We’ve got to find the next step: WOMEN'S CINEMATIC EXPERIMENTS IN 1990S JAPAN

By wakae nakane

Wakae Nakane is a PhD student and Annenberg Fellow in Cinema and Media Studies at USC School of Cinematic Arts. Her research interests include documentary film and video, experimental cinema, postwar Japanese history and cinematic culture, and feminist theory and historiography. Her current projects center on the essayistic mode of expression in the Japanese independent film scene. She has published her works in both English and Japanese, including “Constructing an Intimate Sphere Through Her Own Female Body: Naomi Kawase’s Documentary Films” in Female Authorship and the Documentary Image (eds. Boel Ulfsdotter and Anna Backman Rogers) and Eizogaku, and “Female Performers as Authors: Documentary Film Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 and the Women’s Liberation Movement” in JunCture.

This text was originally published on CCJ’s Meander platform as an accompaniment to the 2022 screening Anarchic Visions of Everyday, which included five works from women filmmakers active in the 1990s curated by Nakane and Miryam Sas.

In the late 1980s, many women film practitioners began intervening in the male-dominated sphere of experimental filmmaking in Japan. Reading the May 1995 issue of Gekkan Image Forum [1] one can sense the vibrant atmosphere and emerging sense of community among women experimental filmmakers that had emerged in the following years, with Image Forum—Tokyo hub of experimental filmmaking, exhibition, and distribution—as a central site for debates around this new role for women and the particular forms of cinema and production structures that might ensue. The magazine issue features a  round table discussion, “We’ve Got to Find the Next Step by Ourselves: Female School Students Discuss,” featuring women filmmakers who had produced their work as students in several film and art colleges in Tokyo such as Musashino Art University, Tama Art University, and Nihon Daigaku.

Utako Koguchi, the organizer of the round table, was joined by nine other participants in the discussion including Naoko Ōtsuki, who had recently won the grand prize from the Pia Film Festival with her work titled Goodbye Movie (1995). Although the diverse topics they discuss range from their shared concerns about the stability of venues at which they could exhibit and circulate their works, to their varied experiences in each educational institution, one of the most substantial issues was their contemplation of the representational strategies of their works, especially surrounding the corporeal aesthetics of their bodies and gendered/sexualized experiences of the personal. Though these works, with their foregrounding of personal matters and corporeality, were often dismissed as self-indulgent or unserious in the context of Japanese film criticism, this discussion contrasts sharply with their oft-caricatured frivolity. The conversation instead suggests highly reflexive attitudes concerning their gender positioning in the male-centered art/film world, and pointed articulations of the aesthetic visions they have been experimenting with in their cinematic works.

The feminist intervention in experimental filmmaking in Japan has too diverse and rich of a history to be captured in a single program, but the films gathered here, I believe, reflect one of its most fascinating facets. These films share a common approach to the affective mapping of identity in all its fluidity, and serve as a form of cinematic contemplation of the shifting dynamics of gender and sexuality against the backdrop of accelerating social alienation in the era of the post-bubble economy.

Among experimental film works by women filmmakers, one of the aesthetic strategies we can frequently observe is the filmmakers’ acts of placing themselves on both sides of the camera in order to question the status of the self, accentuating the transformability or the process of fabrication of the self-image.  Among the filmmakers featured in this program, Yukie Saitō, Hiromi Saiki, and Utako Koguchi employ strategies of self-inscription despite the differences in each work’s degree of commitment to the aesthetics of self-exposure. Saitō’s Benighted but Not Begun follows the micro- and macro-aggressively abusive relationship of a couple played by Saitō and her husband. In her film the repeated portrayal of physical and psychological torment upon Saitō’s body forces us to contemplate the convoluted dual status of the enacted violence on the object of the spectator’s gaze and Saitō’s authorial presence behind the camera with her creative manipulation of that violent footage. Because of Saitō’s double role, in my view, the film guards against and at the same time foregrounds the exploitation of female bodies, and becomes a more nuanced visualization of the power dynamic subsumed under the guise of normalcy in romance and daily life as well as in the constitution of cinema itself. 

