Shinoda's Pale Flower as a Japanese film noir

Shinoda Masahiro's Kawaita hana/Pale Flower, a key film of the Japanese ‘New Wave’ of the 1960s, is poised between the conventional ‘genre’ cinema of the Japanese studios and two prominent strains of international narrative cinema: the European art film and the American film noir. Released in 1964, Shinoda's film is at once a contribution to, and a unique hybridization of, these several distinct, and culturally specific, traditions. This article addresses the multivalent influences of European art cinema and film noir on Pale Flower, addressing, in particular, on what grounds we might convincingly speak of this film as a Japanese ‘film noir’. Through formal analysis, and discussion of the film's representation of character and subjectivity, Pale Flower is shown to be a recognizable and self-conscious exercise in noir stylization on the American model, while also incorporating formal innovations of the European art cinema.