Time Frames: Japanese Cinema and the Unfolding of History (review)

Time Frames is an ambitious, complex, and occasionally quirky study. The author, Scott Nygren, presents both a historical overview of the Japanese film industry that privileges its position within a global, multimedia cultural matrix and a metahistory of the discipline of Japanese cinema studies (and, more generally, of the field of cultural studies) that challenges the very possibility of capturing or containing the multifarious aspects of the subject within a unitary, transcendent narrative. Nygren shows a respectful attitude toward earlier histories of the industry (especially the groundbreaking archival work of Donald Richie and Joseph L. Anderson), but his study is as much about the ways history is constructed as it is about the history of a particular cultural artifact. As such, questions concerning the possibilities and limitations of writing history in an age dominated by poststructuralist methodologies and marked by an acceleration of the convergence of media and cultures have shaped the conception of Time Frames.

Nygren’s approach is, on one level, a narrativist historicism describing the discursive fields and practices that have helped determine the creation and reception of Japanese cinema as an object of study. The book, however, tries to do more than provide a neutral account of discursive formation by examining the ethical aims of this form of historicism.

Is it possible to imagine, construct, and participate in a nonauthoritarian network of discourses, one that does not base its operation on an appeal to unconscious or tacit absolutist assumptions, forcibly excluded from question? . . . The possibilities of speaking across cultural difference, if they are to exist at all, emerge from the proliferation of conflicts and paradoxes that mark the boundary between cultures and contexts. Even if such a task seems impossible, the only ethical goal of knowledge work is to move in this direction, since alternatives are untenable.

(p. 7)

The question Nygren poses here is an important and vexing one, and embedded in it is another level of theory. Time Frames is marked by a heterological historicism that “invites the study of otherness in its multiplicity, through the dislocation and inversion of foundational tropes across intersecting discourses and cultural horizons” (p. 243). This is a difficult but welcome intervention that forces the reader to confront the unsettling process of writing history and to remain conscious at all times of the idiosyncratic, imaginative, and often arbitrary nature of such an undertaking.

The structure of Time Frames naturally reflects its heterological approach. The study is quite consciously divided into three main sections, though the organization is not as simple as such a tripartite division would suggest. The analysis ranges across a wide array of materials that touch on theory, cinema, visual arts, literature, and history, and so it must be stressed here that the brief summary that follows cannot do justice to the scope or sophistication of the argument.

The opening part, consisting of the first three chapters, is devoted mainly to an unraveling of history. Basic categories by which established, standard narratives achieve their discursive coherence have to be dissolved in order to even begin the process of representing difference across cultures. To that end, Nygren goes to great lengths, particularly in chapter 1, “Thresholds,” to defamiliarize and destabilize even the most basic terms of discourse: Japanese—film—history. He consciously focuses on presenting an analysis of discursive terms rather than a narrative account of the emergence of the Japanese film industry in the early twentieth century because, taking his cue from Karatani Kōjin, he does not want to get caught up in the misleading notion of origins. Nygren considers this particular part of the history of Japanese cinema unwritable, since the discourse by which we, perhaps unreflectively, evaluate individual films from that period was not yet fixed or in place. While this is not an unreasonable consideration on the author’s part, it does produce a major gap in the book. Since many of the discursive frames that determined later (especially...