Prologue 1 Setting the Scene

Notes Prologue 1. For Japanese names I have generally used the order used in Japan: surname followed by first name. However, for personages that are well known outside Japan, I have referred to them as would film critics, theorists, and audiences: first name followed by surname. 2. In fact North American cultural anthropologists have tried to do away with the “culture concept,” thereby essentially undermining their own discipline— much to the amusement of sociologists—and certainly contravening the empirical trend found in most societies, which firmly insist on the existence of their own unique cultures. 3. Although I wonder if the financial is really ignored. Recently my own children startled me by announcing that they could not believe that a certain famous director had helped produce what they thought was a terrible film. They expected him to have a better sense of where to put his money. 4. Bruner, of course, relies on the work of many others—Barthes, Ricoeur, Chomsky, Kermode—to make his points. 1 Setting the Scene 1. In contrast, the science fiction writer William Gibson (2001) seems well aware of such conceptual loci and even situates them on actual bridges—the meta- phor made real—in his novels. Building on Augé’s (1995) terms, non-places become the birthplaces of innovation. 2. Silent nonnarrative films were shown throughout the end of the nineteenth century. For example, Japan saw its first film in 1898 (cf. Anderson and Richie 1982). The first narrative film was The Great Train Robbery (1903) directed and photographed by Edwin S. Porter in New Jersey. Interestingly, the first continuous narrative film (sixty or more minutes long) was made in 1906 in Australia by Charles Tait. This was the story of the notorious outback bush- ranger Ned Kelly, The Story of the Kelly Gang, a film that has been remade numerous times since. The first feature-length film made in Europe was by the Frenchman Michel Carre (L’Enfant prodigue, 1907). D.W. Griffith directed the first film made in Hollywood, In Old California (1910). The move from the 184 Notes East to the West coast in the United States was to have important consequences for the development of the film industry (for more details, there is an excellent online source at www.filmsite.org/grea.html). As Atherton (n.d.) has argued in relation to photography, as a modern “art” filmmaking is global largely because of its short history, no one society can claim superiority in the art by virtue of having been doing it longer than anywhere else. 3. I am thinking here of Sessue Hayakawa in the silent era and various Latin Americans such as Carmen Miranda or Desi Arnaz in the sound era. 4. France and Italy especially pushed for trade protection against U.S. films and, later, television programs as part of their postwar cultural reconstruc- tion in 1946–1947. Recently the U.S. film maker Quentin Tarantino has waded into this debate, blaming British actors for the collapse of the British film industry! The actor Sir Ian McKellen has responded by pointing out the role of financers and producers who don’t fund the local. 5. On the need for a mass education system to achieve this, theorists as diverse as Althusser (1984) and Gellner (1988) are agreed. 6. Ivy devotes two chapters in her Discourses of the Vanishing (1995) to an analysis of the work Yanagita Kunio put into the tidying up of the originally rather gritty and incoherent Tales of Tono, the collection of folktales that has come to stand for the peasant “soul” of Japan. He did no more than the brothers Grimm had done in Germany, a century earlier. 7. As I will discuss below, I am not happy with the concept of ideologies as generally understood; I prefer the notion of dominant mythologies. 8. In arguing that myths are also dialogic, I am arguing here against Bakhtin who believed myth was an “absolute form of thought” (1981:367) along with ideology. I would argue that both myth and ideology aim to be absolute forms of thought, but are defeated in this by continuing to be expressed in everyday language, as well as through rituals, despite their existence in formulaic stories. Traditional rituals might not be dialogic, but by Bakhtin’s own definition language always is: “Thus at any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio- ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth, all given a bodily form” (1981:291). 9. Even children as young as eight years of age, in my experience, are capable of this. I did a small research project on children’s opinions about the first Harry Potter film and found they held a vast array of opinions about the movie, many of them deeply critical about what had been done to a story they knew very well. 10. O’Flinn (1999) disagrees with the notion that Dracula is polyphonic in the sense in which Bakhtin means it, since all the characters are British, but this seems an odd caveat since Bakhtin’s analysis was partially based on Dickens’ novels with their huge casts of British characters. 