Review: Book Review: Politics, Porn and Protest: Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema in the

1960s and 1970s by Isolde Standish | Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of
Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return by Miryam B. Sas | Japanese
Counterculture: The Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Shuji by Steven Ridgely
Reviewed Work(s): Politics, Porn and Protest: Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema in the 1960s
and 1970s by Isolde Standish: Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter,
Engagement, and Imagined Return by Miryam B. Sas: Japanese Counterculture: The
Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Shuji by Steven Ridgely
Review by: Ryan Cook
Source: Film Quarterly , Vol. 66, No. 1 (Fall 2012), pp. 73-76
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.73

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traditionalist men’s help guru in the era of the Promise
Keepers’’ (166), Greven’s chapter on Fight Club (1999)
takes a seemingly critically exhausted Clinton-era film and
initially made this reader think of it anew. Yet despite his
unabashed contempt for the film’s endless political lim-
itations, this promise is eventually dissipated by the
author’s humorless refusal to acknowledge the film’s
black comedy and satirical intent, Greven pithily dismiss-
ing the film as ‘‘a remarkably Victorian movie’’ that ex-
presses ‘‘a fantasy of return to nineteenth century
American manhood’’ (167).
Elsewhere, Greven is in his element discussing ‘‘double
protagonist’’ films such as Brokeback Mountain (2005).
Here the author concurs with Gary Needham’s excellent
monograph, Brokeback Mountain (Edinburgh University
Press, 2010), in understanding the film as a powerfully
melodramatic and politically efficacious critique of the
continued savagery of the closet. ‘‘Brokeback Mountain is
a work of unflinching realism,’’ he writes, ‘‘the project of
which is to chart, empathetically but unremittingly, the
pernicious and murderous effects of the closet and homo-
phobia on the lives of people who love members of their
own sex, and, to a secondary degree, on those around them,
principally wives, children and parents’’ (227). If Greven’s
argument here seems uncontroversial, his attention to
detail is consistently rewarding. Moreover, Greven’s
fascinating commentary on the queer implications of
the character of Lureen (Anne Hathaway), wife of Jack
(Jake Gyllenhaal), also serves to underscore the the-
matic richness of the film. With an appearance that
doubles as a parody of heterosexual femininity, Greven
argues that, ‘‘Lureen can be read as Jack’s narcissistic
double in terms of her lack of heterosexual desire. Lu-
reen’s caustic insight into Jack’s closeted sexuality may
stem from her own. Her coded lesbianism makes her
. . . the woman who refracts his own desire, just as he
does her own’’ (234).
Best of all, though, is Greven’s flawless chapter on Vin
Diesel’s embodiment of twenty-first-century masculinity.
Fusing ‘‘French New Wave cool with porn star gravitas’’
(193), the polymorphous ambiguity of Diesel’s star image
synopsises the ambivalent cultural politics of Obama-era
America: ‘‘postrace, postgay, posteverything’’ (176). Glee-
fully delivered with wit, verve, and no little critical
insight—who else dares to take The Pacifier (2005) seri-
ously?—these passages are a joy to read. While solipsistic
confessions of ‘‘scholar fandom’’ are almost certainly
among the most regrettable of recent academic turns,
Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush—for all its
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various flaws—shows pretenders exactly how it should
be done.
MARTIN FRADLEY is co-editor of Shane Meadows: Critical Essays, forth-
coming from Edinburgh University Press.
BOOK DATA Barry Keith Grant, Shadows of Doubt: Negotiations of Mas-
culinity in American Genre Films. Detroit MI: Wayne State University
Press, 2011. $29.95 paper. 246 pages.
David Greven, Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush. Austin: Univer-
sity of Texas Press, 2009. $55.00 cloth; $30.00 paper. 308 pages.
RYAN COOK
Politics, Porn and Protest: Japanese Avant-Garde
Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s by Isolde Standish
Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments
of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return
by Miryam B. Sas
If the book 1968 (Shin’yosha, 2009) by Eiji Oguma is any
indication, a reappraisal of the legacy of the 1960s and
early 70s in Japan has recently begun. This 2000-page
volume aims to tell the complete story of the eventful year
named in its title. But Oguma’s effort has become a lesson
in the difficulty of staking territory and drawing conclu-
sions in a chaotic field still vivid to those who took part in
it, having received a hostile reception in Japan. The film
scholar and cultural critic Inuhiko Yomota has likened the
book to a sinking battleship riddled with the scars of many
critical salvos, and has gone on to launch some torpedoes of
his own in accusing Oguma of neglecting culture—films,
literature, music, manga—in his otherwise exhaustive
treatment of his subject. Yomota responded with his own
edited volume of essays on ‘‘culture in 1968’’ (1968-nen
bunkaron, Mainichi Shinbunsha, 2010), following an ear-
lier memoir reflecting on his own coming of age as a high
school student in the same year (Haisukuuru 1968, Shinch-
osha, 2004). If we accept Yomota’s admonishment, the
lessons of Oguma’s so-called shipwreck should be remem-
bered as the 1960s generally take on a new pertinence
today. The Occupy movement, which has gone increas-
ingly global, nourishes itself on the legacy and lessons of
the 1960s. In Japan, the protest movements calling for
relocation of the Futenma American military base out of
Okinawa, and more recently in response to the nuclear
disaster at Fukushima and the controversial decision to
restart a subsequently idled reactor in Fukui prefecture,
have exceeded in scale anything since the ‘‘season of
F ILM QUA RT E RLY 73
 politics’’ more than four decades ago, which climaxed in
Japan as elsewhere in the late 1960s, before political activ-
ism in Japan took an extended hiatus. This history is now
being revisited, if not repeated, as are the rich and often
exasperating works of art which it produced.
