The Wave Against the Masters

By 1960 Japanese cinema was the most revered in Asia and arguably the world — the serene domestic geometry of Ozu, the flowing tragedies of Mizoguchi, the muscular humanism of Kurosawa. It was also, to a younger generation, a beautiful prison: too composed, too humanist, too willing to find dignity in suffering rather than rage at its causes. The nuberu bagu — the Japanese New Wave, named in deliberate echo of the French — set out to commit parricide.

Nagisa Ōshima led the political assault. He stripped sentiment out and pumped sex, violence, and ideological fury in, treating the camera as a weapon against the postwar consensus and ending, years later, at the explicit erotic-political extreme of In the Realm of the Senses. Others waged the war on the terrain of pure style. Seijun Suzuki, contracted to grind out studio yakuza pictures, instead detonated them from within — Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill are gangster films dissolved into pop-art delirium, color and absurdity overwhelming the plot until the studio fired him for making movies that "made no sense." Masahiro Shinoda cooled the gangster film into existential dread in Pale Flower; Hiroshi Teshigahara and the composer Tōru Takemitsu turned an allegory into a tactile nightmare in Woman in the Dunes; Kaneto Shindō dragged folk horror out of the grass in Onibaba.

Where the masters had built meaning through composure — Ozu's patient mise-en-scène, the held emotion, the dignified frame — the young filled the screen with rupture: jagged cutting, garish color, sex and cruelty and nonsense, anything that would break the serene surface their elders had perfected. The rebellion was real and the contempt was sincere. But here is the turn that the word "parricide" hides: you cannot destroy a tradition that strong without absorbing it, and the rebels' violence was legible as violence only against the calm they were reacting to. Suzuki's delirium needs the studio genre it explodes; Ōshima's rage needs the humanism it refuses. The new wave was bound to the masters by the very force of its rejection, a negative image of the thing it attacked.

And so the parricide became, against its own intentions, a continuation — and then a tradition of its own. Suzuki's pop violence flowed outward into the bloodstream of cool cinema everywhere; you can trace a line from Branded to Kill to the genre-amplifying delirium of Tarantino and the choreographed Asian action that conquered Hollywood. The young directors who tried to murder Japanese cinema's reputation only proved how generative it was — capable of producing not just its serene masters but the furious children who needed those masters to rebel against, and who became masters in turn. Every great tradition eventually breeds the wave that attacks it. The attack is how the tradition stays alive.

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The line: Pale Flower → Woman in the Dunes → Onibaba → Tokyo Drifter → Branded to Kill → In the Realm of the Senses

This line crosses:

• The Revolution That Disappeared — the nuberu bagu was named for the nouvelle vague and ran the same play: the young turning on a national "tradition of quality," armed with rupture against composure.
• A City Filming Its Own Disappearance — Suzuki's pop-art violence is upstream of the stylized Asian action that, through Woo and Tarantino, reshaped Hollywood.

Read through: David Desser, Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema.

A note on the argument: the movement and the films are documented record (Suzuki's firing over Branded to Kill among them). The framing of the nuberu bagu as a "parricide" bound to its targets — a rebellion that needs the masters to be legible, and so continues the tradition it attacks — is this essay's reading.