Calligraphy

[Hideaki Fujiki]

Has anyone mentioned the cartoon Tomehane yet? This was also adapted as a TV drama by NHK a few months ago. Although the moving image has been deleted, this would be a good start: http://doramanodouga.seesaa.net/article/138327311.html




On 2010/05/07, at 5:58, Thomas LaMarre, Prof. wrote:

> 
> Hi Markus,
> 
> Sorry to be responding to your question about calligraphy after the thread of the discussion has broken.
> 
> There are a lot of different ways of defining calligraphy, or rather, 'sho.'  So there isn't a fixed definition.  But it's nonetheless important not to think that any sort of 'writing characters with a brush' is 'sho.'
> 
> For most people, and especially those who do calligraphy, the term sho evokes the lineage of brushwork that comprises kaisho, gyôsho, and sôsho.  This implies a specific set of brush techniques that were consolidated by Wang His-chih (though it is as attribution as reality) and subsequently promulgated in the early Tang as means of unifying the empire.  Integral to these techniques is a sense of 'heart-mind' (kokoro or shin), which comes of the tension between the center of motion of character and its center of mass.  This is what makes the character appear animated, full of movement.  These techniques and styles formed the basis for subsequent developments in calligraphy, which were in China and Japan associated with imperial court culture even though they had broader applications.
> 
> Today in some schools of calligraphy people use brushes to write characters in other scripts such as 'seal script' (tensho), but the techniques are entirely different and don't belong to the same historical lineage; they also aren't geared toward making 'animated' characters.  In effect, this isn't sho.
> 
> There is another kind of writing, which might loosely be dubbed 'spirit writing' or 'reisho,' which differs profoundly from the courtly styles and techniques.  There are a variety of forms associated with a range of ritual practices.  Frequently (and this becomes important in some Chinese ghost movies) such forms stand in contrast and even imply resistance to or parody of courtly modes.  Talismans written quickly with a brush and thrown at spirits aren't like sho, deliberately.
> 
> Like you, I am really interested in calligraphy or brushwork in cinema and animation, and it seems to me such distinctions are very useful because they imply different kinds of embodiment with distinctive sociohistorical connotations.
> 
> In the modern era such distinctions tend to be flattened, for many reasons, but primarily because of the modern distinction between image and text, which (despite some claims to the contrary) had a major impact in Japan, Korea, and China.  Calligraphy, for instance, was initially not included in museums and then subsequently included as image not text.  Printed editions removed gestural qualities of script, forcing them into the space of illustration.
> 
> In any event, one of the questions that arises for me in the context of calligraphy and cinema, is that of whether cinema inevitably reduces different kinds of brushwork embodiment to one formation, collapsing difference and reifying calligraphy as an indicator of unified tradition; or whether film can explore these different kinds of embodied movement.  I tend to see a tension in cinema at this level. Films that reify brushwork don't interest me so much, except in as symptoms of modernization.  But there are some films that brilliantly explore the fields of motion implicit in court calligraphy or spirit writing in compelling and challenging ways.  Animation that builds on manga lineages of the art of the line can be interesting here too.  In his film of Tonari no Yamada-kun, Takahata Isao works with highly specific techniques of brushwork associated with haiga-haiku, playing with the relation between haiga and manga.   It is especially interesting in comparison with Tarkovsky's musings on haiku and cinema, for Takahata's use of haiku is more gestural rather than Tarkovsky's imagistic turn.
> 
> But I won't bore you with details. If you're interested, I've written court calligraphy touching on modern transformations in writing in Japan, and Ken Dean and I wrote a bit on spirit writing in the context of ritual practices in southeast China ('a wobbly script) in "Ritual Matters." I think that I put all this on my website:
> http://web.me.com/lamarre_mediaken/Site/Home.html
> 
> I wish I were going to Hawaii to hear your paper!  It should be a great discussion.
> 
> Tom
> 
> 
> On 30/04/10 10:59 AM, "Mark Nornes" <amnornes at umich.edu> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> <thomas.lamarre at mcgill.ca> wrote:
> 
>> it's not actually calligraphy but talismanic writing plays a central
>> role: Onmyôji.
> 
> Why isn't it calligraphy?
> 
> M
>