is repeated?
What would be the temporality specific to films that insist on quoting journalistic
materials?
In order to answer these questions, we must first look to the anxiety of cinema that
imitates journalism, the cinema that follows its programmatic order of periodicity. As wesaw earlier, the programmatic periodicity brings with it the threat of expiration. The
cinema that replicates the temporal structure of journalism always faces this threat, but
the postwar implementation of the infamous system of “program-pictures” particularlyheightened it. In fact, it is not coincidental that Oshima and Wakamatsu, two filmmakers
who deploy this citational strategy, worked on the periphery of the declining postwar
studio system. At the time when Oshima and Wakamatsu deployed this strategy, the film
industry in Japan, was undergoing a radical restructuration that eventually led to the250

Hiraoka Masaaki, Umi o miteita Zatôichi [Zatôichi Who Was Looking At the Sea] (Tokyo: Izara shobô,1973), 135.!

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differentiation of cinema’s temporality from that of journalism.
As a point of departure, let us turn to an essay titled Eiga zokusetsu e no chôsen (“AChallenge to Vulgar Beliefs about Cinema”) written by Oshima. In this short essay
published in the magazine Gendai no me (Eyes of Modern Times) in 1961, Oshima
insists that the very conception of cinema as temporary entertainment suitable for shortterm consumption must be contested.251 In order to gauge the weight of his statement,
some historical contextualization is required. In Japan, well into the 1960s, it was acommonplace to regard films as commodities virtually branded with expiration dates:
mass produced films (known as “program-pictures”) were delivered weekly by the major
studios and routinely shown for a week or two. After their week-long play they became
obsolete.252 According to Oshima, filmmakers who are accustomed to this programmatic
structure of filmmaking have internalized a “pessimistic” view of cinema as short-lived
entertainment. Yet, argues Oshima, “the cinema does not simply get old after one or two
weeks.” For films with artistic integrity are capable of offering long-lasting impressions
that would live on, perhaps not forever, but definitely longer than one or two weeks.253
Given the conditions of the Japanese film industry around 1961, Oshima’s
argument warrants careful attention, for it helps us understand the growing tension
between conflicting views of narrative cinema. On the one hand, a majority of films –because they were program-pictures – were regarded as temporary amusements prone to
expiration. On the other hand, there existed an alternative view of films as enduring
works of art that defy the very concept of expiration, a concept which governs the life of251

Oshima Nagisa, “Eiga zokusetsu e no chôsen” [A Challenge to Vulgar Beliefs about Cinema],
Sengoeiga: hakai to sôzô [Postwar Cinema: Destruction and Creation] (Tokyo: San’ichi shobô, 1963), 80.
252
Ibid.
253
Ibid, 81.

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both commodities and journalistic materials.
As it is well known, after reaching the astonishing record of 110 million
moviegoers in the year 1958, the Japanese film industry began to decline. Cinema
gradually lost its hegemonic position as peoples’ favored pastime to television, which
was rapidly disseminated nationwide from the late 1950s to mid-1960s. With the rise of
television, the “Golden Age” of the commercial cinema supported by the postwar studiosystem thus came to a close. One of the consequences of this was a gradual weakening of
the programmatic mode of exhibition called “block booking.”
During the 1950s, not only mass-produced program-pictures not only dominatedthe market, but a monopoly by the six major studios (that produced these programpictures) also held effective controls over distribution and exhibition. Japan’s postwar
studio system thus hinged upon the fast-paced production of program-pictures and theprearranged distribution of these films to theaters under contracts. In 1960, Japanproduced 547 films, of which ninety-nine percent were program-pictures.254 At the time,
the average production rate of each studio was two films per week. Theaters undercontract with the major studios then received these program-pictures weekly, and playedthem for one or two weeks, often in the double feature format.
However, the weaker the film industry became overall, the easier it became forlow-budget independent production companies to distribute and exhibit their works. By
the mid-1960s talented young filmmakers like Oshima had also left studios andestablished their own production companies, while others coming out of either the
documentary sector or other arts started their film careers outside the existing studio254

Yomota Inuhiko, Nihon eigashi 100 nen [100 years of Japanese Cinema: A History] (Tokyo: Shûeisha,
2000), 160.

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system. One of the most important outcomes of this flourishing current of independent
filmmaking was the establishment of a new style of exhibition, which allowed more
flexible booking and longer screening.255 As exemplified by the effort of the Art Theater
Guild (ATG) – the first independent distributor, exhibitor and later producer of art films
founded in 1962 – for the first time, “long-run” screenings of small budget films (lastingfor more than a month at a single theater) became not only possible but also desirable.
It is hence crucial to situate the aforementioned essay, wherein Oshima contests thecommonplace view of films as commodities suited for one-time-use, within the larger
shift towards flexible screening times. No longer subordinated to the centralizedmachinery of the studio system, there emerged a small and diffuse network of companies
involved in the production, distribution, and exhibition of independent films in the 1960s.
This was also the time when the emergent model of “long-run” screening, which brokeaway from the periodical cycle of the weekly turnover, took off. Commenting on thisemergent form of exhibition, Oshima argues that the demand for the “long-run” (which
not only came from the producers but also from the audience) should be taken as proof
that the cinema has the potential to produce works of art suited for long-term
appreciation. 256
Of course, Oshima was not alone in espousing the cinema’s aesthetic value over its
entertainment value. As I have discussed in preceding chapters, the theoretical discoursesof the late 1950s and early 1960s had already laid the intellectual ground to appreciate
and analyze film as the art of the “mechanically produced image” (eizô). The emphasison the artistic potential of the cinematic medium, which was generated by avant-garde
255

Satô Tadao, “Eiga sangyô” [“The Film Industry”], Gendai eiga jiten [Dictionary of the Contemporary
Cinema], eds. Okada Susumu, et.al. (Tokyo: Bijutsu shuppansha, 1973), 53-54.
256
Ibid.

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critics such as Hanada Kiyoteru in the 1950s, was clearly passed onto the next generationof critics and filmmakers, including Oshima. However, this view of the cinema – as an artof the mechanically produced image – was by no means popular among the generalpublic, or among the majority of filmmakers. As Oshima himself notes:
Around 1960 the film industry was still powerful, and the cinema as mass entertainment
was going strong, but culturally and intellectually it was considered to be crap. A few
men of letters such as Fukuda Sadayoshi and Hanada Kiyoteru produced film criticism –not in the sense of fine commentaries on film, but rather in the sense of criticism as awork of art in itself – yet these were exceptions. Generally, the cinema is not regarded asculture or art, let alone as thought.257

Oshima’s statement might be read as an indication of the collective desire of filmmakers
and critics with avant-garde dispositions to liberate cinema from its conformity to thejournalistic production and the consumption of novelty. But with the autonomy of cinema
also came the loss of its journalistic currency and its direct appeal to the general public.
According to Gabriel Tarde, the “sensation of actuality” (sensation de l’actualité)
derives from the virtual assurance of one’s belonging to the greater community of theaddressees of journalistic media.258 The sensation of the urgency, topicality or timelinessof the journalistic information presumes its simultaneous mass reception. The impressionof actuality conveyed by the media hinges upon the recipient’s belief that the mass
reception of the same information is taking place concurrently. The sensation of actuality

257

Oshima Nagisa, Oshima Nagisa: 1960 (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1993), 33
Gabriel Tarde, L’opinion et la foule (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989), 9. Tarde describes a
hypothetical situation in which a person is reading a newspaper with great pleasure; events recounted andinformation laid in the pages of the newspaper grip this hypothetical reader. He finishes reading it, andrealizes that the newspaper he has just read is completely out of date. Whether it is from yesterday or lastmonth does not matter. He feels disgusted. Where does this disgust originate, asks Tarde, which we feel at
the moment when we discover that the newspaper we are reading is out of date? According to Tarde, itdoes not originate from our awareness that the information contained in the newspaper is simply old.
Instead, it originates in the sense of exclusion, a feeling of being-left-out of the public composed of thereading masses.

258

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or actuality-effect imparted by the media is underwritten by this subjective sense of
belonging to objectively verifiable time.
This immediate appeal to the time of the present that is coextensive with the entire
social field is, however, something the avant-garde has traditionally lacked. Itsvanguardist position affirms a present that is in the process of arriving. Yet, its desire to
be at the forefront of historical time is also haunted by a corresponding anxiety forbecoming obsolete, outmoded, passé. The anxiety of the avant-garde is essentially
temporal, and this temporal anxiety of becoming obsolete is inseparable from its
contradictory desire to appropriate and differentiate itself from the mass media practices
that incessantly incite sensations of actuality. If the public that the avant-garde addresses
is unformed and not given outright, as Jean Cassou once noted, its temporality cannot
escape an anticipatory structure.259 Like journalism, the avant-garde is caught in an
anticipatory temporality. It expects and desires the arrival of the new. Moreover, if thetask of the avant-garde is to participate actively in the formation of this unformed public,
it must appeal to the masses.
However, it is precisely competing conceptions of the masses that distinguish theavant-garde’s relation to time from journalism’s relation to it. As I argued in Chapter
One, when the avant-garde introduces the concept of plasticity to define the potentiallymalleable nature of the masses, it also opens up a different conception of time. The
concept of plasticity signifies the dual capacity to form itself actively and receive a given
form passively. This dynamic nature of plasticity exceeds programmable form and resists
fixation. As Hanada suggests, understood through this plastic potentiality, the masses
259

Jean Cassou, “From Avant-Garde to Popular Art,” French Film Theory and Criticism: A
History/Anthology, 1907-1939, Volume 2: 1929-1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1988), 218.

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undergo constant metamorphoses. The avant-garde that accepts this plastic dimension of
the masses and its openness to the temporal movement of metamorphosis, then, affirms atemporality that is open to utterly unpredictable changes. If we follow this argument, theavant-garde’s relation to time appears radically different from that of journalism; it isincompatible with the programmatic cycle.
If there indeed was an event that turned “the sixties” into a period of its own in thehistory of Japanese cinema, it was not simply the emergence of the so-called “NewWave.” Rather, the event consists of more fundamental material as well as conceptual
transformations that took place in the production and reception of narrative cinema. The
avant-garde resistance against the programmatic conception of periodicity associatedwith journalism (of which Oshima’s aforementioned statement is exemplary) played an
integral part of these transformations. Scholars on Japanese cinema, however, havesystematically overlooked this point by relying on the conventional framework of the“New Wave.” In fact, one might go so far as to say that the term “New Wave” hasblinded scholars to other changes not encompassed by the stereotyped understanding of
the term.
Here it would be useful to briefly examine the common assumptions that go alongwith the invocation of the “New Wave.” Its use originates in the Japanese media, whichdrew a comparison between younger directors at the Shôchiku Studio (such as Oshima
Nagisa, Yoshida Kijû, and Shinoda Masahiro) and its eponymous counterpart: the French
nouvelle vague filmmakers (Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, etc). Yet theconventional use of this category falls short of offering an appropriate conceptual
framework that could illuminate the epochal shift in the history of Japanese cinema,165which took place in the transitional years between the late 1950s and the 1960s. In its
general use, the term “New Wave” is thematically associated with sex, politics, andviolence, and it is formally associated with Brechtian self-reflexivity. We may recall an
exemplary role Oshima’s films played in the Western film theory; the list of theorists
who turned to Oshima would include prominent figures of the 70s film theory, such as
Stephen Heath, Noël Burch, and Edward Branigan.
Scholarly treatments of the “New Wave” both in Japan as well as in the West havealso been dominated by two contrasting approaches: a thematic approach (dealing withthe representations of sex, politics and violence), and a theoretical approach (which
privileges formal experiments and self-reflexivity). Raising similar concerns about the“New Wave” films, David Desser notes, “[w]hile few film scholars read the New Wavein such overtly reductive terms, those who have dealt in passing with the New Wave
simply acknowledged the sociocultural context and then proceeded to examine the films
from their more preferred, narrow viewpoint.”260 Desser thus argues that existing studies
of Japanese cinema of the 1960s by Western scholars have one-sidedly tended towards
theoretically informed readings, which make exclusive use of Western film theory
influenced by structural and post-structural Marxism, psychoanalysis, and semiotics. As
Desser rightly suggests, this has resulted in the systematic de-historicization of Japanesecinema.
My current study joins Desser in his attempt to historicize postwar Japanesecinema, but my approach also parts ways with Desser’s in a fundamental manner. Desser
aims at contextualizing “how certain Japanese filmmakers used cinema as a tool, aweapon in a cultural struggle,” but preserves the self-explanatory category of the “New260

Desser, Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to The Japanese Cinema, 2.

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Wave.”261 The purported novelty as well as the implicit comparability of the Japanesefilmmakers with their French counter-parts are, therefore, taken for granted. Hiscontextualization also overlooks a body of theoretical texts on film and visual media
produced by Japanese critics and filmmakers. By contrast, I argue that the transitional
years between the late 1950s and early 1960s form a turning point in the history ofJapanese filmmaking and theory, whose ramifications cannot be fully assessed as long as
we cling to this category of the “New Wave.” For this term, through its traditional
association with a limited number of celebrated auteurs, prevents us from seeing larger
transformations that equally affected filmmaking, film theory, and avant-garde art
practice.
Indeed, if we were to consider an intensified demand for actuality that affectedvarious cultural practices, from literature to film, a differently configured history of
postwar Japanese cinema appears. Long before the media construed the emergence of the“New Wave,” critical changes were already taking place in the circulation and receptionof narrative cinema. These changes gave rise to a new temporal logic of durability
specific to the cinema. This logic of durability was opposed to the logic of expiration thatcharacterized journalistic practice and its structure of periodic consumption. To wit,
during the late 1950s and early 1960s Japanese cinema underwent fundamental
transformations not only in the practical dimension of its production, circulation, andexhibition, but also in its theoretical and conceptual dimensions. I have already discussed
the social demand for actuality, and the film theoretical response to this demand in theform of the avant-garde documentary in the previous chapters. The overturning of thejournalistic conception of periodicity that long defined the temporality of cinema
261

Ibid., 3.

