We have recently seen a growing number of works that aimed at a broader and renewed understanding of the new cinemas of the 1960s in Japan. These scholarly endeavors have pursued more complex accounts of the historical, geographical, and geopolitical trajectory of the Japanese New Wave. At the same time, the Japanese New Wave also seems exemplary of the historicization process in general: its point of origin is a retrospective construction. Ongoing investigations have largely ascribed the rise of the New Wave in Japan to Oshima Nagisa, the central figure in the publicity-driven phenomenon known as the “Shōchiku Nouvelle Vague” (Nūberu Bāgu). There are still a series of theoretical and historical/historiographical questions that have remained underexplored: where did the Japanese New Wave come from, and what actually constituted it? How did the emergence of the new cinema intersect with larger media, social, and intellectual history? Did the cinematic medium have to be radicalized in order to become ‘new’? How was such ‘newness’ visualized, accousticized, and registered by other sensory cues in the cinema? How was the emergence of the new cinema in dialogue with institutions?
Placing the films in the contexts of the era’s media-scape, this course will delve into an analytical reconsideration of this rich period of Japanese cinema specifically from the perspective of the Japanese New Wave. While we will aim to capture the exhilaration of the Japanese New Wave by closely analyzing existing studies on some of its key makers and their works, special attention will be given to what is left out of the category as it is conventionally understood, drawing on marginalized works and genres, such as educational and industrial films as well as pink films.
Previously taught Fall 2020.