5/1/2019 Nouvelle Vague Manifesto; or, How I Became a Disciple of Philippe Garrel

LOLA

Nouvelle Vague Manifesto;

or, How I Became a Disciple of Philippe Garrel

Aoyama Shinji
A ‘The right wing can only encourage people to make something famous that is already 1. Thierry Jousse, ‘Intabyū Firippu
Gareru’, trans. Umemoto Yōichi,
written with capital letters’ (1) Cahiers du Cinema Japon 12 (1994), p.
The memory of a spectator: having seen an image of a sphere, or a circle binding 38. Originally published as ‘Le cinéma
de crise’, Cahiers du cinéma 472
together Japanese history. The sphere or circle is a stable eye or symbol of power, one (October 1993), p. 33.
that begins with the Rising Sun (Hinomaru) and is today shamefully reproduced as the
trademark of Fuji TV and other television networks. In this film, the sphere appears for an 2. Translator’s note: In the Asama
Sansō incident from February 1972,
instant at the beginning as the destroyer that both awakens us from the nightmare of where fugitive Japanese Red Army
capitalism and conceals that dream. It then disappears. In a raucous drama arising from members holed up in a mountain
cottage with a hostage, the police used
the discord of a brothel’s internal power structure, the film only emphasizes a a wrecking ball to break down the walls
considerably unbearable abomination. But after that scandal which refuses amnesia is of the villa, attack the militants therein,
finished, the sphere or orb of steel appears, like at the beginning, as a higher power that and free the hostage. The incident was
nationally televised, making it one of
can destroy or hide the brothel. The director uses that concealment against the power, Japan’s first live media news
and then proceeds into the past. In a similar way, these images summon their source, spectacles.
which are TV images of an iron fist/orb wielded by the authorities in order to bring the
3. Translator’s note: A murder mystery
curtain down on a gruesome tragedy played out in the mountains in the northern Kantō directed by Itō Shun’ya about a series
region at the beginning of the 1970s. (2) From those images began the current Japanese of killings that occur inside a Yokohama
brothel in 1942. The image of the
nation state. The Maze Garden (Hanazono no meikyū, 1988) (3) can only seem like an wrecking ball appears showing that
anachronism. And in 1997, Itō Shun’ya makes a film about Tōjō Hideki. (4) brothel being demolished in present-
day Japan.

B ‘But you can also steal the weapon of the enemy and use it’ (5) 4. Translator’s note: This refers to
‘I feel that what comes very close to the "politics" I imagine is a certain operation that Pride, the Moment of Fate (Puraido,
unmei no toki), a film financed by right
presses us to choose between black and white, and, at the same time, tries to sell us that wing money that many accused of
white is black simply for the reason that it has been and will probably continue to be that glorifying the war criminal Tōjō Hideki.
way.’ It was Kurosawa Kiyoshi who wrote these words. Let us presume that what is called
‘politics’ here means ‘system’ and proceed on. ‘And cinema, abandoned by the economy 5. From a private conversation with
Kurosawa Kiyoshi..
and left behind by culture, can probably live on in the end only by brandishing this
operation. If that is the case, I will accept this "politics" with profound emotion and fear.’ 6. Kurosawa Kiyoshi, ‘Eiga o
(6) ikinobisaseru mono’, Representation
no. 5 (1993), p. 127.

