Aaron Gerow's Blog, page 12

Tanaka Masasumi

A shocking piece of news at the beginning of the year was the sudden passing of the film scholar Tanaka Masasumi on 30 December 2011. Tanaka-san was returning home after the benshi Sawato Midori's year-end party and collapsed at the entrance to his apartment. He was only 65 years old. 

Tanaka-san was insistent on not being called an academic, but his scholarship was better than a lot of professional academics I know. He was most famous for his work on Ozu Yasujiro. Over the years, he published not only important analyses of Ozu's work such as Ozu Yasujirō no hō e: Modanizumu eiga shiron, but also accumulated and published over several volumes, Ozu's writings and diaries, such as Ozū Yasujirō zenhatsugen: 1933–1945. But Ozu was not his only passion: he also helped write and edit books on Naruse Mikio, Shimizu Hiroshi, and Mori Masayuki. He contributed essays to many publications (I used his essay on prewar jidaigeki from Jidaigeki eiga to wa nani ka in my period film class this semester--a fine piece that is one of the best surveys of jidaigeki's place in modernity). His breadth of knowledge and scholarship will be greatly missed.

Kitano Takeshi Meets Yamamura Koji

March has been an extremely busy month for me. I have a backlog of things to talk about on this blog, but to get at least one entry in this month, I thought I'd mention an interesting "encounter" that is now visible on TV.

On the website for the NHK television show, Takeshi Art Beat, there is a clip of the new opening animation for the show as it transfers over to NHK World. It was made by Yamamura Koji, the Japanese animator whose Atamayama (Mt. Head) was nominated for an Academy Award. It of course features Beat Takeshi (subject of my book KItano Takeshi), who has been hosting a number of art shows since Hana-bi made "artist" part of his persona. The animation follows the usual practice of dividing Takeshi into two figures (here "director" versus "comedian" doing his Comaneci gag) but interestingly mediates them through cubism. That may be a reference to one of Takeshi's earlier art shows, Takeshi no dare demo Picasso, but perhaps it is also a statement that the only way to view Takeshi is through the cubist convolutions of different spaces and times, a view that itself must include both popular commercial media and the experimental.

Awashima Chikage

The NHK news reported that the actress Awashima Chikage has passed away, dying of pancreatic cancer on February 16 at the age of 87. Foreign fans of Japanese cinema may not know her that much, but she was one of the great screen performers, one who was especially adept at comedy. Gaining fame first as a top star at Takarazuka (she primarily played female roles), she signed with Shochiku in 1950 and played in a variety of films, from Kinoshita Keisuke's postwar satire, Carmen's Pure Love (1952), to Toyoda Shiro's warm drama, Meoto zenzai (1955). She was a feature in the "Ekimae" comedy films, but foreign viewers might know her from Ozu Yasujiro's Early Spring (1956) or Kobayashi Masaki's The Human Condition (1959), but I will most remember her from Kawashima Yuzo's brilliant comedy, Kashima ari (1959), one of my favorite films. Her way of jibing, but also making an earnest play for Frankie Sakai using the phrase "tsun tsun" pierced my heart as well (though I wouldn't have run away like Frankie did -  and as Kawashima heroes usually do). She continued acting into her old age, appearing for instance in Somai Shinji's The Friends (1994), or on stage, even as late as last year. She won a slew of awards for her performances, including Blue Ribbon awards and a Mainichi Film Award. 

The Birth of Japanese Film

This announcement is also a little late, but the final volume in Shinwasha's excellent series of books on Japanese film history has finally come out. I reported on at least two of the previous volumes on this site, one on audiences (in which I have a contribution), and another on cinema's relation to literature. In a twist, the last book in the series is on the first years of Japanese film and, as with a number of books in the series, is edited by Iwamoto Kenji. 

