Out of a background of war; occupation and the legacies of Japan’s postdefeat politics there emerged a dissentient group of avantgarde filmmakers who created a countercinema that addressed a newly constituted; politically conscious audience. While there was no formal manifesto for this movement and the various key filmmakers of the period (Oshima Nagisa; Imamura Shohei; Yoshida Yoshishige; Hani Susumu; Wakamatsu Koji and Okamoto Kihachi) experimented with very different conceptions of visual style; it is possible to identify a sensibility that motivated many of these filmmakers: a generational consciousness based on political opposition that was intimately linked to the student movements of the 1950s; and shared experiences as Japan’s first generation of postwar filmmakers artistically stifled by a monopolistic and hierarchal commercial studio system that had emerged reinvigorated in the wake of the ‘red purges’ of the late1940s.
Politics; Porn and Protest: Japanese AvantGarde Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s provides a much needed overview of these filmmakers and reconsiders the question of dissent in the cultural landscape of Japan in the postwar period.