Picturing Japaneseness

Film and Culture Series

by Darrell William Davis

-- Film Quarterly

Genres: Film, Japan

352 pages, Hardcover

First published February 15, 1996

About the author

Darrell William Davis is senior lecturer at the School of Theatre, Film, and Dance at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He is the author of Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese Film.

Reviews

[Ad · Rating 5 out of 5]

War can lead to cinema in which the own victories are blown up out of proportion, or in which the enemy is ridiculed (as in the war films of Frank Capra). In the Japanese film world, things were different. At the beginning of WWII, films showed the suffering and determination of soldiers and the population. And instead of ridiculing the enemy, Japanese nationalism found expression in films about traditional values and pure national identity - by describing the own heritage as something sacred. There was a certain bombast to these films, reason why Davis speaks about "monumental style," but these were a far cry from crude propaganda efforts. Examples are "The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums" and "Genroku Chushingura" by Mizoguchi, or "The Abe Clan" by Kumagai Hisatora. Not only the contents show pure Japaneseness, also the film technique is as far removed from Hollywood as possible. Interestingly, such films were not only made during the war, later examples are "Gate of Hell" by Kinugasa and "Kagemusha" and "Ran" by Kurosawa, as Davis writes. We could add examples from more recent times as well: nationalistic films as "Dolls," "Zatoichi" and the late yakuza films as "Outrage" by Kitano Takeshi.

[James Crawford · Rating 3 out of 5]

originally got this book hoping it would cover material from World War II, but that did not prove to be the focus of the book. It's an examination of various styles of Japanese films and, at times, the book reads more like a thesis than a regular book.

The book does talk about Japan in the 30's, and the growing militarization of Japan. It notes the backlash against Western music and films, and the growing emphasis on Japanese tradition. It also notes how the military got more control over films. It talks about how various laws controlling what could be made came about, and how writers ended up agreeing to emphasize positive Japanese things, and emphasize negative things about non-Japanese.

Here's a sample of why this book is somewhat hard to understand: “A provisional definition of the monumental style is as follows: it is a pre-war cinema permeated by a hieratic, sacramental appropriation of a classical heritage in order to promote an apotheosis of Japanese national identity.”

There are probably better ways to get an idea across.

The vast majority of the book is a detailed examination of some of the Japanese films, and the categories of films that these fell into. For a person really, really into the details of Japanese films, this would be a good book, but for the casual reader, it's a book to pass over.