In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Atomic Light (Shadow Optics)
  • Louis-Georges Scwartz
Akira Mizuta Lippit. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics).Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. 224 pp.

Perhaps the twentieth century will be remembered as the time when light changed. If so, among the first to articulate that change will have been Akira Lippit, whose new book Atomic Light rethinks radiance as waves. Atomic Light follows the propagation of the new waves that seized public imagination starting in the late nineteenth century. The book focuses on the effects of three interrelated technologies, movies, x-rays, and atomic bombs, which come together on the screens of postwar Japanese cinema. The x-ray and cinema beams created new perceptions and caused cultures to revise the meaning of light. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki cast a shadow on certain films that trope towards images of light that inaugurate a new visibility and images enacting a form of shining destruction. In a sense, Atomic Light does nothing other than trace those shadows in Japanese cinema, but those shadows map an original conceptual plane.

Lippit does not merely explicate an already established theory or philosophy and apply its concepts to a corpus of films. While certainly worthwhile, such a procedure is that of ordinary film theory and cinema history. Atomic Light stands out among such books because Lippit thinks with theorists and philosophers following a complex history including thought, cinema, technology, and war while creating new concepts.

Atomic Light articulates the concepts generated by the new meaning of light across a network including more than twenty-two films, psychoanalysis, writings by Giorgio Agamben, Maurice Blanchot, Jorge Lois Borges, Lisa Cartwright, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Ralph Ellison, Laura Marks, Fred Moten, and Tanizaki Jun'ichiriô, among others. Lippit flashes the reader between these nodes, extracting from each the ideas the book needs to compose a new philosophy of light. The book divides into six chapters and an introduction. The first chapter treats the theme of archives, the second psychoanalysis, the third several films from the 1890s and early 1900s, the fourth Japanese and U.S. invisible man movies, the fifth Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hiroshima Mon Amour (Resnais, 1959), Ugetsu monogatari (Mizoguchi, 1953), and Women in the Dunes (Teshigahara, 1964), the sixth Maborosi (Kore-eda, 1995) and Cure (Kurosawa, 1997).

The book begins by describing a scene from the section of Kobiyashi Masaki's [End Page 1193] Kwaidan entitled "Hôichi the Earless" in which a blind musician with Buddhist prayers painted on his body sings a song narrating a battle to the phantoms of its victims. The ghosts only appear to Hôichi, who cannot see them, and his performances for them drain his vitality. A priest has painted the prayers on his body and face to render him invisible to the ghosts. Lippit conjures the scene as an emblem of post-war Japanese cinema, staged between visibility and invisibility, outside and inside, life and death.

The scene's description condenses and displaces the concepts that the book invents. As the book unfolds, it becomes emblematic in the sense that one could call a dream emblematic, a dream that the rest of Lippit's text analyzes. The description introduces certain concepts manifestly and by name. For example, Lippit uses the writing on Hôichi's body to define "excription" because it both produces a new outside and a new interiority within which it shelters the monk from the phantoms. This concept of a mark that defines an inside and outside will return throughout the book, with extended remarks devoted to it in the last chapter's analysis of Cure.

The opening passage also initiates a set of refrains in which some of the words used to describe the scene return later in the book as the object of an extended analysis. These words function like a melodic development that comes back later in the music to become a major theme. For example, Lippit calls the writing on Hôichi's skin an "archive" (3), and the next chapter develops the concept of an "archive" in readings of Borges, Derrida and Agamben.

Finally, the description of Hôichi implies concepts that Lippit develops later in the book. For example...

pdf

Share