A Retrospective on Japanese Retrospectives
By Aaron Gerow

Retrospectives should ideally be opportunities not just to see, but also to discourse about film: to talk, write, and investigate its meaning and history. Japan's largest film festival, the Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF), unfortunately no longer has a retrospective section, so Tokyo FILMeX has taken up the slack in its ten-year existence and programmed a number of important reexaminations of lesser-known Japanese directors such as Uchida Tomu and Okamoto Kihachi, many of which have traveled abroad. Last year's retro was their first thematic one, focusing not on a single auteur, but on the output of the Shochiku studios during the 1920s and 1930s: it's what they call "Nippon Modern" — the era of Shimazu Yasujiro, Shimizu Hiroshi, Gosho Heinosuke, and the early Ozu Yasujiro.

Such a thematic retro demands an explanation — why these films have been chosen and grouped together — but beyond a short essay in the main catalog, FILMeX does not offer such clarification by producing catalogs with its retrospectives. This is certainly partially a factor of its limited size — much smaller than the TIFF — but the fact is that there are no retrospectives of commercial feature films in Japan for which catalogs are produced. Certainly there are other countries that share the same fate, but with Japan, I think it reflects central contradictions in the way that cinema is shown and thought about in Japan, if not also the way Japanese cinema itself is conceived.

Sato Tadao

The short essay on "Nippon Modern" in the FilmEx catalog was penned by Sato Tadao, one of the deans of Japanese film critics. He emphasizes how the prewar Shochiku style, derived in part from what director Henry Kotani learned in Hollywood and taught to young filmmakers when the company started in 1920, took advantage of editing to enable even amateur actors to perform well, while still seeming natural and contemporary. This he contrasts to Nikkatsu, which utilized professional actors from the stage and thus produced directors such as Mizoguchi Kenji, who challenged his performers with long, grueling takes. Shochiku's form was emblematized by Shimazu, who would take practically amateur actors and, without storyboards, construct their performances through precise use of closeups and analytical editing. Sato recognizes the studio's variety, which could range from Ozu, who was notorious for forcing his actors into a mold and storyboarding their every move, to Shimizu, who increasingly let his often truly amateur performers (such as children) roam a natural landscape. All, however, share aspects of a studio style that David Bordwell has termed "piecemeal decoupage."[1]

These are all incisive observations, even if they are cursorily rendered. The problem is that they circulate around a crucial, but curiously unspoken question: What is the basis of this style — and hence this retrospective — and why is it "modern"? The cynical answer is that this program derives from the desire of Shochiku, which sponsored the retro and hosted the screenings, to promote its old catalog and increase its contemporary value by declaring its stylishness. But there is another peculiar, but central line of thought behind this.

Sato's piece echoes comments he has written in his books, one of which is particularly instructive when thinking about the history of thinking about cinema in Japan: his monograph, The History of Japanese Film Theory. It is a groundbreaking book because no one else has composed such an extensive introduction in one volume to the rich history of film theory in Japan; too many have ignored that prolific conceptual tradition. Sato, however, displays a peculiar relationship to his subject, one that is exhibited in his discussion of Shochiku. He devotes a chapter of a book on theory to the Shochiku style in part to prove the central thesis of this work: that Japanese cinematic culture has not possessed a truly theoretical tradition, and that theory, while nonetheless important, has instead tended to reside on the set in the "fragmentary conversations that pass from the director's mouth into the ears of his assistant directors or staff."[2] This notion of practice as theory is attractive, and can serve as one model for producing alternative histories of film theory (which mostly assume that not only the canonical works of theory, but also the concept of theory itself is produced in the West). But it also involves a telling act of denial and displacement. The next chapter in Sato's book discusses the place of montage in this history, but it does so disparagingly, complaining of the excesses caused by the intellectual fashion for montage in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and again emphasizing the "unique techniques of Japanese cinema" developed on the set in the 1930s, ones that viewed editing used to save a poor performance or to add vitality to a weak scene as "deception" (gomakashi).[3]

Although there is a certain politics of realism lying behind such comments,[4] what interests me is their failure to consider how Shochiku directors like Shimazu, who are celebrated for constructing performance through editing in one chapter, are not considered as engaging in the "deception" derided in the next. Clearly the argument (though an unstated one) is that the Shochiku films were more naturalistic, using montage to bring out what was already there in these nearly amateur actors. But even if we can credit directors such as Shimizu with mastery of a certain naturalism, we should recognize that just as with Hollywood naturalism, which depends on the effacement of film form for its success, so any Shochiku naturalism also requires the elision of montage. More importantly for our concerns, it also requires the effacement of the concept of montage (and of how it was discussed in Japan at the time), or at least its displacement onto other films (or into another book chapter).

