Aaron Gerow's Blog, page 6

Reorienting Ozu: Hasumi Shigehiko, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Asia

As part of my research on the history of Japanese film theory, I have taken advantage of opportunities here and there to approach the subject���and individual thinkers in particular���from��various angles. One such occasion was a conference in Berkeley in 2010 centered on the place of Ozu Yasujiro within Asian cinema. I took the opportunity to triangulate some relations that, while not always direct, were suggestive not just about Ozu but also about the place of theory in��contemporary Japan. In particular, noting the often facile comparisons between Ozu and the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, I wondered if��there was not a better way to relate��the two filmmakers by considering the thinking of Hasumi Shigehiko, the famed film critic and university president who was a champion of both Ozu and Hou. Even if he denied any direct similarity between the two, his approach to the two reveals both how contemporary Japanese theoretical discourse articulates the cinema and the Ozu-qua-Hasumi context behind Hou���s reception in Japan. My contribution also served as a good��opportunity to summarize Hasumi���s approach to cinema���which can be highly theoretical even as it resists theory.

Conversations in Silence 2: Fukujuso and Queer Japanese Cinema in the 1930s

I reported on the first edition of Conversations in Silence back in April. On June 11, we held the second session at Haremame, again with Kataoka Ichiro serving as benshi and Kikuchi Naruyoshi deejaying music. This time the theme was�����LGBT��� and we showed a rare and fascinating film made by Shinko Kinema in 1935 entitled Fukujuso (director: Kawate Jiro). The film was released as a�����sound-ban,��� which means it had music and possibly sound effects on the sound track, but the sound no longer exists, so we showed it as a silent film. It is based on one of the stories in Yoshiya Nobuko���s Hana monogatari, and was the first of a couple films made at the time using that work. What was so interesting about the film was that it appears to strongly depict the love between two women.

Often considered a pioneer of shojo shosetsu, Yoshiya has garnered much interest recently, as her stories narrated in elegant Japanese��of the friendships of young women, often in boarding schools, have been interpreted through queer readings as explorations of lesbian sexuality. In the United States, for instance, Sarah Frederick at Boston University has been writing on and translating Yoshiya���s literature (here is one essay).

Rare Record of Japanese Movie Theater Advertising Troupe from 1929

A few people have been sharing online a YouTube video purporting to show street scenes in Kyoto from 1929. I was suspicious at first, since the same YouTube user previously also uploaded footage from the 1910s with sound added. But it does seem the video is a collection of authentic sound films of Japan in 1929, taken by Fox Movietone cameramen. The combination is sloppy, however, since at least one of scenes is not from Kyoto but from Kamakura.

What I find annoying is that these videos are not this user���s own films, but taken lock stock and��barrel from the Moving Image Research Collections of the University of South Carolina. You can tell that from the watermark in the footage, but the user does little to foreground where s/he took this footage from, even though the Collection website states that "The University owns the rights to most of the material held by MIRC.�����Archives, who do the hard and essential work of accumulating, preserving, and in this case, digitizing and making available online old films, should get proper credit.

Realism and the History of Japan-Soviet Film Interactions

I am currently trying to finish up my book on the history of Japanese film theory. One of the chapters I've recently worked on focused on Iwasaki Akira, arguably the most prominent leftwing critic in Japan from the 1920s to the 1970s. He���s both a legendary figure, one involved in many of the major trends in political cinema, as well as a contradictory one, as he problematically��tread the spaces between cinematic��art, Marxism, Soviet socialist realism, and humanism.

Anastasia��Fedorova��has just published a fascinating book that accounts for part of the background for a person like Iwasaki. The title ���Riarizumu no��genso��� can be translated as ���The Illusion of Realism�����and it offers a narrative that covers a significant aspect in Japanese cinema���s complex relation to realism: its interactions with Soviet cinema.��She begins by detailing how Soviet avant-garde cinema and montage theory affected the mainstream Japanese film world in the 1920s and 1930s as a form of realism, one so powerful that there was even an early attempt at Japan-USSR collaboration in the 1933 travel film, Big Tokyo, directed by Vladimir Shneiderov (the book includes a transcript of the Soviet version of the film). It was the failure of that film, she argues, that led to a different Japanese appropriation of Soviet film technique in the name of politics and national culture by the documentarist Kamei Fumio, who actually studied in Moscow. The story continues into the postwar, as she first shows how a different realism���socialist realism���affected postwar Japanese film, especially the leftwing independent films of the 1950s that have largely been ignored in scholarship in Japan and the USA. Then, in what is likely to be one of the book���s most significant contributions, she argues that Japanese leftwing films��� particular appropriation of socialist realism���her main example is Kamei���s Woman Walking Alone on the Earth (Onna hitori daichi o��yuku, 1953)���subsequently affected Soviet film by showing Russian filmmakers what a post-thaw cinema could look like.��

