Sept 27 Japanese Silent Cinema
–David Bordwell, Our Dream Cinema: Western Historiography and the Japanese Film (Mackenzie)
–Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Space and Narrative in the Films of Ozu (Jason, Gregory)
–J.L. Anderson, Spoken Silents in the Japanese Cinema; or, Talking to Pictures: Essaying the Katsuben , Contextualizing the Texts (Tamara H, Adamo R)
October 15th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
Our Dream Cinema: Western Historiography and the Japanese Film by David Bordwell
Notes below by Mackenzie Salt
Main Arguments
• After WWI, Japan started to borrow more and more Occidental societal institutions (banking, commerce, engineering, manufacturing, government bureaucracy and machine technology)
• Japanese cinema and Western cinema are interrelated (Japanese companies got most of their technology, terminology, some of their talent and all of their film stock from Western companies, specifically American companies).
• Japanese cinema is not incredibly dissimilar to Western cinema (Japanese cinema borrowed plots, styles, technology, script construction methods, editing procedure, even theatre layout. They also widely distributed Western films).
Japanese Film Industry
• Western historiography of Japanese cinema usually only studies director, genre and studio in descending order. Bordwell claims that this is inherently flawed and that each factor should be weighed equally and include production, distribution and exhibition in these accounts.
• Japan produced the largest number of films of any nation over the thirty year period from 1925-1960 with the exception of the war years, 1937-1945. Bordwell find this interesting because Japanese films had no real export market, not like Western cinema.
• Japanese films during those years were typically very low budget (only $3,000 for silent, to $10,000 for a talkie, per film during the 1930s and ‘40s) due mostly to the fact that the film studios all had two locations: Tokyo and Kyoto, (due to earthquakes and also because Tokyo was much more modern and was used for modern-set films and Kyoto, being the ancient capital and more rustic, was used for historical or swordplay films) and thus double the staff and the fact that film stock was not domestically produced and thus had to be imported at great cost.
• Films were made extremely quickly (2 weeks usually, Ozu made A STRAIGHTFORWARD BOY (1929) in 3 days) and were shot on location to lower costs.
• Production was also decentralized, meaning that the same group of producers, writers, directors and cameramen would work together.
• Unlike Western cinema however, Japanese production companies and employees never became organized labour with the exception of the Benshi who were soon out of a job by the time they unionized. Japanese production companies guaranteed lifetime and family employment and that kept most people happy.
• Many of the big firms subsumed and combined smaller firms with the support and sometimes help of the yakuza for purposes of financing. In fact, the Nikkatsu studio was funded by the Yakuza and they also kept any strikes from happening leading to higher quantity of production.
• The movie houses in Japan before 1940 were very much like live show theatres but after 1940, they were almost all identical to the Western theatre.
Film Style
• Most Western film critics approach Japanese cinema by the director.
• Ozu’s films have been analyzed as being zen-like due to exhibition of 7 zen qualities (asymmetry, simplicity, agedness, naturalness, latency, unconventionality, and quietness) and the cuts and transitions show character development.
• Ozu has also been accused of rejecting Japanese cinema norms in favour of Hollywood style norms.
• He also does not fully go from cinematic structure to narrative structure therefore he does not fit into the formalist methodology.
• He is conflictingly accused of being a modernist but also not a modernist.
• All current analyses of Japanese cinema make a series of assumptions about the relation of cinema to traditional arts which are inherently flawed.
Film and Social Institutions
• Mellen claims that Japanese culture has a moral vacuum in its refusal to confront contemporary social problems. Instead, the aspects of the Feudal period of Japan.
• Mellen judges films by their correspondence with historical reality and criticizes them if they do not address the problem adequately.
• Bordwell argues that Mellen’s approach is not anywhere near specific enough because a true critique must be specific about the time period, artistic work, medium, and text.
• The main social institutions that affect Japanese cinema are government through censorship and government economic and trade policy that affects the film industry.
Conclusion
• Westerners cannot truly understand or critique Japanese Cinema until the critics and analysts reject their preconceived notions and inherent beliefs.
Discussion Questions
• Do you think that Bordwell is correct in his conclusions, why or why not?
• Do you think that Japanese Cinema would be different if it were not exposed to Hollywood, how?
• How do you think the situation has changed? Does Japanese cinema rely on Western Cinema to this day?
October 21st, 2007 at 5:57 pm
Hi everyone, Tamara and I (Adamo) did a presentation on the Kabuki, a group of theatrical perfromers who came to define early japanese cinema. Just to quickly reiterate, the central purpose of the article was to expose the Kabuki as an example of ancient japanese tradition and the ways in which the ancient japanese traditions shaped the new medium of cinema in the early 1900’s. Conseqeuntly, the central argument of the article is: early japense cinema was not an autonomous innovation, but an extension of the traditonal forms of stroy-telling and narrative. As a result, we can look at early japanese cinema as “commingled media” — which means, media that is shaped by various forms of narrative, intersecting to create a dynamic cinematic expereince; eg. a film screening while perfromers perform live with singing, music and dialouge
Our discussion questions were:
1) In our contemporary expereince with media, where do we see/consume “commingled media?”
2) Why do you think Japanese cinema developed so uniquly, while the rest of the world (also previously defined by live forms of entertainment) perceived cinema as a completely novel and autonomous developement.
If anyone has any questions on the reading, please email me at adamor@yorku.ca
thanks. cheers!
adamo
October 21st, 2007 at 6:01 pm
Apologies, the proper term used by J.L. Anderson was “Katsuben.” It was Katsuben that performed live.