11. I take up this point in more detail in Chapter ten. 12. For a detailed discussion of these relationships and how they are used in film, see Bordwell (1985). Notes 185 2 Portrait of an Artist as Filmmaker 1. A brief list of this Japanese work includes Tasogawa’s Kurosawa vs Hariuddo (Kurosawa versus Hollywood) (2006); Tsuchiya’s Kurosawa-san (2002); Nishimura’s Kurosawa Akira: Oto to Eizo (Akira Kurosawa: Sound and Image) (1990); and Sato’s Kurosawa Akira no sekai (Akira Kurosawa’s World) (1969). 2. The historian Miriam Silverberg (2007) nicely documents this era, borrow- ing the term “montage” from film editing, in order to capture the heteroge- neity and rapidity of the urban lifestyle in prewar Japan. The anthropologist Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney (2006) documents the wide Western and Eastern education that elite young men of the era had. 3. Kurosawa’s relationship with Dostoevsky and his films as dialogic and inter- textual are best explored by Goodwin (1993). 4. Cazdyn offers us an interesting analysis of Rashomon in which he asserts, “What finally emerges is Kurosawa himself—Kurosawa the risk-taker, Kurosawa the free agent” (2003:242). 5. Galbraith (2001) notes that Kurosawa wrote many “typical” war film scripts during this time. 6. It remained a favorite irony of Kurosawa (1982), that his film They Who Step on the Tiger’s Tail (Tora no O wo Fumu Otokotachi, 1945) was banned by both governments for different reasons: once for its irreverence toward samurai traditions and later for its reverence of samurai values. 7. Kurosawa notes that after one of two important strikes at Toho Studies in 1946, communist party members came to dominate the union (1982). 8. Benshi did not just translate or read the storyboards, but elaborated the entire story—often narrating the interior states of the characters (see Standish 2005). 9. On this see Yoshimoto (2000), whose massive book on Kurosawa is an attempt to rescue his work from the orientalist and eroticizing theorizing of Western film specialists. 10. In a recent UK poll of the greatest films of the twentieth century, Rashomon and Seven Samurai both came in the top ten. Directors and critics such as Denys Arcand, George Armitage, John Boorman, Lewis Gilbert, Taylor Hackford, Ann Hui, Jim Jarmusch, Richard Lester, Gillies Mackinnon, Babak Payami, Philip Saville, and Santosh Sivan voted for the latter; while Ray Anderssen, Gillian Armstrong, Jana Bokova, Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Joe Dante, Ernest Dickerson, Randa Haines, Norman Jewison, Paul Mazursky, Janvir Mokammel, Digvijay Singh, and Paul Verhoeven voted for the former. Critics had Kurosawa at number six of the top ten great filmmakers of all times; directors placed him third behind Orson Welles and Frederico Fellini. 11. In his book (1995) Peter Dale deconstructions some of the most idiosyncratic and persistent themes of this discourse. 12. Oshima wrote a scathing essay on the American film and the cultural danger it poses to non-U.S. filmmakers (1992). 186 Notes 3 Rashomon: The Problem of Subjectivity 1. The commoner in Rashomon says this when he hears the final version of the story (Richie 1987:86). 2. I refer here to what was in the year 2004 the number one television drama series in the United States: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (Anthony Zuiker, 2000–present). CSI made clear its own imaginative link to Kurosawa with its episode Rashomama, aired April 27, 2006. 3. Eco’s Holmes-like investigator in The Name of the Rose (1983) famously mis- reads clues all throughout the novel, finally only discovering the murderer almost by accident, like Sam Spade, after various adventures and near-death experiences. The truth, it would seem, is never easy to discover. The reference here to Dashiell Hammett’s detective is also relevant since Kurosawa knew Hammett’s work as we shall see in chapter nine. 4. There was a complex hierarchy within the samurai as well as a division between samurai (as warriors) and aristocrats in ancient Japan. A high-status couple would not have been travelling alone, nor would the woman have been exposed to the elements—she would have travelled inside a litter with the screens drawn. 5. The Japanese verb used by Masago to describe what happened to her, okasu (to rape), also means to commit an error, to sin, to break, and to violate.

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