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(regarded as a short-term entertainment) was another key component of thesetransformations.
Accordingly, I take the so-called crisis of Japanese cinema induced by the rise of
television – which effectively ended the “Golden Age” of commercial cinema – as amixed blessing rather than an outright misfortune. It is a blessing precisely because it
prompted a re-conceptualization of the temporality – and the obsolescence – specific tonarrative cinema. It is hence all the more important, at this particular historical juncture,that the formal strategy of directly incorporating and citing journalistic materials became
frequent among filmmakers with avant-garde dispositions, such as Oshima andWakamatsu.
News vs. Archive
But what were the effects of Oshima and Wakamatsu’s citational use of journalistic
materials? How did they differ from the works of other filmmakers, who similarly
incorporated materials gleaned from the journalistic media? A good place to start is the
opening sequence of the 1953 film Nihon no higeki (A Japanese Tragedy) by Kinoshita
Keisuke. Not only does Kinoshita’s use of newspapers and newsreels precede those of
Oshima and Wakamatsu, but it also serves as an instructive counterexample. Moreover,to look closely at the respective uses of this technique by Kinoshita, Oshima, andWakamatsu will give us a comprehensive view of the changing status of journalistic
actuality in the films of the 1950s and the 1960s. A point to keep in mind is that thetechnique itself was by no means new. Rather, directly incorporating actual newspapers
and newsreels had been fairly common in the field of documentary filmmaking. We may
think of, for example, the insertions of pages from wartime newspapers in Kamei

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Fumio’s polemical documentary film also titled Nihon no higeki (A Japanese Tragedy,1946).
However, the documentary techniques of reproducing actual pages of newspapers
and incorporating newsreel footage became both conspicuous and frequent in the field of
narrative filmmaking in the 1950s. This was also the time when the general public’s
appetite for investigatory journalism, literary reportage, and detective novels grew
rapidly. Actuality in the sense of both journalistic topicality and factual reporting becamea key to various forms of cultural production and media practice. Meanwhile, many ofleft-wing filmmakers were “purged” from major studios under the General MacArthur’santi-Communist policies. Those who were excluded from the studio system then formed
small production companies, and resumed filmmaking.262 Importantly, many of these
independent filmmakers chose “actual” court cases and political scandals as subject
matters in order to express their ideological convictions. Despite being overtly political in
its theme and oppositional in the conditions of their production, however, these films
resorted to the established formal norms of cinematic realism.
Among them, we find an exemplary instance of directly incorporating journalistic
material in Yamamoto Satsuo’s 1950 film, Bôryoku no machi (Town of Violence). The
film’s narrative closely draws on the written reportage about an actual crime syndicate,
which was in cahoots with the local police. Written by journalists affiliated with the262

Roland Domenig writes: “The outbreak of the Cold War led to a change in occupation policies and to
the suppression of the communist-dominated labor unions. In 1950, members and sympathizers of theCommunist Party were removed first from official positions and later from the private sector by order ofGeneral MacArthur. More than 300 people in the film industry lost their jobs in this way” (7). See Roland
Domenig, “A Brief History of Independent Cinema in Japan and the Role of the Art Theatre Guild,”
Minikomi 70 (Vienna: Akademischer Arbeitskreis Japan, 2003).

169major newspaper Asahi, the reportage dealing with this political scandal was published in1949, and its filmic adaptation appeared in 1950. In the close-up presenting the page ofnewspaper, for instance, we can recognize the actual reporting on this political scandal(Figure 9).
It is important to be aware of these preceding examples because later generations offilmmakers such as Oshima and Wakamatsu rejected the political activism of the old Leftas well as humanist realism, both of which characterized the work of filmmakers such as
Kinoshita and Yamamoto. Of course, this is not to say that Kinoshita and Yamamotoshared the exact same ideological convictions. Unlike leftist independent filmmakers
such as Yamamoto, Imai Tadashi, Shindô Kaneto, and Kamei Fumio, who leaned heavily
towards documentary and reportage, Kinoshita stayed well inside the established studiosystem and came to be known as a master of melodrama at the Shôchiku studio. The
epitome of his work is his widely acclaimed anti-war melodrama, Nijûshi no hitomi(Twenty-Four Eyes, 1956), which Oshima pointedly criticized as an exemplarycelebration of the postwar “victim mentality” of the Japanese.263 Yet, in his ambitious
work, A Japanese Tragedy (1953), Kinoshita attempts to meld the documentary and news
film approaches with melodrama.
Made one year after the end of the Allied Occupation (which imposed strict
censorship over the Japanese film industry), the film A Japanese Tragedy affirms thevictim status of the people of “Japan” and attempts to render visible the after-effects of263

In his essay titled “Sengonihoneiga no jyôkyô to shutai” (“The Situations of the Postwar Japanese
Cinema and Subjectivity”), Oshima notes that the film Twenty-Four Eyes operates through empathy among
victims: “To cry together, this is exactly Kinoshita’s idea and the position he takes in this work. Only
because he could regard himself as a victim just like the people of Japan, who suffered as victims of the
war and feudalism, was Kinoshita able to stake his own subjectivity on it and cry with them” (Sengoeiga:
hakai to sôzô, 198).

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the Pacific War (1937-1945). Formally, it combines the cinematic codes of the maternal
melodrama with the codes of the documentary and news film. The story is about the lifeof a war widow, who commits suicide after being mercilessly abandoned by her children.
The film’s rendition of the postwar cultural milieu is one that unabashedly celebrates
American-style democracy, interpreted as a fierce individualism which is ever at odd
with the old fashioned idea of filial piety. Keeping to the codes of maternal melodrama,
Kinoshita allegorizes the “victim mentality” of the plebian populace through the figure of
the suffering mother. She devotes her entire life to her children’s survival during the war
and their social ascendancy after the war. Her ultimate sacrifice, however, is her suicide,since it alone lifts the burden of filial piety off the shoulders of her children.
Consisting of numerous inserts of newspaper headlines, newsreel footage andwritten titles accompanied by instrumental music, the overall look of the opening
sequence of A Japanese Tragedy mimics that of newsreel and documentary films. Indeed,
there is an unmistakable visual similarity between the opening sequence of Kinoshita’sfilm and Kamei’s documentary film with the same title.264 The impression is corroborated
by its use of written titles. Commenting upon Kinoshita’s strategy of crosscutting
between inserted news materials and fictive events, Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie
note that it is reminiscent of the literary technique used by John Dos Passos in his U.S.A.
trilogy.265 This comparison is a useful one, though one should not conclude that literature
was the origin of this technique. As is evident from Dos Passos’ own terms to describe

264

This similarity suggests Kinoshita’s conscious “citation” of Kamei’s film, a gesture that deserves
analysis that is beyond the scope of this chapter. I just want to point out that Kamei’s A Tragedy of Japan
also makes frequent uses of the technique of direct insertions of newspapers. I also want to add that
Kamei’s film was banned after one week of screening and the Allied Occupation Force confiscated theprint.
265
Anderson and Richie, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, 188.

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his technique – “Newsreel” and “Camera Eye” – this particular writing style was alreadya literary appropriation of cinematic techniques. In A Japanese Tragedy, however,Kinoshita opts for a chronicle-style representation of history that combines direct
citations from the news media with fictive storytelling, which as Anderson and Richie
point out is similar to the way Dos Passos composes his U.S.A. trilogy.
By combining actuality and fiction, A Japanese Tragedy thus attempts to historicize
the general socio-political conditions of the immediate postwar years. In so doing,
Kinoshita treats newspapers and newsreels primarily as archival records. That is, theinserted materials do not give much of a sense of immediacy as that of historicity. Thereis no better example that this to highlight the fundamental difference between news andarchive, or journalism and historiography. To supplement Benjamin, who argues in thequotation cited above that the information only lives for the moment when it was new, I
would like to suggest that only the news lives for the moment. In other words, the life ofnews as news expires after a certain passage of time. However, the same piece of
information, which once was called news, attains a different kind of value once it isreceived as an archival record or document. To put it schematically, the difference
between the news and the archive, in part, corresponds to the difference between
journalism and historiography. Where journalism deals with the present moment,
historiography deals with the past – that is, the archived former-present. Journalism andhistoriography thus privilege different modalities of time: the present for one, and thepast for the other.
Kinoshita’s treatment of newspapers and newsreels in A Japanese Tragedy veers
towards historiography rather than journalism, as it is evident from the allegorical172

structure of the narrative. This allegorizing impulse can be further evinced by the title.
Nihon no higeki can be read both as A Japanese tragedy and The Tragedy of Japan; it is afilm about a tragedy of an individual (i.e. the character of the mother) in Japan, but it isalso the tragedy of Japan as a nation. It is appropriate, therefore, that the very first shot of
A Japanese Tragedy is the close-up of the Yomiuri newspaper’s front page, whichgravely announces the Shôwa Emperor’s “sacred decision” to accept Japan’s
unconditional surrender on August 15th in 1945 (Figure 10). This event was the event thatchanged the course of Japanese history in the twentieth century. It cannot be overlookedthat Kinoshita consciously opens up A Japanese Tragedy with this particular shot, theshot of the newspaper, which no doubt had attained a significant archival value by 1953.
The following shot is also that of a newspaper, its headline reporting on theInternational Military Tribunal for the Far East, the trial for class-A war criminals. The
film then cuts to the newsreel footage of the war trial. On the soundtrack, we continue tohear dramatic instrumental music and no spoken commentary. The next insert of anewspaper headline announces the exemption of the Emperor from being tried for his war
responsibility, and the film cuts to newsreel footage of the Emperor walking towards acar. In this manner, the film continues to show major events and incidents that punctuate
the history of the immediate postwar years, a period marked by the Occupation. The
film’s first written title, which appears superimposed over a shot of the Japanese flag,sums up its historical perspective: “Eight years after the ending of the war.” The next shot
is of a National Diet session with the written title, which reads: “But the political poverty
still exists.” Fragments of newsreel footage about the 1952 May Day protest, (which is
known in Japan as the “bloody May Day” because of the physical confrontation between

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protestors and the police force) ensues. The intertitle “Anxiety of Living” accompanies
the following shot of disheveled female workers. More shots of newspaper clippings
appear, reporting variably the suicide of an unknown mother, the killing of a taxi driver,and juvenile crimes. Among other images, we also see newsreel footage of students
protesting the first ratification of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (ANPO) in 1952. Morethan three minutes into the film, the main title A Japanese Tragedy appears on the screen,
and the narrative action finally begins.
The Citation of Journalistic Actuality
In contrast to Kinoshita’s A Japanese Tragedy, Oshima’s 1960 film Seishun
zankoku monogatari (Cruel Story of Youth) refuses to treat journalistic materials asarchival records and historical documents. The film refuses to historicize the time of its
setting. Instead, Oshima emphasizes the temporal immediacy of cited materials, theirreferential capacity to evoke present-day actualities. While both films incorporate visualelements that are borrowed straight from the pages of newspapers and frames ofnewsreels, their positions with regard to historical time diverge significantly. Since
Kinoshita is a filmmaker with whom Oshima worked at the Shôchiku studio – Oshima’s
criticism of Kinoshita as well as his admiration for him is fairly known – it is particularly
useful to compare their respective ways of incorporating newspapers and newsreels into
narrative film.
Thematically both films present generational conflicts. Yet the privileged points ofidentification in these films differ markedly. Young protagonists in Cruel Story of Youthviolently reject the generation of the 1950s, whose youth was spent in pursuing political
ideals under burgeoning postwar democracy. In rejecting the moral defeatism and174

shattered idealism of those who came before them, the protagonists chase after a life
filled with shocks and thrills only to be killed at the end of the film. The brutal deaths ofMakoto and Kiyoshi in Cruel Story of Youth are hence diametrically opposed to thealtruistic suicide of the mother at the end of A Japanese Tragedy. Unlike A JapaneseTragedy, moreover, no flashbacks are used in Cruel Story of Youth. Neither recollection
nor nostalgia for bygone days is given any space on the screen. But the most striking
difference between the temporal attitudes of two films lies in their respective ways of
directly citing journalistic materials.
The opening credit sequence in Cruel Story of Youth consists of a series of thirteen
black and white shots, presenting intricate collages of hand-torn newspaper clippings as
the background for the credits. Except for the title shot, each shot lasts for three to four
seconds, which is long enough to register the information presented on the screen before
the legibility of letters and graphics are lost. Each shot ends by going out-of-focus, andthe screen fading to black, after which the next shot appears. At the end of the film, an
imprint of the character for “The End” also appears against a background, again
composed of newspaper clippings. Placed at the beginning and the end, these collages ofnewspaper clippings bracket the main body of the film like bookends. These bookends
emphasize the temporal setting of the diegesis; it is set in 1960, the year of the film’s
release. The inserted newsreel reporting the April 1960 Student Revolution in Korea shotby the Daimai news team, and the actuality footage of the 1960 May Day protest shot by
Oshima’s own crew further support this.
Such direct references to contemporary events occurring less than two months
before the release of the film (which opened in June) attest to Oshima’s avowed intention

175to make a film that does not transcend the present age.266 In the journalistic sense of theword, the film’s references are quite actual, up-to-date. Indeed, when we look carefully at
the images of newspaper clippings included, several items bearing the undeniable trace ofthe year 1960 can be glimpsed. For instance, in the shot introducing the names of the
producer and the cameraman (rendered in red brushstrokes), several iconic
advertisements from this year can be discerned. An exemplary one is a newly launchedadvertisement for the Shiseidô’s perfume eau de luxe. Designed by the famous graphic
artist Yamana Ayao this particular advertisement was widely circulated at this time
(Figures 11 and 12). In other shots, we see advertisements for both Japanese and foreign
films, which had premiered a few months or weeks earlier than Cruel Story of Youth.
Among these we find titles such as Shizukana Datsugokusha (Quiet Prison-breakers,
Iwai Kaneo, 1960), Guns of the Timberland (Robert Webb, 1960), and Jigoku nowatarimono (A Drifter from Hell, Nezu Noboru, 1960). Also included are numerous
headlines for sports news and major political events of the year. In one of the headlines,
for instance, we read the announcement about Khrushchev’s approaching visit to theUnited States and Eisenhower’s plan to visit the Soviet Union in return.267 There is little
doubt that the contemporary audience was able to recognize, if only partially, these
inserted headlines, photographs, and advertisements as signs referencing their own
present-day actualities.
What is crucial, then, is not just the specificity of the dates given by the cited
newspapers but also the temporal proximity between the occurrences of events referenced

266

In his production notes for Cruel Story of Youth, Oshima writes that the film cannot be chôjidaiteki or
supra-historical that is detached from the present era. See, Sengoeiga, 224.
267
With hindsight we also know that these visits were swiftly cancelled after the crisis over a U.S. spy plane
destabilized the relationship between these two superpowers in May 1960.

