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Feminist Film Theory: Osaka, circa 1866
- differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
- Duke University Press
- Volume 13, Number 3, Fall 2002
- pp. 24-63
- Article
- Additional Information
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differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13.3 (2003) 24-63
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Feminist Film Theory:
Osaka, circa 1866
Margherita Long
[Figures]
In 1920, Japanese novelist Tanizaki Jun'ichirô took a break from the stories and stage plays he had been writing to accept a position as “artistic consultant” at the Taishô Katsuei film company in Yokohama. The company had been founded earlier that year under the artistic direction of Thomas Kurihara, a Hollywood returnee who had spent six years in America studying production and acting in small roles. 1 Kurihara quickly became the driving force at Taishô Katsuei, single-handedly training a corps of eager cinematographers and actors with what Tanizaki would later describe as superhuman energy. In the following eighteen months, Kurihara and Tanizaki turned out four silent films. While all the screenplays are attributed to Tanizaki, he later admitted that Kurihara had written most of their first production. And while director's credits go formally to Kurihara in each case, the third film was shot and directed partially by Tanizaki. 2 By early 1922, other film studios founded at the same time as Taishô Katsuei were flourishing. In contrast, Tanizaki's company was defunct, ruined by mismanagement and Kurihara's advancing tuberculosis. Yet, in a sense, the brevity of Tanizaki's film career is a perfect expression of its incandescence. For a short but fervent period he [End Page 24] loved everything about motion pictures, convinced that they were fast becoming Japan's most important cultural form.
Ten years later he had changed his mind. “I have long since started not caring about cinema,” he said, “and the day when I will care nothing at all can't be far away” (“Eiga e” 22: 319). 3 Turning his energies back to literature, he began to experiment in particular with classical forms, allusions, and settings. Prior to his film experience he had grown famous for erotic stories, crime fiction, and often violent stage plays. The shift from modernist to traditional literary interests prompted critics to hail a “return to the classics” and to count the author among those who were shifting from cosmopolitanism to cultural nationalism in the years before the Second World War. In this essay I consider the source of Tanizaki's cinematic disappointment from a different angle, arguing that one of the best known novels from his “return to the classics” is actually an extended commentary on film—one might even say an incisive piece of film theory. Shunkinshô [Portrait of Shunkin] is set in Osaka in the second half of the nineteenth century, on the cusp of Japan's premodern (1603–1867, known as “Edo”) and modern (1867–) periods. Its narrative style is classically inflected, an aura of antiquity augmented by characters who speak old Osaka dialect. The plot pivots on the minutiae of a musical world centered on blind masters of shamisen and koto, traditional stringed instruments important to Edo culture. 4 Yet, despite its premodern flavor, the story is at heart the same story that feminist film theorists from Mulvey to Copjec have been telling for quite some time: the story of castration, disavowal, and fetishism; of the lure, the look, and the gaze. When read as a 1933 contribution to debates that did not take shape elsewhere until much later, Shunkinshô is remarkable not only for the precision with which it presents many of the central concerns of feminist film theory but also for the originality with which it handles them.
Tanizaki read only a few of Sigmund Freud's early works at Tokyo Imperial University in the 1910s. Despite this, his accounts of psychic phenomena like castration anxiety and fetishism bear an uncanny resemblance to Freud's. In fact, a salient characteristic of Tanizaki's “return to the classics” is the close attention he pays to desire and sexual difference as functions of originary lack. It is as if the journey back in time is meant to prove nothing so much as the intractability of the modern, Oedipal model of subjectivity that, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, accompanied capitalism in...