Urban landscape and the dishinabitation in Japanese cinema

For a long time Ozu's movies have been praised as the typical representation of Japanese culture such as Zen or Buddhism. However this point of view which strongly echoes the roots of Western documentary genre linked to travelling and exoticism is highly limited and avoid the nature of the media of representation itself: cinema. Cinema is a language. It translates a subjective vision of an author influenced by the objective reality he frames. In the postwar Japan and the increasing modernization this picturesque Japan was strongly questioned by intellectuals and artists very concerned by the loss of Japanese identity at the favor of the underside of Western modernity such as consumerism. Periods of trouble like the 1960s' rebuilding of the country or the 1990s' lost decade even more accentuated the urges of Japanese filmmakers to question Japanese identity to question images through images to use images in order to unravel what lies beneath them. From a selection of Japanese filmmakers's works this essay aims to analyze one aspect of this Japanese identity questionning through images: disinhabitation.