Abstract
This article seeks to cast light on some of Hani Susumu’s theoretical and practical contributions to post-war Japanese documentaries. The article will also show how he created a documentary school at Iwanami Eiga based on authors’ closeness to the filmed object. This is crucial in order to understand the tendencies that developed in non-fiction films from the late 1950s. Hani’s influence can be seen in the leaders of militant cinema, Tsuchimoto Noriaki and Ogawa Shinsuke, who were trained at Iwanami Eiga. However, some of his theoretical writings, together with his documentary films Hōryūji (1958) and Gunka Ken 2 (1962), reveal how his singular subjective realism is applied to unusual shooting objects, landscapes. This article assesses this lesser-known aspect of Hani’s work and its links to certain developments in Japanese documentary films led by other filmmakers, such as Teshigahara Hiroshi and Adachi Masao, which have not yet been addressed.
Highlights
An approach to Hani Susumu’s oeuvre is essential to understand the theoretical discussions and cinematic innovations that took place in postwar Japan
Hani became a leading figure of the Japanese New Wave and an internationally renowned filmmaker, mainly as a result of his feature films
Hani was one of the five founding members of Iwanami Eiga, a production company that specialized in documentary films, for which he directed twenty-seven medium–length films, made between 1951 and 1962
Summary
An approach to Hani Susumu’s oeuvre is essential to understand the theoretical discussions and cinematic innovations that took place in postwar Japan. This article seeks to illustrate how Hani created a documentary school based on the author’s extraordinary commitment to the depicted object, which is crucial to understand certain developments in non-fiction film from the late 1950s.2. Hani opened up new avenues for the development of documentary practices which proved to be crucial for years to come. To tackle this question, this text first contextualizes Hani’s theoretical framework and, secondly, interrogates how his ideas were put into practice, by himself as well as by subsequent documentary filmmakers. Hani’s earlier usage of his filmmaking method to represent landscapes becomes one of the most innovative postwar attempts to develop cinematic subjectivity in unexplored directions
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