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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the intersection of Tosaka Jun's everyday-centred philosophy of history and Ōshima Nagisa's film portrait of post-war Japan's history based on the political allegorisation of everyday relationships, being two different expressions of the same New Left ideology.

Paper long abstract:

During the long 1960s, the everyday dimension took political centrality in Japan thanks to the leading role of the New Left movement and its ideology. This went hand in hand with the appreciation of the theoretical approaches by Marxist thinkers hitherto relatively ignored by the institutionalized communist movement such as Tosaka Jun, who saw the quotidian as a fundamental space for historical transformation. We know how Tosaka developed an everyday-centred philosophy of history through his writings, but we know little about how formats other than the written word such as cinema contributed to thinking historical reality from the same ideological approach. To address this gap in our understanding, this paper analyses the intersection between Ōshima Nagisa’s highly paradigmatic film Gishiki (Ceremonies, 1971) and Tosaka’s historical thought.

The paper explores how, in critically thinking the history of post-war Japan, the film in question used the same ideological approach previously developed by Tosaka. If the commodity was for Marx the basic, semi-opaque unit of the capitalist totality demanding to be deciphered to grasp the true nature of the whole system, the everyday was for Tosaka the basic, semi-opaque unit of historical time whose deciphering gives access to the true nature of history. In the same logic, as I will show, Ōshima presented his characters in Gishiki as fundamental units of the whole cinematic narrative, the everyday relationships of whom were portrayed as semi-opaque symbols demanding to be decoded to grasp the historical allegory making up the totality of the film. To better understand the mechanisms of such an ideology, I will compare the way Ōshima and other film directors addressed the everyday dimension in relation to history.