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by these newspapers and the film’s appearance in theaters. These newspapers are notincluded for visual impacts alone. Instead they are graphic signifiers of present-day
actualities. The fact that the film weighs in the present and not the past is also evinced by
the use of actuality footage wherein the film directly puts actors playing the roles ofMakoto and Kiyoshi in the midst of the May Day student demonstration.
The complete script, dated from May 30th 1960, also makes explicit that the uses of
the actuality footage and newsreel are not accidental but carefully planned. Under theheading “the screen of a newsreel,” for instance, we read notes: “newspaper article” and“insert.” There is also a written transcription of the voice-over from the inserted newsreelon the Korean students’ uprising. In the direction to the following scene, we also find thereference to the May Day demonstration.268 Oshima himself confirms in one interview
that the film’s depictions of the political climate surrounding the young protagonists wereintended to be timely. 269 Indeed, twelve days after the film’s release the Japanese
students stormed the Diet in protest against the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty(ANPO). As Oshima notes, the newsreel of Korean students’ uprising and the May Day
demo were not only relevant to the political climate at the time, but also foreshadowed
what was to come.270
Far from simply adding the look of verisimilitude to a fictional text, the directincorporation of newspapers, newsreel, and actuality footage in Cruel Story of Youthpoints to Oshima’s determination to make a film that was both timely and critical at thesame time. However, his determination to make a film that is timely in its referential

268

Shôchiku inc., Seishunzankoku monogatari [A Script for Cruel Story of Youth], scene 1-8. 1960.
Oshima Nagisa, Oshima Nagisa: 1960 (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1993), 120-121.
270
Oshima revisits the historic event of the ratification of the ANPO on June 15th in 1960 in his next film,
Nihon no yoru to kiri [Night and Fog in Japan].
269

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relation to contemporary social reality contradicts, even undermines, his avant-gardist
desire to liberate narrative cinema from its conformity to journalism. If narrative cinema
wishes to keep up with the times and comment on the present-day actualities, it cannot
but conform to the ever-faster logic of expiration that governs the production anddissemination of journalistic information. The works of Oshima are instructive precisely
because of this contradiction, a contradiction common to all avant-garde practices thatwish to make timely interventions in the present.
The films of Wakamatsu Kôji, whose works Oshima applauded at a time whenmainstream film critics ignored them, present a similar tension between narrative
cinema’s conformity to the journalistic sensation of actuality and its resistance against it.
Because of Wakamatsu’s engagement with the despised genre of commercial erotica (or“pink” film, a genre that became vital to the thriving system of “program-pictures” in the
mid-1960s), his films highlight this tension more starkly than those of Oshima. Take theexemplary use of contemporary newspapers in the 1965 pink film, Kabe no naka no
himegoto (Secrets Behind the Wall). The film’s relationship to journalistic actuality isparticularly complicated, because it immediately attained significant news value of its
own. The film was perceived as a scandal.
It all began when the German distribution company named Hansa-Film bought
Secrets Behind the Wall, and sent it to the Berlin Film Festival in 1965. The film wasthen chosen as the official Japanese entry for the competition, a decision that infuriatedthe conservative Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan. The Association
deemed the film as a “national disgrace” (kokujoku) and publicly denounced it. A
newspaper report from July 7th 1965, for instance, notes: “It is perceived as unacceptable178

that, of all things, the eroduction film is submitted as the official Japanese entry for thecompetition.” 271 An official letter of protest was then sent to the festival committee
through the Japanese Consulate. Despite this protest, however, the film was submitted
and much publicized debates ensued. Wakamatsu himself appeared on television
alongside critics from the Motion Picture Producers Association. The film, whichmeticulously incorporates shots of newspapers and magazines, thus took part in the very
production of journalistic actuality of the year.
The film begins with an extreme close-up of an eye, which we come to realize theeye of a young voyeur, a high school student who spends his days secluded in his room
reading newspapers, porn magazines, and entertainment weeklies. When he is notreading, he picks up a telescope and watches another protagonist, an ex-activist now
turned housewife living in the apartment building across his own. She is having an affair
with her lover, also an ex-antiwar activist, who is now shamelessly turning a profit byinvesting stocks in companies linked to the Vietnam War. As if to amplify the sense ofconfinement, static exterior shots of homogeneous-looking apartment complexes
punctuate the narrative, which culminates in the shocking scene of the high school
student stabbing the housewife to death. At first glance, the film thoroughly conforms to
the generic codes of the “pink” film, which spectacularizes sexual violence inflicted uponinert women’s bodies.
Yet arguably what sets the visual style of Secrets Behind the Wall apart from other“pink” films is its insistent use of newspapers, periodicals, and newsreel footage. For

271

Quoted by Suzuki Yoshiaki in Pinku eiga suikoden [The Pink Film’s Outlaws] (Osaka: Puraza kikaku,1983), 32. The emphasis is mine. The term “eroduction” was used previously to designate a group of films,
which came to be known as “pink” films. I use the term “pink” to describe Wakamatsu’s films, since he isoften referred to as “the king of the Pink.”

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instance, the newsreel footage of the 1960 ANPO protest is superimposed on the ecstatic
face of the housewife when she is having sex with her ex-activist lover in front of aframed photograph of Stalin. This is the first instance we notice the intrusion of
newsworthy events into the otherwise monotonous lives of these two protagonists. The
second direct citation of journalistic materials also occurs in the interior scene, which
opens up with a medium close-up of the pages of a porn magazine leaning against thestudent’s bookshelf. The film then cuts to an array of journalistic materials spread overthe desk, among which we see a Mainichi newspaper with a headline that reads, “First
Nighttime Air-raids on North Vietnam.” The camera slowly pans to the right, capturing
press photographs of the assassination of Malcolm X (who was killed in February of thatyear), and the photograph of the Imperial family (Figure 13).
The third instance of legible newspaper headlines appears in the scene in which theex-activist housewife’s husband is reading a newspaper in bed. Framed as a point-ofview shot of the husband, it reveals the news of Japanese shipmen’s refusal to transport
American ammunition to Vietnam, an actual incident that occurred in April 1965. There
are several more instances in which the film presents close-ups of actual newspapers: weeven learn about the election fraud that took place in March and Japan’s impending
ratification of a convention proposed by the International Labor Organization. From thestandpoint of our present, all the news referenced in this film may well be taken asarchival documents recording the events of 1965. But we must keep in mind that in 1965
these were still contemporary; they would have been seen as actual in their temporal
immediacy. The Vietnam War had not yet ended; it had yet to become history.
The last instance of newspaper inserts can be found in the final shot sequence right180

after the murder scene. On the soundtrack, we hear the live coverage of a baseball gameeither from the radio or television. The camera mimics the point of view shot of anunidentified reader of the newspaper. Then, the sound gradually diminishes, as the handheld camera slowly zooms onto the page. The focus goes in and out, but finally, thecamera gets close enough so that we can discern a small headline on the bottom of thepage. It reads, “Housewife in housing projects killed!” The headline then quickly goesout of focus, and the film ends.
As was the case in Cruel Story of Youth, the visual incorporation of newspapers in
Secrets Behind the Wall rhetorically grounds the temporality of diegetic events in theyear 1965. In both films, the emphasis is on the contemporaneity of fictionalized eventsand journalistic actuality as referenced by the newspaper inserts. Yet, the last shot in
Secrets Behind the Wall goes a step further than Cruel Story of Youth, adding an ironiccommentary on the media’s role in the production of actuality, or more precisely, theproduction of the sensation of actuality. Take the use of the slow zoom in the final shot.
The camera deliberately draws our attentions to the surface of the newspaper.
Consequently, we come to learn, albeit partially, that on this particular day, there was abrawl among baseball players (which actually took place on April 12th, 1965), a fightamong drunken cherry blossom gazers, a minor earthquake, and an incident involving amentally ill female patient slashing her family to death. The last shot thus takes the
spectators away from the realm of fiction with which the preceding scene ended, andthrows them into the realm of journalistic actuality. The tabular form of the newspaper
further stresses its adherence to the present, as if to say, “all these events happened just in
one day!” To use the phrase popularized by Benedict Anderson, such a tabular image of181

the newspaper visualizes the synchronic connectivity among otherwise unrelated events
through the logic of “meanwhile.” The last shot brings to the fore this journalistic
temporality of the meanwhile.
The signifying function of the last shot is, however, not exhausted here. There issomething more to it than being a mere visual signifier of simultaneity, the synchronic
time of the meanwhile. It also functions as a supplement that destabilizes the economy ofits narrative. Read as a recapitulation of the event of the murder, the headline simply
reports what happened in the preceding sequence. But precisely because it is arecapitulation in the form of a newspaper headline, it tells nothing about the political pastof the ex-activist housewife or the sexual frustration of the student; the past is markedly
absent in the newspaper headline. What this supplementary insertion of the newspaper
headline effaces, in its singular attention to the present, is the very desire of these two
protagonists, which has driven the narrative forward. Stripped of its sexualized
spectacles, the film is about the desire of these protagonists to escape monotonous
temporality, a temporality that is punctuated by the periodic consumption of newspapers,
magazines, and television programs.
On separate occasions, the protagonists voice their desire to escape the monotonous
cycle of their daily lives. After being scolded by his mother for not studying hard enough,the student murmurs that he wants to go to Vietnam. Meanwhile, the housewife pleads to
her lover to take her away with him, away from the horrid prison of her genericapartment complex. She is met by his flat rejection: “Japan is like this room no matter
where you go.” The film’s ultimate violence – the murder of the housewife by the student– is thus positioned as a long-awaited rupture, an end to the monotonous repetitions of the182

same routines.
Ironically, however, this final event of the murder brings them right back into thecycle of periodic repetition, once the event enters the economy of news journalism. It is
ironic precisely because the protagonists are moved from one side of journalism to theother, from the side of consuming newspapers to becoming part of the newspaper-cumcommodity. The purported singularity of the event – the murder – is thus negated at thevery moment when it is turned into news. The ultimate irony expressed in the final shotof Secrets Behind the Wall is hence this: the protagonists have only moved from oneorder of repetition to another by failing to escape the trap of journalistic periodicity.
Let us pause here and think through the concept of news and its relation tojournalistic periodicity. The first premise of news-oriented journalism is to deliver
information about singular, contingent, and even unexpected events. If it reports on
everything that is foreseeable and calculable, it loses its attraction: novelty. The second
premise is that it will do so regularly. Here comes the tension internal to the practice ofthe news media; the unpredictability of events is contained by and subjected to the predetermined programmatic system of news reporting. Events, in this journalistic sense, areno longer absolutely but only relatively new. In his discussion of newspaper journalism,
philosopher Tosaka Jun aptly points out that the entire practice of journalism is in fact
predicated upon two complementary but opposing imperatives: timeliness andperiodicity. 272 The paradox of journalism is, however, that the speed of reporting news
affects the temporal validity of the news: “The duration of the validity of a news item is272

Tosaka Jun, “Shinbun genshô no bunseki” [An Analysis of the Newspaper Phenomenon], Tosaka Junzenshû, Vol. 3 (Tokyo: Keisô shobô, 1966), 132.

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diminished in inverse proportion to the speed of its reporting.”273 In other words, the very
conception of news as something timely is already implicated in the periodic structure ofjournalism. Therefore, “The faster the reporting of news becomes, the sooner the
expiration dates of the reported news as news.”274 The concept of expiration is, indeed, abyproduct of journalistic periodicity.
We all know from experience that yesterday’s newspaper gets old when today’s
newspaper arrives. The same can be said about weekly, monthly, or yearly cycles. Take
the example of fashion; when the coming year’s trends are announced, the current ones
become outmoded. The modern conception of newness as well as our understanding ofwhat is “actual,” timely, and up-to-date is dependent upon this journalistic conception of
periodicity. It is no accident that cultural trends, politics, and the economy – three terrainsof social activity that are targeted by the journalistic media – are also staple points ofreference in defining present-day reality. To put it differently, our general understandingof the time of present-day actuality is heavily influenced, if not dictated, by what Jacques
Derrida calls the “actuality-effect.” That is to say, journalistic components of the mass
media often directly determine our conception of actuality in the general sense of “whatis happening today.” According to Derrida, in this mediated state actuality no longer
designates what is truly “existing now”: “No matter how singular, irreducible, stubborn,
distressing or tragic the ‘reality’ to which it refers, ‘actuality’ comes to us by way of afictional fashioning.” 275 The present mediated by the journalistic conception of

273

Ibid.
Ibid., 132.
275
Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews. trans. Jennifer
Bajorek (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2002), 3. Clearly, playing on the semantic ambiguity of the French
word actualité, Derrida in his typical manner extends his argument about actuality produced by the media’s
tele-technology to a philosophical meditation upon the non-coincidence of the presence of the present.
274

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temporality is, in other words, already an artifact, temporally and existentially one step
removed from reality; it is what he calls “artifactuality.” 276
The final shot of Secrets Behind the Wall prompts us to think about the cinema’s
relationship to the artifactual dimension of actuality. What the final shot of thenewspaper headline shows is the film’s own complicity in producing “artifactuality,”
actuality mediated and constructed. It shows, in other words, that the film is complicit incapitalizing on events, on the “actuality-effect” of constructed events. This awareness ofthe cinema’s complicity with journalism is something Oshima and Wakamatsu’s films
bring to the fore. Kinoshita’s A Japanese Tragedy, as we have seen, does not show suchawareness. In Kinoshita’s film, the incorporation of “actual” newspapers only serves tovalidate the film’s referential claim to history. The direct citation of journalistic materials
is used for the production of its reality-effects. By contrast, Oshima and Wakamatsu’s
films deploy this technique both to appropriate and reflect upon the actuality-effects
produced by journalistic media. This strategy is, however, not risk-free. Precisely because
these films draw so heavily on current media events, and the latest news and cultural
materials, the legibility of these journalistic references withers as time passes. The criticalrelevance of these films, in turn, faces the threat of expiration.
The Art of Artifice
Throughout the 1960s Oshima and Wakamatsu continued to make films that dealt
with an artificial fashioning of actuality. Time and again, Oshima and Wakamatsu takeup actual crimes and incidents as their subject matters. However, the emphasis of theirappropriation of journalistic materials shifted from conveying temporal immediacy to
276

Ibid.

