Japan's Film Theory and Avant-Garde Documentary
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REFIGURING ACTUALITY: JAPAN’S FILM THEORY AND AVANT-GARDE DOCUMENTARY MOVEMENT, 1950s-1960s BY YURIKO FURUHATA B.A., INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY, 1996 M.A., UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO, 2001 A.M., BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2004 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AT BROWN UNIVERSITY PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY 2009 ! © Copyright 2009 by Yuriko Furuhata ! This dissertation by Yuriko Furuhata is accepted in its present form by the Department of Comparative Literature as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date___________________ _________________________________ Rey Chow, Advisor Date___________________ _________________________________ Réda Bensmaïa, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date___________________ _________________________________ Mary Ann Doane, Reader Date___________________ _________________________________ Thomas Lamarre, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date___________________ _________________________________ Sheila Bonde, Dean of the Graduate School ! """! VITA Yuriko Furuhata (b. 1973, Kanagawa, Japan) received her B.A. in American Studies from International Christian University in 1996, and her M.A. in Foreign Languages and Literatures from University of New Mexico in 2001. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Brown University in 2009. She has taught at University of New Mexico and Brown University. In 2008 she joined the faculty in the Department of East Asian Studies at McGill University. Her publications in English and Japanese appeared in the following journals and anthologies: New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, Screen, VOL, and Wakamatsu Kôji: Hankenryoku no shôzô. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project would not have been possible without the intellectual stimulation, constant encouragement, and lasting friendship of the following people. First and foremost, I want to thank my dissertation advisors and readers, who generously offered their thoughtful criticism and insight on this project, and always pushed me to expand my horizons: Rey Chow, Réda Bensmaïa, Mary Ann Doane, and Thomas Lamarre. I also want to thank several notable Japanese scholars and filmmakers who helped my research in and outside Japan: Hirasawa Go, Wakamatsu Kôji, Matsumoto Toshio, and Adachi Masao. There are many others who extended their support in the spirit of solidarity throughout the course of this project; in particular I want to thank my dear friends and fellow graduate students at the departments of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Teresa Villa-Ignacio deserves special thanks for her excellent copy-editing and feedback as well as her unwavering friendship. Thanks also goes to Tess Takahashi for her insightful comments on earlier drafts. My deep gratitude also goes to my family in Japan and Canada, especially to my grandmother who passed away before this project was completed. It was she who supported my graduate studies in the first place. Finally, I wish to thank Marc Steinberg for spending countless hours listening to my ideas, preventing me from frivolous meandering, and being my best and closest ally through our many adventures. ! "! TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS……………..………………………………………......….vii INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………...1 CHAPTER I. METAMORPHOSIS: THE ELLIPTIC-DIALECTICAL MOVEMENT OF THE AVANT-GARDE AND THE DOCUMENTARY………………………………………..9 The Genealogy of the Japanese Avant-garde ……………………………………...11 Metamorphosis.…………………………………………………………………….25 Plasticity of the Masses.……………………………………………………………33 Disney Animation and Marxism.…………………………………………………..44 II. THE RISE OF THE AVANT-GARDE DOCUMENTARY MOVEMENT AND THE DEMISE OF PURE LITERATURE……………………………………………………..52 Freeze-Frame, Still Frame, and Extreme Close-Up………………………………..57 The Emergence of the Avant-garde Documentary Movement…………………….68 The Actuality of Pure Literature…………………………………………………...80 From Material Existence to the Temporal Presence of Actuality………………….92 III.THE WALL OF LANGUAGE AND THE MICROPOLITICS OF PERCEPTION……………………………………………………………….………103 The Generality of Language and the Specificity of the Mechanically Produced Image……………………………………………………………………………...105 Naming and Metamorphosis……………………………………………………...122 Minute Perceptions and Woman in the Dunes……………………………………135 IV. ARTIFACTUALITY, PERIODICITY, AND CINEMA…………………………..151 Periodicity and Expiration………………………………………………………. 155 News vs. Archive…………………………………………………………………168 The Citation of Journalistic Actuality…………………………………………….174 The Art of Artifice………………………………………………………………..185 The Emergence of the Art Theatre Guild………………………………………...190 V. RETURNING TO ACTUALITY: FÛKEIRON AND THE LANDSCAPE FILM....195 “Homogeneous Landscapes” and the Cartography of Power………………...