Kawabata and Cinema: The Ambivalence of Knowledge, Medium, and Influence

In 2014 I had the fortune of participating in an international symposium on the Nobel Prize winning novelist, Kawabata Yasunari, that took place in Paris. I wrote about that experience��here. There I spoke about Kawabata���s relationship with cinema, a topic that was an extension of my book on A Page of Madness, a film which Kawabata helped create. Through the hard work of Wada Hirofumi and others, a Japanese anthology emerged first from that conference at the end of 2016, which contains a short version of my paper on Kawabata and film (I introduced that here).��

Well, the full version in English finally��came out in January of this year. Thanks to the diligence of Michael Bourdaghs��and others, the journal Japan Forum published an issue devoted to the theme�����Kawabata Yasunari in the Twenty-First Century��� largely composed of selected papers from the��symposium. It features a wonderful piece by the novelist Tawada Yoko, as well as��thought provoking��scholarly articles by Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Kono Kensuke, Nihei Masato, Tomi Suzuki, and Wada Hirofumi.��

Conversations in Silence 1: A Page of Madness, a Benshi, and Music

I forgot to announce this before it happened, but last week on April 5th, I got to participate in a rather unique event centered on Kinugasa Teinosuke���s A Page of Madness (Kurutta ichipeiji), about which I wrote a book. At the event space Haretara Sora ni Mame Maite (meaning�����When it clears sow beans in the sky������or Haremame for short), there was a screening of the film with Kataoka Ichiro doing benshi narration and the jazz musician Kikuchi Naruyoshi deejaying music for the film. Since Haremame is a small but delightful space (with tatami mats!), we used the Blu-ray of the film I discussed earlier, with permission from Flicker Alley. I introduced the film and MC���d the after-screening discussion. It was the first in a series of three silent film events called�����Conversations in Silence��� that the three of us will be doing at Haremame.

As I mentioned in the book, there is no historical record (that I could find), of the music that was performed with the film upon its first release, or of the style of benshi narration. What I could find is that it showed at the Tokyokan narrated by Ishii Masami and Tamai Kyokuyo with music selected by Oshima Kyotaro, or at Kyoto���s Shochikuza��with Ishida Kyokka as the benshi and music arranged by Sasai Sei, to provide two instances. The great benshi Tokugawa Musei��did perform the narration at Shinjuku���s Musashinokan, and there is a chance he did it in a style similar to his explanation of��The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (check out Kyoko��Omori���s��collection of clips of Caligari��synched with a recording of the narration that Musei provided in 1968), since A��Page of Madness was influenced by that work. But Naoki Sanjugo (after whom the Naoki Prize is named), when noting Musashinokan audience members praising Musei for explaining that incomprehensible film, complained that it was contradictory for a film that rejected��intertitles, if not also conventional meaning making, to have a benshi. So there was the question of what role sound���both words and music���was supposed to play with this supposedly avant-garde film.

Murakami Haruki and Cinema

Just a quick note to say that I will be participating in an international colloquium on Murakami Haruki that will take place in Strasbourg and Paris this week. Hosted by��Antonin Bechler of the Universit�� de Strasbourg and Hitoshi Ishida of Toyo University, the "Colloque international 'Haruki Murakami au pr��sent et au futur'"��features a great set of participants, including a few from the Kawabata symposium in Paris a��few years back. I will actually appear in the Paris section of the colloquium, which will take place at the��Maison de la Culture du Japon �� Paris on March 17, just like with the Kawabata event. I will be on a panel that will focus on Murakami���s relation to cinema. It might not be well known, but Murakami was not only an avid film fan, but he actually majored in film in college, hoping to become a screenwriter. (One paper will talk about why he didn���t become one.) My talk will be a sort of continuation of my writing on Kawabata Yasunari and film, which started with the book on A Page of Madness and continued with other publications such as this. I question the tendency to discuss the relation between film and literature by presuming a notion of cinema and then attempting to find ���cinematic��� elements in literature. I ask first what concept or even theory of cinema literary figures might have before considering how that shapes their writing. For the Murakami colloquium, I take the fact that Murakami, while in general refusing to allow film adaptations of most of his work, quite readily allows students to make short films based on his works��(he told me that when at Yale), to consider whether that does not evince another conception of cinema on Murakami���s part.

