Aoyama, close ups, detached style

[birgit kellner]

Friday, October 27, 2000, 3:11:13 AM, Aaron Gerow wrote:

AG> Beyond us discussing the general situation of current
AG> Japanese film, Aoyama entered into an interesting talk on the 
AG> relationship between cinema and the emperor system, going so far as to 
AG> use the close up as an example.  He basically made the analogy between 
AG> the "as if" ("no yona") nature of the close up (the close up seeming "as 
AG> if" it gives us a sense of what a character is thinking and feeling) and 
AG> the "as if" nature of Japanese society elaborated by Maruyama Masao 
AG> (where it is "as if" people take responsibility for their actions when it 
AG> is actually just passed on down the line).  (This is theoretically 
AG> sketchy, if not problematic, but it is very suggestive.)

(I am not a film scholar, so excuse the uninformedness and somewhat
sketchy (!) character of the following
remarks.)

I have been wondering in more theoretical terms about
the appropriateness/meaningfulness of attributing ideological,
psychological or political functions to certain elements of cinematic grammar such as
close ups or pov-shots. Aoyama's remarks about the close up are one
such example, Aaron's description of the "detached style" in 90s
Japanese cinema is another.

While I can see a certain point in this attribution, it sort of makes me wonder how far it
can
be actually, or is actually, taken. Just as in literature, where the use
of stylistic devices must be viewed in the context of an entire work
and not in isolation from page to page, so in film one would assume
that the use of pov-shots cannot be seen in isolation of whatever
other stylistic devices are used in segments that pov-shots form part
of. In particular, issues of identification and resistance to
identification with characters seem to demand a more sophisticated
approach than simple inferences like "there's a pov-shot, therefore the viewer is asked to
identify with the character" or "there's no pov-shot, therefore the
viewer cannot identify with the character" involve. I do not want to
imply that Aaron's analysis of Aoyama's films is as simplistic as
these inferences, but I am still somewhat at a loss here.

I am also
wondering whether the isolation of certain elements and their
one-to-one identification with undesirable political functions here
does not operates in a fashion similar to political discourse, where
certain extreme forms of
political correctness attribute politically dubious intentions to
individuals or groups of individuals merely on the ground that they
use certain words, irrespective of in what context or how these are
used.

Other issues of course play into this debate as well, but I'll stop
here for the time being and hope, as always, for enlightenment through
the more
knowledgeable ones :-)

---
Best regards,

Birgit Kellner
Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies
Vienna University