Taisho film

[Aaron Gerow]

>Magazines often encourage "amateur" contributions for a number of 
>reasons, but I was slightly surprised to see such an example 
>involving film given the expense of the medium. Are there other 
>examples?  In this case, the magazine ran a four page narration of 
>the story with stills along with a "the making of" type article.

With the rise of the pure film movement in the late 1910s, which itself 
was strongly focused on scriptwriting, most of the film-related magazines 
at the time ran script contests. Only a few of those were ever made into 
a film, but given the poverty level of production at the time (for 
instance, in the mid 1920s, Naoki Sanjugo became the champion of cheap 
independent production), doing a film based on a winning script was not 
"risking" that much. In fact, given the popularity of film journalism 
among some fans, perhaps it may have added a bit of publicity (the 
magazine was sure to publicize the resulting film). Keep in mind that 
this attests both to the lack of a clear division of labor in the 
industry and the lack of "professional" standards for some jobs in that 
division of labor (in a sense, anyone could possibly write a script in 
the early days). Some of the early scriptwriters in fact came from film 
journalism, like Noda Kogo and Takada Tamotsu.

>Not being entirely familiar with the film industry, I wondered if 
>"treatment" would be an apt translation of "eiga monogatari" or not.

Note also that the publication of scripts was itself a central part of 
film journalism at the time. Even before scriptwriting became 
established, film magazines were mostly filled with plot summaries or 
film novelizations. Some of these were called "eiga monogatari", a term 
more from film journalism than from the industry. I have a piece on these 
issues in Cavanaugh and Washburn's Word and Image in Japanese Cinema, and 
Yamamoto Naoki just wrote an interesting essay on these "eiga monogatari" 
for the Meiji Gakuin Art Studies Bulletin.


Aaron Gerow
Associate Professor
International Student Center
Yokohama National University
79-1 Tokiwadai
Hodogaya-ku, Yokohama 240-8501
JAPAN
E-mail: gerow at ynu.ac.jp
Phone: 81-45-339-3170
Fax: 81-45-339-3171