Finally, a DVD (Actually a Blu-ray) of A Page of Madness Is Out

I published my book on Kinugasa Teinosuke���s silent masterpiece A Page of Madness (���������������, Kurutta ichipeiji, 1926) nearly ten years ago. One of my main regrets is that there has been no DVD of the film available for people to watch as they read my book or as the book is taught in classes. I have written about this before, but the National Film Center in Japan has the best print of the film (one that has been restored to its original silent aspect ratio) and has been trying to put out a DVD for years. Their lack of experience in publishing a DVD and some issues with Kinugasa���s family had long delayed the project. (Until recently, they didn���t even lend out the print because of that problem with the family.) I told them that��if they don���t act soon, someone else will put out a DVD, which is what happened with a cut-rate DVD of Kinugasa���s Crossroads (Jujiro, 1928) that came out in 2009.

Well, someone has. And unlike the cheap DVD of Crossroads (which is in fact not��that bad), this has actually been produced by a respectable place. The film preservationist David Shepard collaborated with Flicker Alley to put out a Blu-ray disk of A Page of Madness from a good 16mm print (likely from the once-circulating Blackhawk Films collection Shepard bought���this was probably the print I saw in graduate school when I first viewed A Page of Madness). The disk also includes��Henwar Rodakiewicz���s��Portrait of a Young Man (1925-31). As a bonus, there is an episode of CUNY TV���s "Cinema Then Cinema Now��� featuring host Jerry Carlson leading a discussion on the film with psychoanalyst Dr. Harvey Roy Greenberg and film historian Joseph Anderson (not all they say is accurate, but the discussion is interesting nonetheless). As an online extra, Flicker Alley has posted on their site one of my essays on the film, entitled�����A Page of Madness: Understanding a Work in its Time," that I penned when I was first writing the book. You can access that��here.

Woman Rush Hour and Political Humor in Japan

I like a good laugh, and that is one reason I have always been interested in comedy in Japan. I wrote a book about a comedian turned film director (who didn���t shoot that many comedies), have often sought out comedy films, and even have made going to lots of yose to watch rakugo and manzai one of my goals this year in Japan. I sometimes consider it a challenge to myself, as jokes can in some cases be one of the hardest aspects to understand about a foreign culture, but it also is a way of approaching Japan from a different direction.

The manzai team Woman Rush Hour did an act on TV recently that has made me think about comedy in Japan again.

One difference that observers have noted regarding humor in Japan is the seeming lack of political satire in Japan. Although it seems that comedy in the United States, and in many other countries as well, is dominated by political humor, to the point that such comedy can be more trusted by young people for its political analysis than regular news media, there appears to be virtually none of that in Japan. I���ve read many bad explanations of that, ranging from the old claim (which I in fact encountered when I was younger) that Japanese don���t have much of a sense of humor to the Japanese-supported stereotype that such humor is not welcome in a society focused on harmony. The first is simply a product of orientalist ignorance (anyone who has been to a yose knows that Japanese comedians can be hilarious) and the second just ignores history. In fact, there have been plenty of cases of political humor from the Edo era on. Just listen to Enoken���s amazing�����Is This What They Call Freedom?��� from 1954���which satirizes American H-bomb tests, the Cold War ���peace,��� Japan���s��subservient relation to the USA, the SDF, and postwar Japanese politics���and you can see there has been very biting political comedy on a popular level from long ago.

The Nichigei Film Festival: Cinema, the Emperor, and The Solitary One

In coming to Japan for this year of research, I was eagerly expecting my first��attendance at the Yamagata, Tokyo, and Filmex film festivals in eight years, even if I knew their plusses and��minuses. But I was also very pleased to go to a festival that I learned about for the first time: the Nichigei Film Festival, which took place in December.

���Nichigei��� stands for the Nihon Daigaku Geijutsu��Gakubu, or Nihon University College of Art. The study of film at Nichidai goes back to at least 1929 and has been one of the core courses of the College of Art since it was formed in 1949. The focus has been on production, with such graduates as��Ishii Gakury��, Matsuoka J��ji, Kanai Katsu, and Adachi Masao, although��there are also students researching film history. Faculty have included Ushihara Kiyohiko and Tanaka Jun���ichir��.

One of the current professors is Koga Futoshi, who has had a long career starting at the Japan Foundation and continuing with the Asahi Shinbun newspaper. At both, he organized a large��number of film events and festivals. He still writes a lot on film (check out his blog) and was a member of the Asahi ratings panel with me at the TIFF. After��becoming a��professor at Nichigei, Koga has taught a variety of courses, but quite interestingly��one��for third year students is about film programming. As the main assignment for the course, students have to plan and put on a film festival of their own that will show at regular commercial theater. This is the Nichigei Film Festival. Each student begins by having to put together serious proposals for a festival, from which the best are selected and presented to��Eurospace, the art theater in Shibuya, which then selects the one to put on. The students then have to arrange for renting the films, creating a catalog, arranging for advertising, and inviting guests. They then have to run the week-long festival once it starts.