185

exposing the inseparability of the artifice of fiction from the actuality-effect of nonfiction. This tendency is more pronounced in Oshima’s case. What do we make of thisshift towards the emphasis on artifice – rather than the sensation of immediacy – ofactuality? One way to answer this question is to interpret it as resistance against theanxiety associated with the threat of expiration. If the cinematic repetition of journalismrisks compounding such anxiety, emphasizing the artifice of fiction might be a way tomake explicit this repetition as difference. Another way to answer this question is toconsider changes in the conditions of independent filmmaking in the 1960s, including theweakening of the rigid periodicity embodied by the system of “program-pictures” and acorresponding demand for the more flexible screening time.
Let us take the example of Wakamatsu’s 1969 film, Go, Go, Second-Time Virgin.
As in the case of his other films such as Okasareta Byakui (Violated Angel, 1967) andTeroru no kisetsu (Season of Terror, 1969), Wakamatsu incorporates journalistic
materials in the form of a montage sequence composed of stills. As in the case of
Violated Angel, the montage sequence of the inserted stills in Go, Go, Second-Time
Virgin holds a tenuous connection to the overall narrative, and the stills stand out as
immobile spectacles. The images included are pages of manga (comic books) featuring
violent scenes of killing, photographs of Sharon Tate, and caricaturized images of Tateand other victims slaughtered by Manson Family in August 1969 (Figure 14 and 15).
Again, Wakamatsu recycles elements of journalistic actuality whose “topicality” has yet
to wane.
Interestingly, scholars who have commented on Wakamatsu’s insistent reference tojournalistic actuality have been either dismissive of it or overtly psychological in their186

interpretation. For instance, in his analysis of Violated Angels (a film based on actual
incident of homicides that took place in Chicago in 1966), Noël Burch writes: “Actual,
recent events have often provided raw material for Wakamatsu’s fantasies, as they now
did for Adachi Masao, his new script-writer.”277 Speaking about Go Go Second-Time
Virgin, Desser on the other hand argues: “As in Violated Women [Violated Angels],
Wakamatsu shows still images drawn from commercial exploitation forms, except in thislater film, he shows them at the end, forcing a kind of retrospective understanding of thehero’s motivations.” 278 According to Desser, the graphic violence contained by the
included stills of the manga and the photographs of Sharon Tate explains the“motivations” of the protagonist. However, as I argued in my reading of Secret Behind
the Wall, the use of journalistic materials in Wakamatsu’s films is not reducible to such
simple psychological explanations.279 Rather, what is at stake is the temporal proximity
between journalism’s presentation of actuality and cinema’s repetition of it, which in turnexposes this actuality as artifact.
Indeed, visual and audio materials recycled in Violated Angels make it clear that thefilm is self-consciously building itself on the already mediated – and spectacularized –images of pornography, violence, and political protest. The opening montage sequence ofthe film, which is composed entirely of still frames and still photographs, juxtaposes
close-ups of nude female models and those of the male protagonist who buries his face inthe pages of softcore pornographic magazines. This opening sequence is symmetrically
277

Burch, To the Distant Observer, 352.
Desser, Eros Plus Massacre, 104.
279
Moreover, given the fact that the script was largely written by Kara Jûrô, the legendary performance
artist (and the founder of the Jôkyô gekijô [the Situation Theater]) who plays the leading character of theyoung killer, it is not accurate to solely attribute the film’s imagery to Wakamatsu and Adachi. See “Hontôno imi de no nokosareta comyunikeeshon: Kara Jûrô intabyuu” [“Remaining Communications in the True
Sense of the Word: Interview with Kara Jûrô”], Pamphlet for DVD, Okasareta Byakui [Violated Angel](Tokyo: Kinokuniya, 2006), 7-10.
278

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balanced by the closing sequence, which is again composed of still images. But this time
Wakamatsu alternates the freeze-frame close-up of two police men coming at theprotagonist with a series of press photographs, comic strips, and newspaper articles, all ofwhich deal with the issues of Vietnam war and student protests. Taken together, theopening and closing sequences serve as visual equivalents of quotation marks, reminding
the viewer of the film’s citational strategy. In emphasizing the spectacular status of thequoted journalistic materials through stillness, the film foregrounds the mediatedness ofthe three kinds of spectacles, which its narrative appropriates and dramatizes: sex,
violence, and politics. It is precisely the film’s self-conscious use of the stilled images
taken from the media that heightens our awareness of the mediated status of these
spectacles, and the fact that the media is responsible for producing these sensational
spectacles. The film’s conscious repetition of journalistic materials, including the much
publicized murder incident that serves as the basis of the narrative, hides neither its
complicity with the sensation of actuality produced by the media nor the fact that theactuality is an artifact.
Oshima’s 1968 film, Kôshikei (Death By Hanging), similarly draws on highly
mediatized materials. The film takes as its basis the Komatsugawa Incident, an actual
murder case committed by a residential Korean student named Ri Chin-U (Li Jin Wu) in
1958. The incident received wide press coverage because Ri himself called up the
Yomiuri newspaper, offering information about the murder as a scoop. The police asked
radio stations to broadcast the taped conversation in order to identify the perpetrator. Ri
was also writing a short story based on an earlier murder he had committed, and sent it toa literary competition hosted by the Yomiuri newspaper. After his arrest Ri was188sentenced to death, and was hung in 1962. While being held in prison, Ri correspondedwith another residential Korean journalist; their letters were subsequently published in
1963. Accordingly, the case maintained a high profile, igniting public debates onsurrounding political issues (e.g. capital punishment, Japan’s colonialism, the power ofthe state, the ethnic identity of the residential Koreans, discrimination against Koreans,and so on).
Although

the

film

occasionally

includesreferences

to

the

publishedcorrespondence, its set-up is completely fabricated: the narrative is built upon theimpossible premise that the execution fails because the protagonist R’s “body refuses
capital punishment.” R, who fails to die does not remember his identity. The narrative
henceforth focuses on Japanese officers’ collective effort to bring back his memory, toremind R of his identity and his crime. It is not my intention here to provide an in-depth
analysis of this much discussed film, but I do want to point out that Oshima’s continued
interest in exposing the imbricated relation between journalistic actuality and cinematic
fiction.280 To extrapolate from Derrida, we might say that Oshima’s interest lies in
artifactuality, the artifice of fiction that already integrated into the fabric of actual life.
It is hence all the more appropriate that Oshima’s next film, Shônen (Boy, 1969), is
about a family of imposters who make their living by faking car accidents. The film
repeatedly inserts shots of actual newspaper articles about the real life “crime” of thisfamily, which became a short-lived media sensation in September 1966. Like Death By
Hanging, the focus of the film Boy is again on the character whose life is already marked

280

Newspapers again appear as graphic elements, though this time they are used as wallpaper that covers amakeshift house, a setting presumably signifying where Ri has grown up. Of course, newspapers are often
used as insulation: given the media’s heavy involvement in the whole process of arresting and executing Ri,
it is hardly accidental that Oshima uses newspapers as only decorations of Ri’s house.

189by the art of fiction. The real life model of the ten-years-old protagonist of the film
“acted” in order to make his living. He pretended to be hit by cars so that his parents
could extort compensation from the drivers; artifice was his reality. The film Boy brings
to light the impossibility of categorically separating actuality from fabrication, reality
from fiction.
Importantly, unlike his earlier film, Cruel Story of Youth, Oshima’s later films suchas Death By Hanging and Boy no longer adhere to journalistic references that are“current.” The journalistic materials recycled in these two films are, strictly speaking,inactual. They are out-of-date. Yet, in spite of their dated status, the materials reproducedin these films do not carry the weight of archival documents. Rather, the apparent
obsoleteness of the formerly actual news (which no longer are news in the strict sense)
makes perceptible the difference between cinema’s fictive treatment of mediatized eventsand the original media coverage of these events. In other words, the strategic use of the
belated repetition of journalistic actuality makes it possible for narrative cinema to signal
its difference from the practice of journalism. This temporal non-coincidence between
narrative cinema and journalism, in turn, exposes a constitutive difference in time
construed as present. That is, it exposes how the present time is always inactual; it isalways non-coincident with itself.
The Emergence of the Art Theatre Guild
Oshima’s belated repetition of journalistic materials in his films, such as Death By
Hanging and Boy also compels us to reflect upon the historical timing of narrative
cinema’s separation from journalism. Importantly, the shift in emphasis from temporalproximity to the temporal non-coincidence between the journalistic production of190

actuality and the cinematic repetition of it in Oshima’s works overlaps with his moveaway from studio-based to independent filmmaking. Given Oshima’s dissatisfaction withthe fast turnover of “program-pictures” and their periodic consumption, it is worth
thinking through this shift in emphasis on actuality alongside larger historicaltransformations occurring in Japan’s film culture. For, as I noted earlier, the 1960s was
also the time when the “long-run” style of showing films became possible throughalternative exhibition venues, such as the Art Theatre Shinjuku Bunka (the principle
theater of the Art Theatre Guild), and the Underground Theater Sasoriza. Not
surprisingly, the works of Oshima and Wakamatsu, which became increasingly
experimental throughout the 1960s, became favorites of these alternative theaters.281
Established in 1962, the Art Theatre Guild (ATG) was the first company toexperiment with an alternative mode of producing, distributing, and exhibiting films.
Unlike the studio-based distribution companies, ATG set up an independent committee
mainly composed of film critics who chose films “with artistic instead of commercial
considerations in mind.” 282 Under the auspices of the cinephilic committee, ATG
distributed the works of numerous filmmakers, including Eisenstein, Welles, Bergman,
Cocteau, Antonioni, Buñuel, Fellini, Resnais, Kawalerowics, Wajda, Godard, Truffaut,and Varda.283 Apart from the distribution of these foreign films, ATG also embarked on
distributing, exhibiting, and later funding the works of Japanese filmmakers and avantgarde artists, such as Teshigahara Hiroshi, Matsumoto Toshio, Oshima Nagisa, Imamura
Shôhei, Yoshida Kijû, Hani Susumu, Terayama Shûji, Kuroki Kazuo, and Mishima

281

Many of Wakamatsu’s films from the late 60s were screened at the Art Theatre Shinjuku Bunka, insteadof the commercial theaters for “pink” films.
282
Roland Domenig, 11.
283
Ibid.,12.

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Yukio.
Other alternative film exhibition venues, which functioned as multi-purpose event
spaces for avant-garde performances, music events, and film screenings, also emerged at
this time: these include the Underground Theatre Sasoriza and the Sôgetsu Art Center.284
These alternative venues not only changed the culture of film viewing in a fundamentalmanner, but they also helped foster vibrant interactions among avant-garde artists,
filmmakers, and critics. In 1966, for instance, the first massive screenings of avant-garde
and experimental films were held at the Sôgetsu Art Center. The center, founded by the
Teshigahara family, frequently invited contemporary artists and filmmakers such as
Michel Tapié, Robert Nelson and Stan Brakhage.285 Meanwhile, Teshigahara’s own film,
Otoshiana (Pitfall, 1962), which he made in collaboration with Abé, became the firstJapanese film to be distributed by ATG.
Besides fostering close interactions among avant-garde artists and independent
filmmakers, ATG also made one particularly significant contribution to thetransformation of Japan’s film culture: it revolutionized the screening time of films,
making the “long-run” possible. According to Roland Domenig: “One of ATG’s basic
rules was to show each film for at least a month, irrespective of attendance. In the 1960s,
the repertoire was usually changed weekly, and a four-week run was exceptional even forbox-office hits.”286 ATG thus helped filmmakers with artistic ambitions to challenge
programmatic periodicity that dictated the exhibition of narrative films. Oshima’s desire
for the cinema that does not expire after one or two weeks became a fact with ATG.
284

In discussing the history of ATG, Hiraswa Gô notes a crucial role played by Kuzui Kinshirô, themanager of the Art Theatre Shinjuku Bunka. See Hirasawa Gô, “ATG’s Early Years and Underground
Cinema,” Minikomi 70. (Vienna: Akademischer Arbeitskreis Japan, 2003), 18.
285
Ibid.
286
Roland Domenig, 11.

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In fact, Oshima’s own works played a key role in bringing about this change. The
impetus for ATG to finance independent filmmakers (rather than just distributing them)came out of successful experiences with the “long-run” showing of low-budget films. For
instance, in 1965, the Art Theatre Shinjuku Bunka held an eight-day event, which
included the screenings of Oshima’s experimental short, Yunbogi no nikki (Yunbogi’s
Diary, 1965), his first commercial film, Ai to kibô no machi (A Town of Love and Hope,
1959), and his lectures. According to Hirasawa, it was because the event was so wellattended that “people started to believe that for a low budget independent productions,funds could be recouped even with screenings at just the Shinjuku Bunka, as long as along run was possible.”287 Hirasawa’s observation attests to the fact that low-budget
independent filmmaking and the rejection of the programmatic periodicity associatedwith studio-based filmmaking were critically linked. ATG and its central theater, the Art
Theatre Shinjuku Bunka, thus helped Japanese cinema to break away from its
subordination to the logic of expirability and the temporal structure of programmatic
periodicity associated with journalism. This was an event.
Perhaps it is appropriate to mention here that one of Wakamatsu’s recent books is
provocatively titled Jikônashi (No Statute of Limitations, 2004). The title itself is aquotation from Wakamatsu’s statement that “there is no statute of limitation or parole forthe filmmaker.” 288 Wakamatsu’s statement is a simple one: filmmakers must takeresponsibility for their works as long as they exist. But to say that the films andfilmmakers have no statute of limitations also means that they are exempt from the logicof expiration. Statutes of limitations in legal discourse mean that there are pre-determined

287
288

Hirasawa, 20.
Wakamatsu Kôji, Jikônashi [No Statute of Limitations] (Tokyo: Waizu shuppan, 2004), 202.

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periods of validity. Some crimes, just like edible commodities and medical prescriptions,“expire” after the statutory period of limitation: they are branded with expiration dates.
According to Wakamatsu, however, films do not have expiration dates.
When read together Oshima’s earlier suggestion that films should not be subjectedto the threat of expiration, which journalistic commodities such as weekly magazines
face, Wakamatsu’s statement recaps a crucial transformation that took place in narrative
cinema’s temporal relation to journalism. As I argued in this chapter, at the basis of thisrelation between narrative cinema and journalism is a claim to actuality. This claim to
actuality is, moreover, inseparable from the anxiety of the avant-garde to differentiate
itself from journalism.
By engaging with the works of Oshima and Wakamatsu, two independent
filmmakers with avant-garde dispositions whose works fall in-between the commercial
and experimental poles of filmmaking, I have tried to articulate this paradoxical desire of
the avant-garde to adhere to the present. The works of these two filmmakers who started
their careers within the stratified system of “program pictures,” and who later moved
towards the experimental side of independent filmmaking, allow us to see theproblematic of actuality in its temporal dimension. In the next chapter, I will turn toanother dimension of this problematic, that of the politics of power. This question of
power in relation to actuality will take us to the film-theoretical discourse of the fûkeiron(“theory of landscape”) that emerged at the end of the 1960s, and the appropriation of the
pre-classical genre of actuality films by Japanese filmmakers of the time, namely
Oshima, as well as one of Wakamatsu’s key collaborators, Adachi Masao.

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CHAPTER FIVE
Returning to Actuality: Fûkeiron and The Landscape Film289
The late 1960s occupies a unique place in the history of political filmmaking, notonly in Japan, but also in the world, for, during this period, numerous alternative film
movements worked to intensify the alliance between formal experimentation and political
radicalism. At the same time, however, “politics” started to lose its visibility, since what
constituted as “political” in the very notion of politics became ambiguous. It became
increasingly difficult to track macro-level politics, that is, political operations of statelegislature, government organizations, the police, the military, educational institutions,world capitalism and so on. In turn, leftist intellectuals were growingly frustrated with theclichéd definition of political resistance as nothing other than an antagonistic opposition
to those macropolitical entities. This frustration increasingly led filmmakers, theorists,
and activists to attempt to make micropolitical relations of power visible.
In short, the practice of filmmaking had come to a crossroads. It was no longer
enough for cinema to deploy the now-clichéd images of student protesters confronting
riot police in gear, and expect these images to represent politics adequately. In fact, thepractice of filmmaking had become too bound up with the clichéd representations of“politics” that had become the mainstay, not only of political filmmaking, but also thesensationalist news media. Clichés are the rigidification of image-making practices into
the well-worn roads of representational habits. In other words, these macropoliticalrepresentations of large-scale demonstrations (e.g. the masses confronting the state
apparatus embodied in the form of riot police) no longer gave an adequate picture of the289

An earlier version of this chapter has been published in Screen 48.3 (Autumn, 2007): 345-362.

