Shinoda Masahiro

Nihilist Style

Shinoda Masahiro

• Born in 1931, entered Waseda University and then Shochiku. Imamura Shohei and Oshima Nagisa were his colleagues. He retired from filmmaking after Spy Sorge (2003)

Early Shinoda

• The success of Oshima Nagisa’s Cruel Story of Youth (1960)

• A ‘series’ of youth films by young filmmakers labeled as ‘Shochiku Nouvelle Vague’ films.

• Most of them are poor imitations of Oshima’s.• Exceptions are …

Early Shinoda

• Shinoda Masahiro (1931- ) and Yoshishige Yoshida (1933 - )’s films.

• Auteur and filmmakers with self-conscious styles

Early Shinoda

• The debut film• One-Way Ticket for

Love (1960) • About rock’n rollers

and their nihilistic life styles with sensual imagery.

• Commercial failure demoted him to assistant director.

Early Shinoda

• Dry Lake (1960) - caricature of college students who are infatuated with the idea of revolution and subversive actions and looking forward to a social turmoil that their terrorist activities might cause.

Early Shinoda

• My Face Red in the Sunset (1961) - cartoon-like stories about alienated assassins. A corrupt construction company owner commission them to assassinate a journalist who is about to expose his ill-doings, but things get complicated when an assassin falls in love with the journalist.

Early Shinoda• Shochiku discontinued ‘Shochiku Nouvelle

Vague’ and returned to the former production policy which targeted the female audience - family drama, humanist drama, melodrama and other genre films.

• Yoshida and Shinoda remained in Shochiku unlike Oshima and Imamura.

• Ideas, subjects, themes, scripts forced upon him. • Though working in compliance with the demands

of the studio, Shinoda was no longer innocent follower of the Shochiku tradition.

Early Shinoda

• Renovation in filmmaking under the influence of French nouvelle vague, American film noir and European art cinema and no turn back to the former Shochiku style.

• Loss of stylistic innocence and development of more self-conscious stylization

Early Shinoda

Early Shinoda

• High degree of mannerist tendencies like in Oshima

• But more consistent visual styles: more aesthetic than subversive, more artistic than chaotic, and more sensuous than violent

• Sensuous modernism

Painterly aesthetic composition in a widescreen (cinemascope) format

Painterly aesthetic composition in a widescreen (cinemascope) format

Symmetrical composition

Over the shoulder, selective focus composition in a wide screen format

Normal over the shoulder shot

Chiaro-scruro (low-key lighting, high contrast) images

Symmetrical composition and chiaro-scuro lighting combined mise-en-scène

Chiaro-scuro lighting and wide-screen composition with empty space on the right

Chiaro-scuro lighting and wide-screen composition with empty space on the top of the screen

Chiaro-scuro lighting and selective focus

Reflected shadow

Extrem camera angles (particularly high angle)

Framing

Silhouetting

Frontal and profile shots

Frontal and profile shots

Telephoto shot (disappearance of depth)

Surrealistic and easthetic image

Swish pan (camera movement)

Middle Shinoda

• Montage (editing)• Jagged jump cuts• Ignoring the 180 degree rule• Theatrical long cut and cinematic rapid cut

Middle Shinoda

• Pale Flower (1963) - A hard-boiled Yakuza returns to the Tokyo underworld after three years in prison. He meets a mysterious, wealthy woman who hangs out in illegal gambling houses for excitement. They fall in love but their relationship is doomed.

Middle Shinoda

• Assassination (1964) - At the closing stage of the Tokugawa Shogunate, assassination became a disturbing political tool, a masterless samurai tries to prevent the outbreak of civil war, changing allegiances between the Shogunate and the Emperor.

Middle Shinoda

• Samurai Spy (1965) - odd (unusual) samurai film about three spy rings which are involved in mutual betrayals and bloodsheds. Empty in content but displays Shinoda’s visual bravura.

Shinoda after Shochiku

• Shinoda and ATG• Double Suicide (1969) -

stylistic adaptation of Chikamatsu’s play, The Love Suicide at Amijima. Jihei, the merchant, is married and has two children, but is desperately in love with a courtesan, Oharu.

Shinoda after Shochiku

• Jihei’s infatuation brings to him and his family financial, marital and social ruin. Koharu is out of his reach when she was bought out by a wealthy merchant. This eventually leads to the double suicide.

Shinoda after Shochiku

• Mixture of traditional theatre (bunraku / kabuki) and cinema; avant-garde theatre (Awazu Kiyoshi’s set design); ukiyo-e and cinema

Shinoda after Shochiku

• Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan (1970) - at the time of the great social reform led by the Tokugawa Shogun, a group of outlaws, actors of a banned theatre troupe, and a corrupt monk rebel against the rigidity of the Shogunate.

Shinoda after Shochiku

• The film is set during the time of puritan ‘Tempo Reform’ in which everything pleasurable was banned - the theatre, ukiyoe, novels, expensive meals, dolls, sweets, etc. Six actors from a theatre troupe, an eccentric monk and a useless fortune teller fight for the freedom of expression.

Shinoda after Shochiku

• Silence (1971) - adapted from Endo Shusaku’s novel, the film is about a Portuguese Jesuit missionary and the Japanese peasant converts, who were persecuted and forced to renounce their faith. Shot by Miyagawa Kazuo with rich pastel colours.

Shinoda after Shochiku

• Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees (1975) - a story about a ghost woman who puts under her spell the man who abducted her and dominates him by the use of her sexual power.

Shinoda after Shochiku

• The Ballad of Orin (1977) - Goze is a blind female itinerant shamisen player and storyteller. Orin is a goze though she was expelled from a group for breaking its rules and having an affair with a customer. Traveling alone, she is a popular entertainer, but men are after not only her music but also her body.

Shinoda’s Subjects

• Japanese History• Historical incidents and

situation at junctions of Japanese history

• Radical changes and shifts in history

• People’s reactions and responses to them.

Shinoda’s Subjects • Dry Lake - the 1960s and political movements• Assassination - the arrival of Perry’s fleet in Japan

and the ensuing political and social upheaval• Samurai Spy - 1600; the victory of the

Tokugawa’s and the last phase of civil wars• The Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan - the

‘Tempo Reform’ • The Silence - the time of persecution of Christians • McArthur’s Children - the aftermath of the defeat

in the second world war

Shinoda’s Subjects

• Reaction to such changes • People who find it difficult to cope with them.• Disillusionment with radical shifts in value,

ideology, and political and social system.• Nihilistic rather than ethical response to drastic

shifts• Violence and subversion• Strong images of death and corruption