This anthology features articles by such scholars as Tajima Ryoichi, Koga Futoshi, Irie Yoshirō (who has a piece in the RJCS issue I did), Usui Michiko, Kobayashi Sadahiro (who has a piece in the Makino festschrift we did), Ueda Manabu, and Itakura Fumiaki, on such topics as the first Japanese film exhibition, Komada Koyo, Kobayashi Kisaburo, utsushi-e, home projectors, early movie theaters, benshi, the relationship with misemono, and early color. Many of the contributions are by young researchers, perhaps signaling the birth of a new phase of Japanese early film research. 

Makino Mamoru, Film Studies, and Archiving

There were two things that happened this fall revolving about Makino Mamoru that are worth noting. Makino, for those who don't know him, is the filmmaker, film historian, and collector who has not only produced important scholarship such as his history of Japanese censorship, but also collected materials essential for the study of Japanese film history. Markus Nornes and I edited a festschrift for him, In Praise of Film Studies, as well as dedicated our Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies to him. 

The first big thing was the publication of a collection of his writings, Eigagaku no michishirube, by Bunsei Shoin. It was edited by Sato Yo, a fine young scholar who has been doing some excellent research on early film critics and helping Makino-san a lot recently. The book contains Makino's long-running work "Gaku no susume" that was serialized in Kinema junpo. It is a personalized account of the state of film studies in Japan, and Markus and I appear several times (even--ugh!--through photos!). The anthology also includes some of his other articles on documentary film history, proletarian film, film bibliography, and the history of Japanese film theory (a subject I am also working on: note the special issue of the RJCS). A complete table of contents is available on the Bunsei Shoin site. Markus and I also wrote short recommendations for the publication. Bunsei Shoin, by the way, is currently undertaking a full-color reprinting of all the issues of Kinema junpo from 1927 to 1940 (the period that has not been reprinted so far). This is a reprint that any library with a collection on Japanese film should have. 

Morita Yoshimitsu's Death

The news reports are relating the sad news that Morita Yoshimitsu, the director of such great films as Family Game (Kazoku gemu, 1983), passed away on December 20 of acute liver failure. He was only 61 years old.

Morita was always a complicated, contradictory director: fascinating and frustrating but always worth watching. He emerged from the world of independent filmmaking, becoming one of the first to theatrically release an 8mm feature film (Live in Chigasaki in 1978), and later independently financing his 35mm debut (No yo na mono, or Something Like It, 1981). Family Game, which I wrote about in Julian Stringer and Alistair Phillips's Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts, earned him a reputation abroad as a great social satirist, but as I argue in the piece, it also deftly intersected with popular discourses about postmodernism and fashion. After the film, Morita declared himself a fashionable or pop director (ryuko kantoku) in ads he took out in magazines, and went on to direct quite a number of questionable movies starring idols and tarento. Even with his lesser films, however, you always had a sense Morita was self-consciously thinking about the media environment, if not cinema itself, and some of his best subsequent work, such as Haru (1996), which is largely composed of text messages, are experimental in one way or another. The marvelous monstrosity that is the crime thriller Mohohan (2002) is in fact a critique of our virtual media reality. While some of the idol films are not inspiring, small works like The Mamiya Brothers (Mamiya kyodai, 2006) are absolutely endearing. 

Reviving Somai Shinji

Tokyo FilmEx concluded over the weekend. I was not able to attend, but I did write an essay for the catalog for their small Kawashima Yuzo retrospective. The other big retrospective they did was of the films of Somai Shinji, arguably the best Japanese director who is still not sufficiently known abroad. Somai was Japan's next master of the long take, after Mizoguchi Kenji, but since he worked a lot in youth film, a neglected genre, his work was not picked up by the arbiters of taste introducing Japanese film abroad in the 1980s. I personally think Typhoon Club, his brilliant evocation of youthful anxiety and death, is one of the greatest Japanese films ever made, but no one has ever tried to release it abroad with English subtitles. 