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actual state of power relations. New ways of representing relations of power had to beinvented. This was the challenge that leftist filmmakers, especially ones who engaged in
documentary practice, were facing.
In Japan, several filmmakers actively responded to this challenge by refusing to
document macropolitical events, such as public demonstrations, student protests,
barricades, picket lines, riot police in action, and other such large scale, dramatic scenes.
For they understood that politics at this level of visibility was akin to news events
accompanied by press photographs or broadcasted over dinner tables; that is, these events
had already become the substrate of the actuality-effect produced by the media. As wesaw in the last chapter, one way to respond to this mediatized “actuality” was to repeat itwith difference. Yet another way to respond to it was to avert the camera’s gaze awayfrom the spectacular events themselves. This chapter will turn to two independent films
that exemplify, albeit in a different manner, this shift away from politicized spectacles
packed with human actors to eventless – and often deserted – quotidian landscapes, andthe important current of a theoretical discourse called fûkeiron (“theory of landscape”),
which emerged alongside these two films.
As an example of the political documentary film practice of this period, I cite
Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino’s 1968 film manifesto, La Hora de los Hornos(The Hour of the Furnaces), a celebrated cornerstone of Third World Cinema. Here wehave the sound of machine guns firing in perfect synch with a rapid montage of fashion
models, Batman, cowboys, and bleeding Vietnamese children; this famed sequence
emblematizes the activist notion of “film as a weapon,” a militant ideal engraved so196deeply in the history of world cinema.290 To quote Solanas and Gettino, “The camera is
the inexhaustible expropriator of image-weapons; the projector, a gun that can shoot 24
frames per second.”291 Of course, this militant vision of film activism thus analogized toarmed resistance was not limited to Argentina, but was common to a wide range of leftist
political filmmaking of the 1960s.
For instance, 1968 also saw Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin form amilitant film collective, the Dziga-Vertov Group, as a critical response to the insurrectionof May ’68. In Japan, documentary filmmaking exemplified by the work of Ogawa
Shinsuke and Tsuchimoto Noriaki responded to the increasing demands to document andsupport intensifying student protests and other forms of political activism. Like Newsreel,
the New Left documentary collective founded in New York in 1967, Ogawa andTsuchimoto turned their camera to students and workers behind barricades. The mostemblematic examples of such direct participation in political activism are perhaps
Ogawa’s Gennin hôkoku: Haneda tôsô no kiroku (Report from Haneda, 1967) and
Tsuchimoto’s Paruchizan zenshi (Prehistory of the Partisan Party, 1969).292
Yet at the height of such political upheaval and the spread of activist documentary
filmmaking, another group of Japanese leftist filmmakers was traveling through Japan.
They filmed only the quotidian scenery of more than thirty-three cities in order to trace
290

In the United States, Newsreel is most closely associated with this militant vision of “film as a weapon.”
For instance, in discussing Newsreel’s strategic differences from other documentary filmmaking of theperiod, Thomas Waugh notes, “Such spokespeople as New York’s Robert Kramer (before he turned to
fiction) rejected analysis as a goal entirely, championing instead the notion of film as a weapon. . . . The
early Newsreel film-weapons were often criticized by radicals for an ‘ultra-left disdain for quality (thelarger the grain, the better the politics)’” (237). See Thomas Waugh, “Beyond Vérité: Emile de Antonio
and the New Documentary of the Seventies,” Movies and Methods: An Anthology II, ed. Bill Nichols(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 233-258.
291
Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino, “Towards a Third Cinema,” Movies and Methods: An Anthology,
Ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1976, 58.
292
For a comprehensive account of the works of Ogawa and Tsuchimoto, see Mark Abé Nornes, “ThePostwar Documentary Trace: Groping in the Dark,” Positions 10.1 (Spring 2002), 39-78.

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the footsteps of a nineteen year old, Nagayama Norio, who was charged with serial
murder, and who immediately gained the media’s attention upon his arrest in April, 1969.
The film is titled Ryakushô: renzoku shasatsuma (A.K.A. Serial Killer, 1969). While
taking on one of the most “actual” news materials of the time, A.K.A. Serial killer refuses
to reproduce the sensation of actuality conveyed by the news media.
Furthermore, while A.K.A. Serial Killer presents itself as non-fiction, its approach
to its subject matter is antithetical to the Griersonian ideal of classical documentary
filmmaking practice, famously defined as “the creative treatment [or dramatization] of
actuality.” Nothing dramatic happens or appears in A.K.A. Serial Killer. In its insistenceon the lack of drama and its focus on the eventless landscape, the film’s strategy appears
comparable to the works of certain European filmmakers, such as Chantal Akerman andDanièle Huillet/Jean-Marie Straub from the 1970s.293 Yet A.K.A. Serial Killer criticallydiffers from the latter precisely because of its temporal and referential proximity to acontemporary media event: Nagayama’s crime.
Neither incorporating journalistic materials nor showing images of Nagayama andhis victims, the film refuses to reduce the crime to the level of individual human agents.
Instead it strings together 90 minutes of fragmentary actuality footage, presenting bothurban and rural landscapes taken in the cities from the tip of the northern island of
Hokkaido to the southwestern prefectures of the mainland Japan. Yet, because of its
peculiar obsession with the eventless images of quotidian landscapes, A.K.A. Serial Killer
stands apart from the majority of militant, political documentaries of the time, whichemphatically turn the camera towards the individual faces of social agents in the midst of293

I am thinking of films, such as Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal
Akerman, 1975) and Moses und Aron (Danièle Huillet/Jean-Marie Straub,1974-1975).

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macropolitical events. Where does this refusal to focus on individual actors come from?
Why was it necessary to turn the camera towards banal cityscapes instead of dramatic
actions? In order to answer these questions, we need to turn to the discourse of thefûkeiron and, to another important film that presents a similar strategy of documenting
eventless landscapes. This is Oshima Nagisa’s Tokyo sensô sengo hiwa: eiga de isho onokoshiteitta otoko no monogatari (The Secret Story of the Post-Tokyo War: The Story of
A Man Who Left His Will on Film, 1970).
We may start by noting the contextual relation between these two films. A.K.A.
Serial Killer is the collaborative work of several filmmakers, most of whom worked for
either Oshima Nagisa or Wakamatsu Kôji (or for both). The film has gained its legendary
status in the history of Japanese cinema for various reasons; but most of all, the film’slegendary reputation grew because of its proximity to the concurrent discourse of thefûkeiron. Although the film itself was not officially shown to the public until 1975, thehandful of critics and filmmakers who had seen it engaged in heated debate over thefilm’s focus on landscape. 294 Moreover, fûkeiron critics such as Matsuda Masao (1933-)
explicitly made connections between A.K.A. Serial Killer and Oshima’s The Secret Storyof the Post-Tokyo War. Made one year after A.K.A. Serial Killer, this black and white
narrative film is dedicated to the failed revolutionary “War of Tokyo.” In Oshima’s view,the radical student movements that intensified during 1968-69 and culminated in theoccupation of Tokyo University and in the anti-war demonstrations in Shinjuku
constituted a failed revolution. This revolutionary struggle, “at its peak, was dubbed the294

The film was never screened in the United States until recently, and the U.S. premiering of the film by
was made possible by the joint efforts of Japanese scholars, such as Hirasawa Gô who has been working on
the theory of fûkeiron, as well as non-Japanese scholars, such as Mark Abé Nornes, Aaron Gerow, andHarry Harootunian. In addition, what set off this revived interest in A.K.A. Serial Killer was, at least in part,the return of Adachi Masao to Japan from Lebanon in 2000.

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War of Tokyo by the Red Army Faction,” and it ended “in a mood of defeat.”295
Importantly, this filmic requiem dedicated to the post-Tokyo War period includes a filmwithin-a-film, which presents a remarkable formal similarity to A.K.A. Serial Killer. Thisfilm-within-a-film of The Secret Story of the Post-Tokyo War and the entire film of
A.K.A. Serial killer are characterized by the visual predominance of static long shots ofbanal cityscapes often devoid of human figures. Japanese critics and filmmakers who
became involved in the discourse of the fûkeiron therefore called these two films“landscape films” (fûkei eiga).296
While the main theorist of the fûkeiron was Matsuda Masao, who was one of thecrew members of A.K.A. Serial Killer, a former professional Marxist revolutionist and an
editor of literary and film journals, other well-known figures contributed to its formation,such as the filmmaker Hara Masataka (a.k.a. Masato, co-scriptwriter for Oshima’s The
Secret Story of the Post-Tokyo War), photographer Nakahira Takuma, and other critics
associated with journals such as Provoke (1968-1969) and Eiga Hihyô II (Film Criticism
II, 1970-1973). Perhaps the most well known participant of the fûkeiron is, however,
Adachi Masao (1953- ), a “filmmaker-activist,” who began his filmmaking career while
he was a student at Nihon University. Since so little is written in English about Adachi’sfilmmaking career, I will offer a brief overview before turning to an analysis of thefûkeiron and the two “landscape films.”
Adachi worked for Wakamatsu Production throughout the 1960s. In 1971,
Adachi and Wakamatsu filmed a polemical propaganda “newsreel,” Sekigun – PFLP
295

Oshima Nagisa, “How to die in the 1970s.” Commentary included in the DVD, The Post-Tokyo War
Confidential: The Story of A Man Who Left His Will on Film. (1970).
296
While the term “landscape film” was initially used to describe just two films (A.K.A. Serial Killer and
The Secret Story), it has been applied to other films such as Hara Masato’s Hatsukuni shirasumera mikoto(1973) and Takamine Gô’s Okinawan Dream Show (1971-1974).

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Sekai sensô sengen (The Red Army/ PFLP: Declaration of World War), in Lebanon andJordan through the help of the Marxist Leninist militant organization Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).297 Wakamatsu and Adachi’s documentation of thePalestinian struggle took place shortly after the Dziga Vertov Group’s documentary
project commissioned by Al Fatah was shot in Jordan. 298
Before he joined the Wakamatsu Production, Adachi made an experimental shortfilm Wan (Bowl, 1961), which was followed by another experimental film, Sain (Closed
Vagina, 1963). He was then a member of the student-initiated film collective VAN (VAN
eiga kagaku kenkyûjo), which took part in various avant-garde art activities, such as theannual Yomiuri Indépandant exhibition. From the mid-1960s, Adachi worked for
Wakamatsu mostly as a scriptwriter. It was during this time that he directed several
feature-length films, including Hinin Kakumei (Contraceptive Revolution, 1966),
Gingakei (Galaxy, 1967), Seichitai: Sexzone, (Sexzone, 1968), and Jogakusei gerira(School Girl Guerilla, 1969). Adachi also worked as a scriptwriter for Oshima’s
independent production company Sôzôsha, which Oshima founded after he left the
Shôchiku studio.299 Adachi’s involvement in the making of A.K.A. Serial Killer and thediscourse of the fûkeiron came after these years of close collaborations with Oshima andWakamatsu.
297

The making of this film was a turning point for Adachi’s career as a filmmaker-activist. After a several
more years of filmmaking and grass roots activism, he left Japan for Lebanon. Adachi was arrested in
Lebanon in 1997, and deported back to Japan in 2000. Adachi has directed a new film, Yûheisha, terorisuto(The Condemned: Terrorist, 2007). For more information on Adachi and the political avant-garde andexperimental film movements in Japan from 1960s onward, see Underground Film Archives[Andaaguraundo firumu aakaibusu] ed. Hirasawa Gô (Tokyo: Kawaide shobô, 2001).
298
However, the Dziga Vertov Group’s project did not materialize until Godard reconstructed the
documentary footage with Anne-Marie Miéville, and released it as Ici et ailleurs (Here & Elsewhere) in
1974.
299
Oshima established his own production company Sôzôsha after he left the Shôchiku Studio in 1960. The
Oshima’s films to which Adachi contributed as a scriptwriter are Shinjuku dorobô nikki (Diary of A
Shinjuku Thief, 1968) and Kaette kita yopparai (Three Resurrected Drunkards, 1968).

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It is also known that Sasaki Mamoru, co-scriptwriter for Oshima’s film, The
Secret Story of the Post-Tokyo War, was involved in the production of A.K.A. Serial
Killer. But the nexus between the relatively unknown A.K.A. Serial Killer and theinternationally renowned The Secret Story of the Post-Tokyo War that I want toforeground in this chapter does not focus on the crewmembers but rather the form of thefilm. My argument is that in their exclusive focus on the quotidian landscapes of Japan
A.K.A. Serial Killer and The Secret Story of the Post-Tokyo War not only reconceptualize the militant ideal of “film as a weapon,” but also offer an implicit critiqueof documentary film as a genre. Moreover, they do so by appropriating the pre-classicalcinematic genre of the actuality film (or actualities). To assess their implicit critique,however, requires an extended examination of fûkeiron, which will provide anindispensable theoretical framework for understanding why these particular films
emerged at the end of the 1960s in Japan.
In the words of Matsuda, what these critics commonly shared was an “obsessive
propensity towards landscape.”300 As I hope to demonstrate in this chapter, their interestin the concept and image of landscape points to their collective awareness of a particular
historical conjuncture of political, cultural, and economic transformation. Veryschematically, we can identify at least three interlocking changes happening at the end of
the 1960s in Japan: the waning of a centralized mode of political resistance (the masses
vs. the state); an increasing skepticism towards the centrality of the revolutionary subject

300300

Matsuda Masao, “Ûtopia no hango,” Fûkei no Shimetsu. (Tokyo: Tabata shoten, 1971), 134.

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(shutai) among leftist filmmakers and activists; and Japan’s economic shift fromindustrial to postindustrial capitalism.301
More concretely, I am arguing that the faltering of the centralized mode of
thinking about political resistance and subjectivity led these Japanese leftist filmmakers
to discover the problematic of landscape. That is, the increasing interest in the semiotic
functions of quotidian landscapes in Japanese cinema marks a crucial transition from acentralized subjectivist mode of thinking about political resistance –anchored in therevolutionary acts of human agents – to a de-centralized analytic mode of investigating a
structural dimension of what Gilles Deleuze calls the “diagram” that conditions andactualizes invisible relations of power. 302“Homogeneous Landscapes” and the Cartography of Power
Among the classical images presented by the documentary films of the 1960s arethose of police brutality, picketing workers, marching students; images, in other words,
that convey a sense of eventfulness and human action. As Michael Renov writes in his
discussion of early Newsreel, “there was a perceived need for immediate coverage of
events from a left perspective.”303 Similarly, in a 1967 interview Ogawa speaks of thesense of urgency he felt about getting involved in the filming of student activism: “I had agut-level fear that I was becoming apathetic towards politics while making PR films[public relations films] no matter what I said about them . . . And when I saw the struggle

301

For the Marxist discourse on the active, revolutionary “subject” (shutai) and the debate over subjectivity(shutaisei ronsô) that took place in the immediate postwar years, see J. Victor Koshmann, Revolution andSubjectivity in Postwar Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1996.
302
Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1986), 80-81.
303
Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 11.

