Hani Susumu, Nouvelle Vague in Japan and Processive Cinema

This chapter focuses on Hani Susumu and his complex status, namely, one of the champions of the Japanese New Wave who has thus far been sidelined in the Japanese film history of the period. Tracing and analyzing the historical trajectory of Hani's filmmaking principles and practices (primarily at Iwanami Productions), it reconsiders the genealogy of postwar cinematic modernism. The key players of the so‐called “Japanese New Wave” flung themselves into face‐to‐face dialogue with the lion of the French Nouvelle Vague. Iwanami Productions was by no means a monolithic organization that solely made state and corporate commercials. The seminal work Hani himself considers as his directorial debut was Kyoshitsu no kodomotachi (Children in the Classroom, 1954). Hani leaves the terms of the processive open, avoiding strict definition and stressing instead its affinity with what he posits as a “documentary method” and its relation to “the machinic”.