Isn’t he saying that by accepting the ‘system’, he is extending his life as a filmmaker? 7. From Natsukashii toshi e no tegami
Everything is circulating within that closed ‘system’ – it is the ‘calm and serious game (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1987).
played out in times of circulation’ (Ōe Kenzaburō). (7) At present, it seems that all of his
8. Translator’s note: Kurosawa Kiyoshi
actions are based in this consciousness. His lawsuit against Itami Productions and Tōhō, directed the horror film Sweet Home
(8) his Suit Yourself or Shoot Yourself (Katte ni shiyagare!) series, the impenetrability of (Suwīto hōmu, 1989) for Itami Jūzō’s
Itami Productions and Tōhō, but after
Cure (Kyua, 1997) – which will probably become the masterpiece of 1990s Japanese film continued conflicts with Itami over the
– all these reflect the same tendency. This does not at all mean, however, that Kurosawa style of the film (Itami demanding more
visual gore), he eventually sued the
has become a man of the ‘system’, or that he has reached the more philosophical producers for not paying residuals for
perspective concomitant with old age. The situation, rather, is the reverse. He has merely video sales.
been able to coolly perceive the ‘system’ and decode it – that is, to internalise it. The
modus operandi of those who commit the perfect crime is often like this. In the 1980s, he 9. ‘Kyō no eiga to wa kaihōsareta kojin
no eiga de aru: Seruju Danē vs Firippu
stubbornly called white ‘white’ and was almost wiped out as a result. Today, he Gareru’, trans. Sakamoto Abi, Cahiers
nonchalantly transcends a situation in which he must call what is white ‘black’. It is du cinema Japon 12 (1994), p. 84.
Originally published as ‘Philippe Garrel,
sufficient just to comply with the bargain that the ‘system’ prepares for us in order to call Serge Daney: Dialogue’, Cahiers du
white ‘black’. After all, in cinema, anyone can see that white is white. cinéma 443-44 (May 1991), pp. 58-63.
Translator’s note: As the original
French differs in some nuances from
C ‘The ideology of labour has regained its rights’ (9) the Japanese translation faithfully
rendered in the text, alternate
The memory of an assistant director, part 2: Kurosawa Kiyoshi said this to me one day: ‘I translations (by Adrian Martin) of
hate the zoom. You just have to move your fingers. That’s not labour.’ Someone who did phrases from this interview are
provided in these notes.
not hesitate to call himself a ‘craftsman’ was thus a labourer. Kurosawa had become
aware that film ‘is not the work of genius or of chance happenings, but of labour’. 10. Karatani Kōjin, ‘Dōitsusei no enkan:
Ōe Kenzaburō to Mishima Yukio’,
Shūen o megutte (Tokyo: Kōdansha,
Karatani Kōjin writes the following: ‘For instance, what Kant calls the “subjective” in fact 1995), p. 141.
signifies the “labour” that composes the world. It, in other words, is the foundation of
modern science, acquiring the truth through hypothesis and experiment. Even in Hegel, 11. From a private conversation with
the Spirit is the labour that produces and transforms the world’. (10) the director.

12. Translator’s note: A film by Suzuki

To rephrase this in the spirit of Arnaud Desplechin, with his slogan-like ‘Cinema composes Seijun focusing on the loves of a
the world’, (11) we can say that filmmaking is, in other words, the ‘labour that composes female professional golfer.
the world’. We can term our attitude towards labour ‘politics’, but it goes without saying
13. Translator’s note: Yamatoya
that politics does not appear through depicting Tōjō Hideki or persecuted prostitutes. That Atsushi was both a screenwriter
is simply ‘narrative’. ‘Politics’ appears – and Ōshima Nagisa said something similar before (working on such films as Seijun’s
Branded to Kill [Koroshi no rakuin,
– depending on the way it is filmed: the labour. Or, perhaps we can say it this way: no 1967], which is credited to ‘Guryū
film can escape ‘politics’ as long as it undergoes a production process: labour. Hachirō’, the name for a collective
group of writers) and a pink film director
(Dutch Wife in the Desert [Kōya no
Jean-Luc Godard, however, says that, ‘There are only love stories in cinema’: ‘In a war datchi waifu, 1967] and The Hairy Gun
[Ke no haita kenjū, 1968] are his most
film, love is the feeling the young soldier has for his gun, in a gangster film, the feeling acclaimed films).
they have for what they steal. I think that love is cinema itself’. Godard, who the previous
year had already depicted the ‘love’ for labour in Passion, is another person who treats
cinema as ‘labour’. And as with labour, his attitude towards ‘love’ is also nothing other
than politics. In this case, what should be referred to as ‘politics’ is the love or labour of
the individual that (or who) can in no way be universalised or generalised. However, even

