[KineJapan] Use of memoir in film histories

[Zahlten, Alexander]

Hi Anne,

What a great topic! My immediate thought on the “obsolescence” of this genre/subgenre is along the lines of what you mention – it really comes down to what one bills as a memoir (though it is probably exactly relevant if the ones producing it understand the work in that way).

Can you say a bit more about your focus on nouvelle vague? Since it is arguably is a tiny part of the mainstream film industry, looking beyond it (and the immediate definition of memoir)will show up more (as you’re already doing with Haneda, Atsugi, etc.); there are the industry figures like Okura Mitsugi (apparently full of fabrications) or Toei’s Okawa Hiroshi, or even Uchida Masaru (of Shonen Magajin, important for the early manga-animation tie-ups); later on pink film’s Hamano Sachi or Nishihara Giichi (see Kim Icreverzi’s excellent thesis for more on the former; the latter is a kind of interview/memoir mashup) are some examples. Scriptwriters are quite active as well (e.g. Katsura Chiho, in a kind of memoir/essay hybrid, similar to Yamagiwa Eizo). I assume there are quite a few written by actors/actresses.

It’s difficult to say without actually doing a systematic count, but my sense would also, as you already say, be that generally there is a generational cut-off point after which these publications become less common – I’m less certain it has to do with specific discourses circulating in the “high-culture” end of the film industry, maybe that is also symptomatic of broader shifts? I don’t have a good explanation though.

Apologies for the haphazard reply – again, a terrific topic, I hope you decide to write on this!
Alex




From: KineJapan <kinejapan-bounces at mailman.yale.edu> on behalf of Anne McKnight via KineJapan <kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu>
Reply-To: Japanese Cinema Discussion Forum <kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu>
Date: Friday, December 25, 2020 at 22:28
To: Japanese Cinema Discussion Forum <kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu>
Cc: Anne McKnight <annekmcknight at gmail.com>
Subject: [KineJapan] Use of memoir in film histories

Greetings all, and happiest of holidays~

I am reading a handful of memoirs of female documentarists at the moment—by women who all debuted in the early 1950s, and wrote memoirs late in life. I think this mode of writing (memoir) used to be common, but I can’t remember many male directors doing so once you get into the nouvelle vague era (Ōshima Nagisa would be an exception here, with his multiple volumes of memoir; also, Wakamatsu Kōji).

This just struck me as interesting, given the awareness of this generation of historical meta-narratives and one’s place in it—war, the Shōwa era, etc. And memoirs are  common in literary figures of the time, seen pegged to “large” histories. ( My Shōwa by Yasuoka Shōtarō is one such highly crafted memoir, discussed by Kendall Heitzman in his recent book).

In the case of the female directors—Nakamura Rinko, Okano Kaoruko, Haneda Sumiko, and Atsugi Taka—all of them did write and publish, and all stressed the micro-politics of labor relation on the set and in the companies they worked for.  (Basically all the postwar doc directors employed at studios except for Tokieda Toshie, and not Tanaka Kinuyo or Sakane Takuzo). The science film directors’ memoirs is the niche I am especially interested in. Though Haneda branched out and Okano ultimately quit, and Nakamura went freelance after a number of years, the science film is extensively covered in each memoir as a privileged stage or pivot.

So, I am wondering what elements to take into consideration if they might be called a small cluster, a sub-genre, when reading them as they articulate the relation between life and work —time of debut, position in the industry, wartime experience (related to debut and corporate role), gender, other media and genres of self-expression available overall and to each person. (Literary critic Hibi Yoshitaka has a nice phrase “the distributed self” [or “I", I can’t remember, but you get the point]). Basically, why they all waited to write and publish memoirs, when the male nouvelle directors seemed to opt out of the genre and to take up a different array of “I”-media in real time.

Beginning with the nouvelle vague people (and slightly earlier, in at least one interesting account I can think of), the concepts of humanism were challenged, and the debates on subjectivity and filmmaking put forth a number of ways of thinking about the role of critique, complicating “naive” readings of individual action and relation with institutions. They had many critiques of “expression.” TV, of course, would made put first-person critiques accessible in the 1950s. On top of that, all kinds of essays and zadankai and taidans contain elements one could consider memoir-like (with all of the performativities specific to these venues, which are probably different in a memoir).  The emphasis on life experience how it is narrated, figured, vis-a-vis one’s relation to various histories (labor, production, etc.) is what I guess I am trying to frame.

I would be very curious for any thoughts about this genre of memoir and its obsolescence, or major ones I might have forgotten, whether independent or in the studio system (like Kurosawa Akira).

Thanks!

Anne


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