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Cinema and Sensoria in Modern Japan
Organizer: Hideaki Fujiki, Nagoya University, Japan
Chair: Daisuke Miyao, University of Oregon
Discussant: Joanne Izbicki, Ithaca College
Cinema is a medium not only of narrative, but also of stimulation. It appeals to human sensoria no less significantly than intelligence. Focusing on modern Japan (particularly from the 1920s through the mid-1940s, our panel explores this hitherto overlooked cultural process. How did films and related visual images present the senses? How did the mediated senses involve historical contexts? To answer these questions, we conduct both theoretical and empirical analyses of multiple dimensions concerning cinema: filmic and non-filmic visual representations, intellectual and popular discourses, and institutional practices (mainly in the film industry and governmental administrations). In so doing, we discuss correlations and contradictions among the ways that visual stimulation constituted different moments of Japan’s modernity.
The panel begins with Daisuke Miyao, who investigates what has been represented as the haptic sense in German expressionist films, critical Japanese discourses on them, and Ozu Yasujiro’s That Night’s Wife. Hideaki Fujiki examines how movie advertisements nourished a sense of speed and a sensitivity to trends, thereby helping to create a new visual experience related to Japan’s rising consumerism. Chika Kinoshita analyzes Mizoguchi Kenji’s “tendency” films as examples of how the film industry appropriated visual techniques by which modernist films, especially in Soviet Montage, had provoked the senses. Michael Raine traces the ways that Japanese wartime cinema incorporated Soviet, German, and American antecedents and culminated in soaking audiences in sensory ecstasy. Joanne Izbicki will bring a historian's perspective and her background in Japanese film to the discussion.
The Transplanted Hands: German Expressionism and the Haptic in Ozu's That Night's Wife
Daisuke Miyao, University of Oregon
It was May of 1921. It was in Asakusa district of Tokyo, the center of film exhibition in Japan at that time. Arguably the first German expressionist film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), was released at Kinema Club Theatre. The film caused sensational reactions from many artists and novelists. Curiously, some of them were particularly impressed by the representation of hands in Caligari. In fact, not only Caligari, but also numerous other German expressionist films were obsessed with hands. There are several historical contexts that this obsession with hands in German expressionist cinema could be located. Most importantly, German expressionist cinema concerned with the discursive concept of emerging cinema as a haptic medium. Examining Ozu Yasujiro’s film That Night’s Wife (Sono yo no tsuma, 1930), in particular, this paper will discuss the significance of German expressionist cinema in early-twentieth-century Japanese film culture, in terms of the sensitivity to the notion of the haptic. This paper is an attempt to examine the works of Japanese filmmakers and critics in the 1920s that questioned the primacy of disembodied vision and explored the notion of the haptic.
Movie Advertisements and the Formation of a New Visual Experience
Hideaki Fujiki, Nagoya University, Japan
During the 1920s and 1930s, new types of posters and magazine pages that advertised movies flourished. This paper will explore these film advertisements’ characteristics and significance in relation to the rise of Japan’s new visual culture and consumerism. Designed by Yamada Shinkichi, Kôno Takashi, and other, less famous illustrators, film advertisements were visually elaborated by means of such modernist techniques as collage, deformation, and simplification. Through such sophisticated techniques, each advertisement organized multiple kinds of information into a single representation. For one thing, advertisements constituted a somewhat self-contained culture of visual experience in their association with the screen. That is, they encouraged audiences not to purchase useable goods, but to go to cinema playhouses and experience transient enjoyment in the moving images there. Moreover, film ads were not faithful reflections of onscreen images, but took a form of artistic collage and deformation on a piece of flat paper. Here it was assumed that recipients would scan the multiple layers of information swiftly and sense the leading edge of trends immediately. Thus, the newly emerging visual culture brought a sense of speed and a sensitivity to trends into people’s everyday lives. Rather than reducing this phenomenon into “phantasmagoria” or an exchange value dominating over a use value, I will discuss the complex historical relations among different media, and between visual representations and the rising consumer culture.
Mass Culture of Montage, 1929-1930
Chika Kinoshita, University of Western Ontario, Canada
This presentation centers on Japanese film culture’s introduction of the Soviet film theory of montage within the context of Proletarian arts movements and flourishing culture industry in 1929-1930. At the time, Japanese films such as Mizoguchi Kenji’s Tokyo March (Tokyo kôshinkyoku, 1929), together with other mass-cultural artifacts like serial novels, embodied the modernist principle of montage, i.e., a juxtaposition of heterogeneous parts that generates a new significance in vernacular forms. This vernacular usage was the dominant culture’s commodification of a revolutionary art form, to be sure. And yet, it sought to articulate the experience of industrial modernity and the class system through lurid dramatization of social inequality, appropriating the theory newly introduced by Marxist cultural and film critics, like Iwasaki Akira, from the dream factory of communism.
Japanese society in 1929-1930, greatly affected by the global depression, saw an unparalleled number of strikes and tenant disputes, polarization of politics, and destabilization of the existing value system. While this social climate eventually led to militarist expansion and the collapse of the parliamentary democracy, it transiently generated a carnivalesque moment in which Proletarian artists and culture industry together participated in appropriation of high arts for mass appeal/agitation. Through a close look at contemporary discourse including film texts, magazine articles and literary and film theory, I demonstrate that cultural theorists, such as Hirayabashi Heinosuke and Itô Sei as well as Walter Benjamin and Siegfreid Kracauer, regarded montage as a mimetic response to industrial modernity’s assault to and transformation of human senses.
“Recapturing the Cinematic Sky": Sensorial Ecstasy in Japanese Wartime Cinema
Michael Raine, University of Chicago
Japanese film authorities maintained an astonishing medium consciousness in their prescriptions for the cinema after the promulgation of the Film Law in 1939. Critics, cultural bureaucrats, and filmmakers debated the significance of film's formal qualities, generating a medium-conscious film culture that continued unabated even as the thematic and ideological range of Japanese cinema became increasingly constrained. That wartime film culture minimized the differences between newsreel, documentary, and dramatic film, including all three in the typical exhibition program and encouraging stylistic choices and production practices that blurred the boundaries between them. Approved films were explicitly tasked with "recapturing the cinematic sky" from special-effects laden Hollywood war films and "raising the technical level" of popular Japanese cinema into something that could compete with the memory of those films both at home and in Japan's new overseas territories. The cinema became both a synecdoche for optical weapons (kogaku heiki) such as bomb sights and range finders and the medium through which citizens were informed of those modern technological triumphs and trained in the new modes of perception they required. This paper will trace an "other modernism" of system and cybernesis in Japanese wartime cinema with important links to Soviet, German, and American antecedents, as well as to the commercial culture of 1930s Japan. In these films, propaganda is leavened by agitation: the biomechanical subject of total war is completed by technological prostheses and film style aims for audio-visual ecstasy.