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if we have the ultimate ‘political’ film in A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness (Hisui monogatari,
1977) (12) – a film equating politics with love that possesses far more destructive power
than Tiger Woods – that work has continually been ignored from the time it was released.
That is because it depicts the politics of individuals that cannot be universalised or
generalised. Even in the era that was thought to be the ‘season of politics’, I cannot help
but think that there was no politics – with perhaps the exception of Suzuki Seijun and
Yamatoya Atsushi. (13)

This is what Godard says after the above statement: ‘And that is what the Nouvelle Vague
brought into the cinema for the first time’.

There was no Nouvelle Vague in Japan. Even that brilliant group of masterpieces could not
in the end become a nouvelle vague. That seems to be the truth.

D ‘Today’s cinema is a liberated, individual cinema in which you don’t know what to do’
(14)
The memory of a film critic: the critic Abe Kashō, who seems to watch films with the
consciousness that the entirety of life is an accumulation of chance occurrences, can also
in this respect be strangely termed political because his criticism continually conceives of
14. ‘Kyō no eiga to wa kaihōsareta
the ‘totality’. For instance, already in the first two lines in his critique of Arnaud kojin no eiga de aru’, p. 87. Translator’s
Desplechin – ‘If one attempts to answer the difficult problem, “What is life?”, a certain note: These words are spoken by
Serge Daney; from their original French
discomfort arises in people in normal conditions’ (15) – a ‘totality’ appears in the form of context, they can be rendered into
a ‘difficult problem’ and ‘normal conditions’, one that makes a ‘discomfort’ ‘arise’ in me. English as: ‘I have the feeling that you
[i.e., Garrel] occupy the limit between
But to whom is this a ‘difficult problem’? What situations are ‘normal conditions’? In a way that modern cinema which is a cinema
contrary to that of Kurosawa, Abe assimilates himself to the politics=system without any of the couple and living together, and
current cinema where only the
excuse (or strategy), and forces a fantasy devoid of any specificity upon the reader as a emancipated individual matters – a
totality. What a carefree ‘system of irresponsibility’ this is! (16) Here the Other is absent character we don’t quite know what to
to an appalling degree. It is just like the emperor system, content in a self-defense do with’ (Cahiers, p. 62).

system in which nothing shocking or chaotic arises. Furthermore, his writing lends proof 15. Abe Kashō, ‘Gūyū to zentai’, Eiga
to the absence of a nouvelle vague, what one could call the fatal flaw of today’s Japanese geijutsu 382 (Spring 1997), p. 100. He
film. The names of Desplechin, Rohmer and Truffaut are spoken, but a nouvelle vague as uses the name Casio Abe when
publishing in English.
a way of thought is forgotten, as if it never existed.
16. Translator’s note: Aoyama is
‘A nouvelle vague as a mode of thought’ is nothing other than a discourse dueling over referring to the political theorist
Maruyama Masao’s famous description
the sole point of how to treat the Other from a political perspective, with the subject in of the Japanese modern emperor
struggle in the end being the individual. However, ignoring the subject (shutai) needed to system as a ‘system of irresponsibility’
(musekinin no taikei). See Maruyama’s
clearly define the individual is an unspoken premise that reigns not just in Abe, but also Thought and Behavior in Modern
in the discursive space of contemporary Japanese cinema. This is just a self-concealing Japanese Politics, ed. Ivan Morris
(London: Oxford University Press,
machine, a fearsome collective that continues to expand by absorbing others, eradicating 1963), p. 113.
the individual. Without harbouring any doubts, they play day and night in this virtual
‘Japanese nature’ (Nihon-teki shizen), never noticing their own baseness, which becomes 17. ‘Kyō no eiga to wa kaihōsareta
their cloak of invisibility. kojin no eiga de aru’, p. 81; Cahiers, p.
58.

