3.2 Dialectical diagram of Hanada's documentary theory (as interpreted by Naoki Yamamoto).
1 The x‐axis represents a specific moment in history and illustrates Hanada's existentialist attitude that foregrounds the embeddedness of our lived experience of reality within the present.
2 Reflecting Hanada's Marxist background, the y‐axis represents the ongoing progress toward socialist revolution.
3 Actuality/contingency is located at the intersection of these coordinate axes, dialectically mediating two correlational sets of the opponents (the past/the future and necessity/possibility).
4 Moreover, Hanada seems to be assigning four different modes of filmmaking to each end of the coordinate axes, with “fiction” being associated with “history,” “avant‐garde” with “revolution,” “newsreel” with “the present,” and “documentary” with “reality.”
It is on this dialectic diagram that Hanada set out his criticism of Rotha, attacking in particular the latter's treatment of the term dramatization. In Hanada's assessment, the problem with Rotha's theory is that it aimed to enhance the dramatic quality of documentary in accordance with the conventions of modern theatrical plays developed since Ibsen. “What Rotha meant by the term ‘drama,’” he says, “was nothing but the highly rational drama of everyday life which is completely caught in the grips of causal relationships” (Hanada 1978 [1958b]: 163). Interpreting this statement according to the diagram I posed above, it becomes obvious that Rotha's “dramatization of actuality” goes against the historical progress toward revolution, indicating the eclectic unity of fiction and documentary for the sake of necessity, or “the mere artistic expression of social reformism,” as Hanada puts it (Hanada 1978 [1958a]: 157). On the contrary, Hanada's own formula must head in the opposite direction on the temporal x‐axis, aiming for the dialectical unity of the avant‐garde and documentary that is mediated through possibility. Hanada names this sur‐documentary (shuru‐dokyumentarī). While the French prefix sur here undoubtedly derives from Surrealism, but it also means the sublation of the documentary genre as a whole through its serious confrontation with the legacy of the interwar artistic avant‐garde.
It is necessary to explain here what Hanada means by the avant‐garde. His understanding of the term owes much to his collaborator Okamoto Tarō's concept of “bipolarism” (taikyoku shugi). Having spent 10 years (1930–1940) in France actively participating in the Surrealist‐influenced group Abstraction‐Création, Okamoto argued that avant‐garde art movements in 1920s Europe were composed of two opposing currents – the logical and nonfigurative expression of abstract painting, and the irrational but concrete expression of Surrealism. The main impetus of their interrelation, Okamoto contends, was not to combine them through eclecticism but rather to open up a new horizon of artistic possibilities by intensifying the conflict between the two as deeply as possible (Okamoto cited in Ōtani 2009: 18). To this, Hanada adds that one could easily find a similar division in the avant‐garde cinema of the same period, between German absolute films on one hand and French Dada/Surrealist films on the other. But he also notes that in the realm of filmmaking such a bipolar opposition between abstract art and Surrealism did not constitute a real dialectical relationship in its strict sense, for insofar as film practice is premised on the medium's recording capacity, filmmakers must always begin with the concrete objects the camera captures in the world and not with the abstract ideas they come up with in their mind. Consequently, avant‐garde filmmakers of the past came to concentrate their creativity in order “to boldly visualize our internal world, that is, the world of ideas and the unconsciousness,” while at the same time consciously separating themselves from the immediacy and intimacy of actuality (Hanada 1977 [1953]: 216). Thus the real dialectic in filmmaking, Hanada contends, must instead lie between the documentary method and the avant‐garde aesthetic. Rather than accepting what the camera presents before us as a priori facts, creators of sur‐documentary films must first of all be skeptical of our common perception of actuality, and thereby aim to reveal “how enigmatic and mysterious those concrete things in our external world are,” just as avant‐garde artists demonstrated through their experimentation with our internal worlds (Hanada 1977 [1951]: 170).
Still, one last question remains: what kinds of films can qualify as sur‐documentary? Like Imamura, Hanada refers to Clément's The Damned, Dassin's The Naked City, and some Italian neorealist films. These films, he argues, partly share his existentialist attitude in that they focus less on the search for the general truth of reality than on the filmic presentation of the contingent status of concrete objects and social phenomena. He also highly praises Luis Buñuel's The Young and the Damned (Los olvidados, 1950) for its conscious attempt to look at the actuality of Mexican society through the eye of a surrealist. These examples, however, still cannot be seen as the exemplary sur‐documentary films of which he dreams, the films that are able to reformulate the entire genre of documentary by negating its conventional choice and treatment of subject matter. As a possible theme for this new approach, Hanada goes so far as to suggest the creative adoption of the tradition of ghost or supernatural creature stories written and circulated widely in Japan since the seventeenth century. “Especially in stories of ghost cat incidents in the Arima and Nabeshima clans,” he says, “surrealistic elements are merged into highly realistic elements. If it were possible for us to inherit and develop this tradition properly, then we must be able to create a documentary art that could prevail over Surrealism—the finest of its kind with novelty and eccentricity.” (Hanada 1977 [1954a]: 234).
Of course, this is a rather playful suggestion that was meant to ridicule his fellow Japanese documentary filmmakers, who were still hesitant to abandon their persistent belief in naive realism. Hence, aside from this particular example, Hanada deliberately kept his vision open to many different possibilities. This was partly because his role as a theorist was to provide a concept and not to offer practical advices for filmmakers. But the more significant reason is that Hanada, like Okamoto, believed that creative imagination lies less in the synthesis of a thesis and an antithesis as such than in the perpetual collision between the two. Indeed, everywhere in the essays he wrote during the 1950s Hanada repeatedly presented dialectics as the unending process of becoming: “To unify the opposites without dissolving their conflicts” (tairitsubutsu wo tairitsu no mama tōitsu suru) (Hanada 1977 [1949b]: 14). As Hanada himself admits, this idiosyncratic call for the eternal struggle of mutually exclusive opposites – which I paraphrase as “dialectics without synthesis” – may seem illogical at first glance, but it was intentionally formulated thus with the clear intent to “smash down those who privilege the unity over the conflict in the course of dialectical progress” (Hanada 1978 [1954b]: 109). Furthermore, inasmuch as Hanada was indeed faithful to Lenin's observation of the laws of dialectics – “The unity of opposites is conditional, temporary, transitory, relative. The struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute, just as development and motion are absolute” (Lenin 1975 [1915]: 649) – one could find in his seemingly counterintuitive gesture a highly self‐reflective treatment of theory as such. For Hanada, theory – including his own – never meant a universal and timeless account of general truths but always manifested itself in motion, as part of a particular discursive practice deeply embedded into the both historical and political contexts of the present.
Conclusion
In his contribution to Hanada's posthumous anthologies, the renowned experimental filmmaker Matsumoto Toshio acknowledged Hanada's decisive influence on his own practice and theorization of a new genre called “avant‐garde documentary”:
The critical consciousness that questions conventional thinking, uncompromising anti‐authoritarianism, and the exhaustive mentality that objectifies both the object and the subject without being entrapped with sentimental emotions—these were the best things I learned from Mr. Hanada. And his dynamic and flexible method that unifies the essential opponents without dissolving their conflicts had been served as a guide for my own practice for a long time. (Matsumoto 1978: appendix 10)9
As