Negotiating Power: Gender and Body Politics in the New Wave Japanese Cinema

I analyze in this dissertation films about women made by Imamura Shōhei, Yoshida Kiju and Hani Susumu, three representative figures of the New Wave Japanese cinema, arguing that these films make visible gender and body politics in postwar Japan. They explore the cultural construction of female bodies through the representation of the body as an interface between individual subjectivity and cultural norms, politicizing both sexuality and the medium of cinema. In my analysis of the films I will outline the duality between the look and the gaze and I will demonstrate that these filmmakers construct an ethical form of representation that recognizes the alterity of women. My analysis is informed by phenomenological theories that explore bodies as interconnected ways of being in the world and a feminist analysis of power concerned with the disciplining of female bodies.;My case studies will be Imamura's two fiction films: Insect Woman (1963) and Intentions of Murder (1964), Imamura's two documentaries: The History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (1970) and Karayuki-san, the Making of a Prostitute (1973), Yoshida's Eros Plus Massacre (1969) and Hani's Nanami, the Inferno of First Love (1968).;The main argument of the dissertation is that these three directors perform a negotiation of gender power inherent in the institution of cinema through a self-reflexive cinematic style that critiques the power of the male gaze. Imamura, Yoshida and Hani regard cinema as a mode of intersubjective engagement with the world based on an ethical negotiation of gender power. Their ethical position involves an encounter with female alterity that disrupts the filmmaker's illusory position of omnipotence or the power of the gaze as a gendered mechanism of oppression. The representation of the female body involves both desire and responsibility, a duality inherent in their films as the interlacing of the gaze with the look. This duality makes it possible for the three filmmakers to explore female bodies not only as objects of male desire, but also as the foundations of female subjectivity. The films represent women's version of the body as political struggle against repressive ideological forces of society, in contrast to the dominant postwar male discourse of the body as source of pleasure and liberation.