Three new books in English on film in 1960s and 1970s
Japan were published recently, around the time of the
Tohoku tsunami: Isolde Standish’s Politics, Porn and
Protest: Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema in the 1960s and
1970s, Miryam B. Sas’s Experimental Arts in Postwar
Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined
Return, and Steven Ridgely’s Japanese Counterculture: The
Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Shuji. Of course, the
history of Japanese cinema in the era has been reckoned
with before, in the classic English-language examples by
Donald Richie in his many film books, by Noël Burch in
his canonical To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in
Japanese Cinema (University of California Press, 1979), and
more recently, among others, by David Desser in Eros Plus
Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema
(Indiana University Press, 1988—a book which takes its
title from the important 1969 film by Kiju Yoshida) and
Abé Mark Nornes in Forest of Pressure (University of Min-
nesota Press, 2006), his study of the documentary films of
Shinsuke Ogawa. But the appearance of these three books
all at once attests to the renewed significance of the arts of
this historical period in the current context. 2011 also saw
at least two major retrospectives of Japanese films from the
1960s and 70s: the Art Theatre Guild program which
traveled between London, Paris, and Montreal, and the
lineup of films produced by Nikkatsu, many from the era
in question, in celebration of that studio’s one hundredth
anniversary which played at the 2011 New York Film
Festival. All of these have celebrated the abandon with
which filmmakers indulged in formal invention and
boundary-pushing in a period when cinematic expression
was remarkably concerned with freedom. Part of the cul-
tural effect of the liberation politics of the late 1960s was
that films themselves persistently tested the limits of polit-
ical, sexual, and formal freedom.
The three books coincide in significant ways. First of
all, they are all concerned with the avant-garde. This, at
least, is Standish’s name for it. The term Sas uses is ‘‘exper-
imental arts,’’ and Ridgely employs ‘‘counterculture,’’
among others. These various terms do not perfectly corre-
spond, but they do put the individual projects into conver-
sation with one another. Secondly, all three are interested
in the ‘‘promiscuity’’ of the arts in the 1960s, as Sas puts it.
In her case, this refers to the openness with which different
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art forms—theater, film, video, photography, dance,
music—cross-fertilize. For Ridgely, this openness comes
in the form of a kind of Renaissance man, the artist Shuji
Terayama, who in his career never discriminated against
modes or media, but took to them each as the opportunity
arose, as if embodying what Ridgely sees as the flexible and
adaptive spirit of global counterculture. For Standish, who
is perhaps least militant on this point, the model is a socio-
logical one that situates films within a field of politics and
social conditions. Thirdly, and perhaps most interestingly,
the studies independently arrive at assessments of the
problem of meaning in ‘‘difficult’’ or absurdist texts, call
them texts concerned with freedom as a theme reflected in
their willful challenges to myriad constraints, including
those imposed by the expectation that films should make
sense.
Politics, Porn and Protest is a history of the era by means
of avant-garde filmmakers and films. With help from the
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Standish defines avant-garde
movements in terms of the ‘‘internal historicity’’ of their
own fields in contrast to a ‘‘mainstream’’ culture that is
subject to more general, outside influences (11). This
means that avant-garde filmmakers occupy positions rela-
tive to one another within a narrower spectrum, and there-
fore tend to be more author-centered and self-referential,
and more reliant on cultural capital than on commercial
forces. Standish explores the ways in which these condi-
tions influenced films stylistically. She notes that the films
produced by the Art Theatre Guild, a semi-independent
production and exhibition organization that became the
venue for many of the era’s most significant ‘‘art films,’’
placed a premium on ‘‘taste’’ and ‘‘internationalism’’ while
also displaying an ‘‘aesthetics of economy’’ (15) in the ways
they took shape within a low-budget production system.
