Japanese Cinema Between Frames

183 Pages·2017·3.715 MB·English

by  Laura Lee (auth.)

Laura Lee
Japanese Cinema Between Frames
Laura Lee
Japanese Cinema
Between Frames
Laura Lee
Department of Modern Languages
and Linguistics
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-66372-2 ISBN 978-3-319-66373-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66373-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017951521
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
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Cover art by Laura Lee
Cover design by Tjaša Krivec
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C
ontents
1 Introduction 1
2 Modern Vitality: Pure Film and the Cinematic 17
3 Still Dynamic: Image and Seriality at the Dawn
of Television 51
4 Animating the Image: Patch Work
and Video Interactivity 83
5 Film in the Composite Image: Cinema
at the Digital Turn 111
6 Conclusion 139
Notes 143
Bibliography 163
Index 173
v
L f
ist of igures
Fig. 2.1 Souls on the Road (Murata Minoru, 1921) 21
Fig. 2.2 Goro Masamune (Yoshino Jirō, 1915) 24
Fig. 2.3 Goro Masamune (Yoshino Jirō, 1915) 33
Fig. 2.4 The Gallant Jiraiya (Makino Shōzō, 1921) 34
Fig. 2.5 The Gallant Jiraiya (Makino Shōzō, 1921) 35
Fig. 2.6 Shibukawa Bangoro (Tsukiyama Kōkichi, 1922) 36
Fig. 2.7 Shibukawa Bangoro (Tsukiyama Kōkichi, 1922) 36
Fig. 2.8 Jirokichi the Rat (Itō Daisuke, 1931) 48
Fig. 3.1 Satan’s Town (Suzuki Seijun, 1956) 55
Fig. 3.2 The Insect Woman (Imamura Shōhei, 1963) 60
Fig. 3.3 Giants and Toys (Masumura Yasuzō, 1958) 62
Fig. 3.4 Astroboy (Tezuka Osamu, 1963) 66
Fig. 3.5 Astroboy (Tezuka Osamu, 1963) 67
Fig. 3.6 Astroboy (Tezuka Osamu, 1963) 69
Fig. 3.7 Carmen from Kawachi (Suzuki Seijun, 1966) 71
Fig. 3.8 A Colt is My Passport (Nomura Takashi, 1967) 75
Fig. 3.9 Intentions of Murder (Imamura Shōhei, 1964) 75
Fig. 3.10 Double Suicide (Shinoda Masahiro, 1969) 76
Fig. 3.11 Blackmail is My Life (Fukasaku Kinji, 1968) 80
Fig. 3.12 Monday Girl (Nakahira Kō, 1964) 82
Fig. 4.1 The Story of the Electricity Pole Boy
(Tsukamoto Shinya, 1987) 86
Fig. 4.2 Tetsuo (Tsukamoto Shinya, 1989) 89
Fig. 4.3 Tetsuo (Tsukamoto Shinya, 1989) 90
Fig. 4.4 The Story of the Electricity Pole Boy
(Tsukamoto Shinya, 1987) 100
vii
viii LIST OF FIGUrES
Fig. 4.5 The Phantom of Regular Size (Tsukamoto Shinya, 1986) 101
Fig. 4.6 Tetsuo (Tsukamoto Shinya, 1989) 101
Fig. 4.7 Tetsuo (Tsukamoto Shinya, 1989) 103
Fig. 4.8 Shuffle (Ishii Sōgo, 1981) 104
Fig. 4.9 Tetsuo (Tsukamoto Shinya, 1989) 107
Fig. 4.10 Tetsuo (Tsukamoto Shinya, 1989) 108
Fig. 5.1 Go! Go! Fushimi Jet (Miike Takashi, 2002) 113
Fig. 5.2 Go! Go! Fushimi Jet (Miike Takashi, 2002) 113
Fig. 5.3 Cure (Kurosawa Kiyoshi, 1997) 116
Fig. 5.4 Dead or Alive: Final (Miike Takashi, 2002) 118
Fig. 5.5 City of Lost Souls (Miike Takashi, 2000) 119
Fig. 5.6 Loft (Kurosawa Kiyoshi, 2005) 121
Fig. 5.7 Galaxy Express 999 (rintarō, 1978) 126
Fig. 5.8 The Happiness of the Katakuris (Miike Takashi, 2001) 128
Fig. 5.9 The Happiness of the Katakuris (Miike Takashi, 2001) 129
Fig. 5.10 The Happiness of the Katakuris (Miike Takashi, 2001) 130
CHAPTEr 1
Introduction
What happens between each frame is so much more
important than what exists on each frame.
Norman McLaren (McLaren, quoted in Sifianos,
“The Definition of Animation,” 62. Emphasis in original).
It’s between frames where cinema speaks.
Peter Kubelka (Kubelka, “The Theory of Metrical Film,” 141).
Norman McLaren’s famous assertion that animation is the art of manip-
ulating the interstices between frames on the filmstrip functions as a
reminder that the heart of all cinema resides in that evocative power
between frames. This book aims foremost to harness this technological
underpinning of the cinematic mechanism to cast a new paradigm for
Japanese film history and aesthetics. To do so it analyzes instances when
films have pulled focus to the interval between frames to create a specta-
cle, for example through play between stillness and motion, or insistence
on discontinuity and rupture. The overarching argument is that, in addi-
tion to making visible film’s physical structure, these sites of mechani-
cal manipulation also unveil historical transformations to provide a new
dimension to Japanese cinema history.
Thinking afresh about simple techniques or features that are gener-
ally overlooked or taken for granted opens new paths of discovery and
enquiry. The book’s title, Japanese Cinema Between Frames, highlights
© The Author(s) 2017 1
L. Lee, Japanese Cinema Between Frames,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66373-9_1
2 L. LEE
the sets of relationships that are foregrounded through this approach.
For although its most conspicuous reference is to the interval between
frames on the filmstrip, it also speaks of cinema’s close proximity to other
media and endeavors to disrupt the framing that separates them. That
is, the interval serves as a linchpin to explore cinema’s entwinement in
