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In 1931 Japanese
critics rated the Shochiku company's first full talkie,
Madamu to nyobo (The neighbour's wife and
mine, dir. Gosho Heinosuke), the best Japanese film of
the year. Though superficially a typical Shochiku
lightweight domestic comedy, it can be read allegorically in
two ways: as an allegory of the transition to sound in the
cinema; and as an allegory of the local industry's taming of
the threat of modernity. The male
protagonist is a scriptwriter (for the theatre) whose
commissioned script is overdue, causing anxiety to his
practical wife, who has a family to feed. He seems to have
writer's block, and his concentration is disturbed by a
series of noises (the scampering of mice, the miaowing of
cats, the ringing of alarm clocks, the bawling of his
children, the whining and singing of his wife) that first
distract him, then irritate him and finally drive him mad.
The noise of the jazz band practising next door is the final
straw. His initial hostility to this violation of his peace
and quiet is dissipated, soon after he enters their house in
protest, when he is seduced by the music and modern manners
of the band. He is finally able to complete his script
successfully and speedily to the accompaniment of the jazz
rhythms. The lead singer of the band, the brazenly modern
girl next door, provokes anxiety in his wife, but he returns
home to wife and work. The final scene is of a family outing
during which husband and wife recapture the romance of their
courtship to the strains of "My blue heaven". On the
allegorical level, this film demonstrates not only that
Shochiku has overcome the challenge of sound technology
(initially vexing, ultimately manageable and even
liberating) but also that disturbing manifestations of
modernity can be domesticated. These modern girls, even if
smoking and drinking and flirting outrageously, are really
no threat to the stability of the Japanese family. At their
Kamata studio, Shochiku were to continue to produce silent
films for several years after this (until their move to the
properly equipped sound studios at Ofuna), but they had
found the way to defuse the threat of westernized modernity
by flirtation with it and domestication of its cinematic
manifestations. But Shochiku was
not the only film company in Japan at this time, and the
Kamata studio was not the only Shochiku studio. In Kyoto,
Shochiku, Nikkatsu, Toa, Teikine, Makino and Chiezo
companies were all making period films. One very popular
1931 release was Mabuta no haha (Mother of
memory), a jidai-geki (period film) directed by
Inagaki Hiroshi for Chiezo Productions. It was a silent
film, but screenings were accompanied by the live
performance of music and dramatic narration, so that it was
not experienced by audiences in silence. This film combines
racy swordplay action with family melodrama, in a story
about a lonely wandering yakuza who pines for reunion
with the mother who abandoned him. Based on a long-running
hit of the popular theatre written by Hasegawa Shin, a
popular novelist and playwright, it stars Chiezo Kataoka,
one of several jidai-geki stars. The performances of
narrator and star dwell on the pathetic aspects of the
hero's situation and feelings, in the tradition of the
popular theatre, but the film is edited in an eclectic
style: fast cutting in action sequences, slower-paced
shot-reverse-shot for scenes of intimate dialogue exchanges,
and decorative inserts of unpeopled scenery and still-life
shots (steaming kettle, leaves falling, sword on ground)
that prefigure the more systematic still-life sequences of
later Ozu films. Here these odd inserts can be read as
illustration of the off-screen narration, or conversely the
off-screen narration serves to integrate them into the
continuity of the story, just as the narrator's expert
rendering of the dialogue (in a continuous stream before, at
the same time as, and after the inter-titles are shown)
masks the interruption that inter-titles pose to the
action. Mabuta no
haha is no allegory but, in its hybrid mixture of the
theatrical and cinematic, in its eclectic approach to
editing and composition, and in its recourse to a popular
Japanese narrative that was already familiar to the audience
through its recurrent renditions in other media (stage,
print), it is exemplary of the early Japanese
cinema. In late Taisho
and early Showa Japan, between 1920 and 1934, film culture
blossomed and film industry personnel experimented with a
wide range of styles and subjects, albeit restricted by the
commercial priorities of the heads of the major companies
and the watchful eye of the state censors. European and
American films were avidly viewed, studied and imitated.
However, as both Noel Burch and David Bordwell have noted,
the resulting films were never pure imitations: they were
marked by a fondness for (narratively redundant) stylistic
flourishes (Bordwell) or a certain fetishization of the
cinematic signifier (Burch) that Burch relates to a
non-realist Japanese artistic tradition (presentational
rather than representational). [1] [1]
See Noel Burch, To the distant observer (London:
Scolar Press, 1979) and David Bordwell, "A cinema of
flourishes: Japanese decorative classicism of the prewar
era", in Arthur Nolletti Jnr and David Desser (eds),
Reframing Japanese cinema: authorship, genre, history
(Indiana University Press, 1992), 328- 346. Both Burch and
Bordwell focus on the formal differences, the variations
from European and American models, of Japanese film practice
in general, as well as the particular formal strategies (or
norms, as Bordwell would have it) of the great Japanese
directors of the classic era. Their work has been widely
disseminated and is generally familiar to film scholars.
