Covert dissent in wartime cinema?

[Aaron Gerow]

As someone else who has published on wartime film and censorship, I too 
have been reading the discussion with fascination and notebook in hand. 
I in particular want to thank Peter for taking so much time to write 
what are probably the longest posts to KineJapan in years! (That's a 
compliment, not a complaint!)

Clearly it is a desire in liberal minded scholars to find something 
politically positive in aesthetically pleasing cinema. We admire some 
of the wartime works of Ozu, Mizoguchi, Shimizu, Toyoda, Kamei and 
others, and we hope that our admiration is not purely aesthetic, but 
based on the perception of some humanistic or otherwise political 
values we admire. It would be hard to like Japanese cinema during the 
15 Years War if we couldn't find such elements. Certainly the search 
for subversive meanings is justified by many historical examples of 
cinemas in totalitarian or authoritarian regimes, especially those of 
the former USSR and Eastern Europe. We often in those cases have the 
testimonies of filmmakers explaining how they did try to circumvent 
regulations. Scholars of Japanese cinema often hope we can find similar 
phenomena in Japan, but the fact is that there was in general far less 
resistance to wartime militarism than to communism in Eastern Europe. 
That makes the search a lot harder.

I think Markus is right, though, that we do have to readjust our lenses 
and not just look for cases of pro-war or anti-war. Responses were 
varied, complex, contradictory and rarely monolithic. Peter's 
argumentation is effectively supported by facts, but I sometimes think 
that there is too often an effort to find consistency in a situation 
where consistency was difficult. To argue against the political 
subversiveness of one film because the same filmmaker made a pro-war 
film is an important point against those who wish to write a 
hagiography of that filmmaker (as many of the JCP critics wanted to do 
with Imai and Yamamoto), but I do not think that prevents us from 
seeing complexities in the first film (or the second!). We don't have 
to assume consistent, unified creative subjects here. I think one of 
the great points in Peter's books is underlying how many conflicts did 
exist in official policy--a point he reiterated here--and I think we 
should consider such confusion on the level of the individual subject 
as well. I think Itami Mansaku is a case in point. On the one hand, he 
made a film with a fascist filmmaker and wrote essays during the war 
praising Goebbel's propaganda policy. But he also wrote a profoundly 
moving and complex script in Muhomatsu no issho that was torn up by 
both wartime and occupation censors. And, unlike many on the left, he 
came out of the war not saying "I was clean" or "I was duped" but that 
"We are all responsible and we better start considering why." I think 
this is an image of an intelligent individual who was for the war--but 
for reasons that did not always fit the official model, and thus 
sometimes deviated from the pro-war track. I don't think this is simply 
an issue of Limbaugh delusionism versus Scowcroft realism, where 
something anti-war is just the reality revealing its ugly head--but off 
a multitude of positions. I think we should remember that artists' 
responses were varied to the war, and could include even non-producing 
works.

Markus's point about multiple responses also should remind us that the 
issue here is not solely one of textuality. I think much of the 
discussion here has focused a bit too much on finding IN texts some 
meaning or other, either pro- or anti-war. But as my research has 
shown, what many censors and even filmmakers were conscious of is that 
even the most seemingly pro-war film could be "misread" or 
"misinterpreted" by spectators, especially as the empire expanded and 
different people were watching Japanese films. Citing comments that the 
end of Kinoshita's Rikugun showed a truly militarist mother--not the 
questioning mother that some critics, both during and after the war--as 
evidence that the film's conclusion is not unambiguously anti-war is 
important, but the very fact that BOTH interpretations existed shows 
how signification, even during a time of highly controlled censorship 
and film policy, was never stable or unambiguous. I think this fact 
scared some in policy positions--and led to calls like Fuwa's for 
"training spectators"--and highlights how even the control bureaucrats 
were never fully in control. Texts were never able to force single 
readings and spectators never read films all in the same way. The 
question in many ways is not whether a certain film gave us a pro- or 
anti-war message, but how the entire situation frequently evinced a 
complex struggle over signification and reception, over trying to make 
films mean, and what spectators role was in that.

I thus would not discourage Sam from doing his research, but rather ask 
him to redirect it. I think it will be less productive to look for 
anti-war intentions in filmmakers as reflected in films than to look 
for textual instabilities and contradictions--which could then reveal 
the variations of position that criss-crossed through particular 
filmmakers. These complications should be extended into the realm of 
reception, where responses could be--but perhaps were not 
always--varied. Don't just look at the films, but how they were seen 
and shown, and what was said about them in a variety of places. 
Combining this close textual analysis with historically grounded in 
reception is not easy--especially with the reception side--but I think 
there is still a lot of productive research to be done out there. My 
work has tended to focus on the macro struggles over reception, but I 
would love to see more micro-analyses of specific texts and situations.


Aaron Gerow
Director of Undergraduate Studies, Film Studies Program
Assistant Professor
Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
Yale University
53 Wall Street, Room 316
PO Box 208363
New Haven, CT 06520-8363
USA
Phone: 1-203-432-7082
Fax: 1-203-432-6764
e-mail: aaron.gerow at yale.edu