E ‘There are some who inherit a cinema born of a certain unease’ (17)
The memory of a film director: in response to my request that he define the concept
‘anti-film’, mentioned in a published 1991 conversation with Serge Daney, Philippe Garrel
answered the following:

Anti-film is, in other words, a cinema in which the artist declares an oppositional
position by creating and expressing his or her own method against the dominant
écriture. This, for instance, is the case with Nanni Moretti, Aki Kaurismäki or
Arnaud Desplechin. When I said that, the situation was quite dire: such a cinema
was on the verge of extinction. However, through them, the struggle has lived on
and they have achieved considerable success in Europe today. That is a good
thing.

Isn’t that what a ‘nouvelle vague’ is? In a strict sense, it is what constitutes ‘a nouvelle
vague as a mode of thought’, a ‘nouvelle vague’ as the creative activities of an individual
auteur. Couldn’t we say that it is like the ‘nouvelle vague’ of the past – the one that
proposed a politique des auteurs and developed it into a collective movement – but minus
the factionalism and ‘cinema for cinema’s sake’? Philippe Garrel’s films turn their backs on
these latter two in a negative way. What they instead pursue positively is life and isolation
– in other words, love and the individual. These are chosen for political reasons.

There is not a thread of mythology in his words: ‘What we have striven for is a cinema
that, while not costing much money, correctly captures life’. (18) What exists there is a
life-size politics, one in the present, progressive tense. He always avoids collectivisation 18. Ibid., p. 86. Rendering the original
French: ‘What we aim for is for the film
and confronts his own thought alone. He endeavours to make films like a shoemaker in a to be more modest, while its grasp on
small shop. The image of children projected on the monitor of an editing table in L’enfant life is more just’ (Cahiers, p. 61).
secret (1982) was achieved when Garrel, hoping for a simple and inexpensive distancing
effect, went by himself to the editing room after an afternoon’s shooting and ran the
camera himself. He carried through his own politics in order to achieve that rarified image
– a vacuum on screen – that fervently materialistic (yuibutsuronteki) impression which
refuses a humanistic perfume. It is not an easy road to take, but there are some effects
that can only be achieved in that fashion. An astounding level of concentration, one that
can withstand the pressures of time, is necessary in order to obtain a materialistic image.
This is impossible to do collectively; it is only feasible through solitary work. There is no
budget for optical effects, and the insecurities of work multiply the insecurities of the
content. But is there any meaning to making films other than to achieve such effects?
That’s why he chose this method.

F ‘I believe the individual more than I do the characters’ (19) 19. Thierry Jousse, ‘Interview with
Philippe Garrel’, trans. Hayashi

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What does it mean to present an ‘individual’ in film? Of course, it is the voice and the Hirokazu, Ai no tanjō/La Naissance de
l’amour, official Japanese theater
figure projected on screen and nothing else. But there should also be a mode of direction pamphlet (Tokyo: Bitter’s End).
for presenting the individual. Garrel discovers that in speech. For instance, several of the
actors who appear in La Naissance de l’amour (1993) cannot properly speak French.
Normally in Japan, one ‘adjusts’ the speech of an actor with an accent into standard
Japanese (hyōjungo), even if the meaning does get across. Garrel does not try to correct
those who cannot speak or understand French, but simply puts them on screen as they
are. At that moment, the actors are placed in a ‘liberated’ situation in which they feel they
‘don’t know what to do’. As a result, individuals appear who are inseparable from the Lou
Castel or Johanna ter Steege playing the characters. French with Italian or German
accents is materialistically thrown before us, representing these individuals themselves.

