Catherine Russell - Classical Japanese Cinema Revisited

Who ever said that films were a one-time thing?

Nagisa Oshima

Japanese films have been included among the classics of world cinema ever since 1951 when Rashomon (1950) was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Embraced by the Cahiers du Cinma critics, numerous titles became canonized as great works of world cinema, exhibiting innovative displays of film technique, a richly poetic vocabulary and universal themes of progressive humanism. In the 1970s, many of these same titles were endorsed as radical alternatives to the dominant norms of classical Hollywood cinema. Japanese cinema of the studio era became a key site of critical discourse, not simply because of its aesthetic values but because its formal language differed significantly from American and European film practices. Moreover, the strong national flavor of this cinema, its auteurist structure and its links to a rich cultural tradition have invited many volumes of critical interpretation.

The classics of Japanese cinema are indubitably beautiful, elegant and extraordinarily well crafted. They have had a significant influence on many international auteurs and genres, especially the action film. And yet, the Japanese cinema that was embraced internationally as a radical alternative to the mainstream was in fact mainstream mass entertainment in Japan. From the 1930s through to the early 1960s the years covered by this book the Japanese film industry was one of the biggest in the world. It had a well-developed star system and had many highly ranked directors, around whom the system was more or less organized. As more bilingual scholarship reveals and analyzes the complexity of the cultural context of this commercial industry, the classics of Japanese cinema can begin to be understood as part of a classical cinema, with all the social, political, historical and ideological implications of the American film industry.

In the American context, classical cinema is a critical concept that continues to be in a state of flux. For Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, it refers to the industrial mode of production that dominated from 1917 to 1960, based on a set of stylistic rules, or norms, and a set of commercial practices. Even in this sense, the term classical is somewhat at odds with the cinema as a form of mass entertainment. The genius of the system, as Andr Bazin put it, created the basis from which the auteur cinema came into being. The classicism of cinema includes both the everyday, routine productions that keep the wheels turning and the exceptional masterpieces that can be recognized as artworks. Japanese cinema arguably replicates this classicism in its own terms, with its own methods and rules that are not actually that different from those of Hollywood. However, its group style emerged from a very different set of cultural and linguistic principles that cannot be reduced to a set of formal rules.

American classical cinema is not merely a style, an art form or a mode of entertainment. It is deeply embedded in the construction of American national subjects and has come to represent America to other nations (and to Americans themselves). The same can be said of classical Japanese cinema. Film studies scholars have long debated the rhetoric of the classical system as an ideological phenomenon that tends, on one hand, to reproduce assumptions about race, class and gender and, on the other, to constantly question, revise and challenge those conventions, in implicit and explicit ways. Until recently, it has been difficult for non-Japanese audiences to grasp this level of Japanese film, and it is only with the growing numbers of bilingual film scholars able to do original research into Japanese-language sources that the larger picture has begun to come into focus. It has been too easy to imagine the cinema as being representative of a homogeneous national imaginary without fully appreciating the dynamics of power, history and difference that underscore classical Japanese cinema. It wasnt until the 1990s that film scholarship took up a more historical inquiry into the cultural context of these classics. Instead of relating them to archaic cultural forms of traditional Japanese culture, critics began to situate them within modern Japanese culture.

As the classical cinemas of America and Japan recede in history, they tend to become more circumscribed as coherent styles. They belong to a specific 30-year period of the twentieth century, during which the world underwent huge social, technological and geopolitical changes. My own view of the classical, which will be developed in this book, is not stylistic, but understands it, rather, as a discourse of modernity. As I explain in the first chapter, the American cinema has also begun to be considered in these terms; but I am interested in Japanese modernity as a cultural formation of heterogeneous styles, subjects, discourses and desires. The very question of what is Japanese is negotiated in modernity; what one can expect from modernity and how it is experienced are implicit in every film.