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of student protesters at Meiji University, I felt strong urge to do something about thereality presented there from my own [professional] position.”304
This interview took place immediately after Ogawa finished the making ofAssatsu no mori (Forest of Pressure, 1967), an acclaimed documentary film about
students at Takasaki City University of Economics. It is worth noting some of the critics’
responses to the film in order to highlight the sense of urgency aimed at and conveyed by
Ogawa’s film. In a 1968 review of the film, Matsuda, for instance, describes the sequence
from Forest of Pressure, wherein student protesters violently clash with police in front of
the courthouse: “A riot policeman reaches his hand forward with the intention of taking
off the white cloths masking the students’ faces. Even a piece of white cloth, here, canbecome a weapon. And when the documentarist gives up his camera and tries to guard
the masked fighters – the student troopers – with his own body, this documentary is
promised to appear as masterpiece in front of our eyes.”305 To turn to more recent
responses, a comment by Mark Abé Nornes expresses a similar appraisal: “All of thesefilms rejected the rhetoric of objective reportage used by the television news
documentary to veil its alliance with the government and big business. Ogawa andTsuchimoto’s films documented the thrill of independence, of crossing barricade lines
and taking sides. This bold move attracted the burgeoning student movement, making thefilmmakers cultural heroes of the left.”306
Contrary to this tradition, however, there are no such iconic, urgent images ofhistoric events or heroic figures that would easily identify A.K.A. Serial Killer as a
304

Ogawa Shinsuke, “Daigaku tôsô o toraeru me,” Eiga o toru: dokyumentarii no shifuku o motomete, ed.
Yamane Sadao (Tokyo: Satsuma shobô, 1993), 82.
305
Matsuda Masao, “Ajitêshon no ne: Assatsu no mori san” [The Roots of Agitation: Praise for Assatsu nomori], Bara to mumeisha [A Rose and The Unnamed] (Tokyo: Haga shoten, 1970), 215.
306
Nornes, “The Postwar Documentary Trace,” 52.

204political documentary film. While it is true that several long shots of tanks and the feet ofmarching soldiers from the Self-Defense Forces briefly appear on screen, these are no
more privileged than the neighboring shots of anonymous boys delivering milk cartons or
bundles of newspapers. Unlike Solanas and Gettino’s La Hora de los Hornos (1968), no
indictment of cultural imperialism and neo-colonial capitalism is explicitly articulated.
Unlike Newsreel’s Columbia Revolt (1968) or Ogawa’s Report from Haneda (1967) thefilm steers away from focusing on epoch-making events, and towards the recording of theeventless everyday (Figure 16).
In the case of The Secret Story of the Post-Tokyo War, the militant ideal of “filmas a weapon” is diegetically incorporated by the use of inserted documentary footage ofstudent protests against the U.S. Occupation of Okinawa. Yet it is critically juxtaposed
against the film-within-the-film, which contains nothing but several static long shots ofpeaceful townscapes of residential areas within Tokyo. At one point in the film, thevoice-overs of student activists loudly denounce this inserted film-within-the-film, which
they interpret as the testament of an unidentified member of their activist group who
presumably committed suicide. These student characters complain that this film-withinthe-film does not convey any clear political message or vision; it is a waste of time andmoney to document sporadic vehicle traffic around a guardrail or an underpass, or to
document peaceful scenes of immobile rows of houses and television antennas. Theirconclusion is that such generic scenes of urban life can be filmed “anytime, anywhere.”
The actuality footage in this film-within-the-film is thus rejected for its lack of
local and temporal specificity. These militant students do not see any need to document
such non-dramatic scenes precisely because, according to their political vision,205

documentary films are supposed to capture the historic moments of specific struggles.
And this is exactly what these characters do in filming student protests against the U.S.
Occupation of Okinawa on April 28th in 1969.
However, given the thematic and visual primacy of the film-within-the film in
The Secret Story of the Post-Tokyo War, it would be a mistake to simply endorse thepolitical point of view of these student activist characters. Rather, I want to argue that thefilm’s main critique is inversely aimed at the established mode of political documentary
filmmaking itself, which privileges epoch-making revolutionary events while focusing on
the human actors. The revolutionary view of history, which privileges dramatic momentsof rupture and change, is also called into question by the everyday temporality ofeventless landscapes. A.K.A. Serial Killer enacts a similar critique by deliberately
avoiding the narrative dramatization of Nagayama’s crime. In contrast to the images of
dated, localized, and eventful space-time that appear in conventional documentaries andnewsreels, what A.K.A. Serial Killer and the film-within-the-film of The Secret Story of
the Post-Tokyo War present, therefore, are decidedly unmarked images, which showcompletely banal space-time of the everyday. These images are devoid of chronologicalmarkers and local specificities. What, then, one may ask, would be the political efficacy
of making such films?
Despite being called “landscape” films, what A.K.A. Serial Killer and the filmwithin-the-film of The Secret Story of the Post-Tokyo War present are neither the pastoral
nor the sublime. Here it is banality that counts. But why emphasize the banality of
everyday scenery? At one level, as I have mentioned already, the foregrounding of
everydayness counteracts the revolutionary temporality that structures political206

documentary films of the 1960s. But, there is another level of critique at work in these
two “landscape films,” a critique that engages with the question of space. Before I
analyze this spatial critique in the films’ landscape images, a brief contextualization of
the life of Nagayama Norio – the inspiration for A.K.A. Serial Killer – is in order.
Nagayama Norio (1949-1997) was born into a poor working-class family in thenorthern island of Hokkaido. As he recounts later in his novelistic works, poverty forced
him and his family to move around, preventing him from attending school regularly. In
1968 he stole a pistol from the U.S. navy base in Yokosuka, and killed two security
guards and two taxi drivers. He was arrested and sentenced to death. While he was
imprisoned he learned to read, turned to political philosophy, and began to write. In 1971
he published his first autobiographical novel, Muchi no namida (Tears of Ignorance),
which became an instant bestseller, gaining enthusiastic support from left-leaning youth.
Nagayama continued to publish novels from prison, sending his royalties to the familiesof his victims.
But more than anything, Nagayama became an icon of radical leftism and theagitating voice of the so-called lumpenproletariat, by putting forward statements such as“The bourgeoisie does not have the right to pass judgment on the proletariat.” In so doing
he laid his indictment at the feet of the capitalist State. When he wrote, for instance, “At
midnight on a certain day of a certain era/ a fool who knew neither East nor West/declared war in solitude/ against the Japanese capitalist State,” Nagayama retrospectively
positioned himself the solitary rebel.307 Consequently, numerous writers, filmmakers and307

Cited by Matsuda Masao in “Misshitsu no teroru” [Terror In The Closed Chamber] Fûkei no shimetsu[The Extinction of the Landscape], (Tokyo: Tabata shoten, 1971), 238. My translation.

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intellectuals turned to Nagayama in order to speak for and about him, as if he were thesymbolic nodal point of the political, economic and cultural strata of postwar Japan.
The filmmaker Shindô Kaneto (1912- ), for instance, turned the life of Nagayama
into a sentimental narrative film, Hadaka no jûkyûsai (Live Today, Die Tomorrow!) in
1970. Unlike A.K.A. Serial Killer, Live Today, Die Tomorrow! focuses on Nagayama’ssocial and familial relationships. It tells a heartrending story by articulating a chain ofdramatic events propelled by the main characters’ actions. In contrast, A.K.A. Serial
Killer refuses this narrative impulse towards dramatic storytelling. In recalling themaking of A.K.A. Serial Killer, Adachi notes that they resisted the temptation to narrate
Nagayama’s life. Landscape, according Adachi, emerged as an alternative way oforganizing the film while they followed the migratory footsteps of Nagayama from one
location to another:
The impression that every city is just like the same city did not disappear. While I held
my breath, stood still, and wondered about the origins of this stifling feeling in thesecities, the landscapes in front of my eyes appeared as beautiful as postcards. Yet precisely
because their beauty was like that of picture postcards, I realized that this was the sourceof our suffocation. Perhaps everyone knows about this suffocation, yet it continues tospread everyday while people walk through the city in order to survive. I felt that perhaps
these suffocating landscapes had been Nagayama’s enemy. Then, we thought we could
turn these landscapes that keep stealing from us into a method of interrogatinglandscapes, ourselves, and the images of Nagayama.308

Adachi’s visual analogy between the clichéd images of picture postcards andhomogeneous local scenery is indeed translated into the formal style of A.K.A. Serial
Killer, in which the majority of shots appear as composed as the static view of picture
postcards.
Adachi’s reference to the clichéd images of picture postcards thus sheds light on
the question of the uniformity and banality of the images at the heart of these two
308

Adachi Masao, Eiga/ Kakumei [Cinema/Revolution] (Tokyo: Kawaide Shobô, 2003), 290. My
translation.

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landscape films. However, Adachi also regards the uniform impression of the landscapethat changes so little from one city to another as “Nagayama’s enemy.” But what does itmean to say that the generic landscape is an enemy, a source of suffocation?
Interestingly, referencing Walter Benjamin, who argues that Eugène Atget
photographed the deserted landscapes of nineteenth century Paris as if they were deserted
crime scenes, Matsuda discusses the making of A.K.A. Serial Killer in the 1970 essay
titled Fûkei to shite no toshi (“City as Landscape”) as follows: “We filmed crime scenes
just like landscape.” 309 But, one might ask, which scenes are the crime scenes?
Undoubtedly, Matsuda would say all the scenes in A.K.A. Serial Killer; that is, all thelandscapes. In noting that the only point of intersection between the journey taken by
Nagayama and that of filmmakers a few months later was the “homogeneous landscape,”
Matsuda too draws our attention to the correlation between the uniformity of thelandscapes of various cities and Nagayama’s migratory footsteps through them.310 In the
essay titled Waga rettô, waga fûkei (“My Archipelago, My Landscape”) Matsuda puts
forward another statement that resonates well with Adachi’s observation:
When we tried to see another Japanese archipelago with visionary eyes by following thefootsteps of a member of the masses who grew up in the lower-class strata of society, andwho had to form his own class position through constant vagrancy as his only state ofbeing, surprisingly or not surprisingly, we ended up discovering a common element thatcannot be called anything but landscape, which existed like the end point of a segment ofa line.311

As Matsuda writes in another essay, the “common elements” that repeatedly appear likeequidistant points on the line of their journey precisely constitute the uniformity of the309

Ibid. Hirai Gen at the Kinema Club IV conference (June 22-26, summer 2005) also pointed out thisintriguing passage in his analysis of Nagayama Norio through the framework of the historical disintegrationof the welfare state.
310
Matsuda Masao, “Fûkei to shite no toshi” [“City as Landscape”] Fûkei no shimetsu, 16. The essay was
originally published in April issue of journal, Gendai no me in 1970.
311
Matsuda Masao, “Waga rettô, waga fûkei” [“My Archipelago, My Landscape”] Fûkei no shimetsu, 9293.

209homogeneous landscape.312 What is important to note is that Matsuda and Adachi bothemphasize their awareness of such uniformity of landscapes at the profilmic level as wellas the compositional level of effects produced by the camera; that is, what already exists
before the camera’s gaze and what appears after the camera captures it.
Here it would be helpful briefly to consider what is generally meant by the term
“landscape” to think through the correlation between the production of homogeneouslandscapes and the structure of domination, in particular that of a class society, which
underlies Adachi’s and Matsuda’s discussion of Nagayama. The term landscape, usuallyencompasses two different levels of the organization of space: the first is the physicalspace seen from a particular point of view; the second is the framed space of a visual
representation (e.g. in painting, photography, and cinema). In both cases, the emphasis ison an expansive space relatively devoid of human figures. Similarly, Japanese critics use
the term fûkei (“landscape”) in order to refer to profilmic physical space as well as therepresentational space inside the screen.
The representational practice of landscape as well as the landscaping of physicalspace have increasingly been theorized (since the 1980s) by cultural geographers and art
historians through the frameworks of modern subjectivism, colonialism, market
capitalism, urban development, and so on. For instance, W. J. T. Mitchell has argued thatlandscape at the physical or concrete material level already constitutes “a medium ofcultural expression.”313 Mitchell writes:
Landscape may be represented by painting, drawing, or engraving; by photography, film,
and theatrical scenery; by writing, speech, and presumably even music and other ‘sound312

Matsuda Masao, “Fûkei no shimetsu no tame ni” [For the Extinction of the Landscape] Fûkei no
shimetsu, 280.
313
W. J. T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994),14.