…..203 Formal Appropriations of Actuality Films………………………………...……..216 The Landscape as Diagram…………………………………………………….....224 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………230 ILLUSTRATIONS……………………………………………………………………..240 vi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1. A portrait of Hanada Kiyoteru (1909-1974)……………………....…………..10 Figure 2. A fantastic figure of rokurokubi by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849)……….48 Figure 3. An image of Sea Bonz (Umibôzu) by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861)……...51 Figure 4. The opening shot of Woman in the Dunes……………………………………..61 Figure 5. An extreme close-up of a woman’s throat in Woman in the Dunes…………...64 Figure 6. A weaver’s body in Nishijin…………………………………………………...65 Figure 7. A stonemason at work in The Song of Stone…………………………………..65 Figure 8. A shot of sand grains passing through a sieve in Woman in the Dunes...........147 Figure 9. A shot of the newspaper from Town of Violence…………………………….170 Figure 10. The opening shot of A Japanese Tragedy…………………...…………..….173 Figure 11. A shot from the opening credit sequence in Cruel Story of Youth.................176 Figure 12. Shiseido advertisement designed by Yamana Ayao………………………...176 Figure 13. A shot of newspapers and magazines from Secrets Behind the Wall……….180 Figure 14. One of the inserted stills from a manga in Go Go Second-Time Virgin…….186 Figure 15. Inserted image of Sharon Tate in the film Go, Go Second-Time Virgin……186 Figure 16. A landscape shot from A.K.A. Serial Killer. Courtesy Hirasawa Gô……….205 Figure 17. A landscape shot from The Secret Story of the Post-Tokyo War…………...226 vii INTRODUCTION In the present day, the notion of the avant-garde seems to evoke a feeling of nostalgia rather than a sense of urgency. An air of obsoleteness hangs around it. Likewise, film, the quintessentially modern medium, has gained a reputation as being the medium of twentieth century – and not the twenty-first. Its position as the principal object of study is being threatened, even from within the discipline of cinema studies. The elegiac voice that declares film’s purported obsoleteness is, moreover, often coupled with another voice that remarks on the waning currency of “film theory” (the heyday of which is said to be the 1970s). Summarizing this sentiment, D. N. Rodowick has recently written: “Not only do many feel that film theory is much less central to the identity of the field; within cinema studies itself the disappearance of ‘film’ as a clearly defined aesthetic object anchoring our young discipline is also the cause of some anxiety.”! If Rodowick is correct in his assessment of the direction that the cinema studies is currently taking, a dissertation that examines the 1950s and 1960s avant-garde and film theory in Japan may strike some readers as anachronistic. I would argue that it is not so. To understand why this return to both avant-garde art practice and film theory in Japan is an urgent and indeed “actual” task today, we might consider the recent upsurge of leftist discourse that has many younger generations of new media scholars and activists enthralled: the theory and the problem of “the common.” The concept of the common and the question of commonness have recently gained theoretical currency through the works of Autonomist Marxists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, though there is also a parallel development of the concept of “the commons” by environmental and media activists. The innovativeness of Hardt and 1 D.N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 3. 1 Negri’s theory of the common is, however, in their shift of focus away from older understandings of the common framed in terms of the legal right over shared resources, to an emergent form of “immaterial labor” that produces such commons under the changing conditions of present day capitalism." Unlike traditional forms of labor that produce tangible material goods, the products of immaterial labor (e.g. information, knowledge, service, and emotional care) are, according to Hardt and Negri, “immediately social and common.” “Producing communication, affective relationships, and knowledges, in contrast to cars and typewriters, can directly expand the realm of what we share in common.”# This mutual development of commonness unites otherwise disparate, singular social agents, who in turn constitute what they call “the multitude.” This notion of the multitude proposes to replace an older Marxist conception: that of the masses. The multitude is defined in relation to commonality or a commonness that lies at the basis of contemporary forms of communication, social production and human relations. Networking and sharing (including the sharing of information)