Kinema Club Workshop on Japanese Cinema Studies

[Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto]

                        __Kinema Club Workshop__
Japanese Cinema Studies in the Rear View Mirror: Re-Viewing the Discipline

        University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, March 26-28, 1999
        Organizers: Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto and Abe' Mark Nornes

The purpose of this workshop is to enable participants to engage in
collaborative reflection on a series of papers on the subject of Japanese
cinema studies. It will use the occasion to prepare this work for a
publication in the form of a journal issue or edited book.

The idea of a workshop with a publication as the final objective took shape
over the last year, however, it has been the culmination of several years
of discussion about the state of Japanese cinema studies in the United
States. It is evident to all researchers and teachers in the field that we
are in a state of flux. While the scholars who established the field came
from film studies proper or from without academia, there are now people
approaching Japanese cinema from a variety of disciplines including
history, literature, area studies, anthropology, and comparative
literature. It is apparent that the study of Japanese cinema now has no
"home"----this may be a unique strength, but it also has serious implications
for anyone turning it into an academic career. At this moment of blurring
disciplinary boundaries, many have come to feel the need to take stock of
the situation: ask where we have come from and where we are going. What is
the shape of our field, and what are the most pressing issues for future
work?

Unlike film conferences where papers present research projects or analyze
films, this workshop will deal specifically with meta-critical and
methodological issues concerning the disciplinary and institutional
problems of Japanese film scholarship. 

The workshop will feature the following six papers: 



--Eric Cazdyn (U of Oregon), "Film Historiography's Other Object: Theorizing
the History of Writing Japanese Film History" 

--Darrell Wm. Davis (Hong Kong), "Japanese Cinema in a Transnational Age:
Whither National Cinema?"

--Aaron Gerow (Yokohama National U), "Japanese Cinema Studies Here and
There: The Academic Subject in Global Culture"

--Jonathan Hall (UC Santa Cruz/U of Tokyo), "Sexual Worlds in National
Films: Sexuality, the Dilemma of Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Stakes of
Theory"

--Kato Mikiro (U of Kyoto), "What is Japanese Cinema Studies as Such?: Some
Tendencies of the Discipline in Japan"

--Joseph Murphy (U of Florida), "Is There a Discipline Called Japanese
Cinema Studies?"



                                
The titles of the papers may change as some of the presenters are still
revising their proposals. Two abstracts are appended to the end of this
message, and others will be posted to the list as they become available. To
generate a productive discussion at the workshop (and on the list), we'd
like to make six papers available not just to the presenters and discussants
but to all workshop participants. Since the cost of xeroxing and mailing is
potentially prohibitive, we've decided to post the papers to the Kinema Club
website as PDF files, which anybody interested in the workshop can download
and print as formatted papers. 

In addition to the presentation of the six papers, we may have a panel on
pedagogical issues (depending on general interest in this subject and the
size of our final budget). If you have any comments or suggestions (e.g.,
the panel's format, types of issues and questions to be addressed), please
correspond to M. Yoshimoto (mitsuhiro-yoshimoto at uiowa.edu) or A.M. Nornes
(amnornes at umich.edu). 

Updated information will osted on the Kinema Club website:
http://pears.lib.ohio-state.edu/Markus/Welcome.html 


_______________________________________________
FILM HISTORIOGRAPHY'S OTHER OBJECT:
THEORIZING THE HISTORY OF WRITING JAPANESE FILM HISTORY

by
Eric Cazdyn
University of Oregon


ABSTRACT
In this paper I conduct a formal analysis of six histories of Japanese film
(two of which are films) that were made over the past seventy years.  I
argue that the most significant histories of Japanese film have been
produced at times when the idea of the nation has been critically
destabilized.  And it is precisely at these moments when nationalist
discourse is disrupted--disruptions that are themselves related to crises
in the Japanese and world capitalist systems--that the various
historiographies under examination, in however indirect (or even
unconscious) a way, emerge as acts of crisis-management.  In other words,
film histories do not only analyze their acknowledged objects of study
(plots, directors, audiences, actors, profits-and-losses incurred by the
film corporations, and so on), but at one and the same time symbolically
intervene with the most critical transformations of the nation-state and,
perhaps more important, with the politically charged ways that these
transformations are thought.  I locate each of the three most productive
stages of Japanese film historiography in relation to a specific historical
problem: 1) between being colonized and being a colonizer during the 1930s;
2) between the individual and the collective (or agent and structure)
during the post-war period, and 3) between the national and transnational
during the contemporary moment.  When read against these antinomies the
historiographies under consideration no longer remain merely stories of
Japanese film but are revealed as symptoms of the more general political
unconscious that engage these historically specific, highly-charged social
problems.


________________________________________
Japanese Cinema in a Transnational Age:  Whither National Cinema?

by Darrell Wm. Davis

* Is ?national cinema? on the wane in film and cultural studies?
* Has globalization eclipsed, or re-framed national and area studies?
* Is ?national cinema? a viable concept in describing contemporary
Japanese film?
* What does the concept of ?transnational? Chinese cinema signify for
Japanese film studies?
* What is the relationship between Japanese film/media studies and Asian
cinema?

