Late Japanese New Wave Documentary and Cinematic Truth: Charting the Theory and Method of “Graphic Sensitivity” Towards Cultural Otherness

Japanese New Wave cinema is characterised by an exploration of the marginalised and outsiders, including peasants, juvenile delinquents and factory workers. Through politically charged philosophical and artistic inquiry, it provides a fascinating insight into alternative possibilities of subjectivity and cinematic truth, and offers a theory for representing the subaltern through a “graphic sensitivity” towards otherness. Against the backdrop of political and social change in a Japan ravaged by war, and alongside a strong and exceptionally creative mainstream film industry, filmmakers including Hani Susumu, Imamura Shohei, Ogawa Shinsuke, and Oshima Nagisa challenged the boundaries of conventional filmmaking by undertaking an ontological and epistemological interrogation of representation from the 1950s through to the early 1980s.