The de-nationalisation of language? But this is of a completely different character from

the multinationality of language evident in Wim Wenders’ recent works. In those films,
the actors speak their own languages without any impediment. They can understand their
roles and interpret their written dialog in their own ways. By speaking their mother
tongues, they succeed in existing like representatives of their countries. However, doesn’t
‘materialistic’ mean to refuse to pass through interpretation, to be in a naked state that
does not represent anything other than itself – in other words, to be an individual?

I feel that Wenders suggests the transcendental state of angels through the
multinationality of language; in there is the hope for a global salvation that one could call
the ‘multinational army of love’. That is a reflection of how Wenders conceives the world.
Faraway, So Close! (1993) and La Naissance de l’amour are two kinds of answers to the
Persian Gulf War, just as The Great Dictator (1940) and Rules of the Game (1939)
proffered two different ways of dealing with the arrival of World War II. Garrel’s criticism
of Wenders is that this can boil down to the same logic of America and the international
alliance – that is, of the participants in the war itself. In fact it was this logic that sparked
the chaos in Sarajevo.

Garrel takes off from and lands in a completely different place. Both the world and the
individual can only appear through an individual facing the world. Garrel does not speak
his thoughts on the world through film. He merely allows the world to manifest itself –
through depicting its smallest unit, the individual. The world that then appears before the
individual is neither nationality, salvation nor hope – not anything – just a space totally
filled with daily life, one in which the mind is continually assaulted by reality. Into that
reality intrudes a TV screen reporting on the Gulf War, possessing the same capacity as
the blood-soaked daughter who just emerged from her mother’s womb or the condoms
bought at a drug store for a tryst with a former lover. Somewhere in the world, someone
is dying, someone is being born, and someone is practicing contraception. We can affirm
the world only in conjunction with such a reality. And ‘that kind of reality’ is nothing other
than cinema. ‘Cinema composes the world’.

G ‘Cinema is a problem of existence and expression’ (20)

‘Individual’ is a matter of words, in the sense that that it is not an ‘image’ (imêji). Lou
Castel, when driving a car across the Italian border in La Naissance de l’amour, is asked 20. ‘Kyō no eiga to wa kaihōsareta
to show his passport by the border guards. When he also shows the passport of Jean- kojin no eiga de aru’, p. 81. Translator’s
note: There is no statement by either
Pierre Léaud, who’s sleeping in the passenger seat, the guard tells him to wake him up. Garrel or Daney in their original French
‘There’s the colour of his eyes, you know’. The film is in black and white, so it’s a foregone dialogue which precisely matches this
statement, although it fairly
conclusion that the colour of the woken Léaud’s eyes will be black. We, the audience, summarises points that both make
cannot know the real colour of his eyes. One cannot know who Léaud is from the image of throughout.
the colour of his eyes; that is, Léaud the individual is not manifested through the image.
From the beginning of the film, it is through his peculiar voice that we recognise Léaud.
Those who remember his voice from the days of the Nouvelle Vague understand the
changes in his voice as the transformations he himself has undergone. Just like with the
accents of Castel and Steege’s dialogue, Léaud displays his individuality through speech.

In Garrel, there is clearly a will to resist the rule of the image. This is also resistance
against film being consumed in any which way. The image at times becomes the ‘cover
that blocks our thoughts from emerging’. (21) The image gives birth to that privilege of
the subject that Abe Kashō calls ‘accidental’ (gūyū). There is an Other and when the self
thinks of how to grasp that Other, the self/subject tries to universalise or generalise it, 21. Ibid., p. 89; Cahiers, p. 63.
rendering it easy to understand; it digests it by using the medium of the image as a
representation/representative (daikō/hyōshō) that can attach meaning to all forms of
existence. The image rules as a means of handily understanding an Other or a world that
is difficult to grasp. And thus, today, the Other if not the world itself has turned into a
virtual image. However, an ‘individual’ is from the start a unitary existence that possesses
no meaning and is representative of nothing. As long as one refuses to accept the
difficulty of grasping such an existence, there can be no Other and no world. The difficulty
of Garrel’s works derives from this.

