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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Gerow, Aaron. Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895-1925. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
Main Argument: The emergence and eventual triumph of the Pure Film Movement in the discourse of Japanese cinema represents the triumph of a particular conception of "cinema," nation, spectatorship--one view of modernism--over an earlier conception which saw cinema as one among a constellation of performative forms rather than as a unique artistic medium. This discursive triumph is symbolized by the movement from calling cinema katsudô shashin (moving pictures) to eiga ("projected images," literally).
Historiographical Engagement: Miriam Silverberg's Erotic Grotesque Nonsense is the biggest influence here; Gerow's conception of the "modernisms of order and of mixture" owes something to her conception of official versus mass culture. Tom Lamarre's book on Tanazaki Jun'ichiro is also mentioned frequently, as are several writers on cinema who are, according to Gerow, varying degrees of off-base.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Gerow outlines his intention to produce a discursive history of film, one that does not take the Pure Film Movement as the start of "real" cinema and that does not presume an absolute Western/non-Western binary in cinema. Existing, non-discursive histories of Japanese cinema and of the Pure Film Movement, in a word, are anachronistic. Writing of another author, Gerow remarks that "Bordwell also fails to interrogate how the concepts of 'norm,' 'understanding,' 'spectator,' or even 'cinema' were articulated. I will show how those concepts were shaped by various discourses in a certain historical conjuncture and imbricated with developing relations of social and cultural power" (5). Partly this is strategic; very, very few prints of movies from before the Pure Film Movement survive, so a history of Japanese cinema in this era must of necessity be discursive. Gerow elaborates on "two competing strands of modernism," one of which "is dedicated to purity, unity, and homogeneity, to clearly and rationally distinguishing things and practices according to their essences, which are by definition universal," and the other of which, "aligned with the anonymous urban crowd, the new flows of goods and services, and the acceleration of daily life, celebrates instances of mixture, heterogeneity, the chance, the local, the specific" (35). The former became the dominant discourse and, "precisely by attempting to create a pure cinema, made every effort to eliminate such hybridity and efface traces of cultural difference within cinema and the film culture" (18). Gerow also insists that another problem is "asserting a clear border between Japan and the West when narrating a history of cinema rife with border crossings" (19), and argues that the best answer to this problem is "to problematize the division between Japan and the West by historicizing its role, formation, and meaning" (21).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter covers the arrival of cinema in Japan, noting that "long before the cinema's arrival in Japan, books described in rather sensationalistic terms the marvels of Western knowledge," including Edison's experiments (40). Cinema was naturalized when it did arrive as one of multiple forms of misemono ("things to watch"); only with the French film Zigomar in the early 1910s did a discourse emerge which defined cinema as a specific problem due to its specific affordances as a medium and through the way it was viewed. Gerow concludes that "Certainly cinema became a mark of the modern, a modern to be feared and regulated, but it was seen as alien only after it was treated as familiar (as a misemono). The Japan that encountered it was also assuredly not a traditional entity, but one that authorities recognized was already new, different, and changing" (64).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter engages with Gonda Yasunosuke (the Ohara sociologist familiar from Silverberg) and his film studies, which were part of the movement that saw film study--knowledge--as the solution to the problem of cinema, "yet from the start…research was aligned with correction and control of that problem" (69). (Recall Silverberg's perceptive quip about the survey as an effective tool of modern control, in this same context.) In Gerow's detailed reading, "Gonda expressed a fundamental ambivalence about cinema and film study, both celebrating the joyful excess of motion picture entertainment as enacted by 1910s audiences and seeking to correct spectator misbehavior by establishing an understandable norm for the cinema" (71). Even as Gonda, rather radically, held that "the spectator's encounter with the silver screen is fundamentally productive" because it was possible for "audiences to construct their own culture by reconfiguring the cheap amusements capitalism provides into meaningful parts of their class-based, lived experience" (79)--even as he did that, and openly celebrated minshû goroku ("popular play"), "by stressing the central role of knowledge in the future of entertainment, he opens the door to the control of popular play by those who claim special access to knowledge--by those with the power to speak and articulate cinema" (89). NB Gerow's remark towards the end that Silverberg's reading Gonda and Watsuji "in relation to the problem of the nation, she sometimes loses sight of the ideological functions of ethnographic research in relation to society and culture" (92).