Our Neighbor Miss Yae

One does see here a sort of post-facto rewriting of the history of the theorization of the long take in Japan, stretching a conceptual belief in that form possibly back into the 1920s, when in fact its major theorists, such as Sugiyama Heiichi, were formulating their proto-Bazinian critique of montage in the late 1930s. Perhaps those on the set were working in advance of the theorists (even though again, most Shochiku directors, other than Shimizu, were using shorter takes), but this account of a practice-driven conceptualization of Shochiku naturalism fails to account for crucial elements of that studio's film practice. First, the privileging of the inarticulate, but naturally attuned filmmaker elides intellectual directors such as Ushihara Kiyohiko, one of Shochiku's top cineastes up until the 1930s, who happened to edit Eiga kagaku kenkyu (Scientific Studies of Cinema), one of the crucial analytical journals of the time, and later became a professor at Nihon University. (Ushihara was also tellingly absent from the FILMeX retro.) With the filmmakers he does consider, Sato skillfully details the differences in the major directors' approaches to naturalism and editing, but overall the effacement of montage from this discussion detracts attention from the crucial tension between style and naturalism in the studio's output. What are we to make of the peculiarly obtrusive montage of clouds, baseball and thunder-like sound at the end of Shimazu's Our Neighbor Miss Yae (Tonari no Yae-chan, 1934), or of the narratively enigmatic camera movement following nothing and ending up at a lamppost at the end of Ozu's Woman of Tokyo (Tokyo no onna, 1933)? Such foregrounding of style, whether ultimately meaningful or not, is an example of the sorts of "flourishes" that David Bordwell has identified as a marker of 1920s and 1930s Japanese film style.[5] In a cinematic environment where displays of cinematic virtuosity were the norm, perhaps we should consider playful uses of montage and editing as less "deception" than as decorative moments, as experiments in skill. The occasional use of montage as a display of virtuosity, crucially informed by not just the examples of, but also the writings on, Soviet film and French Impressionism,[6] is also a central factor in Shochiku filmmaking.

The question that Bordwell does not ask is where film theory intersects with these flourishes — whether there is not a conceptual context that renders these more than just decoration. If, in Bordwell's case, the elision of Japanese film theory allows him in part to naturalize Hollywood as the norm against which Japanese prewar style is judged as decoration or not (omitting any contemporary Japanese explanations that may see it as more essential to cinema), in Sato's case it allows him to naturalize the Japaneseness of the films he considers — to present the "unique techniques of Japanese cinema" not as deriving from a complex and politically fraught struggle between Western cultural powers and Japan, or between uneven and contradictory structures of modernity within Japan, but as the natural outgrowth of Japanese craftsmanship founded in an unquestioned bodily labor and resonance with tradition. "Nippon Modern," while potentially containing oxymoronic terms, can then present "modern and fashionable movies" that "glisten with freshness even today" (to quote the advertising handbill) precisely because history — especially the history of intellectually confronting cinema and modernity — has been forgotten.

Sato is one of the few to contemplate the rich history of Japanese thinking about cinema, but his way of divorcing filmmaking and film viewing from film theory functions in the end, I suspect, as one of the ways the concept of Japanese cinema itself has been constructed in Japan. Japanese cinema exists to the degree it cannot allow for overt theorization, that it has been de-theorized and made naturally Japanese.[7] By taking up the subject of Japanese film theory, Sato has possibly come closest to shaking the foundations of this paradigm, but the continued presentation of film history without the film thinking in festival retrospectives in Japan is one bit of evidence for its continued existence, a sign of a larger malaise where cinema is demoted by being rendered un-thought. Certainly there are great studies of Japanese cinema in Japan, but they are overshadowed by a culture-wide ignorance of film history, a pathetic degree of support for advanced film study (academic or otherwise), and societal and industrial trivialization of independent film criticism (ergo the contemporary crisis of film criticism in Japan).

Film retrospectives should be opportunities to discover new cinemas. Perhaps, in this case, adding some public — and published — thinking to the viewing can be an opportunity to discover a new Japanese cinema, one that was never not there before, but that was forgotten along with the history of conceptualizing that cinema.[8]

Aaron Gerow
© FIPRESCI 2010

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