From here, she considers the interesting if overly broad
problem of historical consciousness in the mainstream
Japanese cinema of the postwar period. Commercial films
of a humanist stripe tended to recite victimization narra-
tives about the suffering of the Japanese during the war
and about their postwar struggles. The common flashback
structure of these films, she argues, betrayed an ‘‘a priori’’
approach in which characters’ predicaments or accom-
plishments were foregone conclusions in tightly wound
narratives where the past neatly determined the present
(30). Avant-garde films, by contrast, troubled the forward
momentum of such narratives by playing with temporal
and causal relationships. These films also tended to negate
or render obscure subjectivity, including that of authors
themselves. Standish rightly hones in on the filmmaker
Kiju Yoshida as an auteur with a guilty conscience about
his own authorial status, preoccupied with his own self-
negation as a director. Ultimately, this line of argument
leads Standish to the unsurprising conclusion that avant-
garde directors played freely with style at the expense of
narrative and meaning.
In addition to Yoshida, Standish also discusses at some
length films by Nagisa Oshima, Kihachi Okamoto, Shohei
Imamura, Koji Wakamatsu, and Kazuo Hara, often in
fruitful comparisons with other films. She reads Alain
Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955) and Hiroshima Mon Amour
(1959), for example, alongside the films Night and Fog in
Japan (Nihon no yoru to kiri, 1960) by Oshima and Farewell
to the Summer Light (Saraba natsu no hikari, 1968) by
Yoshida. Among the interesting topics discussed in the
book is the problem of sexual expression—notably, Japa-
nese film producers felt pressure at the time to keep up
with standards of sexual expression that were liberalizing
faster in Europe than in Japan—and the strategies used by
filmmakers to circumvent censorship restrictions. Standish
observes that Japanese censorship policies of the time
tended to treat films as entertainment, and thus as subject
to stricter obscenity standards than in cases involving the
constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech. She reads
the political content of Wakamatsu’s radical pink—or
erotic—films as a conscious strategy to complicate the
boundaries between entertainment and political
expression.
Yet despite these insights, the book falls short as a his-
tory of the era’s avant-garde. By Standish’s own admission,
her work is a partial history limited by the availability of
what she calls ‘‘glossy’’ new DVD boxed sets (156). The
field of avant-garde Japanese cinema of the 1960s and 70s
for Standish is mapped by the fortunate contributions of
the Criterion Eclipse series, which have made the films,
these rare objects, more broadly available. In this respect,
Standish’s book might be thought of as a set of extended
liner notes for films that are being rediscovered today as
representatives of an era. There remains to be written, she
says, a history of the films not rereleased on DVD, and it
will fall to a perhaps more ambitious researcher to account
for the omissions.
By contrast, Miryam Sas has taken on rarer material.
Her study is admittedly not a film history, but a theoretical
history of ‘‘experimental arts.’’ This is a richly researched
book that proposes a provisional canon of works that resist
canonization, in part because they are not necessarily col-
lected in DVD sets. This book undoubtedly will be of great
use as a reference for teachers and programmers; its
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chapters are both informative and interpretive introduc-
tions to artists and works. The reader also encounters
everywhere the inevitable networks tying artists and
works together in ‘‘promiscuous’’ relationships. Sas ana-
lyzes the arts of this period in terms of ‘‘‘scenes or ‘waves,’’’
rather than by medium, highlighting the ‘‘interlocking
networks of collaborators on so many projects’’ (132).
Examining works of theater, dance, photography, and per-
formance alongside film and video, she emphasizes the
inseparability of these manifold practices from one another
in artistic production at the time.
The films she examines include two produced in 1960 as
part of a Jazz Film Workshop: the legendary photogra-
pher Eiko Hosoe’s only cinematic work and an essential
record of early 1960s butoh dance performance Navel and
A-Bomb (Heso to genbaku), and a collaboration between the
film and concert composer Toru Takemitsu and the poet
Shuntaro Tanikawa called X (Batsu). There is also close
analysis of a third film, Motoharu Jonouchi’s Gewaltopia
Trailer (Gebarutopia yokokuhen, 1969). Sas is especially
interested in the ways these films use images of landscapes
and of atomic-bomb explosions and mushroom clouds,
perhaps the most iconic image of Japan’s defeat and the
‘‘start from scratch’’ ethos of the new postwar order. To
Sas, the films destabilize the meanings of these images as
they appear in common postwar narratives—as deployed
in these films, they no longer underwrite the standard
narratives of defeat and postwar reconstruction. Sas also
cites Bruce Conner’s 1958 experimental film A MOVIE, in
which the A-bomb image is dislodged from the meanings
generally encircling its iconicity, thrown indifferently into
an absurdist succession of images from found footage.
