The nuberu bagu film trend as an artistic correlate of the japanese new left. A political reading of cultural productions
- Autores: Ferrán de Vargas
- Directores de la Tesis: Blai Guarné Cabello (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2020
- Idioma: español
- Materias:
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- Resumen
This Ph.D. dissertation analyses the Nuberu Bagu film trend based on the premise that its characteristics allow it to be considered an integral component of the Japanese New Left ideology, with both phenomena belonging to what is known as the “season of politics” (seiji no kisetsu) (1966-1971).
The core of the methodology of "ideological analysis" I use here is a reading of films as texts whose internal elements serve the external interests of certain socio-political groups in a significant power relationship with other socio-political groups. In the case at hand, this means fundamentally decoding the continuous lines connecting the Nuberu Bagu cinema with other ideological components of the Japanese New Left, as well as with this socio-political group’s ideology as a whole, opposed mainly to the Japanese Old Left.
I select a sample of two paradigmatic films through which a set of characteristic elements of this film trend can be distinguished, which enables to configure a model to address this cinematographic phenomenon as an integral part of the Japanese New Left ideology; a model that can be used for future research. These films are Eros + Massacre (Erosu purasu Guakusatsu, 1969), by Yoshida Kiju, and Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (Sho o suteyo machi e deyo, 1971), by Terayama Shuji. The films were released at historical moments with significantly different implications, and filmed by directors with divergent sensitivities, but it is precisely these discontinuities that enable us to establish a coherent model (under the name of Nuberu Bagu), belonging to a coherent ideology (under the name of New Left).
The analysis of the Nūberu Bāgu conducted in this dissertation is made up of three stages. In the first stage, I present the methodological approach for the “ideological analysis” of cinema as opposed to that of national cinema; by means of this contraposition, the convenience of “ideological analysis” when addressing cinema will be grasped. Secondly, I address the context of power relationships in Japan at the time when the Nūberu Bāgu emerged, and then I analyse Eros + Massacre by decoding the connections between the film text and this ideology as a whole (to which the film belongs as a doctrinal component).
In the second stage, I investigate the relationship between the Nuberu Bagu cinema, still using the illustrative case of Eros + Massacre, and the prevailing collective consciousness in the Japanese New Left of the importance of human subjectivity (shutaisei) conceived as the subject’s self-negation (jiko hitei) (and which is a subjective component of this ideology). To do so, I focus on two key aspects of Yoshida Kijū’s cinema through which he displays his view of subjectivity as self-negation: space and memory.
In the third stage, I analytically relate the political theory of one of the most important thinkers in the shaping of the Japanese New Left, Yoshimoto Takaaki, and Terayama Shuji’s conception of cinema, through the illustrative case of his film Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets. In this stage I focus on the way Yoshimoto, through his political theory, and Terayama, through his film practice, express a similar view of the relationship between the figure of the intellectual and the masses, taking into account that these expressions can be considered as part of the same doctrinal body of the same ideology: the Japanese New Left.
