Fantasia 2025: Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers Review

This will be one of many reviews during this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.

Historically, the aftermath of conflicts can be most felt within a country’s culture. Besides the economic and structural repercussions, culture often takes the biggest hit. No other battle provoked more transformation globally than World War II. Writer-director Amélie Ravalec studies the cultural shift in Japanese society after the Second Great War, especially on how it influenced the survivors of the bombings, including the nuclear attack in 1945. In Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers, Ravalec draws a correlation between the new shape of Japan in its post-war era and how the artistic expressions of a new generation changed following the aftermath of American attacks during WWII.

In this sense, Ravalec assumes a didactic approach to her story. The film divides each subtopic in a manner that feels episodic and lecture-like. Consequently, it has an academic backing through interviews of scholars who study the 1960s and 1970s Japanese photography movements, the principal current of avant-garde art portrayed in the film. It is almost an expository scheme similar to an art textbook in the introduction to vanguardist photography in Japan. Its organization is chronological and thoroughly curated to expose an organized and direct broader picture of multiple currents that fall under the umbrella of post-war vanguardism. Yet, it is a highly competent introduction to those unfamiliar with the artistic philosophies of a ruined country that would become this developed nation in the decades to follow.

Its interviews are a fascinating exercise in the understanding of a new movement in the making. Those artists did not understand the impact and importance of their work in that period. However, the film precisely imprints enough context to comprehend how they would subvert the artistic canon pre-war. For example, Eikoh Hosoe, the legendary photographer, collaborated with Yukio Mishima, the far-right writer who attempted a coup d’état with his militia, Tatenokai. In Ordeal by Roses (Barakei), the photographer created fictionalized pictures of Mishima posing as a dead body. The poses and compositions would defy the status quo of artistry, aiming for perfection and a clear reflection of reality. However, the Japanese Avant-Garde understood the photographic material as a lie, a representation of what it is real, and pushed it to their subversion of the art.

Consequently, the generation of artists such as Araki Nobuyoshi, Moriyama Daido, Ishiuchi Miyako, Tanaami Keiichi, Yokoo Tadanori, Hijikata Tatsumi, and Ohno Kazuo, among others, reflects the use of troubled times to flip expectations. Those photographers would portray sex, substance use, and subcultures in an inventive manner. In the transition of Japan from a destroyed land to an industrial power, artists dared to use film to capture the transformation in people. The sexual desire of human nature, the desire to push boundaries sexually through bondage and rope play, is a mundane activity. The understanding of taboo practices in mainstream artistic photobooks that influenced occidental artists and scholars as a form of comprehending cultural change.

Even though it struggles with a formulaic, scholarly, and episodic structure, Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers offers audiences a compelling look at the avant-garde culture in Japan post-war. The documentary marks an exciting discovery for those curious about photography and how the socioeconomic context of a changing Japan gave birth to some of the most influential artistry of the last fifty years.

still courtesy of Circle Time Studio

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Pedro Lima

Brazilian film writer. He is also a producer and executive producer for Zariah Filmes. Member of the International Film Society Critics Association (IFSCA), International Documentary Association (IDA), and Gotham and Media Film Institute.