the konaka kouka

[akmck@sympatico.ca]

i was quite interested in kumiko sato's remarks about how a history of styles in expressing horror transverses different media (film, tv, etc).  horror, like its many filiates, including suspense, film noir, ghost stories (i'm sure we all have our favorites) seems so rich and so resistant to totalizing that it's hard to classify.  i'm reminded of the film noir discourse of the 50s on, where every article, it seemed, began by the critic throwing up his/her hands in a rapture of despair, marvelling at the ruination of all classifying systems (is film noir a narrative?  a style? a kaiju of its very own?), then bravely soldiering on to propose its own origin and system.  

hugely short-cutting here, many of these origins and systems, it seems to me, have to do with what genre criticism felt it needed to do.  which was making a case for emerging cinemas in the context of a film criticism based on hollywood genre cinema, and its natural dialectical backlash, the critique of american exceptionalism from both within studies of american cinema and without it (e.g. resistant cinema, third cinema, the deconscurtive moment of critiquing the 'regulatory fictopns' of american melodrama, etc). this was happening in an era where independent national cinemas were first making their presence known, and being known, in international film criticism.  note that i'm talking about a discursive formation of inside/outside, universal/ particular here, not my own personal druthers.

some of the most interesting genre criticism, in my day in grad school anyway, came in the form of feminist psychoanalysis--questioning structures of ideology, apparatus, and belief in the structures of psychological realism seemed to underpin, underwrite, and yet remain hidden under, classical hollywood narrative, its totalities, closures, masteries, and so on, and all the attendant allegories (again hugely short-cutting) of nation-state and modernization that went along with the theorization of hollywood cinema & american exceptionalism.

it's probably safe to say that a lot of recent film criticism/theory, both in japan, and overseas, has concentrated on deconstructing these ideologies, and the _subject formations they privilege as a focus of inquiry_as they relate to a certain formation of the nation-state & the modern, with whatever complicated algorithm of a relation to capitol that each critic sees.  

thinking back to that era of genre criticism as it intersected with feminist psychoanalysis, it seems that a lot of interesting insights are worth thinking about.  off the bat, i'm thinking of linda williams' remarks that linked porn, horror, and the sentimental melodrama through the fact that a certain group of films not restricted to genre makes the body of the spectator react unconsciously, through laughter, crying, etc.  this is in the context of her book on porn where she tries to look at the 'truth claims' about representing sexuality in the context of much broader truth claims about photographic realism.  her foucauldian take takes some fetish value out of porn, and of the critical maneuver of speaking the truth of pink cinema.  it also, i think, allows us to take some of those questions about the truth claims of photographic realism, belieft in the direction kumiko sato is pointing to--toward asking the question of how this konaka kouka (konaka effect, a series of questions about how to represent horror & its affects/effects using the new media styles whose effects often aim to extend and maximize tendencies of photographic realism, psychological realism, but which also may not) represents a different set of expectations on the part of the viewer than cinema based on classical hollywood narrative does.

it is probably also worth thinking about another shift in viewing practice i have been noticng with my students. people in my generation who got their training in an era in which classical hollywood narratives were deconstructed, classified, subdivided and re-made, through other forms of genre forms.  my students, though, don't have the same partisan readership as a lotof feminist psychoanalysis assumes--that you're in or out of the symbolic, represented or castrated.  they're very comfortable with cross-viewing and cross-reading, in terms of gender identifications which are much more fluid than those f.f.c. of the 70s on (in a post-mulvey discourse) was trying to deconstruct.  

this makes me wonder a lot of things--about various kinds of fluidity,  between genres, genres, histories of styles.  but i think that this movement seems different from what has come to seem 'postmodern' (although of course there are many accounts of the postmodern, its relation to the flows of commodities, relations to time/space and so on).  

kumiko, did you have any speculations of your own about where any of this is going, or why?  i know there are people out there working on the anime/film relation, but it seems a hugely open question...i'm curious also about how the parameters of a feminist film criticism might have to change, in response also to new practices of cross-viewing, the impact of queer theory, etc...

anne mcknight