Organizer: Christine Marran, University of Washington, Seattle
Chair: Paul Berry, University of Washington, Seattle
Discussant: Motoo Kobayashi, University of Washington, Seattle
New Wave cinema of the sixties has often been the object of critical discussion while films of the ensuing decade remain, in many respects, uncharted territory. This panel will interrogate the significance of the evolution of sexual themes in films from the late sixties and seventies by Oshima Nagisa (1932-), Tanaka Noboru (1937-), Matsumoto Toshio (1932-), and Jissoji Akio (1937-).
While New Wave cinema often explored sexuality as inextricably linked to politics, the films of the seventies moved toward the explicit expression of sexuality on its own grounds; sex continued to be a place for affirming political revolution while it also became more mundane or visceral. This panel's examination of Matsumoto's Bara no soretsu (1969), Jissoji's Mandara (1971), Tanaka's Jitsuroku Abe Sada (1975), and Oshima's Ai no koriida (1976) explores the portrayal of homosexuality, nationalist utopian visions, and the multiple interpretations of Abe Sada in seventies' Japanese cinema.
Negatively Oedipal: Matsumoto Toshio's Pessimistic Portrayal of the World of
Roses
Jonathan M. Hall, University of California, Santa Cruz
Despite its lack of recognition outside Japan, Matsumoto Toshio's Bara no soretsu (Funeral Parade of Roses, 1969) is one of the finest productions of the Japanese avant-garde film movement of the late sixties and early seventies. Not simply a bold restaging of an Oedipal drama in the flourishing recesses of Tokyo's homosexual world, Matsumoto's film questions the "sexual" as an arena for resisting the patriarchal logic of high-growth capitalism. At first, homosexuality appears to offer an alternative to a heterosexual, Oedipal logic. But, as Eddy vies with Leda, mama of the bar Genet, for the affections of its master, the homosexual world of roses suggests only a multiplication of Oedipal configurations. Indeed, unlike his ideological rival Oshima Nagisa, Matsumoto suggests the "sexual" offers little space for opposition to the consistently refracted Oedipal and patriarchal structures that pervade the film. Through a series of cinematic disruptions and an intersplicing of faux documentary interviews within the film's narrative, itself attenuated by a circular logic of flashbacks and flashforwards, Bara no soretsu offers a persistent attack on both the self-congratulatory affect of the sixties avant-garde and the melodrama of conventional Japanese studio cinema. Through these techniques, a politically redemptive role for sexuality is called into doubt. Moreover, in satirizing both cinematic and dramatic effects, consistent with the bent of Matsumoto's oeuvre, the film pays new psychological attention to sexuality, investigating capitalism's sexual psychodynamics.
Mandala of Cultural Identity and Sexuality: Jissoji Akio's Film Mandara (1971)
Paul Berry, University of Washington
An often-overlooked confederate of Oshima Nagisa (1932-) and Yoshida Yoshishige (1933-), Jissoji Akio (1937-) was one of the avant-garde cinema directors of the early 1970s to focus on issues of sexuality and changing cultural values. Although Jissoji is best known for his first feature film Mujo (1970) and his biggest box office success Teito monogatari (1988), his second feature Mandara best portrays his attitude towards sexuality and Japanese culture. Working with the noted script writer Ishido Toshiro (1932-), who wrote the scripts for a number of famous films, including Oshima's The Sun's Burial (1960), Night and Fog in Japan (1960) and Yoshida's A Story Written in Water (a.k.a. Forbidden Love, 1965), Jissoji created a complex portrayal of a utopian cult attempting the union of sexuality and an agrarian way-of-life. Two pairs of alienated unmarried college students from Kyoto visit an isolated hotel on a beach near Tsuruga where they become enmeshed in the devious schemes of the charismatic cult leader who eventually leads his surviving disciples on a fatal ocean voyage. The cult advocates a violent rejection of social and sexual norms in order to return to a more primitive and emotionally real life focused on the attainment of an ecstatic state of near-death eroticism. These attitudes are mixed into a syncretic religion containing aspects of Shinto ritual, shamanism, and Japanese and Tibetan Buddhism. To effectively create a brooding atmosphere that Ishido describes as "the use of unreality to depict reality," Jissoji makes use of dramatic camera angles, the still photography of Sawatari Hajime (1940-), classical organ music, locales in Kyoto Zen temples and rural areas, and group scenes that include student members of a theatrical troupe from Ritsumeikan Daigaku.
An analysis of Jissoji's film and Ishido's script allows a critique of the fusion of death and sexuality found in the nationalist romanticism that emerged in the Japanese counter-culture movement as portrayed in sixties and seventies film.
Cinematic Sexualities: The Two Faces of Abe Sada
Christine Marran, University of Washington
For Oshima Nagisa (1932-), the protagonist of his film Ai no koriida (In the Realm of the Senses, 1976), Abe Sada who chose erotic engagement over conventional domesticity, was the quintessential revolutionary. In Ai no koriida, Oshima continued a literary tradition of casting Abe Sada as metonym for uninhibited female desire, placing emphasis on her status as an apolitical revolutionary heroine standing at the interstice of sexual and political freedom suppressed in the thirties.
Only a year earlier, filmmaker Tanaka Noboru (1937-) had completed Jitsuroku Abe Sada (The True Story of Abe Sada) also based on her biography but shot in the roman poruno style adopted by many emerging directors of the decade. An award-winning young filmmaker working in the "pink film" industry led by Nikkatsu, Tanaka had been considered an aesthetician in the genre; but in Jitsuroku, rather than focus on the unique, oppositional quality of a woman who devotes herself to pleasure during the oppressive times of the thirties, Tanaka depicts the subjectivity of the heroine by stripping away apparent unconventionalities to "uncover the ordinary" woman. Although Jitsuroku is called the culmination of roman poruno in a history of Nikkatsu film and is characteristic of seventies' trends in the mass filmmaking industry, Tanaka's Sada contrasts with other accounts; while Oshima's film represents an inventive transgression of the censorial conventions maintained in the erotic aesthetic employed by Tanaka.
In the late sixties and seventies a debate occurred among directors both within and without the roman poruno industry regarding censorship, consumerism, and the representation of sex. The achievements and limitations of Ai no koriida will be illustrated through a comparison with Tanaka's representation of female deviancy in Jitsuroku Abe Sada.