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As mentioned at the beginning of the essay, Hanada served as the most influential leader/agitator (sendōsha) of the postwar Japanese artistic and political avant‐garde movement, frequently collaborating or having disputes with numerous important artists, writers, and filmmakers including Okamoto Tarō, Haniya Yutaka, Abe Kōbō, Yoshimoto Takaaki, and Matsumoto Toshio. As a result, some scholars have seen him as marking a significant rupture not only between wartime and postwar critical discourse, but also between traditional, studio‐based commercial filmmaking and the more independent‐leaning Japanese New Wave of the 1960s (Sakamoto 2011: 57–68). It is true that Hanada remained relatively unknown as a critic until the end of the war, but we should remember that he also belonged to the same generation as the two critics discussed above, and that his intellectual formation dates to the 1930s and the early 40s. During this period of obscurity, Hanada was diligently writing a series of essays on what he called “the spirit of the transformative period” (tenkeiki no seishin), pieces that interpreted how the major European figures in art and science – Dante, Leonardo, Copernicus, Swift, Villon, and so on – articulated their experience of the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, or to the modern period of the Enlightenment (Hanada 1977 [1946]). When these essays were published in book form in 1946, many contemporary readers welcomed them as an opportune guide to their own survival of the crisis of (Japanese) modernity. And yet especially remarkable from today's perspective are the rigor and boldness of Hanada's method of creative interpretation, which he elaborated through his wide range of knowledge of Marxism, the Kyoto School of philosophy (Kyoto gakuha), Continental philosophy (from Plato to Hegel to existentialism), and many other contemporary literary and art movements that, perhaps surprisingly, he was able to access and contemplate on during the war. If Hanada's reconceptualization of documentary appears radically new and different, it was not because of his generational gap from the other two critics, but due rather to the critical distance he had from the relatively small world of Japanese film criticism, as well as to his wide reading in modern and contemporary thought.

This is, however, not to say that Hanada lacked interest in film in his early career. Although his first essay on film did not appear until October 1951, he had been paying constant attention to both domestic and international currents in critical discourse on this medium. In fact, it was Hanada who took the lead in reassessing the enduring relevance of Imamura's film theory in the postwar era. Not only did he help republish Imamura's Theory of Animated Film in 1948 from his own publishing house Shinzenbisha, he also contributed a favorable preface to the 1950 reprint of Imamura's first book The Form of Film Art: “Although there are so many film critics around us, only a few can think things cinematically. If [the poet] Nishiwaki Junzaburō's so‐called ‘kaigateki shikō’ [pictorial thinking] was peculiar to Surrealists of the past, one could say that Imamura Taihei's ‘eigateki shikō’ [cinematic thinking] stands at the forefront of our times” (Hanada 1950: 1). There is no doubt that Imamura's influence on Hanada was profound at the beginning – for instance, Hanada's first book on cinema was precisely titled Cinematic Thinking (Eigateki shikō) (Hanada 1978 [1958c]) – but Hanada's assessment of Imamura gradually went sour as he developed his own documentary theory. Indeed, after reading the aforementioned debate between Imamura and Iwasaki, Hanada dismissed both critics as “the typical prewar figures who had finished forming their thoughts in the 1930s” (Hanada 1978 [1956]: 208). In his view, while Iwasaki fell completely behind the times due to his old‐fashioned humanism, Imamura was also problematic in his naïve treatment of the fact as a self‐evident truth.

Hanada's criticism of Imamura and other fellow Japanese critics became more apparent in his meta‐commentaries on the hitherto local interpretation of Rotha's documentary theory. According to Hanada, the problem with Imamura's reading of Rotha is that he was never seriously concerned with the conceptual distinction between reality and actuality. Given his treatment of these opposing terms with the same single Japanese word genjitsu, the reader is likely to get confused because it is not clear at all whether what he meant by it was the idealist “essence” of a universal truth or the materialist “existence” of an external being. Moreover, Imamura's overemphasis on the fact as a transcendent category would likely diminish the possibility of our active and conscious commitment to the self‐transformation of the world in motion. On this point, Tsumura was more careful with his argument on the categorical difference between reality/Realität and actuality/Wirklichkeit. Yet again, Hanada argues, Tsumura was no less problematic for his dualistic thinking that reality and actuality are completely separable from each other, and that one could even achieve the general truth of reality without stepping into the hustle and bustle of actuality. And precisely because this schematic dyad between reality and actuality, between fiction and nonfiction, and between essence and phenomenon was a common feature of previous Japanese debates on documentary, Hanada asks his readers to revisit Rotha once again:

I don't need to restate here the self‐evident axiom that the “truth” is nothing more than a relative and historically determined concept. As Paul Rotha tells us, I think we must start our work by addressing the raw and vivid problems our external reality [genjitsu] presents us, from the standpoint of what he called “the creative dramatization of actuality” [actuaritī].

(Hanada 1977 [1954a]: 244)

It goes without saying that Hanada, in writing this statement, did not intend to provide a more accurate reading of Rotha's original text. Rather, he only used Rotha as a foothold for the exhibition of his own documentary theory. Let us look first at how he considers the significance of the term actuality used in Rotha's call for “the creative dramatization of actuality.” Unlike Tsumura, Hanada does not underrate actuality but instead treats it as an indispensable means of reaching reality, which he thinks of as a mysterious, uncanny, and even unknowable entity, almost equivalent to “the thing‐in‐itself” in Kantian philosophy. To foreground the relevance of actuality as the main subject of film practice in his times, Hanada argues that this term can also be replaced with “contingency” (gūzensei) in part following Imamura's claim that “the aim of documentary film is to reveal the necessity among the contingent” (Hanada 1978 [1957]: 367). Here, however, it is also possible to presume that Hanada's equation of the actual and the contingent came from Hegel, who defined contingency as the immediate, external appearance of actuality, or “the shape in which actuality first presents itself to consciousness” (Hegel 1991 [1830]: 218). But if Hegel, as an Idealist philosopher, was rather critical of contingency for its indeterminate, transformative, and inessential nature, Hanada finds more values in exactly what Hegel has negated. In other words, his main motivation is to establish a documentary theory that hinges on those miscellaneous and ever‐changing phenomena that appear and exist for our experience alone. In this regard Hanada maintains that actuality/contingency can also be seen as equivalent to existence (jitsuzon), having some unmistakable resonance with Sartre's famous motto “existence precedes essence” (Hanada 1978 [1957]: 368). Consequently, what becomes important for Hanada's existentialist standpoint is “to pay more attention to individual ‘objects’ as such than to the ‘essence’ or ‘universal meaning’ ” (Hanada 1978 [1957]: 373).

Hanada further explicates the significance of actuality in his documentary theory by comparing it with two other modalities of empirical thinking discussed in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason – necessity (hitsuzensei) and possibility (kanōsei). According to Hanada, each of these modalities represents three different moments in temporality, namely, the past (necessity), the present (actuality), and the future (possibility). And it is on this formula that one could understand – or rather, “experience” – the ontological meaning of reality in temporary terms, because, he says, “‘reality’ is that which sublates in itself both the necessity of the ‘past’ and the possibility of the ‘future’ by taking a lead from the contingency of the ‘present’ ” (Hanada 1978 [1957]: 367). Hanada himself admits that this triadic formula itself is too Hegelian, but it still helps us know how he tries to give shape, in a purely dialectical manner, to the basic structure of the world surrounding us and the multiple roles film plays in it (Sasaki et al. 1956: 151). To provide a clear exposition of Hanada's rather complicated argument, I would like to explain it using the following interpretive diagram (Figure 3.2):

Figure 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.