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images.’ Before all these secondary representations, however, landscape is itself aphysical and multisensory medium (earth, stone, vegetation, water, sky, sound andsilence, light and darkness, etc) in which cultural meanings and values are encoded,
whether they are put there by the physical transformation of a place in landscapegardening and architecture, or found in a place formed, as we say, ‘by nature.’314

Mitchell thus expands the notion of landscape to include semiotic functions of physicalspace itself. Similarly, Denis Cosgrove defines landscape as a way of seeing. 315
Landscape as a way of seeing the external world, moreover, gave rise to a “practical
appropriation of space,” which has taken as diverse modalities as urban planning, garden
architecture, and colonial expropriations of land. For Cosgrove, the dominant
representational practices of landscape – be they painting or photography – are hence
inseparable from the economic and social expansions of the urban property owners thatemerged in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Europe.
Most importantly, many critics have argued that landscape needs to be understoodas an ideology, as well as a technique of vision, which has its basis in linear perspective.
It is argued that the apparatus of the camera itself, with its built-in linear perspective, falls
within the purview of the ideological construction of human vision that coincides withthe rise of Renaissance humanism. This is a view corroborated by the apparatus theory of
1970s film studies, such as that of Jean-Louis Baudry. 316 When we turn to thespecificities of Japan, however, we find that not only cinema but also the entire practiceof European-style landscape painting and photography (along with philosophy) was
314

Ibid.
Following the lead of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), Denis Cosgrove defines landscape as a wayof seeing. He writes, “Landscape first emerged as a term, an idea, or better still, a way of seeing the external
world, in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century. It was, and it remains, a visual term, one that arose
initially out of renaissance humanism and its particular concepts and constructs of space” (46). See Denis
Cosgrove, “Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea,” Transactions of the Institute of
the British Geographers, New Series, 10.1 (1985): 45-62.
316
Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” in Narrative,
Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press,
1986), 286-298.
315

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imported in the late nineteenth century. Hence, for critics like Karatani Kôjin, thesemiotic “discovery of landscape,” which entailed a perspectival inversion of the world,
took place only in the nineteenth century, the era of Japan’s intensive industrial andcultural modernization.317
Whether it is analyzed in the Euro-American context or the Japanese context,
critics seem to agree upon one thing: landscape as an idea as well as a practice is
inseparable from the emergence of the modern epistemic subject who, as Martin
Heidegger has argued, sees the world as if it is a “picture.”318 “The fundamental event of
the modern age,” writes Heidegger, “is the conquest of the world as picture.”319 However,what remains implicit in Heidegger and Karatani, who are concerned with the epistemic
ramifications rather than the specific political and economic implications of modernity, isthe question of the control over space as tied to the expansion of modern state capitalism.
It is precisely the interdependence between the increasing control over territorial
space and the consolidation of postwar democratic state capitalism that the critics offûkeiron problematize. In other words, the central concern of fûkeiron (as articulated byAdachi and Matsuda in the above quotations) is neither the aesthetic production of
picturesque scenery nor the metaphysical divide between subject and object, but rather
the immanent relations of power that produce homogenized landscapes. In their view, thevery uniformity of the landscape of rural and urban cities throughout Japan corresponds
to the serial mass production and standardization of commodities, which, in turn,317

To quote Karatani, “The philosophical standpoint which distinguishes between subject and object cameinto existence within what I refer to as ‘landscape.’ Rather than existing prior to landscape, subject andobject emerge from within it.” (34). See Karatani Kôjin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature. Forward
by Frederic Jameson. trans. Brett de Bary (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 34.
318
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. trans. William Lovitt (NewYork: Harper & Row, 1977), 132.
319
Ibid.,134.

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reproduce unskilled manual laborers like Nagayama Norio. Thus, “the enemy of
Nagayama” of which Adachi speaks is not simply the homogenized landscape itself, butrather the invisible relations of power that produce such homogenized landscapes.
Given these critics and filmmakers’ topographical interests in the politics oflandscape, it is worth examining closely how Matsuda turns to the cartographic practiceof mapping to describe the process of tracing the migratory footsteps of Nagayama whilefilming A.K.A. Serial Killer. For instance, Matsuda begins his essay, “My Archipelago,
My Landscape,” with some reflections upon cartography:
It is well known that the atlas made in Japan and the atlases made abroad, let’s say in
London, have different compositions. That is, Japan is placed at the center in the former,
and England in the latter. As a result, the Pacific Ocean spreads vastly, with North andSouth America placed on the right side and Africa on the left in the former atlas, while
South America and Africa face one another closely across the Atlantic Ocean in the latter
atlas. Of course the Pacific Ocean gets divided in half, and if you look for Japan, it barely
retains its trace, like a stretched scar at the top corner on the right. As I write this, it may
appear commonsensical and hence not move you at all, but, by way of experiment, I
suggest actually buying two maps and place them on both sides of the wall forcomparison. When placed between two maps, we would actually feel the transformationof our own worldview. In my case, when a printing gets shifted slightly, things whose
existence I took for granted are transformed into a source of tremendous shock that evencauses a sensation of nausea.320

Of particular interest here is Matsuda’s recognition that the cartographic practices ofdifferent nation-states reflect different “worldviews” (sekaikan). The innocuous surface
of a page from an atlas might be read as the symbolic mapping of different geopoliticalimaginations at work.
An especially important passage, which leads Matsuda’s thinking fromcartography to the making of the film A.K.A. Serial Killer, appears immediately
afterwards. In noting how Africa and South America show up like severed “Siamese
twins” in the atlas made in London, Matsuda shifts his cartographic meditation from the320

Matsuda, “Waga rettô, waga fûkei,” 91. My translation. The emphasis is in the original.

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comparison between Japan and England to the formation of the “Third World.” Hewrites: “The innocuous existence of the map made in London triggered me to think themeaning of the ‘Third World’ as another world. I felt that the entire history of the ones
who made the map and the ones who were made into the map crystallized there.”321 In
other words, Matsuda pays attention to the peripheral positioning of both Africa andSouth America in the maps made in two former imperial nation-states –Japan andEngland – and reads “Third World” politics into it. In so doing he links his shock at
seeing Japan marginalized in the map made by British cartographers to a self-reflexive
observation about the equally marginalizing attitude of Japanese cartographers towards
Africa and South America (which are placed at both edges of the map). Matsuda thus
moves away from the dualistic comparative schema of Japan versus the West towards atertiary schema in order to highlight the interrelation between the cartographic
imagination and the politico-economic constitution of the “Third World.”
Matsuda’s evocation of the “Third World” in this essay is not surprising given his
political interest in anarchism and anti-colonialism, particularly the works of writers suchas Louis Auguste Blanqui, Jules Régis Debray, Che Guevara and Franz Fanon.322 But
what I want to emphasize here is how Matsuda uses the conceptual framework ofcartography to discuss the culturally and historically conditioned ways of seeing theworld (worldview), and especially the ways of seeing that are directly linked to thecolonial and imperial relations of power. Although an in-depth analysis of Matsuda’s
conceptualization of the “Third World” is outside the scope of this chapter, we can atleast grasp from this brief passage how Matsuda introduces the notion of the “Third
321

Ibid., 92. The emphasis is in the original.
For his detailed discussion of the concept of the “Third World” (as an imaginary space), see his essay,“Sien no kûkan” in Fûkei no shimetsu, 165-182.

322

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World” in order to offer a global perspective on the disenfranchised, migratory“lumpenproletariat” populace that forms a symbolic “Third World” within Japan.
Nagayama’s plight (to which he is clearly sympathetic, though this sympathy itself maydeserve criticism) is thus framed against the worldwide division between those who
dominate and those who are dominated. Then, how does this understanding relate to thefilm, A.K.A. Serial Killer?
In the passage following the reference to the “Third World,” Matsuda notes, “I
could not help but wonder whether it is possible for us to discover another Japan–
another Japan which is expressible as a concrete material map.” 323 Matsuda thendescribes his desire to re-write the official map of Japan as his personal premise forbecoming involved in the making of A.K.A. Serial Killer. The discovery of homogeneouslandscapes, which exist like equidistant points of a line that constitute an alternative“map” of the Japanese archipelago, is therefore explained, at least in part, as an antistate
cartographic endeavor. Other critics of the fûkeiron have also suggested (albeit implicitly)that the homogenization of landscapes in rural and urban cities of Japan must be read as
visible symptoms of the consolidation of postindustrial capitalism. In other words, theconcept of landscape for these Japanese theorists writing at the end of the 1960s meant
something more than picturesque scenery. When read critically, landscapes enabled themto see a visual “diagram” of social and economic relations, especially those of
domination, at work. Despite their apparent privileging of class over other modes ofdisempowerment, their reconceptualization of landscape as a diagrammatic mapping of
power relations thus deserves attention.

323

Matsuda, “Waga rettô, waga fûkei,” 92.

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Since a map, by definition, is a non-mimetic (and hence literally a diagrammatic)
mode of representation, Matsuda’s introduction of cartography into the theoretical
discourse of the fûkeiron would naturally complicate our reading of A.K.A. Serial Killer
and The Secret Story of the Post-Tokyo War. The general understanding of cinema as aphoto-realistic medium, which presumably reproduces the phenomenological impressionsof reality is clearly not compatible with the non-mimetic, diagrammatic practice of
cartography. The question then becomes: how do we understand the relationship between
these two modes of conceiving landscape as the photo-realistic “document” and the nonmimetic “diagram”? In order to answer this question, we need to examine the formal
characteristics of the filmic texts themselves.

Formal Appropriations of Actuality Films
As I have mentioned, despite being called landscape films, A.K.A. Serial Killer
and The Secret Story of the Post-Tokyo War present neither pastoral nor sublime scenery,
but rather generic urban and rural townscapes. In A.K.A. Serial Killer and the filmwithin-the-film in The Secret Story of the Post-Tokyo War, one immediately notices thediscontinuous shot transitions. Moreover, the shots themselves appear self-contained andstatic, like meticulously framed postcard photographs. This is more strongly
demonstrated by the film-within-the-film of The Secret Story of the Post-Tokyo War.
Here the camera holds a fixed position, keeping the “tableau”-like appearance of shots.
For instance, the main body of the film-within-the-film of The Secret Story of the PostTokyo War is composed of six long-takes with a fixed camera position, each shot lasting
more than 60 seconds.

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Although the reel that includes these “tableau” shots also contains a few jerky
hand-held shots of cityscapes, its main body consists of these fixed-frame shots of highly
composed “landscapes.” These long-takes present a view of rooftops, a small shopping
street and pedestrians, a guardrail occasionally obscured by passing cars, a viaduct and a
mailbox beside it, a small tobacco shop filmed across railway fences, and televisionantennas and telephone lines filmed against the empty sky. Nothing spectacular or
dramatic happens in any of these shots. Similarly, A.K.A. Serial Killer consists of a seriesof actuality shots: train stations, airports, docks, railway tracks, and back alleys,occasional glimpses of newspaper delivering boys and school girls commuting by bicycle
in distance. Without an identifiable human actor holding a central position inside theframe, shots begin to bleed into one another, while an endless score of improvised jazz
plays on the soundtrack. Even with the occasional male voice-over, which states the basic
facts of Nagayama’s journey (moving from one city to another), the film as a wholeseems to lack a coherent narrative.
Moreover, to emphasize the flatness of the surface of the screen, these twolandscape films maximize their use of the horizontal axis. In A.K.A. Serial Killer, thecamera often pans laterally, along the wall, along the streets, along the movement ofvehicles. The spectatorial desire to hold objects in deep focus is constantly thwarted by
the obtrusive lateral blurs of shadows, fences, and trains running across the frontal plane,thus momentarily, but repeatedly, blocking the complete view of the objects in deep
focus. Shots are discontinuously edited together, and repetitive closeups of partial viewsof vehicles, such as the wheels of airplanes or trucks are abundant. The result is auniquely frustrating experience for the spectator, forced to take an external position to the217unsutured screen space. Similarly, the six “tableau” shots of The Secret Story of the PostTokyo War offer no narrative logic to explain their successive placement. Taken together,
these shots present all the characteristics of early cinema, which Noël Burch defines interms of “the autarchy of tableau,” “horizontal and frontal camera placement,”“maintenance of shots,” “centrifugality,” and “narrative non-closure.” 324
The crucial effect of these formal devices is the externality of the spectator’s
position in relation to the screen space. The transition from what Burch calls the“primitive mode of representation” of early cinema to the “institutional mode ofrepresentation” of mainstream narrative cinema occurs when the spectator, who wasexternally positioned in relation to the screen space, becomes emplaced within it. This
“psycho-physiological orientation of the spectator” is done through a combination of
narrative and formal devices, such as the use of the axial match, the eyeline match, theshot/reverse shot, and narrative closure. In other words, the historical emergence ofmainstream narrative cinema is marked by “the cinema’s centering of the spectator”
which makes him or her the point of reference around which the narrative space-time is
structured.325
We can infer from this that A.K.A. Serial Killer and the film-within-the film in
The Secret Story of the Post-Tokyo War are neither narrative films nor even documentaryfilms, if we understand the term “documentary” as the established genre of filmmaking
structured by what Philip Rosen calls “the centralization of meaning through internal324Noël Burch, Life to Those Shadows, trans. and ed. Ben Brewster (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990).
325
Ibid., 209.

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sequenciation.”326 Rosen’s phrase refers to the way in which shots are organized, suchthat this centralization delimits and regulates meanings communicated by the filmic text.
This characteristic applies to both mainstream narrative cinema and documentary.
Importantly, Rosen also argues that documentary film (as theorized by John Grierson andothers since the 1930s) and mainstream narrative cinema have something in common:just as narrative cinema “ejected the actuality film” from its proper terrain, documentary
film came into existence by rejecting newsreels and actuality films.327 In other words, it
was not enough either for institutional narrative cinema or for documentary film tosimply set up the camera “in front of an unprepared chunk of reality, [turn] it on for a few
minutes, and then [present] the result to audiences,” as early actuality films had done.328
Similarly, in his discussion of early cinema, Tom Gunning notes that early trick
films and actuality films markedly lacked the “dramatic articulation of a story.”329 It isprecisely this lack of the dramatic articulation of a story that characterizes both A.K.A.
Serial Killer and the film-within-the-film of The Secret Story of the Post-Tokyo War.
These two landscape films thus undertake a curious formal appropriation of the preclassical cinematic genre of actuality films. What would be the reason for thisappropriation? Before I answer this question, I will present a brief overview of theactuality genre would be helpful.
The term actualities or actuality film refers to a genre of preclassical, preinstitutional silent cinema that was very popular during the first decade of cinematic

326

Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2001), 245.
327
Ibid., 242.
328
Ibid.
329
Tom Gunning, “‘Primitive’ Cinema: A Frame-up? Or the Trick’s on Us,” Cinema Journal 28.2 (Winter1989), 8.

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production roughly between 1895 and 1904. 330 The best examples are those of the
Lumière brothers, inventors of the cinematographe. Among numerous actuality films
produced during this period, the ones shot outdoors, such as New York: Broadway atUnion Square (1896) by the Lumière brothers and Skyscrapers of New York City from
North River (1903) by G.A. Smith, bear striking similarities to these two Japaneselandscape films. Take the example of the second “tableau” shot in The Secret Story of the
Post-Tokyo War, in which the camera is set at one end of a narrow shopping street;pedestrians walk in and out of the frame while a small pickup truck passes slowly.
Though different in time and place, the fixed frame of New York: Broadway at Union
Square similarly shows the movement of pedestrians walking in and out of the frame.
Unlike scripted films, they contain neither elaborate narratives nor dramatic events.
Although such actuality films are considered the precursors of documentary film,
the documentary as a genre first came into existence by rigorously differentiating itself
from the actuality.331 When Grierson defined documentary film as the “creative treatmentof actuality,” what he had in mind was clearly not a simple assemblage of actuality
footage. For instance, in his critical assessment of various “shorts,” Grierson argues:“They do not dramatize, they do not even dramatize an episode: they describe, and evenexpose, but in any aesthetic sense, only rarely reveal. Herein is their formal limit, and it is330

In reference to the Lumière brothers’ actuality films, Mary Ann Doane writes, “The actuality dominatedthe first decade of film production” (22). See Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time:
Modernity, Contingency, The Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). According toPhilip Rosen, “the commercial heyday of the actuality in various forms was 1896-1903. Preclassicalnarratives emerged as one of the leading products during 1903-4, but actualities remained a common
component of the film viewing experience until around 1908” (164, Change Mummified).
331
Philip Rosen writes, “In its own originary self-definitions, the documentary tradition shares thedenigration of preclassical cinema as primitive with its putative other, mainstream fictional filmmaking. If
proponents of documentary banished the newsreels that became a secondary mainstream product from theirrealm, it is all the more clear that actualities could not be admitted. In the 1930s Grierson himself
associated actuality films with an outgrown childhood – his own as well as the medium’s.” Ibid., 243.

