Legacies of Hani Susumu’s Documentary School

Abstract

This article seeks to cast light on some of Hani Susumu’s theoretical and practical contributions to post-war Japanese documentaries. The article will also show how he created a documentary school at Iwanami Eiga based on authors’ closeness to the filmed object. This is crucial in order to understand the tendencies that developed in non-fiction films from the late 1950s. Hani’s influence can be seen in the leaders of militant cinema, Tsuchimoto Noriaki and Ogawa Shinsuke, who were trained at Iwanami Eiga. However, some of his theoretical writings, together with his documentary films Hōryūji (1958) and Gunka Ken 2 (1962), reveal how his singular subjective realism is applied to unusual shooting objects, landscapes. This article assesses this lesser-known aspect of Hani’s work and its links to certain developments in Japanese documentary films led by other filmmakers, such as Teshigahara Hiroshi and Adachi Masao, which have not yet been addressed.