Shunji Iwai In The Japanese Neo-cinema Movement

In the1990s, Japanese cinema turned a brand new page. A group of new directors, who laid remarkable stress on personal styles, rode a wave of film innovation with brand new cinema philosophy and technologies, raising a blockbuster new cinema movement. Japanese cinema resuscitated thanks to the event. The thesis studies on the director Shunji Iwai who is a standard-bearer in the campaign, puts great emphasis on the themes and styles of his films, discusses the features of his works which represent the neo-cinema movement, summarizes his inspiration to Chinese new film directors, and tries to unfold the idiosyncrasy of Japanese new cinema as well as its enlightenment and significance to the rising of Asian cinema.To begin with, the thesis starts from the overview of the background of the Japanese neo-cinema movement. The movement is one film wave based on independent production, new film directors, reflects the realistic themes in contemporary Japanese society. Then the paper offers introductions to the representative environment of Shunji Iwai’s works and the director’s status of standard-bearer of the important campaign. After teasing the artist’s works and his ideas, we reach a conclusion that Shunji Iwai’s creative ideas are wandering between modern and traditional values.Moreover, the paper analyzes the themes of Iwai’s films based on psychology, cultures and literature theories. There three dimensions. First is the extraordinary interest the films shows in youth theme, and the second angle is the imitation and construction of multi-cultural society. The last one is the director’s return to the traditional culture and cinema. Accordingly, we discover his focus on Japanese youth, his aspiration to American cultures and his anaclisis on Japanese traditional and national cultures. The development of the themes of his films points to the tendency of integration of modernity and traditional cultures.Finally, the thesis analyzes Iwai’s and other new cinema directors’film text according to aesthetic theories, and it is not difficult to find that the idiosyncrasy of Iwai’s works is the integration of two different techniques of expression and the characteristics of death aesthetics in new cinema. Shunji Iwai’s films combine the modern and the tradition. Shunji Iwai focuses on young men in Japan, investigates their psychological state, feels them with his heart, depicts them with full details, records their living conditions with pictures dutifully, and inspires the new generation of Japanese youth-themed films. The new experience and outreach of Japanese neo-cinema give extraordinary impetus to the rising of Asian cinema, strives advantages and status for Asian films in the present competition among world cinema.