   Hiromi Saiki’s strategies of self-inscription in her The Place Which Isn’t Necessarily Wrong, on the other hand, meditates anxiously but incisively on the construction and fabrication of the self in the highly alienated climate of contemporary society. A conflict emerges between her voiceover pronouncements of polite clichés and text depicting her inner thoughts projected on her body, literally transforming her skin into a screen, as they provide clashing messages towards the world. While these two works place their focus on the image of the self, the brief appearance of the author’s physical presence in Utako Koguchi’s puppet motion animation, Dandelion gravitates towards a direct meditation on the ambiguous status of gender and sexual identity, in some ways problematizing the binary gender structure around which we have (nonetheless) constructed our recuperative project. While a large proportion of the film revolves around the stories of two doll sisters who go through the transformation of their bodies by gaining male genitalia, Koguchi herself also makes an appearance, with her body doubled and transformed through costume into that of a man. Accompanied by a male voiceover, this moment forces the viewers’ awareness of the unsynchronized relationship of body and voice in cinema, and thus highlights the fluid/indeterminate or malleable structures and status of gender more broadly.

            While these three works share strategies of self-inscription by placing their own bodies in front of as well as behind the screen–in some ways in the legacy of Chantal Akerman, though of course with very different formal structures—the other two filmmakers featured in this program, Yūko Asano and Mari Terashima, abstain from appearing within their own films. Instead, their inscription of the self on the screen emerges by means other than their literal physical presence. Yet both of their works still thematically and stylistically deal with issues concerning performative identity, specifically highlighting the thematics of confinement or entrapment. Terashima’s Green Bug focuses on a gender-ambiguous protagonist who is under the condition of pseudo-domestic imprisonment. Characterized by its goth aesthetics, a major subculture in 1990s Japan, the film accentuates the internal state of the protagonists as it erodes the boundaries between reality and illusion. Notable also is the formal extensiveness of this super-8 film, its duration exceeding that of most works in this format, which perhaps allows viewers also to experience a sense of entrapment within the violence of the green and looping world of the film, and to reconsider the relations between the confines of cinematic spectatorship and that of desire’s circular imprisonment, resonant with psychoanalytic and apparatus theories. Asano’s meticulously and gorgeously crafted stop-motion animation, The Life of Ants, signals a shift in Asano’s career in terms of the intermingling of her long-term interests in animation as media as well as pre-cinema with the elements of narrative. Asano leaves viewers to contemplate gendered social subjugation and its moments of potential but foreclosed upturning, as embodied in ritualized activities through the allegorical narrative of the mantis and ants.

            Of course, we should take care not to simplify their diverse range of aesthetic strategies and thematic concerns to only one thread of concepts or styles. However, what I would like to emphasize here is the presence of certain collective synergies concerning the politics of gender, sexuality, and identity across diverse ranges of expression. Each of them was attempting to articulate and realize what would be those “next steps'' for women in experimental filmmaking. Reflecting on women’s artists’ gender positioning in the art world, Naho Murakami from Tama Art University mentions “As we cannot put ourselves in a male perspective, we don’t know what it exactly means when they describe our work as ‘feminine.’ Does it contain a sense of insult? Do they say it because these works are unfamiliar to them? In any case, if they lump our works all together, why not make a tactical use of this categorization?” Concerning the differences between male and female practitioners, Murakami notes the tendency shared by women that the style of their works continues to transform as bodies go through numerous changes. Another participant Miki Takahashi from Musashino Art University emphatically endorses the importance of “distance” and “detachment” in their artworks, questioning the dominant consensus over the attention to specificities of sexualized experiences, clarifying her stance saying that “I have tried to detach myself from my work,” which is followed by Koguchi’s comments on the issue of whether they deal with the self and sexuality objectively or not. As is seen from the diversity of their idea’s directions, what we need for the future feminist historiography and theorization of Japanese experimental film is to acknowledge that there are a multitude of different forms, both collective and individual, that feminist filmmaking can take, representing different artistic and philosophical visions, and we cannot and should not reduce their voices into any single slogan. 

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