Contextual Study: Evaluation

At the start of this contextual study into cinematic New Waves I wasn't aware of neither the term nor the movement itself, so the initial task was to research and learn about the context and meaning behind a cinematic new wave and define it. To begin with the focus was on the French New Wave in cinema during the 1950-1960's, however as I learned more about the New Wave movements I discovered similar occurrences in other countries during roughly the same time, one such occurrence was the Japanese New wave movement that was happening in concurrence with the French New Wave, so I decided upon researching that particular movement as I thought it provide an interesting challenge.

To begin with the research was rather slow, as information on the Japanese New Wave was hard to come across, this is probably due to the movement not being well known in the west and was overlooked in the west due to the French New Wave occurring at the same time. Although information was initially hard to come across I was eventually able to learn of a few websites that gave details on specific directors which would help focus my research. There was however a large variety of different Japanese directors that were considered part of the new wave movement in Japan so I decided to only focus on one director, after viewing some basic information on a variety of directors I decided to go with the director I thought would be most interesting, Nagisa Oshima. As it would turn out the director I decided to research happened to be one of the most influential figures of the Japanese New Wave and drew many comparisons to the French New Wave in his films, which provided me with a range of useful discussion points for my research. I was also able to obtain access to a few books which I thought would be useful for learning about the contextual issues of the Japanese New Wave and for that I needed to travel to Coventry University library to obtain the information as they would have access to a wide range of texts which would help me gather information for discussion points on the context behind the movement in my study. As for the films by Nagisa Oshima, many of them are unavailable outside of Japan so many of the films by this director I was unable to access. The films I was able to obtain however caused a problem as I needed to order them from a retail website and I needed to wait at least a week for each of them to come which was very time consuming which set me back as I couldn't continue working without knowledge of the films.

After I gathered enough research on the Japanese New Wave movement and had watched the films by Oshima I could start work on my essay, The films I had been able to acquire gave me a lot of themes and context to discuss as they featured very controversial and extreme topics which provided me an insight into some of the context behind the movement. As from my research I discovered that Oshima was a political activist before he became a film maker, so whilst watching his films I found many aspects which expressed his views on the society during the 50/60's. One thing I learned that was not in my initial research was on the subject of a range of student protests in Japan during 1950 and again in the 1960's over the signing of a security treaty between Japan and the USA, I found this rather interesting and decided to research it to a greater detail and later decided to include information about it in my essay, as this subject was also a major theme in one of Oshima's films.

I found that during this contextual study I learned a variety of new information about a culture that I had no prior knowledge of and I've found it rather interesting, and I learned some of the issues that were affecting Japan during the time the New Wave movement occurred there and i now understand why these issues are expressed in the films that were produced. If I were to reproduce my contextual essay I would hopefully be able to further my research into this movement as it has proved to be very interesting to me, although if I were to improve on the research by viewing more of Oshima or any other directors work I would probably need to visit Japan to learn a greater amount of information on the subject, though this seems unlikely. Overall I think my research and essay have gone well as I managed to obtain viable sources of information that I was able to work with to my advantage.