Much as Standish writes of the avant-garde prioritization
of style over meaning, Sas’s more sophisticated metaphor
for this kind of procedure, in which signification is some-
how undermined or supplanted by form, is the ‘‘counter-
feit coin,’’ which stands for some value or meaning that it
ultimately is unauthorized to represent. The forged prom-
issory note or counterfeit unit of money invokes a meaning
only to ‘‘foreclose’’ it. It marks an attempt to return to
‘‘false origins,’’ or else invites misreading (201). For Sas,
this kind of procedure is symptomatic of the idealism of
1960s arts as a whole, when ‘‘the search for a means of
effective direct action,’’ or else of illusory communities and
origins, was accompanied by the ‘‘structural realization’’
that these ideals were always out of reach (204).
Unlike Standish and Sas, Steven Ridgely’s Japanese
Counterculture pursues a sustained study of a single artist,
Shuji Terayama, albeit an artist whose career was as
F ILM QUA RT E RLY 75
 diverse as the field of artistic practice that Sas describes in
her own volume (which also includes analyses of Teraya-
ma’s theatrical and video work). Japanese Counterculture is
an exceptionally well-constructed book, and one that per-
forms a variety of roles. Ridgely’s study takes the form of
a cultural biography, but thanks to its subject, covers
a spectrum of artistic modes and genres: the book is also
both a media archeology of postwar Japan and a broad
essay on global counterculture. Terayama was active as
a poet and filmmaker, a dramaturge and writer for radio
and television, and an instigator of happenings. Ridgely
rightly notes that a treatment of any single facet of his
career would not sufficiently account for his significance
as an artist and cultural figure, and therefore traces his
career across media (including the iterations of a single
work, Pastoral Hide and Seek [Den’en ni shisu], in television,
tanka poetic form, and as a 1974 feature film). The book
also moves elegantly through a history of technology with
highly interesting discussions along the way of early color
television and stereo radio broadcasting, as well as of the
introduction of satellites and the idea of global simultane-
ity in the early 1960s. The book as a whole is informed by
a nice polemic on globalism and anti-establishment arts
and politics. Rejecting the exceptionalism that conceives
of Japan as a locality on the margins of global cultural
exchange, and thus out of sync and derivative, Ridgely
argues compellingly that Terayama was involved actively
in contemporaneous global countercultural developments
as they took shape. This study should provide a strong
impetus to a much-needed revival of Terayama in English
(indeed Ridgely was involved in an early 2012 Tate Mod-
ern retrospective of the artist’s work).
Another strength of the book is its close readings of
texts. The opening chapter, dealing with the problem of
permissible citation versus plagiarism in the poetic form
of tanka with which Terayama started his career, is built
around a tour-de-force analysis of a Terayama poem
alongside classic moments from the film Casablanca
(1942), which the poem cites. The liberal use of citation
in Terayama’s poems is one place where Ridgely identifies
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‘‘indeterminacy’’ in the artist’s work, and a call to the
reader to ‘‘overread,’’ which Ridgely sees as a characteristic
of global counterculture as a whole, and which he takes as
a methodological instruction for his own project. The
‘‘flexibility’’ of the counterculture movement is sustained
by such indeterminacy (181). While Ridgely fizzles some-
what in closing on this note, it does highlight the problem
of meaning-making as a concern all three volumes share in
turning to the era.
This emphasis on meaning as a problem and on mis-
reading in film can also become an argument about how to
narrate an era. There is more than one way to tell the story,
these books seem to say, and evidently no finally correct
way. This, at least, is the lesson that artistic and cultural
practices, in their contradictions and variety, offer to those
who would attempt to tell an exhaustive and authoritative
history. Much as today’s Occupy movement has been taken
to task for its indeterminate agendas while also for the
same reason has been able to open out and accommodate
a wide variety of frustrations and concerns, the picture of
film and art in the 1960s and 70s that emerges from these
studies is flexible almost as a matter of methodology, in
imitation of their subject. In returning now to the period,
these three books share the romance with freedom that
marked the culture, however idealistic it may have been,
and the implicit hope that the widespread engagement
with the problem of freedom of cinematic expression in
this moment of film history will replay in some way in
a new political era.
RYAN COOK is a Ph.D. candidate in Film Studies and Japanese Literature
at Yale University.
BOOK DATA Isolde Standish, Politics, Porn and Protest: Japanese Avant-
Garde Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s. New York: Continuum, 2011.
$110.00 cloth; $29.95 paper. 216 pages.
Miryam B. Sas, Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encoun-
ter, Engagement, and Imagined Return. Cambridge, MA: Harvard East
Asia Monographs, 2011. $39.95 cloth. 300 pages.
Steven Ridgely, Japanese Counterculture: The Antiestablishment Art of
Terayama Shuji. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. $67.50
cloth; $22.50 paper. 264 pages.