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter discusses the Pure Film Movement and the discourse it advanced, in the course of which it becomes clear that the modernism of which vanguard it was part was essentially a kind of Japanese Progressivism (here recall the chestnut that Japan experienced all of the modern in about half the time that the States did). Gerow summarizes the main points thus: "the assertion of an essence unique to the cinema, the use of foreign film as the standard for condemning Japanese output, the hierarchy of taste, the criticism of the benshi, and the call for films that could be understood without the benshi" (96), articulating a specific class-based vision of modernity in the process. Moreover, these discourses were powered by a kind of "dream of export" in which Japanese film critics "internalize[d] foreign definitions of cinema--and assume[d] the foreign gaze--in order to create films that were both cinematic and Japanese" (114).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the theorization and disciplining of the benshi, which was part of the effort to modernize and Ford-ize the Japanese film industry, which also entailed the creation of a "star system" and the synthesis of the director as auteur. Gerow concludes that
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the evolution of systems for censoring films, from licensing benshi to issuing films "ratings" to doing so ad hoc. Gerow concludes that "for the industry and film fans, the only way to make cinema respectable was to assert that it was more socially beneficial than entertaining" and thus to refigure the cinema as a site of public meaning rather than escape or pleasure, which according to Gerow directly presaged the use of motion pictures in the service of the the state up to and during the war years. In this way, the potentially liberatory libertine subject of cinema could be redefined as "kokumin…who, while expressing individual desires and mental processes, were always firmly tied to public obligations that structured their private interiority so that it, too, could service the state" (221).
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Gerow concludes with a long list of contradictions in the pure film discourse, but argues that "the 'failures' in the project of producing a pure cinema are not so much an indication that the Pure Film Movement was unsuccessful, as they are manifestations of the contradictions inherent both in the historical conditions and in the discourse of reformers themselves" (225). Moreover, "if Western modernism needed others (the East, the South) to define itself, so did this modernism of purity, only its others were located as much in Japan as in the colonies, if not also in the Japanese text and in the Japanese subject. Modernism, in this case was not a state to be achieved but a seemingly self-perpetuating process" (226). This process reached a new stage with the 1939 Film Law, which positioned the state as "the gaze of the Other that gave Japanese cinema its needed approval" (232), and which created the industry structure that "survived the war and eventually developed into the dominant culture industry of Japan" (ibid), though Gerow does not specify exactly when that was.
Critical assessment: I read this book partly for what it discussed and partly because I was interested in Gerow's method, which I think is close to the method that I want to employ in my dissertation. I think the method is good and his conclusions seem largely sound, though I don't know enough about Japanese cinema to evaluate them specifically--instead, I know about history and the discourses in which Gerow situates the discussions he details, and he seems to be right on the money for the most part.
Further reading: Tom Lamarre, Shadows on the Screen
Meta notes: Always historicize.
Main Argument: The emergence and eventual triumph of the Pure Film Movement in the discourse of Japanese cinema represents the triumph of a particular conception of "cinema," nation, spectatorship--one view of modernism--over an earlier conception which saw cinema as one among a constellation of performative forms rather than as a unique artistic medium. This discursive triumph is symbolized by the movement from calling cinema katsudô shashin (moving pictures) to eiga ("projected images," literally).
Historiographical Engagement: Miriam Silverberg's Erotic Grotesque Nonsense is the biggest influence here; Gerow's conception of the "modernisms of order and of mixture" owes something to her conception of official versus mass culture. Tom Lamarre's book on Tanazaki Jun'ichiro is also mentioned frequently, as are several writers on cinema who are, according to Gerow, varying degrees of off-base.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Gerow outlines his intention to produce a discursive history of film, one that does not take the Pure Film Movement as the start of "real" cinema and that does not presume an absolute Western/non-Western binary in cinema. Existing, non-discursive histories of Japanese cinema and of the Pure Film Movement, in a word, are anachronistic. Writing of another author, Gerow remarks that "Bordwell also fails to interrogate how the concepts of 'norm,' 'understanding,' 'spectator,' or even 'cinema' were articulated. I will show how those concepts were shaped by various discourses in a certain historical conjuncture and imbricated with developing relations of social and cultural power" (5). Partly this is strategic; very, very few prints of movies from before the Pure Film Movement survive, so a history of Japanese cinema in this era must of necessity be discursive. Gerow elaborates on "two competing strands of modernism," one of which "is dedicated to purity, unity, and homogeneity, to clearly and rationally distinguishing things and practices according to their essences, which are by definition universal," and the other of which, "aligned with the anonymous urban crowd, the new flows of goods and services, and the acceleration of daily life, celebrates instances of mixture, heterogeneity, the chance, the local, the specific" (35). The former became the dominant discourse and, "precisely by attempting to create a pure cinema, made every effort to eliminate such hybridity and efface traces of cultural difference within cinema and the film culture" (18). Gerow also insists that another problem is "asserting a clear border between Japan and the West when narrating a history of cinema rife with border crossings" (19), and argues that the best answer to this problem is "to problematize the division between Japan and the West by historicizing its role, formation, and meaning" (21).