The Elegant Beast: Kawashima Yūzō's modernist stage

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Elegant Beast (Shitoyakana kedamono, 1962), is a post-war satire directed by Kawashima Yūzō (1818–1963) that aims criticism towards post-war modernity represented by a struggling middle-class family dealing with the transformation of Japanese urban life in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. This essay analyses the modernist cinematic aesthetics of the film and introduces the common themes of nihilism and a subversive tendency that Kawashima Yūzō persisted with since starting out with his programme picture comedy films. I contend that The Elegant Beast demonstrates Kawashima’s position as a leading precursor to the modernist cinema of the 1960s, for his engagement with associated themes of modernism such as nihilism, a subversive tendency in the Bakhtinian carnivalesque tradition, and a self-reflexivity. I further suggest that in The Elegant Beast, Kawashima explores the possibility of a theory of film through the practice of film.