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

[Quentin Turnour]

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_______________________________________________
KineJapan mailing list
KineJapan at lists.osu.edu
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