Philip Kaffen- Taking Yakuza Film Seriously: Critique and Consensus in Film Criticism

[Jonathan M Hall]

Date: Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:28:26 -0400
From: kendall.heitzman at yale.edu


Please join us for the next meeting of the Modern Japanese History  
Workshop on
Friday, June 5, from 6 to 8pm at Waseda University.  The workshop is  
open to
all, and directions to the venue can be found on our Google Group:

http://groups.google.com/group/modern-japanese-history-workshop

Best wishes,
Kendall Heitzman
PhD Candidate
East Asian Languages and Literatures
Yale University


Taking Yakuza Film Seriously:  Critique and Consensus in Film Criticism
Philip Kaffen, PhD Candidate, East Asian Studies, New York University

The study of cinema faces a crisis that once plagued cinema itself.   
The latter
began as a crisis of cinematic form, where cinema's ability to  
produce new
experiences abated beneath the spread of new image technologies.   
Though cinema
seems to have survived the crisis of its imminent demise, the study  
of cinema
has now found itself on shaky ground.  Shifts in its institutional  
assumptions
and politics; the emergence of new technologies that allow for a  
proliferation
of cinematic critique that threatens the privileged position of academic
experts; and the sense of exigency that we face in the current moment  
demanding
the rationalization and legitimation of humanities based knowledge,  
all point to
the question of the legitimation of the field as a whole, explicitly  
raising the
question:  What role should the study and critique of cinematic  
images play?

As this crisis unfolds, a new interest in Japanese film theory and  
the role of
film criticism in Japan, once marginalized, is growing within  
academic film
studies as well as journalistic writings.  Largely occurring under  
the aegis of
archival and empirical work within a research paradigm, the impulses and
outcomes of these explorations are decidedly unclear. What is at  
stake in this
historical investigation of image critique in Japan and how might it
contribute, if at all, to the problems outlined above?

My proposal is to explore this problem through an examination of the  
history of
criticism centered on yakuza film.  Some recent writing in Japan has  
suggested
that film criticism was at its most vigorous during the late 1960s  
and revolved
around yakuza film before withering away along with the studio system  
itself.
Yakuza film is often treated as a repository of national cultural  
values of
giri, ninjo, and jingi, (i.e. various terms of social obligation and  
hierarchy
rooted in a national tradition).  My interest, however, is in  
thinking of
yakuza film as a field of exploration for a critique of romanticism.   
It is
also an index of the studio system in crisis as its dominant generic  
form.
Defining romanticism provisionally as the desire to be free of all  
systems, I
will argue that the study of yakuza film reveals a shifting relationship
between images and the studio system within film criticism, raising  
questions
for contemporary discourses on the aesthetics and politics of  
cinematic images.


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