More reflections on pink films and other popular genres

[Alexander Jacoby]

  Needless to say, Jasper was one of the people I was referring to in the sentence, "I accept that each of these genres has produced some films of aesthetic interest in Japan, as comparable genres have elsewhere; there are writers who acknowledge this, and who, rather than concerning themselves with the symptomatic interest of the genre, single out individual pink films, horror films and yakuza films as worthy of serious aesthetic appreciation."
   
  He's right too, of course, that it's short-sighted to speak slightingly of whole genres, even if one feels personally averse to them.
   
  Interesting, though, that the justifications of pink film, etc, tend to lead back to the auteur theory. The proponents of these genres end up talking about individual directors like Zeze, Meike, which is very similar to what Cahiers du Cinema did in the fifties - the Western is a genre, but Hawks, Mann, Boetticher, etc, are artists. Of course I approve of this. But it interests me that the auteur theory has ended up meaning something rather different in Japanese terms than in Hollywood terms, and indeed it has done since the fifties. In the fifties, no one in the West ever doubted that Mizoguchi or Kurosawa were the authors of their own films, and it would presumably have come as a shock to some Western filmgoers to discover that Japan had a studio system not entirely dissimilar to Hollywood's. In other words, what seemed radical when Godard, Truffaut and Rohmer applied it to the Hollywood cinema sort of seemed like common sense when applied to Japan. And this is really fa!
 ir
 enough, because the studio system in Japan up to 1960 gave directors much more freedom than their Hollywood counterparts. Also, it seems that the names of directors were much more widely known in Japan than in Hollywood, and ordinary filmgoers might have gone to see films because of the director as much as because of the stars. So I'd argue that auteurism (with modifications - no one, I suppose, accepts the politique des auteurs exactly as it was first formulated in the fifties) is a model which is actually particularly suitable to the analysis of classical Japanese cinema.
   
  But the strength of the original auteur theory as applied to Hollywood was that it was inclusive. Directors as obscure as Edgar Ulmer and Joseph Newman were considered, as well as Hitchcock and Hawks. Because so few Japanese directors were known or shown abroad, and because of the difficulty of seeing a representative sample of Japanese films, about five names were singled out to be the Japanese auteurs for the rest of the world, and the others were overlooked. Even directors like Yoshimura and Gosho, who were enthusiastically discussed in Donald Richie's early books, didn't benefit from international distribution. In other words, the Japanese directors who were picked up by Western auteurists constituted a small, exclusive list - and those of us who care about these things still have to move heaven and earth in any attempt to widen the canon.
   
  As a film buff, I just want to see good movies, and I find the auteur theory is as useful a method as any of doing that. I take the point that auteurism can miss some gems, but no approach is comprehensive. As a film critic, I suppose the issue is which oeuvres are usefully approached through auteurism. For instance, I find that my understanding of Tasaka's The Maid's Kid is furthered by my awareness that several of his films have the same plot formation - naive country girl goes to urban or industrial milieu. But I don't find that I learn much more about Toyoda's Marital Relations by watching Wild Geese - though both are damn good movies. I think that, in the strict sense, Tasaka is an auteur and Toyoda isn't, therefore, I'd happily write about Tasaka's films as a group, whereas if interpreting Wild Geese I'd be more inclined to compare it with, say, other literary adaptations of Meiji and Taisho-era stories, whether or not by Toyoda.
   
  To return to the original point - what people are doing in seeking auteurs in genres such as pink is actually not far from what the original auteurists did in the fifties - looking for works of art emerging from critically neglected corners of the industry. Which is a good thing, of course, so I apologise if my earlier post sounded dismissive of their efforts.
   
  ALEX
   


		
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