        After more than a decade of foundering, Japanese film has clearly made
an international comeback.  Prizes and special programs at major
festivals, active independent production, and some encouraging changes
in the industry are signs of revitalization.  The death of Kurosawa may
also mark a new era for young Japanese filmmakers, in that the
monumental shadow cast by a postwar master has disappeared (see Kitano,
below).  But these developments come at a time when the study of
national cinemas is transforming itself into something else.  Once upon
a time, national cinema was a province of the emerging discipline of
film studies, with its distinctive historical links to English,
communications and area studies.  One can clearly see this pedigree in
the major studies of Japanese cinema:  Richie/Anderson,
Bordwell/Thompson and Burch.  Despite their substantial differences, all
three employ classical Hollywood cinema, as art and industrial practice,
as a touchstone for their in-depth studies of Japanese film.  More
recent studies (Desser, Prince, Goodwin, Kirihara, Davis, Turim, et.
al.) have sustained this textualist construction of Japanese film.  Put
simply, the construction of Japanese film as national cinema is
undertaken using a logic of difference, and sometimes refusal, of the
normative patterns of Hollywood.
         In the last few years, however, Japanese cinema as an object of study
has become disengaged from the traditional ?national cinema? concept.
Several reasons come to mind:  cinema?s nund legitimacy in other
disciplines; cinema?s usefulness in moves toward inter-disciplinary
scholarship; and finally the seemingly irresistible globalization of
film and other popular cultural material.  With the acceptance of film
and other popular representations as primary documents in the fields of
history, comparative literature, anthropology, political science, East
Asian languages and cultures, etc., Japanese ?national cinema? is being
transformed into global cultural studies.  Scholars working in these
fields are asking different, sometimes better questions than the old
guard.  The departures of Japanese film style and narrative from
Hollywood do not exercise them.  They are less interested in analysis of
film form or medium, and are drawn instead toward film as institution or
repository of social phenomena.  They work with an awareness of the
fluidity between their specialization and others, which necessitates an
interdisciplinary facility, accompanied by pitfalls of translation,
oversimplification and misrepresentation.  National cinema scholars, as
well, have their pitfalls to work around.
         Most important, I think, is the increasing globalization of culture
and global media, in which Japanese film is rapidly being caught up.
Hypothesis:  Global cultural studies can be distinguished from national
cinema studies not by its indifference to a Hollywood norm, but by its
presumption of Hollywood?s ubiquitousness and that of global popular
culture generally.  As a ?national cinema? historian I may bring
Japanese film to bear on Hollywood, supposing there is some distance
separating them, but global cultural studies supposes no such distance.
?White noise? of Hollywood, Madison Ave., Microsoft etc. constantly
buzzing around us, wherever we may be.  The international comeback of
Japanese film mentioned above owes its existence to a dense global
network of festivals, media coverage, distribution, marketing, and
international word of mouth (like our own Kine Japan).
        So what?  What are the consequences of this transformation of ?national
cinema? into global cultural studies?  There are losses and there are
gains.  Loss:  Japanese cinema studies is about to lose its commitment
to the medium of cinema, partly because of digitization onto tape and
disk (we don?t even use film anymore in the classroom) but mostly
because cultural studies isn?t much interested in medium-specific
issues.  Those issues are historical ones, from a time when cinema as a
medium was still fresh (especially as an academic subject).   Also,
global cultural studies is suspicious of received ideas about national
identity, which is a good thing, but there is a tendency for charges of
?essentialism? to run certain questions right off the agenda.
Hermeneutics of suspicion can be taken too far when national identity,
as a psychological and social fact, is being energized by globalization
(S. Hall).  It would be too bad if scholars of Japanese cinema lost
faith in both cinema and the concept of ?Japaneseness.?  Most of all,
cultural studies itself is becoming globalized, in the sense that it?s a
bandwagon, a juggernaut, an all-encompassing discourse machine that
neglects specific texts, individual films, and concrete, local
experiences--like those that happen in movie theaters.  Cultural studies
is in danger of becoming just as totalizing and hermetic as the
psychoanalytic and post-structuralist models it replaced.  In sum:  no
more cinema.  No more Japanese.  No more film criticism.  Cultural
studies is starting to reflect its object and is becoming ?white noise?
in its own right.
        Gains:  a desire for methodological rigor, being more reflexive and
critical about what it is we do.  At the same time, a greater
willingness to learn from people outside our own departments.  Or,
learning the basics from departmental colleagues, in my case,
post-colonialism, digital culture and feminism.
        Finally, in studying Japanese cinema we shn?t neglect the history
of non-Western cinema as a whole, because the history of cinema overall
is a history of struggle and negotiation with other national cinemas.
Can we legitimately talk, for example, of transnational Japanese cinema?
(cf. TIFF Tokyo Film Creators? Forum).  Compared to Japan, Chinese
cinema (PRC, Hong Kong and Taiwan) was more dependent on Hollywood in
its early development, but throughout the 20s and 30s, it also drew
heavily upon Japan.  This means that Chinese cinema is not only an Other
for the historical reconstruction of (anOther) non-Western cinema; it
also works as a proto-transnational cinema, a foreshadowing, perhaps, of
the limitless, ?borderless? global media circulation we hear so much
about now.


        I feel like when anybody calls me an ?Asian director? it?s loaded with
preconceptions. . . . I would really like to get rid of the typical
Asian traits, cultures, aesthetics in our films.  I don?t mean to put
down Kurosawa, but I would rather see contemporary Japanese films
succeed over samurai films.  I hate seeing people sell a blatantly
stereotypical Asian look.  I realize that this is what sells right now,
but that?s what I am trying to get away from.
                                ?       Kitano Takeshi