著者

畑 あゆみ Hata Ayumi

出版者

名古屋大学大学院文学研究科附属日本近現代文化研究センター

雑誌

JunCture : 超域的日本文化研究 (ISSN:18844766)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.1, pp.182-194, 2010-01-01

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This paper will examine how Japanese committed documentary films of the late 1960s were particularly associated with the realism shared in the contemporary society of their time, due to their representation of individual bodies and spontaneous speech. I will especially focus on the student strike documentary Forest of Oppression, filmed by Ogawa Shinsuke and his crew in 1967. Intensive agitation against the revision of the 1951 U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (known as the 1960 Anpo tôsô) marked the height of the postwar leftist movement in Japan, mobilizing not only activist-students but also a large number of workers and city dwellers of all ages. The collective move towards repenting the past, and thereby of wishing to become active agents of history, also influenced the younger generation to go on a quest for an existential 'self' with autonomous individual subjectivity. New Left student-militants were in the thick of a struggle, not only against the policies of the current government or the authoritarianism which permeated the entire society, but also against a persistent anxiety about their equivocal selves due to the socio-political upheaval of the time and the rapid infiltration of a high-consumption culture into their everyday lives. Taking into consideration this historical context, I will show how Forest of Oppression caught moments that induced its viewers to understand the stagnant, problematic reality of postwar subjectivity through the use of an ensemble of close-up shots of bodies accompanied by quasi-synched speech. In fact, the contrast between unanchored words and solid-textured physical images reveals the fundamental inappropriateness of the impractical Marxist slogans the students repeated, and hence, evokes much speculation about how those students' insecure inner lives contrasted with their passionate words. While the historical significance of Ogawa Productions has been chiefly discussed in terms of their radical methodology, including their independent filmmaking-screening practice and their policy of shooting one subject over a long period of time, I will argue that Ogawa's early film precisely presented the symptoms of contemporary social problems and the intricate realities of people's lived experiences through formal experimentation.