[KineJapan] question about Japanese film and Mark Cousins' series

Fri Sep 19 07:18:36 EDT 2014

Cousins' Story of Film is written in superlatives rather than factual details. He makes a similar claim about Japanese cinema in the 1970s as being the most exciting and innovative in the world, an assumption he seems to base largely on the (TV!) documentaries of Imamura rather than the main output of Nikkatsu Roman Porno and Toei yakuza films. The series is not without a considerable merit in its expansive scope, but most with knowledge of the national cinemas he discusses may find themselves cringing at some of his claims.

The Creeping Garden - A Real-Life Science-Fiction Story about Slime Moulds and the People Who Work With them, directed by Tim Grabham and Jasper Sharp. "...one of the year's most original and bizarre documentaries", James Marsh, Twitch.
The Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema (2011) is out now from Scarecrow Press
Midnight Eye - Visions of Japanese cinema
http://www.midnighteye.com

To: kinejapan at lists.osu.edu
From: Quentin.Turnour at nfsa.gov.au
Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 20:16:07 +1000
Subject: Re: [KineJapan] question about Japanese film and Mark Cousins'	series

Hi William,

I'll have a go at this. All IMHO, of course...

You are not the only one to be irritated
with Cousin's sloppy film historiography and grandiose leaps of assumption;
Jonathan Rosenbaum's piece for Film Comment is a good example: http://filmcomment.com/article/mark-cousins-the-story-of-film-an-odyssey.

But as Rosenbaum also makes clear, you often
need to tear the at times 'wrongheadiness' of THE STORY OF FILM as film
history apart from where Cousin's "...keeps  things fresh even
when they’re contrived". 

The late 20s and 30s was a period when filmmakers
across the world were working either under authoritarian situations of
poltical and economic control and censorship (in Hollywood as well as Soviet
Russia or Fascist Europe) - or lived in the bubble of oppositional filmmaking
movements that reacted to authoritarianism by making films (for example
Popular Front and other leftist documentary of the period) whose texts
are now a little hard to take for all their radical hyperbole and naivety.

But cinema scholarship often passes over
these period-piece annoyances of film's texts, to concentrate instead on
the brilliance of the form, the breakthroughs in visual style or in sound.
And we often explain this by writing about how the times, the political
constraints and even peer self-censorship may have contributed to this
brilliance. Precisely because official constraint can often encourage creative
subtexts and creative work-arounds. Or because authoritarian governments
can have reasons to turn a blind eye to certain filmmakers or types of
filmmaking. Or because there can be a systemically blindsides - that allow
a kind of sly, implicit creativity - within the "vanity" systems
of artistic production authoritarian governments liked to indulge in.

I think Cousins' is assuming that something
of the later, "Genius of the System" was at work here. Just as
we accept that something similar allowed the creativity of Hollywood in
the 1930s and the post-war "Golden Ages" in Mexican and Argentina
national studio filmmaking, or Iranian cinema in the 1980s and 90s. His
mistake is to be way too quick to assume that the quality of the filmmaking
proves what the system's genius was: it let its most creative filmmakers
alone. Whereas we all know that English-language Japanese classical cinema
 scholarship accepts the axiom of the greatness of the filmmaking,
but is far more cautious, contentious about the difficult issue of why
it came about; highly aware, for example of the complex, paradoxical socio-cultural
motivations betwen the apparent self-censorship of many filmmakers from
the late 1930s to 1945; or of the complex business, production, labour
and distribution structures of post war Japanese studios; or the deeply
coded way in which Japanese narrative art forms and genre are practiced
and make meaning. 

Indeed, this contextual, industrial (?),
or sociological (?) "why" Japanese classical cinema achieved
what it did is maybe the long standing core issue of some much of this
scholarship, at least in English-language studies - perhaps because some
of the lead scholars in English (Richie, Bordwell, Burch) were ahead of
the time in their degree of their interest in the socio-economic and other
historical context in which these feature films got made. (Those who know
the Japanese language scholarship will be better equipped to comment on
what its primary concerns are, by comparision)

It's just that this scholarship community
also knows the historiography grey areas a bit too well to risk jumping
to the conclusion that Cousins has for the "why". However, that
bad scholarship doesn't have to negate the "what" that was achieved.
Or negate that an 'introductory' film history like THE STORY OF FILM is
doing a significant thing when it's maker is willing to put out there to
his audiences the premise that pre-war Japanese classical cinema has a
global peer of the 20s and 30s cinema art of Western Europe and the US.

In that context of Japanese cinema studies,
its so interesting that Rosenbaum draws a comparison between Cousin's work
and Noel Burch's; in that Burch's work was also "... littered with
factual errors but often much more imaginative and fruitful than the correct
but boring academic writing of others during the same period". 

qt

Best wishes

Quentin Turnour, 

National Film and Sound Archive of Australia,

From:      
 ReelDrew at aol.com

To:      
 kinejapan at lists.osu.edu,

Date:      
 18/09/2014 07:55 AM

Subject:    
   [KineJapan]
question about Japanese film and Mark Cousins' series

Sent by:    
   "KineJapan"
       <kinejapan-bounces+quentin.turnour=nfsa.gov.au at lists.osu.edu>

Although I've written a number of articles
on early Japanese cinema, I value the expertise of others on the subject,
including those here who have made a particular study in this field. I'm
currently writing an analysis of Mark Cousins' documentary series, "The
Story of Film." Those who are familiar with it will recall that Cousins
places the Japanese cinema of the 1920s and 1930s in the forefront of what
has been described as a radical reinterpretation of world film history.
He appears to believe that Japanese cinema surpassed all others in those
years in terms of artistic maturity. 

While for many years I have sought to bring
greater recognition to the once-neglected field of early Japanese cinema,
often in the face of considerable indifference on the part of the film
history establishment, I never did so with an eye to diminishing the pioneering
cinematic achievements of other countries or regions. Some of Mark Cousins'
reading of Japanese film history thus arouses questions in my mind, particularly
in comparison to those of other countries. Did Japanese directors of the
'20s, '30s and '40s enjoy as much creative freedom as he states, seemingly
unhampered by the kind of commercial and political constraints that filmmakers
elsewhere experienced in those years? I recall that toward the end of his
life, Daisuke Ito stated in an interview that the political censorship
the Japanese government then imposed on filmmakers was terrible. Also,
due to less-than-supportive studio executives at Shochiku, Mikio Naruse
in the mid-1930s left the company and went to Toho. 

I believe the proper appreciation and understanding
of Japanese cinema can be best served, not by indulging in dubious theories
of cultural superiority as I think some writers have done with respect
to Japan, whether consciously or not, but by viewing it within the context
of world film history. Hence, I'd be interested in the views of others
here concerning the degree to which Japanese filmmakers did or did not
work under conditions similar to cinema artists elsewhere in the world
in those years.

William M. Drew_______________________________________________

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