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    Art, Riot, Terror: The 60s Tokyo Avant-Garde: Mishima, Hijikata, Oshima
    Art, Riot, Terror: The 60s Tokyo Avant-Garde: Mishima, Hijikata, Oshima
    Art, Riot, Terror: The 60s Tokyo Avant-Garde: Mishima, Hijikata, Oshima
    Ebook52 pages42 minutes

    Art, Riot, Terror: The 60s Tokyo Avant-Garde: Mishima, Hijikata, Oshima

    By Stephen Barber

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    About this ebook

    This book explores the unique and volatile art scene of 1960s Tokyo, and its connections to the culture of violent rioting and street-protest which developed across that decade, in intimate contact with avant-garde art, photography, performance and film. Through studies of seminal figures of that culture the choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata and the novelist Yukio Mishima together with a close analysis of film-culture experimentation embodied in the works of Nagisa Oshima, Toshio Matsumoto and Donald Richie, the book maps Tokyo's insurgent 1960s terrain. In the subterraneas of Tokyo's avant-garde, a culture of out-of-control aberrance and sexual obsession underpinned the city's surface locations, especially that decade's emblematic site of turmoil: Shinjuku. The book also interrogates the preoccupations with violence and erasure manifested notably in the form of opposition to Japan's subservient role in servicing the USA's war in Vietnam one strand of which led to Japan's implosive terrorist cells of the early 1970s, as documented in Koji Wakamatsu's recent film "United Red Army". This book, charting the pivotal elements of 60s Tokyo avant-garde, illuminates that unprecedented era in Japan, as well as forming the key to understanding the resurgent experimental cultures of contemporary Tokyo.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherElektron Ebooks
    Release dateMar 4, 2015
    ISBN9781909923058
    Art, Riot, Terror: The 60s Tokyo Avant-Garde: Mishima, Hijikata, Oshima
    Author

    Stephen Barber

    Stephen Barber is Professor of Global Affairs at Regent’s University London, Senior Fellow at the Global Policy Institute, Board Member of the International Public Management Network, and Visiting Professor at the University of Cagliari.

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      Book preview

      Art, Riot, Terror - Stephen Barber

      credits

      ART, RIOT, TERROR

      BY STEPHEN BARBER

      AN EBOOK

      ISBN 978-1-909923-05-8

      PUBLISHED BY ELEKTRON EBOOKS

      COPYRIGHT 2013 ELEKTRON EBOOKS

      www.elektron-ebooks.com

      No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a database or retrieval system, posted on any internet site, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders. Any such copyright infringement of this publication may result in civil prosecution

      TOYKO 1969

      Revolutionary Image-Thieves In The Disintegrating City

      Tokyo’s period of urban unrest extended across the 1960s, beginning with widespread rioting, and demonstrations around the parliament building, in 1960, and culminating in sustained protests and confrontations that lasted throughout 1968 and 1969, before mutating into other forms; film constituted a sensitised medium for the exploration of that uproar, with a number of directors initiating stylistic experiments and outstanding approaches to the representation of urban space in transformation. In particular, two films from 1969, Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade Of Roses (Bara No Soretsu) and Nagisa Oshima’s Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief (Shinjuku Dorobō Nikki), probed the intimate rapport between the dynamics of Tokyo’s urban unrest and the intensive artistic and sexual experimentation ongoing during that period in the city’s Shinjuku district. This essay gives an account of the unique cultural history of postwar Tokyo, and its relationship to filmmaking; it then examines the particular challenges faced by filmmakers in creating images of the excessive space of Tokyo, looking in particular at sequences in films by Chris Marker and Andrei Tarkovsky. The essay then considers Funeral Parade Of Roses and Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief as exceptional filmic explorations of the urban culture of Tokyo (a culture viewed by many of its participants as a revolutionary one); it then concludes by evaluating the enduring relevance of that strand of urban filmmaking for contemporary Tokyo’s visual culture.

      Urban filmmaking in Tokyo at the end of the 1960s reflects the very particular dynamics and range of filmmaking practice during that era, as well as the wide-ranging architectural expansion and experimentation that had been taking place in the city during the preceding decade. In the face of a studio system which appeared to be increasingly disintegrating, Tokyo-based filmmakers operated in a vast range and combination of forms and styles, from the structuralist experimental filmmaking exemplified by Takahiko Iimura, to independently or collaboratively funded projects, often preoccupied with issues of sexuality and dissident political issues, as in the films of Shuji Terayama.

      Filmmakers often oscillated between working on studio-funded projects and more independent projects, at a time when the hard-pressed studios were focusing their attention on previously peripheral genres, such as pornographic and horror films, often commissioning directors to work on entire series of such films. To some extent, this flexibility and mutability of late-1960s filmmaking in Tokyo replicates that of European filmmaking of the same period, including its concerns with political and sexual issues and with stylistic experimentation; however, the particular historical and cultural context of Japan in the late 1960s, and its influence on urban life and on urban representations in film, is distinctly different from that of Europe.

      Both the visual form of Tokyo as an urban entity, and the tensions which generated the exceptional filmmaking of the late 1960s, have their origins in the large-scale destruction of the city during the Second World War, and the Occupation by US military forces which succeeded that destruction. As with many other industrial cities in Japan, Tokyo was extensively fire-bombed, especially in March 1945, with enormous casualties in the urban population; entire areas of the city vanished, and four million

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