Please update your browser
Your current browser version is outdated. We recommend updating to the latest version for an improved and secure browsing experience.
Teshigahara, Sōgetsu, and Takemitsu
Hiroshi Teshigahara (1927-2001) began his career as a painter and also hosted the meetings of the Century Association, which openly called for the integration of the arts as the key to postwar recovery. As the critic and painter-photographer Tarō Okamoto, who acted as a sort of mentor for Teshigahara, put it, “the most urgent task of contemporary art is to synthesize the global (sekai-sei) and the particular (koyu-sei); to understand the particular in a global perspective; and to achieve a global perspective that is based on the particular” [i].
Okamoto pointed a way out of the internecine political struggles that were leaving many postwar artists at a creative impasse by embracing opposites, such as inorganic abstract painting and surrealism, arguing that both tendencies be accepted in their tension, in what he called their “violently dissonant relations.”
[i] Thomas R. Havens, Radicals and Realists in the Japanese Nonverbal Arts: The Avant-garde Rejection of Modernism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), 78
Hokusai (1953)
The dissonant collision between different traditions was also advocated by Torū Takemitsu, a member of Teshigahara’s circle who worked closely with him on most of his films.
Even in the films he made before working with Takemitsu, however, Teshigahara worked to hold contrasting tendencies towards an almost documentary realism and towards audiovisual expressionism in careful balance. This is evident as early as his first film, Hokusai from 1953, which includes several moments where the cutting and the soundtrack dynamize otherwise static images and, in one case, blur the boundary between different levels of representation.
Tokyo 1958
In a similar way, Tokyo 1958 , a collaborative project spearheaded by Teshigahara and presented at the first World Experimental Film Competition in Belgium, caricatures contemporary Japanese society by superimposing modern ukiyo-e prints and documentary footage of Tokyo.
Inochi Vita (1963)
In Inochi Vita: Sculptures by Sōfu (1963), Teshighara’s integrative approach to the arts and innovative fusion of different film forms comes to full fruition. Teshigahara uses an array of techniques – superimposition, rapid single-frame cutting, jarring sound, etc. – usually associated with the avant-garde to explore the vitality of modernist sculpture and the aesthetics of sculptural space.
Sōgetsu Arts Center
The sculptures shown in the film Inochi, Vita are by Hiroshi Teshigahara’s father, Sōfu, who established his own form of integrative modernism in the pre-war period. An extremely versatile artist, Sōfū Teshigahara (1900-1979) started the Sōgetsu ikebana school, the largest and most influential organization devoted to flower arrangement, and through its journal, he tried to extend ideas about spatial arrangement developed from ikebana into other areas. The first school was constructed in 1933 and destroyed by an American air raid during World War II; its replacement, an imposing four-story building designed by Kenzō Tange (1913-2005) across the street from the crown prince’s residence, was completed in June 1958. Sōfū Teshigahara was extremely open to influences from a variety of different international sources, but he still founded the school on the traditional, lineage-based iemoto system and assumed that his son would eventually take over.
At that time, Hiroshi Teshigahara had little interest in working in a medium as traditional as ikebana, and he instead started the Sōgetsu Arts Center. Active from 1959 to 1971, the Sōgetsu Arts Center quickly became the epicenter of the avant-garde, the main site where the competing movements in the plastic and theatrical arts as well as photography and cinema could intersect and vie for attention.
Hiroshi Teshigahara said that the center’s goal was “exchange and experimentation among the various arts,” and claimed that this would give unity to the contrasting strands of the avant-garde: "Sōgetsu was such a central space for exhibiting all genres of art that one could say there was not one young artist at the time who was not involved in the movement at Sōgetsu. I think one can declare that it was by creating this situation, in which, if the exchanges between artists were made intimate, the conflicts between them were rendered more radical, that one artistic movement progressed throughout all of Japan."
Embracing Contradiction
Teshighara’s ultimate aspiration with Sōgetsu was to encourage a uniquely Japanese modernism that would incorporate forms derived from the traditional arts as well as from contemporary international developments, a description that applies equally to the features he began to make in the early 1960s. These films, most notably Pitfall (1961), Woman in the Dunes (1964), and The Face of Another (1966), were examples of Sōgetsu principles in action, works of high artistic ambition that were both authentically auteur-driven and genuinely collaborative. Screenwriter Kōbō Abe (1924-1993) provided the intellectual skeletons of these films, but it was the combination of Teshigahara’s visual style and Takemitsu’s soundtracks that contributed most to their distinctive character.
Takemitsu shared Teshigahara’s ideas about cinema and argued that “if cinema has an individual character, the participation of ‘pure’ fields of art is a contradiction. However, instead of trying to resolve this contradiction, deepening this contradiction through a greater intermingling with other fields will lead to a newness in cinema.”
These ideas find concrete expression in the opening titles of Woman in the Dunes. This deceptively rich title sequence begins with urban noises of trains, car horns honking, and public-address systems blaring. Gradually, these blend with the wooden clappers and traditional drums of the classical bunraku puppet theater, signaling the murky boundary line between the cacophony of modern life and an older and deeper rhythm within which individual action is circumscribed. The imagery works in a similar fashion, first using traditional hanko stamps to represent the individuals working on the film, and then layering them in a way that suggests modern bureaucratic efficiency.
The audio and visual streams also intersect at several points, as in the moment when the sound of trains is synchronized with the appearance of an abstract pattern suggesting train tracks as well as grains of wood. This, in turn, is set off against the bold, calligraphic strokes used for the titles of the film, which simultaneously connects tradition and personal style, unifying these elements without smoothing over their contradictions.
-
Ryūsuke Hamaguchi
