Kinema Club Workshop: Hall Abstract

[Abe-Nornes]

Here is the abstract from Jonathan Hall, one of the presenters at the
Kinema Club Workshop: "Japan Cinema Studies in the Rear View Mirror:
Re-Viewing the Discipline"

It's looking exciting. I hope you can come. As we've mentioned before,
everyone is welcome to attend the event. If you can get here, we can take
care of you. 

All abstracts and other information is posted on the Kinema Club website
(http://pears.lib.ohio-state.edu/Markus/Workshop.html)

Markus

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"Cramping: Sexual Fields in the National Body, the
Dilemma of Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Stakes of Theory"

Presenter: Jonathan M. Hall 

As with one former empire, the chapter never seems to close, the sun never
to set, in the worn phrase, on the national paradigm.  For those who study
within and around Japanese film and cinema, the nation is overestimated and
undertheorized, righteously attacked and regularly surpassed--but
seemingly, suspiciously, and especially recently always present even if as
a negation.  What is the effect of this compulsion to repeat the national
trope on the ways in which we can conceive, organize, and dispute claims to
knowledge in Japan film studies?  During the workshop, I want to direct
some of our attention to the question of sexuality and psychoanalytic
criticism, especially because it can provide a swerving away from the
national question, but one that does not involve its refusal or its
supercession.  Indeed, psychoanalytic film criticicm is useful precisely
for its uncomfortable relation to the nation.  While auteur studies, genre
studies, and industry histories (to name but a few forms of cinema
scholarship) can be and have been easily amalgamated to the national
cinematic trope, the notion of a nationally-specific psychoanalytic
approach or of a nationally-organized sexuality suggests a specious and
questionable (albeit eccentrically intriguing) project.  By focusing on the
status of psychoanalytic Japan film criticism, I also intend to float a
means for the workshop to relay quickly and easily into discussions of
feminist Japan film scholarship and of new emphases on sexuality and
cinema.

The impetus for this project is two-fold. It stems first of all from a
strongly felt conviction that, along with renewed interest in the critical
nexus of sexuality, there is considerable need for Japan film criticism to
step back and assess the meta-critical privileging of sexuality as an
analytic or categorizing term.  Second, despite this fashion for the sexual
within the field, one can recognize a simultaneous wariness of projects
that take questions of sexuality, psychoanalysis, and representation as
starting points for non-Japan-specific interrogations of filmic and
cinematic systems using Japanese film.  As example, one might think of the
foregrounding of Oshima Nagisa in Stephen Heath's highly influential work
on semiotics and psychoanalysis, on spectatorial desire and its rupturing,
especially in "The Question Oshima" (1977).  The production of certain
disciplinary requirements for Japan cinema studies--extensive knowledge of
Japanese film, for example--may have made such an article less than useful
for film curricula today and may have made it even less likely for similar
approaches to make the pages in contemporary criticism.  But the move of
specialization here is not one simply of increasingly refined knowledges;
it involves the active exclusion of the cinematic models that underlay
Heath's approach: a rejection of the value in formally analyzing Japanese
film for its contributions to a general theorization of spectatorship, of
fantasy, and of sexuality. 

A key example of this development is the forced absence of psychoanalytic
film criticism from recent Japan film studies (Maureen Turim's recent book
on Oshima perhaps withstanding), and importantly--since this project must
be more than eulogy for the psychoanalytic film project--the absence of
alternative, non- or anti- psychoanalytic modes which still take the sexual
as something inherently involved with representative processes
(Butlerian-inspired analyses, for one).  More than simple coincidence,
these two tendencies--to make visible the sexual as a topic of film study,
and to reject its 'invisible' participation in supposedly
'Western-centered, totalizing systems' (as psychoanalysis is clumsily
dismissed)--are part and parcel, I claim, of a similar trajectory. 
Criticism in the 1990s has seen a tendency to reduce paradigms of sex and
sexuality to the status of //represented// sites (or objects) within an
increasingly hegemonic, frequently unproblematized notion of national or
global film.   And, while this can be seen as the result of a turning away
from post-structuralist film theory in general, the phenomenon in a Japan
film context must be read in relation to the emergence of a nationally or
globally conceived queer cinema and to the historicist (often taking the
nation-state as its uncomplicated unit of analysis) rejection of
"universalizing" projects.   (See for example the work of Chris Berry or
Paul Lee. in relation to "Asian queer film.")

