Eiga Hihyō 映画批評 (Film Criticism)
June 1957- September 1973
Monthly
Founding publisher: Shinsensha, Tokyo
Founding editor: Kasu Sanpei
Eiga Hihyō was a film magazine published by producer and film director Kumagaya Mitsuyuki (Kasu Sanpei) and co-founded by Eizo Yamagiwa, a leading postwar Japanese film critic and theorist, providing support for Shochiku Nouvelle Vague such as Oshima and Yoshida, as well as new wave in documentary films, including Matsumoto and Hani.
Important was the role of Matsuda as editor of the journal from 1970 to 1973 beeing part of the editorial group, the Hihiyō Sensen ( Critical Front). It was the medium by which to discuss critically this new phase of film as movement from the late 1960s through the early 1970s. The magazine eschewed film stills, publishing only uncompromising criticism and interviews. Numerous revolutionary films from around the world were introduced, and had significant influence politically as well as cinematically until the end of publication in September 1973. As a critical movement young critics and filmmakers were proactively used, and a number of new writers made their debut.
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Mai 1971 - 5
Editor: Hihyō Sensen (critical front) - Adachi Masao, Ainokura Hisato, Sasaki Mamoru, and Matsuda Masao
Cover: Akasegawa Genpei
B5 size, approx. 18 x 26 cm, 126 pages
Photography pages in gravure printing.
September 1971 - 9
Editor: Hihyō Sensen (critical front) - Adachi Masao, Ainokura Hisato, Sasaki Mamoru, and Matsuda Masao
Cover: Akasegawa Genpei
B5 size, approx. 18 x 26 cm, 126 pages
Photography pages in gravure printing.
Mai 1971
Nakahira Takuma
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September 1971
Nakahira Takuma
Fūkeiron.
The 1960s and 1970s were decades in which the “commodification of the landscape” and “Tokyo-ization across the entire country” reached its peak and caused not only the physical appearance, but also the collective mentality of the entire nation to undergo a drastic process of homogenization.
Around 1970 a topic of public discourse that drew a great deal of attention was landscape. It fell under the general heading of fūkeiron, 風景論 , or “landscape theory.”
This theory was proposed by the anarchist film critic Matsuda Masao at the end of 1969 and further developed by filmdirector Adachi Masao, the screenwriter Sasaki Mamoru and the photographer Nakahira Takuma, as a new theory of politics and revolution that moved beyond the framework of film history and art theory.
As noted by Hirasawa Gō, a film scholar and the foremost expert on landscape theory, this discourse emerged not only from the specific contexts of the Long Sixties, when the protest cycle was beginning to wane while Japan’s economic juggernaut continued to roar, but also from the nature travelogues and landscape writings by the likes of Shiga Shigetaka in the late nineteenth century. These ushered in a wide range of voices and thought on landscape, in particular what constituted the “Japanese” landscape, and such nationalist messages often dominated this discourse. We continue to live with the legacy of this Meiji iteration of landscape theory, as tourism campaigns and government efforts to promote Japan through soft power means almost always reach for lazy tropes of the country’s “pristine” and “beautiful” nature (often contrasted admiringly with the “high-tech” and “high-octane” buzz of “futuristic” Tokyo).
Matsuda’s new landscape theory was a response to this nationalist, romantic discourse, and its interrogation of the nation-state and post-war modernity is a defining feature of its achievements. Rather than a celebration of Japan’s incredible economic development, landscape theory problematized what this was doing to the regional character of the nation, and suggested that placeness was being usurped by the hidden presence of capitalism and the state. It was a political theory as much, if not far more, than an aesthetic one, and rooted in contemporary engagement with archipelagic concepts and practices, not to mention the activist-poet Tanigawa Gan’s critique of Tokyo during the 1960s.
Landscape, as used by Matsuda and Nakahira referred to what they saw as a lifeless and unmediated “scene” (nagame) created by a conservative power structure to force a desired order on the environment and society in a way unbeknownst to the indolent and unconcerned masses. For both men, such a “landscape” was not something to contemplate or admire but something to be cut up and dissected as much as possible, something to be overcome and to serve as a point of departure.
It involved an influential coterie of film-makers, photographers and critics in Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s, most notably Matsuda Masao, Adachi Masao, Ōshima Nagisa, Hara Masato (Masataka) and Nakahira Takuma. Their collaborations and endeavours produced both a significant tranche of discourse (essays and articles, photography and text dialogues, round-table discussions, full-length books) and several key films, the most renowned of which are A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969) — a kind of “anti-film” or “anti-documentary” about spree killer Nagayama Norio comprising only the landscapes that he presumably saw during his peripatetic life until his arrest, narrated by a disembodied, dispassionate voice-over (in direct contrast to the sensationalized media coverage of Nagayama’s crimes) — and the Ōshima Nagisa cult classic Secret Story of the Post–Tokyo War: The Man Who Left His Will on Film (1970) (usually known in English just by its subtitle), about a man in search of the landscapes that a friend filmed before his suicide.
For Nakahira Takuma landscape was the most prominent topic in photography because of its accessibility and theoretical importance. Besides in Eiga Hihyō he published his Fukeiron photography in magazines like ‘Design’ , 'Nikkor Club Kaihō' and Kikan Shashin Eizō (The Photo Image), among others.
Sources:
- Hirasawa, Go; Landscape theory: post-68 revolutionary cinema in Japan, 2021
- Fujii Yūko; Japanese Photography Magazines 1880s-198s, Goliga Books, 2022
- Hatekeyama Naoya; Artist talk about fūkei at the Izu Photo Museum,
Nagaizumi, 2013
- Hayashi Michio; The Fate of Landscape in Post-War Japanese Art and Visual
Culture, 2018