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unlikely that they will make any considerable contribution to the fuller art of
documentary.”332 In his emphasis on drama, Grierson thus shares the same ideology ofnarrativity that characterizes mainstream narrative cinema. It is an ideology of unity andcoherence; both documentary film and narrative cinema emphasize narrative coherence
and control over the production of meaning. The actuality film, in contrast, tends todisplay the scene, captured by the camera as if to show a slice of life. The production of
meaning in actuality film is, in short, not as rigidly controlled as in the documentary or
mainstream narrative cinema.
If A.K.A. Serial Killer and The Secret Story of the Post-Tokyo War return to theformal stylistics of actuality film, it is because of their openness of the textual productionof meaning and the external positioning of the spectator in relation to the screen space.
That is, the very absence of narrative in the landscape films deliberately forces the
spectator to remain at a distance outside the screen space. These landscape films’
appropriation of the actuality genre could thus be read as an indirect critique of
documentary filmmaking practice, including the politically committed kind. As I
mentioned earlier, this critique is built into the diegesis of The Secret Story of the PostTokyo War through an opposition between the documentary footage of armed student
protests and the actuality footage of quotidian landscapes. The documentary footage
sequence that the activist characters aim to shape into a coherent narrative is clearly
linked to the militant ideal of “film as a weapon,” while the actuality footage of eventlesslandscapes remains its antithesis. Similarly, A.K.A. Serial Killer’s refusal to dramatize

332

John Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary,” Grierson on Documentary, ed. Forsyth Hardy(London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 146.

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Nagayama’s life and its decision to focus on homogeneous landscapes takes a strong
stance against political documentary filmmaking of the time.
In the 1969 essay titled Misshitsu, fûkei, kenryoku (“Closed Chamber, Landscape,and the Power of Domination”) Matsuda uses the term jikkei eiga (“actual-scenery film”
or “actual-landscape film”) to describe A.K.A. Serial Killer:
The reason why we, including Adachi Masao, in making a strange work –which can only
be called an ‘actual-landscape film’ [jikkei eiga] rather than a documentary film –followed the footsteps of the ‘serial killer’ Nagayama Norio by passing through theeastern half of Japan; Abashiri, Sapporo, Hakodate, Tsugaru Plane, Tokyo, Nagoya,
Kyoto, Osaka, Kôbe, and even through Hong Kong; and filmed only the local landscapes,
which Nagayama would have seen with his own eyes – is because we became conscious
333of the landscape as the antagonistic ‘power’ itself.

Of particular interest for us here is Matsuda’s suggestion that the film A.K.A. Serial Killer
should be aligned with the genre of actuality rather than that of documentary. This
corroborates the landscape films’ formal appropriation of the pre-classical genre ofactuality film that I have suggested. But let us come back to the question of the political
efficacy of this formal critique of documentary film: why was it necessary for filmmakersof A.K.A. Serial Killer and The Secret Story of the Post-Tokyo War to criticize thedominant mode of documentary filmmaking in the first place? This question takes meback to the point discussed earlier in relation to the cartographic imagination tied to therelations of power. It is not accidental that Matsuda connects the notion of landscape tothe notions of antagonism and the power of domination (kenryoku). This relation between
landscape and antagonism is a key to the film’s investigation of the micropolitical levelof power relations, which remain latent or imperceptible beneath the clichéd images ofmacropolitical events.
333

Matsuda Masao, “Misshitsu, fûkei, kenryoku” [“Closed Chamber, Landscape, and the Power ofDomination,” Bara to mumeisha, 123.

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In the above quotation, Matsuda also writes that after following in the footsteps ofNagayama in the process of making A.K.A. Serial Killer, he became conscious of “thelandscape as the antagonistic ‘power’ itself” (tekitai shitekuru ‘kenryoku’ sono mono).
Landscape is a way in which the economic and political relations of domination andsubjection become visible to the observing eye. The mediating act of filming, however,must also allow the spectator to experience the same revelation while viewing the filmed
landscapes. How does a film allow the spectator to pay attention to banal landscapes,
from which familiar, recognizable markers and agents of macropolitical activities areabsent? The answer lies in the flatness and stillness of landscapes shots, structured in amanner comparable to shots of early actuality films, for such formal devices prevent the
spectator from being emplaced within the imaginary screen space. This externalization of
the spectator positions her as a kind of a distant observer. Of course, this strategy may
risk putting the spectator into the position of the “transcendental” subject, a position
which Baudry and other apparatus theorists have already criticized. But it is precisely
because the form (actuality film) is not inherently critical that the attendant discourse offûkeiron must be introduced in order to complete the political efficacy of A.K.A. Serial
Killer and The Secret Story of the Post-Tokyo War. A lack of attention to the theoretical
discourse on landscape at the time of these films’ production would hinder ourcomprehension of the scope of their political trajectory. Indeed, the work done byWestern scholars – from that of Edward Branigan to Burch, from David Desser toMaureen Turim – on The Secret Story of the Post-Tokyo War (often said to be Oshima’s“most difficult” film) has collectively missed the significance of the film’s peculiar
treatment of landscape.334
334

Edward Branigan, “Subjectivity Under Siege: From Fellini’s 8 1/2 to Oshima’s The Story of a Man Who223

When viewed in relation to the film-theoretical discourse of the fûkeiron,
however, the shots of landscapes in A.K.A. Serial Killer and The Secret Story of the PostTokyo War attain a dual visibility: they become both a document of homogeneity and adiagram of economic and political power relations. In short, the homogenization and thestandardization of the various landscapes become visible evidence of Japan’s postwar
economic development, concentric labor migrations and the correlative circulation ofstandardized commodities. Nagayama’s class background as a temporary migrant is
indeed already engraved in the landscapes of the cities he had traversed.
The Landscape as Diagram
The film-theoretical concept of the landscape, which Japanese critics discoveredat the end of the 1960s through the mediation of A.K.A. Serial Killer and The Secret Storyof the Post-Tokyo War, thus offered them a new way of seeing landscapes as
manifestations of structural changes occurring in Japan as it reached its postindustrial
phase. These films document increasingly homogenizing urban and rural landscapes, but
their documented landscapes also reveal what Deleuze calls the diagram, that is, thearrangement of historically specific, invisible relations and functions of power
coextensive with a given social field.
In his reading of Michel Foucault, Deleuze explicates Foucault’s concept of
power as function, not as form. Deleuze thus uses the term diagram (which Foucault
initially used in his discussion of the panopticon in Discipline and Punish) to explain theLeft His Will on Film,” Screen 19.1: 7-40; Noël Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in theJapanese Cinema, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); David Desser,
Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1988); Maureen Turim, The Films of Oshima Nagisa: Images of A Japanese Iconoclast (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998).

224

specific arrangement (agencement) of power, which can be applied to various instancesand locations (from prison to school, from hospital to military training camp). It is
important to distinguish the dynamic mechanism of power, which Foucault and Deleuze
express by the term diagram, and the architectural blueprint of the panoptic prison drawn
by Jeremy Bentham in 1791. While it is this flat, diagrammatic figure that enabled
Foucault to exemplify the mechanism of disciplinary power and to gain knowledge of its
workings, the term diagram as used by Deleuze refers to the pure function of suchdisciplinary power (and not to the diagrammatic representation of architectural design).
In the words of Deleuze: “The diagram is no longer an auditory or visual archive
but a map, a cartography that is coextensive with the whole social field.” 335 What
Deleuze calls the diagram in its strict sense is the invisible abstract functioning of power
in a given social field; it is a term that refers to the nondiscursive mechanism of relational
forces, not to the strata of knowledge formed by visibilities and statements. Bentham’s
drawing is only a visual aid to understand the mechanism of the panopticon as a
generalized model of the functioning of power in a disciplinary society. Furthermore,
there is not just one but multiple diagrams; every society at any given moment operates
through a set of diagrams, some of them more dominant than others.
Similarly, when taken together the discourse of fûkeiron and landscape films
might be read as interlocking sites of visibility and invisibility. The assemblage of filmic
images of homogeneous landscapes in A.K.A. Serial Killer and The Secret Story of the
Post-Tokyo War would correspond to the form (a blueprint), which allows the spectator
to conduct a certain critical “reading” of the diagram that is at work in Japanese society atthe end of the 1960s. But this is not to say that the knowledge of the diagrammatic
335

Deleuze, Foucault, 34.

225

functions of power is immediately given to the spectator. The spectator must actively“create” her or his own reading – we may call this activity diagramming – of the relationsof power that are neither immediately legible nor visible onscreen. This is why the
concurrent formation of the discourse (which belongs to the dimension of knowledge) by
the fûkeiron critics deserves attention, and is essential for the understanding of these twofilms.
What are the diagrams of power that the spectator may infer from A.K.A. Serial
Killer and The Secret Story of the Post-Tokyo War? Let us take the six “tableau” shotsfrom The Secret Story of the Post-Tokyo War (Figure 17). We immediately notice thetelephone lines, mailbox, railway and bridge, all of which constitute invisible networks of
information and commodity circulation. Moreover, these networks are sustained by what
Paul Virilio calls the “policing” of open space by the state: “The State’s political power . .
. is only secondarily ‘power organized by one class to oppress another.’ More materially,
it is the polis, the police, in other words highway surveillance.”336 Indeed, the invisible
yet immanent presence of the state control over the open space of quotidian life is exactly
what Matsuda articulates in his writings on landscape: the “power” in his essays is asynonym for “state-power.”
However, this is precisely where Matsuda’s theory of landscape falls short ofgrasping the real workings of power, which is no longer centralized under the sovereign
control of the state. The image of landscapes in A.K.A. Serial killer and The Secret Storyof the Post-Tokyo War clearly indicate that power is not synonymous with police,

336

Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York:
Semiotext(e), 1986), 14.

226

military, or parliamentary power, but with transportation and infrastructure – in short,pathways of commerce and information.
By “documenting” the existence of this infrastructure, the films point to thestate’s role as secondary support for commerce rather than as the primary sovereign
power. This may also indicate the shift from the 1960s – the era of the anti-state politicalmovements emblematized by the mass protests against Japan-U.S. Security Treaty(ANPO) – to the 1970s, an era marked by the consolidation of Japan’s late capitalist
consumer society and by diffused networks of resistance and subversion. This is where I
also locate the symptomatic waning of the centralized mode of imagining politicalresistance, which had been anchored around the figure of the subject [shutai] that had solong dominated the political imagination of postwar Japanese intellectuals.337 While
Matsuda and other critics associated with fûkeiron may still think of political resistancewithin the classical Marxist (and anarchist) framework of repressive state power, the“landscape films” themselves have already suggested, albeit implicitly, the necessity of
dislodging the concept of power from the central authority of the state. In short, in termsof questioning and making visible the micropolitical level of power, the films were moreinsightful than the actual theory produced through them.
Against those who may argue that the “actuality” captured by these films isalready a historical document of a bygone era – and therefore devoid of any actuality orcontemporary relevance – I would suggest that the films are not just documents but in
337

The discourse on subjectivity (shutaisei), which was first articulated by critics and writers associatedwith the literary journal, Kindai bungaku, in the immediate postwar period, and which was carried on by
the Marxist critics (such as Yoshimoto Takaaki) well into the 1960s lost is currency by the end of the
1960s. Given Oshima’s earlier stance – his emphasis on the cinema of subjectivity and his critique of war
responsibility of the earlier generations – it is also worth considering Hara Masato’s critique of Oshimaspecifically on this point of privileging subjectivity. Arguably, the film The Secret Story of the Post-Tokyo
War reflects Hara’s perspective as much as that of Oshima.

227

fact part and parcel of the larger theoretical practice of analyzing the relationship between
cinematic visuality and historically specific diagrams of power. As I have shown in thisdissertation, this theoretical practice is an endpoint of a longer trajectory of the analysisof image-production and avant-garde activism, centered on the question of actuality. I
term this an endpoint because the trajectory of avant-garde activism and film theory inJapan took a radically different route after the collapse of student movements and the
New Left at the beginning of the 1970s. This collapse coincided with the rejection of thecentralized mode of resistance among critics and activists, and the gradual waning of film
as the privileged medium of avant-garde art practice. Nonetheless, it is important torevisit this particular trajectory of Japan’s politic-aesthetic vanguardism with its
theoretical concern with actuality, since it offers a valuable counterpoint to the current
academic and activist with the concept of the “common.”As I suggested in the introduction, works that analyze and theorize the complex
relation between the avant-garde art and the politics of the “common” are urgently
needed at a moment when being political is increasingly becoming synonymous with acategorical rejection of vanguardism. Yet it is the historical legacy of the Marxist notionof vanguardism and its productive tension with aesthetic avant-garde practice that not
only offers us a means of re-examining the relation between art and politics, but alsosuggests the importance of questioning the purported givenness of the “common,” a
recent theoretical keyword among contemporary leftist critics and artists. It is with thisgoal in mind that this dissertation excavates and explores vital connections among thewritings and filmic works of those who were associated with the avant-garde228documentary movement, those who were influenced by it, and those who came after but
engaged with the same set of problematics, organized around the question of actuality.

229

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1. A portrait of Hanada Kiyoteru (1909-1974).

Figure 2. A fantastic figure of rokurokubi by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849)

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Figure 3. An image of Sea Bonz (Umibôzu) by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861)

Figure 4. The opening shot of Woman in the Dunes.

241Figure 5. An extreme close-up of a woman’s throat in Woman in the Dunes.

Figure 6. A weaver’s body in Nishijin.
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Figure 7. A stonemason at work in The Song of Stone.

Figure 8. A shot of sand grains passing through a sieve in Woman in the Dunes.

243Figure 9. A shot of the newspaper from Town of Violence.

Figure 10. The opening shot of A Japanese Tragedy.

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Figure 11. A shot from the opening credit sequence in Cruel Story of Youth.

Figure 12. Shiseido advertisement designed by Yamana Ayao.

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Figure 13. Shot of newspapers and magazines from Secrets Behind the Wall.

Figure 14. One of the inserted stills from a manga in Go Go Second-Time Virgin

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Figure 15. Inserted image of Sharon Tate in Go, Go Second-Time Virgin

Figure 16. A landscape shot from A.K.A. Serial Killer. Courtesy Hirasawa Gô(247

Figure 17. A landscape shot from The Secret Story of the Post-Tokyo War.

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