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter covers the arrival of cinema in Japan, noting that "long before the cinema's arrival in Japan, books described in rather sensationalistic terms the marvels of Western knowledge," including Edison's experiments (40). Cinema was naturalized when it did arrive as one of multiple forms of misemono ("things to watch"); only with the French film Zigomar in the early 1910s did a discourse emerge which defined cinema as a specific problem due to its specific affordances as a medium and through the way it was viewed. Gerow concludes that "Certainly cinema became a mark of the modern, a modern to be feared and regulated, but it was seen as alien only after it was treated as familiar (as a misemono). The Japan that encountered it was also assuredly not a traditional entity, but one that authorities recognized was already new, different, and changing" (64).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter engages with Gonda Yasunosuke (the Ohara sociologist familiar from Silverberg) and his film studies, which were part of the movement that saw film study--knowledge--as the solution to the problem of cinema, "yet from the start…research was aligned with correction and control of that problem" (69). (Recall Silverberg's perceptive quip about the survey as an effective tool of modern control, in this same context.) In Gerow's detailed reading, "Gonda expressed a fundamental ambivalence about cinema and film study, both celebrating the joyful excess of motion picture entertainment as enacted by 1910s audiences and seeking to correct spectator misbehavior by establishing an understandable norm for the cinema" (71). Even as Gonda, rather radically, held that "the spectator's encounter with the silver screen is fundamentally productive" because it was possible for "audiences to construct their own culture by reconfiguring the cheap amusements capitalism provides into meaningful parts of their class-based, lived experience" (79)--even as he did that, and openly celebrated minshû goroku ("popular play"), "by stressing the central role of knowledge in the future of entertainment, he opens the door to the control of popular play by those who claim special access to knowledge--by those with the power to speak and articulate cinema" (89). NB Gerow's remark towards the end that Silverberg's reading Gonda and Watsuji "in relation to the problem of the nation, she sometimes loses sight of the ideological functions of ethnographic research in relation to society and culture" (92).
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter discusses the Pure Film Movement and the discourse it advanced, in the course of which it becomes clear that the modernism of which vanguard it was part was essentially a kind of Japanese Progressivism (here recall the chestnut that Japan experienced all of the modern in about half the time that the States did). Gerow summarizes the main points thus: "the assertion of an essence unique to the cinema, the use of foreign film as the standard for condemning Japanese output, the hierarchy of taste, the criticism of the benshi, and the call for films that could be understood without the benshi" (96), articulating a specific class-based vision of modernity in the process. Moreover, these discourses were powered by a kind of "dream of export" in which Japanese film critics "internalize[d] foreign definitions of cinema--and assume[d] the foreign gaze--in order to create films that were both cinematic and Japanese" (114).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the theorization and disciplining of the benshi, which was part of the effort to modernize and Ford-ize the Japanese film industry, which also entailed the creation of a "star system" and the synthesis of the director as auteur. Gerow concludes that
Both writings on cinema and changes in the practices of benshi, producers, and exhibitors combined to formulate a new cinematic experience centered in the authority of the text, in a meaning constructed as originating from expressive subjects such as stars and directors in the sphere of production, not from benshi in the theaters. All this was organized within a conception of modernity in which signification was centralized and corralled through Fordist modes and the unequal appropriation of the power to speak and enunciate the text. (173)
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the evolution of systems for censoring films, from licensing benshi to issuing films "ratings" to doing so ad hoc. Gerow concludes that "for the industry and film fans, the only way to make cinema respectable was to assert that it was more socially beneficial than entertaining" and thus to refigure the cinema as a site of public meaning rather than escape or pleasure, which according to Gerow directly presaged the use of motion pictures in the service of the the state up to and during the war years. In this way, the potentially liberatory libertine subject of cinema could be redefined as "kokumin…who, while expressing individual desires and mental processes, were always firmly tied to public obligations that structured their private interiority so that it, too, could service the state" (221).
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Gerow concludes with a long list of contradictions in the pure film discourse, but argues that "the 'failures' in the project of producing a pure cinema are not so much an indication that the Pure Film Movement was unsuccessful, as they are manifestations of the contradictions inherent both in the historical conditions and in the discourse of reformers themselves" (225). Moreover, "if Western modernism needed others (the East, the South) to define itself, so did this modernism of purity, only its others were located as much in Japan as in the colonies, if not also in the Japanese text and in the Japanese subject. Modernism, in this case was not a state to be achieved but a seemingly self-perpetuating process" (226). This process reached a new stage with the 1939 Film Law, which positioned the state as "the gaze of the Other that gave Japanese cinema its needed approval" (232), and which created the industry structure that "survived the war and eventually developed into the dominant culture industry of Japan" (ibid), though Gerow does not specify exactly when that was.
Critical assessment: I read this book partly for what it discussed and partly because I was interested in Gerow's method, which I think is close to the method that I want to employ in my dissertation. I think the method is good and his conclusions seem largely sound, though I don't know enough about Japanese cinema to evaluate them specifically--instead, I know about history and the discourses in which Gerow situates the discussions he details, and he seems to be right on the money for the most part.
Further reading: Tom Lamarre, Shadows on the Screen
Meta notes: Always historicize.