From Documentary to Fiction: Susumu Hani's Starting Point
Susumu Hani is a pioneering filmmaker who brought an innovative perspective to Japanese cinema. Born in 1928, he began studying film while attending the University of Tokyo and joined Iwanami Productions after graduating. There, he worked on numerous educational films and social documentaries, developing an honest approach to filmmaking centered on observation and recording.
The documentaries he made during the 1950s were important to this early career. In representative works such as Children in the Classroom and Zoo Diary, he emphasized a camera that observes rather than explains, bringing a fresh approach to documentary storytelling. What Hani developed was a perspective that sought to remain faithful to reality without controlling events. This observational realism would continue to exert a strong influence when he later moved into fiction filmmaking.
Hani's transition to fiction was a challenge to combine narrative with a documentary quality without losing the latter. He aimed to capture the truth hidden within fiction through a documentary gaze. This would give his fiction films their distinctive appeal and depth.
Bad Boys and the Realistic Expression of Raw Emotion
Bad Boys (1961), widely known as Hani's first fiction film, symbolizes his fusion of documentary methods and narrative cinema. Its leading roles were played by young people who were unknown at the time. Instead of professional actors, he cast with actual juvenile delinquents as his models, adopting an approach in which the script was developed on location with an emphasis on improvisation rather than following a fixed text.
Hani's direction emphasized having actors experience situations rather than perform them. The camera maintains a certain distance from its subjects, never abandoning its perspective as an observer. As a result, audiences feel less that they are being shown a performance than that they are witnessing something real happening right beside them.
The film realistically depicts young people's loneliness, collapsing family environments, and disconnection from society in postwar Japanese cities, earning high praise in Japan and abroad for its overwhelming immediacy. Many filmmakers were particularly astonished that a director from documentary could create such drama through emotionally restrained direction. Bad Boys demonstrated that Hani's challenge to fiction filmmaking was more than a change of genre: it was the development of a new cinematic language.
Hani's Realism Reaches the World: Acclaim at International Film Festivals
Bad Boys was entered in the 12th Berlin International Film Festival and received the FIPRESCI Prize. This was an important moment demonstrating that Hani's realism could resonate fully on the world stage. It is also notable as an example of Japanese cinema receiving international recognition for contemporary reality rather than stylized beauty or traditional culture.
She and He (1963) subsequently portrayed Tokyo's urbanization and changing families from a woman's perspective and was officially selected for the Venice International Film Festival. Hani's ability to treat the realistic everyday lives of individuals as universal themes gained increasing recognition. His style, carefully capturing the felt texture and viewpoints of reality rather than emphasizing dramatic developments, resonated with later neorealism and the New Wave.
His work also greatly influenced filmmakers in Asian and African countries. Traces of Hani's perspective can be seen particularly in realist cinema from India and Iran, showing how the method of observational filmmaking spread across borders.
Reconsidering Hani's Cinematic Significance Today
Hani continued moving between fiction and documentary, working on children's films, educational films, and productions about animals and nature. He also devoted himself to filmmaking that nurtured children's sensibilities, including Doubutsu Monogatari: Risu no Banner, and pursued the capture of human inner life and the breath of reality on film throughout his life.
Opportunities to reassess Hani's fiction films have increased in recent years. His style transcending the boundary between fiction and nonfiction stands at the origins of today's orientation toward reality. It provides an important reference for young video creators seeking fiction filmmaking with a documentary perspective.
Rejecting excessive embellishment in direction, Hani continued portraying real human beings through the camera. His style did not conform to its times; rather, it continues to live beyond them. His work quietly teaches us that cinema is not only a means of conveying information and stories, but also a tool for discovering human truth.