I will emphasize three nodes or interstices: the status of psychoanalytic
thought especially in relation to  Japanese avant-garde cinema,  1980s and
90s feminist film criticism especially in relation to classic Japanese
cinema, and the emergence of "queer moment" in Japanese film in relation to
an American-driven festival circle.  Of these, the first provides for a
reconsideration of the psychoanalytically informed debates on and around
sexual difference, sexuality, and representation that provided the context
within which Japanese New Wave films--especially but not exclusively those
of Oshima--were introduced in Western Europe and North America in the
1970s.  I examine the privileged place garnered by the Japanese New Wave
within the effort of film criticism at large to investigate sexuality and
the unconscious processes involved in looking and in fantasy--what had
become linchpins of psychoanalytic film criticism.  This historical survey
pays particular attention to the status of Japanese cinema in the hands of
theorists not necessarily invested in a notion of Japanese national
cinema--most notably Stephen Heath's work on Oshima-- but also addresses
the status of sexuality in relation to film for the New Wave directors
themselves, debated between Oshima and Matsumoto especially.  

The second node of interest is the status of sexuality within feminist
Japan film criticism. This interstice allows an opportunity to consider the
critical tension between a notion of national cinema and an engagement with
the critical categories of gender and sexuality.  Here attention is on the
manner in which such scholars as Turim negotiate the concepts of Japanese
cinema and Japan within pieces that foreground gender and sexuality. 
Finally, the third node or interstice highlights the emergence of what is
called "queer Japanese film" by amalgamating such antithetical film
projects as Oki Hiroyuki's //I Like You, I Like You Very Much// and
Nakajima Takehiro's //Okoge//. The force of this construction is located in
relation to an American understanding of "international queer film" and an
external projection of Japan.  This last section  highlights the inversely
proportional fortune enjoyed by this newer notion of 'representations of
sexuality,' as psychoanalytic and post-structuralist concerns waned from
importance.  The paper will problematize the seeming diversification seen
especially when a notion of queer, or even gay, Japanese film is conjured
up, participating in an increasing hegemony of national cinema as the
dominant metaphor against which psychoanalytic theory is read as
universalizing and, by extension, orientalizing.  

Using the category of sexuality at times as foil, at times as the necessary
component of a theory of a cinematic unconscious and of spectatorship,  I
hope to move attention away from the current concern with sexuality as
//represented// and to re-open the prematurely foreclosed
post-structuralist questions of fantasy, cinematic spectatorship, and
nation in relation to Japanese film that were begun in the 1970s in such
places as //Screen// and //Wide Angle//.  By extension, my project means
not simply a reconnoitering the shifting stakes of the sexual, but a
re-examination of the status of psychoanalytically informed film theory
within Japan film studies; it offers not just a potential second-opinion on
the tight hold today of history, auteur  and genre studies, and concepts of
national cinema within the field, but suggests relevant, current concerns
that a renewed consideration of psychoanalysis and post-structuralist film
theory could offer.  In closing, the paper will call for attention to the
potentials of a psychoanalytic criticism based in the work of Matsumoto
Toshio, Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, and Jean Laplanche.  By bringing the
critical apparati provided by these writers--the concern for fetishistic
structures and for public, private, and mass fantasy in relation to race
and nation--into a more vocal dialogue with Japanese film criticism, we
will be able to confront more effectively what remains a pressing concern
of the discipline: how to incorporate the significant contributions of
psychoanalytic film criticism within a national configurations of our
field.  Or indeed, as Oki's insistence on the immediacy of locale in
relation to sex can remind us, sexuality in the "Japanese film" to be
politically effective must sometimes be about much less than nation.

(END)