However, it is not as if his films feel heavy. In fact, they are strangely light. Perhaps that
is because the subject there insubstantially fades away. Of course there is something like
a protagonist in his films, and the world and Others are seen through that person’s
perspective. However, that protagonist’s actions or words are so unsubstantial, he or she
does in the end not fulfill the function of the work’s subject. Those around this character
are more likely to speak eloquently of their consciousness of Others and the world. The
hero merely listens to that and either scowls or smiles ambiguously. Perhaps it is the 22. From the interview for the official
blank expression of a nihilist, fitting into a certain ‘image’, but that doesn’t work either. pamphlet sold at theatres during the
He or she is also an Other. Everyone is an individual who can be objectified. The assertion Japanese release of J’entends plus la
guitare.
that Garrel’s films are like an ‘I-novel’ thus only sounds to me like a bad joke. He himself
declares of Benoît Régent in J'entends plus la guitare (1991): ‘He is not me’. He also

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states that, ‘No one can play Nico’. (22) They are themselves, individuals who bear no
one’s image. That’s why his films are simply light.

One cannot confirm too many times that cinema is not the reproduction of the past, but a
reality that is continually being renewed.

H ‘Everything is connected to history’ (23)

I wrote something above to the effect that a nouvelle vague is a struggle over how to
23. ‘Kyō no eiga to wa kaihōsareta
treat the Other. At the same time, it should also be the battle over the subject that kojin no eiga de aru’, p. 86; Cahiers, p.
grasps the Other; in other words, the struggle to protect the individual as an individual. 61.
In the first place, wasn’t auteurism a movement to protect truly superlative filmmakers as
individuals by sweeping away the general image of them? At the time, their strategy was
to strengthen the fragile self/subject through collectivisation.

Liberating the individual from the rule of the image is the mission of contemporary
cinema. The Nouvelle Vague ended because the collective had completed its function as a
strategy – it was like the graduation of a certain generation. For the next generation, the
Nouvelle Vague became nothing but an image, only a virtual apparatus for obfuscating
the self. That is why it was necessary for them to return again to the self and re-forge the
subject; they had to redo cinema not as a recreation of a past nouvelle vague, but as a
present that is continuously and endlessly renewing itself. Garrel started from that
situation. At the time, he was not yet constructing narratives. But when he passed the
age of 30, he suddenly began telling stories in cinema. It was 1979, the same year as
Godard’s Sauve qui peut (la vie), and 20 years after the start of the Nouvelle Vague.

Ever since then, his narrative construction has tended to look the same. With the
exception of Liberté, la nuit (1984), a story of the war in Algiers, all the rest appear to
repeat the single narrative of poverty and love between a man and a woman. One can
suppose that this larger narrative is conscious of the structure of silent action serials. The
story, which begins with L’enfant secret, is carried on by Rue Fontaine (a segment of Paris
vu par . . . vingt ans après, 1984) and Emergency Kisses (Les Baisers de secours, 1989),
and then by J’entends plus la guitare, La Naissance de l’amour and Le Cœur fantôme
(1996) – continuing on in a form where each film takes over where the previous film left
off. This is different from Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel films. In those, there is the body
Truffaut=Léaud, and that is the basic condition of the Doinel films. It goes without saying,
however, that Garrel regularly changes the actors playing the hero as a form of critique of
the image.

