japanese new wave

Shochiku's studio head, Shiro Kido, put money behind a run of young directors starting in 1956, hoping that "cheaply made, innovative pictures could emulate the success of the Nouvelle Vague in Europe": the Japanese press coined the term Nuberu Bagu from that same French label and it stuck. Nagisa Oshima, Shohei Imamura, Hiroshi Teshigahara and Kaneto Shindo took the budget and went at Japan's postwar restraint with politics and sex instead, working through the American occupation and the Security Treaty protests, and Kido withdrew his backing within a few years. What the studio's money bought is still on screen: Woman in the Dunes holds a vacationing entomologist in a sand pit, trapped by villagers and made to shovel alongside a woman who has been doing it for years, the camera never flinching from what looks like an ordinary work routine. Death by Hanging pushes the same calm further, letting a condemned Korean man survive his own execution so his executioners can spend two hours arguing, in a straight face, about what they are now obliged to do to him.

Distinguish from French New Wave is the direct influence and parallel movement, but the Japanese New Wave is more politically confrontational and sexually explicit. Korean New Wave is a later East Asian new wave (1990s–2000s) that shares the genre-bending ambition but in a more commercially viable mode.