Butterflies, beetles, and postwar Japan: semi-documentary in the 1960s

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn 1958, Hanada Kiyoteru pointed to the virtues of the ‘semi-documentary’ format. By the 1960s, highly political films, especially those centered on human rights, abandoned Griersonian documentary and instead used highly poetic and allegorical forms. Hanada claimed that postwar viewers can only feel fuman – dissatisfaction – with documentary objectivity; indeed, the era produced a number of filmmakers attempting a more subjective iteration of the documentary format, or a more documentarian approach to a standard fiction film. This paper analyzes two such ‘semi-documentaries’ that serve as political allegories: Kuroki Kazuo’s Silence Has No Wings (1966) and Imamura Shohei’s Insect Woman (1963). Interestingly, both films use insects – a beetle in Imamura’s film and a butterfly in Kuroki’s – to allegorize the contemporary landscape of postwar Japan. Although both appear fiction films to contemporary audiences, these two films were ‘semidocumentaries’ according to the zeitgeist of the 1960s. By analyzing the form and content of both films, this paper describes a documentary format which, while remaining deeply committed to politics and issues of human rights, still retains the artfulness inherent in the filmmaking process. Such films are undidactic works of leftist inspiration, capable of striking deeply affecting notes, while defined by and desirous of transformation.