This situation is rather closer to Ozu, in the sense of a structure where a single content is
reiterated time and time again with the same form; or in the sense that all the subjects
are individuals, rarified to the limit – all are Others; or in the sense of the ‘presentness’
(genzaisei) shared between Léaud, who repeatedly appears from the early to the recent
films, and Ryū Chishū, who continued to feature in Ozu’s work from the silent era up until
his death; or, more than anything else, in the sense of the anarchic materialism that
flippantly crosses the border between the conscious and the unconscious. I do not have
time to expand on that here, but I cannot help recalling that famous shot of the urn in
Ozu’s Late Spring (1949) when I watch the images of dreams that appear in Garrel’s
recent films. What I find through these commonalities between Ozu and Garrel is what
could perhaps be called the central possibility of contemporary cinema. I am not
absolutely sure about this, but I feel I want to take a gamble on it. I am thus already a
disciple of Garrel.

I ‘What is most difficult these days is resisting the neurotic urge to make sideshow
entertainments’ (24)
The memory of a film director: while shooting a frontally lit shot indoors on location, the 24. Ibid., p. 89. Translator’s note:
crew discovered that the reflection of the HMI light positioned behind the camera was Garrel’s original French formulation
making the edge of the refrigerator look shiny. They sprayed something on that shiny part (which provides the conclusion of his
dialogue with Daney) is more strictly
in order to eliminate that unnatural ‘glare’. The surface then became a dull, inconspicuous Debordian: ‘At the moment, the most
and ambiguous thing, and so a naturalness was born. That spray is called dulling or anti- difficult thing is to resist the neurosis of
spectacle’ (Cahiers, p. 63).
reflection spray. I was serious when I thought, ‘Why use anti-reflection spray in a medium
that depends on reflection?’, but perhaps I tend to be paranoid. Nevertheless, it is a fact
that I am sick of the natural, the beautiful, the interesting. For me to be satisfied, you
would have to get rid of the spray, the HMI light, the refrigerator, and in the end even the
location set and the actors’ acting. If that is the case, it would mean giving up filming
altogether. Capitalism would not permit that, however. And even if it did, I would not. So I
continue filming, staring at the glare on the refrigerator.

I read an interview with Garrel done when he was visiting Japan, in which he said he was
reassessing Fassbinder. He said: ‘Everything is ugly because the films were made on a low
budget, but depending on what comes out from inside, there are some works that are
masterpieces of tremendous power’. Here, ‘resisting the neurotic urge to make sideshow
entertainments’ begins with first accepting this surface unsightliness. This is completely
inconsistent with the sense of values that finds a hierarchy between low and high
budgets, and considers big budgets or a Hollywood contract as equal to success. It is also
unrelated to such aesthetic choices as selecting 35mm or 16mm film. The art in Japan of
blowing 16mm up to 35mm is one of the best in the world, which is why you can continue
to set the budget lower.

Our difficulty is therefore not in that area. It is in the complicatedness of reviving the lost
interest in the internal. What I mean here by ‘internal’ is the emergence of the individual
– the practice of a nouvelle vague as a mode of thought. This is a materialistic cinematic
practice that conflicts with what is generally called ‘depicting humanity’ or ‘depicting

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emotions’. The only basis and possibility for making films today lies in that practice, at
least for me. There is a need to once again transform the very base of our methods.
Changing method in the end means altering our way of thinking. If ‘proceeding toward
the external is nothing but a fabrication’, one can only stop here and erode it from within.
I learned that from Philippe Garrel.

A nouvelle vague will soon begin in our country.

This manifesto was originally published under the title ‘Yo wa ikani shite Gareru shito ni
narishi ka’ in Cahiers du Cinema Japon 21 (1997), pp. 166-175. It was republished under
the title ‘Nūveru Vāgu sengen, arui wa yo wa ikani shite Gareru shito ni narishi ka’ in
Aoyama Shinji, Ware eiga o hakkenseri (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2001), pp. 19-30. This English
translation by Aaron Gerow is based on the Seidosha version. The translator and LOLA
thank Aoyama for helping provide sources for many of the quotes used in the text.

from Issue 6: Distances

© Original Japanese text © Aoyama Shinji, 1997.

English translation © Aaron Gerow and LOLA, 2015.
Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors.

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