Probably in time with the FilmEx retro, a new anthology on Somai, entitled Yomigaeru Somai Shinji, has been published in Japanese. (The English subtitle is "A Film Director in the Japanese Post-Studio Era.") As if emphasizing the above issue, the obi for the book declares: "The world still does not know Somai." It will take some more work in other languages for that to happen, but hopefully this book is a step. 

The Japanese Film Ephemera Collection at Yale

Wow, it has been a long time since my last post! Sorry about that! It's been a busy semester, but I also have found few things to write about. But now I have one.

The Yale University Library has finally made public an important archival collection on Japanese film that I helped create. It is the Japanese Film Ephemera Collection which is housed in Manuscripts and Archives, inside Sterling Memorial Library. 

Those who study film history in general know that ephemera can be important sources for understanding the way cinema works. Ephemera can include such things as posters, stills, magazines, handbills, advertisements, and programs. One may think that the only real thing that matters in studying a movie is the film itself, but as years of research in film history have shown, especially under the rubric of reception studies, the actual meaning that real audiences garner from a film is not exclusively the result of the text or of the director's intention. Viewers play a significant role in working with the text to create its meaning, interpreting it and adding their own experiences and feelings. Critics and other figures try to shape the text as well, and film companies, knowing the role of audiences quite well, also in advertisements and other publicity material try to not just get people to fork out money, but to form certain expectations that will frame how they view the film (informing people of the genre is one of the main examples of this). The notion that reception shapes a film is old hat for those of us who study Japanese film, because we know that a major portion of Japanese film history was dominated by the figure of the benshi, a person who took what was never a complete text and worked with the audience to complete it. Ephemera are thus crucial for understanding how a movie became a living thing amongst real people in its own time, an experience that might have been quite different from us watching a DVD of the film on our laptop.

Seo Mitsuyo, Pioneer Anime Director, Passes Away

I heard the rumor some months ago, but I finally came across some articles to make this official: Seo Mitsuyo, the pioneer Japanese animator who directed the first feature length Japanese animated films, died last year, on 24 August 2010. He was 99 years old. For some reason, the passing of such a historic figure has not been officially reported in the press or been the subject of (much deserving) obituaries. My confirmation has just been two articles that Ohara Atsushi published in the Asahi shinbun here and here. There is no news on the exact cause of death.

Seo was a fascinating figure. He first studied painting, but interested in animation, he got involved in the animation group in Prokino and was even arrested for his activities. It is thus ironic that a leftist ended up making some of Japan's most infamous wartime animated propaganda films, and Seo was apparently long ashamed of that part of his career. But we should not forget that he was an innovator, a figure who, along with Masaoka Kenzo, with whom he sometimes worked, laid the foundation for the Japanese animation world we know today. He was the first to introduce the multiplane camera to Japan in Ari-chan in 1941 and then directed Momotaro no umiwashi in 1942, which even at 37 minutes was billed as Japan's first feature-length animated film. (My wife has released that film on DVD with English subtitles as part of the Roots of Japanese Anime collection.)

Japanese Cinema and Literature

The relationship between Japanese cinema and literature has remained a rich topic of study not only because of the long history of adaptations of literary works into film, but also because artists on both sides have been intrigued, both for artistic and political reasons, with the potentials posed by the other medium. Some of this research can contribute to the ongoing discussion of adaptation, but there's always been the danger of much of it falling into dull comparisons of the original and the copy or trite claims about "visual" literature or about "literary" film. My writings on the topic, which include essays on Tanizaki, Akutagawa, and about the word and image in Japanese cinema, as well as a book on A Page of Madness, have tried to avoid these pitfalls by focusing on how each medium has pictured the other, within a larger discursive field defined by conflicts over the definitions of image and language.

Toeda Hirokazu of Waseda University is the preeminent literature scholar working on these issues in Japan, and he has just come out with an exciting edited volume as part of Shinwasha's Nihon eigashi sosho series (another volume of which featured my essay on Japanese film criticism).