Editor’s Introduction

In his accounting of Mantetsu and Man’ei ethnographic films, “Phantasmagoric Manchukuo: Documentaries Produced by the South Manchurian Railway Company, 1932–1940,” Jie Li introduces a five-hundred-reel film archive that the South Manchurian RR Company created during the ephemeral life of “Manchuria.” He explains the films’ production and intended use (inducements to tourism, labor recruitment, touting the benefits of colonization to local Chinese) yet argues that “the films retain a certain naiveté that defies accusations of conspiracy [emphasis mine],” while at the same time clearly creating a vision that justifies gross occupation strategies. Li’s general strategic aim is to set a foundation for “read[ing] these films as … a phantasmagoria”; colonized, colonizers, visiting Nazis, and diplomats alike might be excused for falling under its thrall. The crucial dialectic of intended meaning in relation to “unintended revelations,” deepens understanding of how even the shoddiest “nation-building projects” harbor the idealism of political false consciousness.

Jie Li tenaciously muddied moral culpability and sought to complicate the way we grasp propaganda and the phantasmagoric elements of colonial violence. Baryon Tensor Posadas’s “Fantasies of the End of the World: The Politics of Repetition in the Films of Kurosawa Kiyoshi” is not concerned with colonialist idealism. Yet, interestingly, he addresses how filmic violence and moral culpability are enmeshed in Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s generic serial-murder plots. In Kurosawa’s B-fantasy world, mass murderers are inexplicable even to themselves. Their actions are indecipherable because murder has become a quotidian activity. There is nothing exceptional about it, and consequently murderers “are unable to ascribe exceptional motives to their actions.” It is not a bad metaphor for colonial idealism, this fantasy of murder’s acceptability and quotidianization. Posadas then invokes Slavoj Žižek’s distinction between subjective or personal and objective and institutional violence at the essay’s conclusion to argue that in refusing to see injustice, Yoshioka, the film’s protagonist, exemplifies the actual fact that no crime is innocent of the very institutional structural violence that makes things appear to be normal, inevitable, quotidian. The injustices he refuses to address haunt Yoshioka mercilessly; the spectral woman in the red dress reflects unacknowledged historical wrongs at the end of time that he cannot even see.

James Reichert’s contribution, “Oyama and Anxieties about the Feminization of Japanese Film,” contributes to understanding the long pan-Asian debate over the female impersonator’s feminine performance in film, as anatomically correct female actresses supplanted the oyama or onnagata figure. Some media viewers and critics voiced concern that impersonation created what they felt was an excessive femininity, while New Women, advocates of new female-oriented commercial culture, and male progressives argued that the oyama and its big, female fan base threatened Japan’s new cinema in the eyes of the world. James Reichert underscores the historical point that fans did not “naturally choose” anatomical naturalism over cross-dressing superstars. They were pushed: the campaign for alleged natural anatomy had more to do with the scorn reformers felt would come “Japan’s” way if the scandal of old-style feminine performance was to dominate the new media. In the 1910S, a campaign launched the effort to install a new gender order: Laura Mulvey’s male gaze was installed in a policy of conscious derogation of still-popular forms.

To an unprecedented extent, critics such as Posadas have exposed how film technology extends the means of production and installs subjectivation, to a degree also the extension of the means of production through the human body. In Luke Robinson’s hands, “Voice, Liveness, Digital Video: The Talking Head in Contemporary Independent Chinese Documentary” interrogates the documentary mode to ask “what does liveness actually mean in [the] context” of the Chinese documentary tradition as this relates to sound. In counter-documentary tradition over the last thirty years, he argues, “talking heads … operate as the locus of a particular sort of liveness[,] one that presents itself as unmediated presence rather than as a product of mediation.” It means that mediated counter-documentary sound creates different kinds of distance. This marks a stylistic shift. The “talking head” that has often been...