Abstract

Abstract:
This thesis theorizes the correlation between national historical trauma in Japan and West Germany, and the excessive, gendered and often sexualized violence inflicted upon and by women protagonists in films emerging from these nations in the 1970s. The thesis provides a comparative analysis of two films which investigate the origins of ‘fascism’ in their nation through the allegory of the female protagonist and her relationship to the institution of the family: Toshiya Fujita’s 1973 Lady Snowblood (Shurayukihime) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 film Martha. This thesis puts the film’s conclusions regarding the origins of fascism in their nation in relation to the historiographical discourses emerging in the post-war period, to examine how these films participate in the project of rebuilding the nation and national identity in the wake of the enduring traumas of the Second World War. Whereas in Lady Snowblood, ‘fascism’ is depicted as a foreign product imported from the West in the Meiji period (1868- 1912), diametrically opposed to the Neo-Confucian politics governing family and state in Japan’s isolationist Edo period, (1603-1868). Contrastingly, in Martha, ‘fascism’ is a fundamentally domestic affair.