"Cinema as Symptom and Vehicle of Social Reëngineering"

Abstract

An investigation into the role played by so-called "idea films" in post-war Japanese cinema. Examples are used to illustrate how film has been both a vehicle for ideological indoctrination and symptomatic of the social effects of radical politics. The selection is based on films that featured in the 2020-21 Japanese Film Festival. These form a platform from which the questions of identity - national and sexual - are discussed. The ensuing analysis considers the meaning of tradition and traditionalism in the context of the politics of progress and the forces of modernisation; how the ideology of industrialism (in its physical and aesthetic manifestations) leads towards the dehumanisation of the individual; the relationship between sexual liberalism and social dysfunction; libertine nihilism as illustrated through the horror film genre; how the revolt against traditional norms leads to national self-hate and anti-nativism (oikophobia). The post-war Japanese cinematographic environment is then compared to similar trends witnessed throughout the West.

Biographical Note

Edwin Dyga is the editor of the Observer & Review. His back-ground is in legal practice and government relations. In 2012 he founded the Sydney Traditionalist Forum, and was briefly the Australian editor of the British Quarterly Review. His work has appeared in journals of opinion and cultural review in the United States, Europe and Australia.

Access Issue

Filmography

Akira Kurusawa, “The Most Beautiful” (1944)

Toshiro Matsumoto, “Funeral Parade of Roses” (1969)

Yūsako Matsumoto, “Noise” (2017)

Nobuhiko Obayashi and Yoshitaka Sakamoto, “House” (1977)

Nagisa Ōshima, “Diary of a Shinjuku Thief” (1968)

Shinya Tsukamoto, “Tetsuo the Iron Man” (1989)

Yoshishige (Kijū) Yoshida and Masahiro Yamada, “Coup d’Etat” (1973)

Yoshishige (Kijū) Yoshida and Masahiro Yamada, “Eros + Massacre” (1969)

Yoshishige (Kijū) Yoshida and Masahiro Yamada, “Heroic Purgatory” (1970)

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↳ Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, “Reading Nishijin (1961) as Cinematic Memory”

↳ Ayako Saito, “Occupation and Memory: the Representation of Woman’s Body in Postwar Japanese Cinema”

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Bibliography: Other Materials Noted

Richard F. Calichman (ed., trans.) The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kōbō (New York, New York, USA: Columbia University Press, 2013)