a shifting, dynamic media ecology, tracing its historical permutations
as a way to think about it as a material and aesthetic medium. This in
turn unsettles both chronological frames of history and the frame of
national cinema, as cinema’s porousness with other media underscores
both its historical plasticity and geographical mobility. This is especially
significant in the context of Japanese cinema aesthetics, which have tra-
ditionally been viewed as enduring and culturally specific; charting mani-
festations of the interval instead presents Japanese cinema as an artistic
and industrial practice that has deep reciprocal relations with interna-
tional film trends. Finding new productive spaces between these frames
of understanding thus serves to dismantle conventional approaches to
Japanese film aesthetics, so as to find new possibilities in them and give
them new life. In particular the project speaks back to Noël Burch’s work
from the 1970s, which somewhat paradoxically serves as its conceptual
origin point.
the PresentationaL
Indeed Japanese film studies has been stymied by a legacy of scholarship
that sees the nation’s film aesthetic as fundamentally other, with height-
ened stylization as its key distinguishing feature. This is to a significant
extent due to Burch’s position that Japanese cinema of the 1920s and
1930s simply took aspects of the Western filmmaking mode, rather than
implementing it as a system. As he puts it, although filmmakers were
familiar with Hollywood techniques and the rules governing the emerg-
ing classical film style, they elected to avoid using techniques in accord
with this system and instead incorporated them primarily as dramatic
effects. For Burch this means Japanese filmmakers remained faithful to a
traditional artistic code, developing a cinema that preserved an essential
Japanese aesthetic.1 Drawing on Burch’s ideas, Donald richie claims that
Japaneseness emerges in a “presentationalist” aesthetic, one character-
ized by stylization rather than a realism that conforms to a self-sufficient,
enclosed representational system.2 For richie, as with Burch, the use of
techniques to create an effect rather than to fulfill a specific structural
1 INTrODUCTION 3
function within a film reflects a traditional, Oriental theatricality through
its stylized presentation, resulting in a unique fusion of realism and for-
malism. Formal uniqueness in these films is thus attributed to the cul-
tural particularity of Japaneseness, and Burch, followed by richie, looks
to aesthetic traditions to explain that which is different about Japanese
films.3
David Bordwell’s critique of Burch’s stance has been the most thor-
oughgoing. He has argued that, in fact, Japanese filmmakers had exten-
sive knowledge of Hollywood filmmaking techniques by this time, as
evidenced by numerous films that utilized them as a coherent system.
Bordwell’s position is significant for revealing that Japanese film was not
an oppositional practice to American and European filmmaking that had
wholly transposed its native aesthetic traditions onto the new medium,
but it had instead more or less adopted the narrative and representational
norms of Western cinema, including scriptwriting, shot composition and
analytical editing. Moreover, his position acknowledges that aesthetic tra-
ditions are continually revised and redefined as a result of changing social
contexts, and thus that Japanese cinema did not emerge in the kind of
cultural vacuum that Burch envisions—merely transmitting distant tra-
ditions—but were of their historical moment, shaped by foreign and
domestic influences.4
Interestingly, however, despite these differences Bordwell’s position
on visual effects in Japanese films is remarkably close to that of Burch.
For although he believes classical Hollywood narrative construction and
style provided a stable framework in Japan’s cinema of the period, he too
sees the eclectic implementation of techniques and effects as “appeals
to indigenous artistic traditions,” which overlay international filmmak-
ing norms with elaborate embroidery and decorative displays of virtu-
osity.5 In other words, because Japanese films had assimilated Western
continuity norms he assumes that the stylistic deviations they exhibit
from these norms must represent citations or residues of native cul-
ture, which are slotted into a shell otherwise mediated by international
norms of filmmaking to inflect these normative conventions with a pecu-
liar Japaneseness. As he puts it, “By the time distinctively ‘Japanese’
representational strategies showed up in films, they were not spontane-
ously and unreflectingly transmitted across centuries but operated more
as knowing citations, marking the product as distinctively ‘Japanese’ as
well as achieving particular formal and cultural ends.”6 Bordwell is thus
careful to say that the assimilation of traditional aesthetic features was