Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies

24. Reconstructing Japanese Film

24 Reconstructing Japanese Film Donald I(irihara In a scene from Kenji Mizoguchi's The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (1939), Kiku, the young ward of a famous Kabuki acting clan, meets the family nursemaid walking a baby late at night. He rides up in a rickshaw (Fig. 24.1), gets out, and begins walking with her. The camera tracks with them as they talk, but neither comes closer nor moves farther away (Figs. 24.2-24.4). Mter as-minute, 12-second shot, the scene ends when the couple pauses under a streetlamp, then walks out ofthe frame (Fig. 24.5). This is a remarkable shot, representative of Mizoguchi's long take style of the late 1930s and indicative of his films of the 1950s like Sansho the Bailiff and Chikamatsu Monogatari: films that created fabulous worlds offeudal settings , richly detailed mise-en-scene, and transcendent suffering. They are films that can evoke "the world ofreality as the essence ofa tragic dream," as Parker Tyler said of Mizoguchi's Ugetsu.! For some it may also be a quintessentially Japanese moment, not only in theme, but materially in its unusual handling ofspace and time. We are reminded here ofDonald Richie's remark that for many Western viewers, Mizoguchi's films represent what Japanese films are supposed to look like.2 The scene is a moment that is supremely strange, but is it also uniquely Japanese? What constitutes that uniqueness? How is Japanese film style so different? These are difficult questions, since they direct us toward an examination offilm style in history: What is it different from and what are the specifics of that difference? In what follows I wish to examine the importance of culture in explaining film style, particularly how and why it affects film style's development. My area ofinterest is Japanese cinema because in recent years it has received considerable attention for the ways in which culture mediates film practice and film viewing. This seems an appropriate moment to reexamine Noel Burch's work on Japanese film as an attempt to address the ways in which cultures collide in film practice. To begin with, there remain some overlapping assumptions film historians use to explain what makes a Japanese film Japanese. For us they provide a convenient point of departure for arguing why Japanese film commands the attention ofWestern film scholarship. ID assume Japanese film is different because ofits isolation. Part ofour view 501 502 Part Four: History and Analysis Fig.24.1. The Story ofthe Last Chrysanthemum. Fig. 24.3. The Story ofthe Last Chrysanthemum. Fig. 24.2. The Story ofthe Last Chrysanthemum. Fig. 24.4. The Story ofthe Last Chrysanthemum. Fig. 24.5. The Story ofthe Last Chrysanthemum. of Japan is influenced by the country's self-imposed social quarantine from the 1600s to the mid-1800s. It bloomed late as an industrialized nation, and it competed fiercely to catch up. In this view, Japanese cinema followed that legacy, remaining from the late 19105 to the 1980s one of the world's few KIRIHARA: ReconstructingJapanese Film 503 countries where American films did not dominate the screens. Japanese film production was also relatively unknown internationally until the early 1950s, when films like Rashomon and The Life of Oharu dazzled art cinema audiences . By comparison, The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum won awards in Japan at its release but was unseen in the West for twenty years. Yet at the same time Japan is home to one of the world's oldest film industries, with the origins ofthe vertically integrated Nikkatsu (an often-dissolved, often-revived company) dating back to 1912, and one of today's major companies, Shochiku , founded in 1920. Studios in Tokyo and Kyoto cranked out four to five hundred films per year in the 1920s and 1930s, a frantic output that rivaled the Hollywood studios ofthe same era. And Japan was anything but deprived offoreign movies, constituting a significant market for European and American films continuously from the beginning of the century to the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. ffi assume Japanese cinema is different because the creators (and to a lesser extent, the viewers) have a different aesthetic sense. This "temperamental" approach is taken by the most influential presentation ofJapanese cinema to the West, Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie's The Japanese Film. For them, a different style is accounted for by a creator's personal intervention. Mizoguchi uses...