Less well known is the considerable role played by Japanese
institutions in the development of a national cinema. The
practices of these institutions performed a mediating role
in the reception of European and American models of cinema
in Japan; they fostered particular film genres and
particular styles of performance; they enabled some
expression of modernism but domesticated its manifestations.
I will concentrate here on three institutions: the theatre,
the film industry and the state. In the silent
era, and well into the sound era, there was a close nexus
between the theatre and film industries in Japan. Both
Anderson & Richie's pioneer history of Japanese cinema
and Noel Burch's ambitious re-writing of that history
attribute a significant role to the institution of the
benshi in early Japanese cinema[2].
By carrying the burden of the narrative, narrating the story
and speaking the dialogue off-screen, he reduced the role of
the film text to mime and illustration. Anderson and Richie
initially saw this as a reactionary practice, delaying the
introduction of true film language; but in his later
writings Anderson celebrated the benshi's role as
star of the "silent" cinema[3].
Burch saw the benshi as a positive influence on the
development of a distinctive national cinema. By relieving
the film text of the need to narrate the story, he enabled
Japanese film-makers to concentrate on extra-narrative
embellishments of the visual text, on surface play, and thus
to transgress the norms of Hollywood-style narrative
efficiency (continuity editing, crisply cut to tell a story,
shot-reverse-shot dialogue exchanges, eyeline matching, use
of 90 degree shooting space). [2]
See Burch, ch 7; also Joseph L.Anderson and Donald Richie,
The Japanese film: art and industry (Tuttle 1959,
reprinted in expanded edition Princeton University Press,
1982), ch 1. [3]
J.L. Anderson, "In praise of Benshi", Japanese
film, Appendix A (1982), 439-444; and J. L. Anderson,
"Spoken silents in the Japanese cinema; or talking to
pictures: essaying the Katsuben, contexturalizing the
texts", in Nolletti & Desser, 259-311. In fact, the use
of an off-stage storyteller with virtuoso vocal skills, able
to register a wide range of emotions and impersonate a wide
range of characters, was common in the Japanese theatre -
not just in the puppet theatre (bunraku), but also in
kabuki plays adapted from the puppet repertoire and in some
forms of popular theatre. The popularity of benshi
performers and their numerical strength (according to
the Annual Film Censorship Report issued by the Ministry of
the Interior, they numbered 7,500 - including 312 women - in
February 1927[4])
enabled them to exercise considerable industrial muscle and
to take strong industrial action when their jobs were
threatened by the introduction of sound. [4]
Naimusho Keihyokyoku, Showa 2, National Diet Library,
Tokyo. Another
theatrical practice adopted by the early cinema was
abandoned much sooner, already by 1923, despite industrial
action. That was the practice of male actors playing female
roles, a fixed convention of both the noh and the
kabuki theatres. The widely held belief of the Edo
era (1600-1868), that the star onnagata (male actor
specialising in female roles) could better portray
femininity than a real woman, survived into the present
century. As late as 1940, an actor trained as an
onnagata in the kabuki theatre, who was then
playing the male romantic lead in an imperialist
inter-racial romance, coached his co-star in methods of
making her performance more touchingly
feminine[5]. [5]
Yamaguchi Yoshiko and Fujiwara Sakuya, Ri Ko Ran: watashi
no hansei (Ri Ko Ran: my early life) (Tokyo:
Shincho Press, 1987). But the
connections between stage and screen went much further than
the absorption of these theatrical practices into the early
Japanese cinema. Performers and directors moved back and
forth between the two entertainment media, popular plays
were adapted to the screen, theatrical genres and
performance styles were employed in the cinema, and the two
largest film companies of the late 1930s, Shochiku and Toho,
were part of giant entertainment complexes with major
theatre interests, companies which derived their profits
from live theatre as well as movies. The film industry
followed the practice of kabuki theatre in dividing
its productions into two major genres - jidai-geki
(period drama) and gendai-mono (contemporary drama),
with period production centred in the region of Kyoto, the
old capital with its old world charm (blessed with numerous
castles, temples and decorative gardens), and contemporary
production centred around Tokyo, the newer metropolis, with
its high-rise buildings, offices, banks, neon-lit emporia,
modern restaurants and expanding suburbs. The actors for
period films were trained in the kabuki theatre; the
actors for Meiji melodrama were trained in shimpa
(Meiji-era new-wave theatre, largely romantic melodrama).
Shochiku owned kabuki theatre companies and
shimpa troupes before and after it became active in
film production, distribution and exhibition. Toho ran the
Takarazuka all-girls musical theatre and built giant
theatres for stage shows and movie exhibition before and
after it became involved in film production (in the sound
era). The Shingeki (the modern, European-style theatre)
supplied actors and directors for both period and
contemporary films[6].
When Shochiku opened its contemporary Kamata studio near
Tokyo in the early 1920s, its personnel studied the
techniques of Hollywood films but it is notable that Osanai
Kaoru, the co-director of their first major production,
Souls on the road (Rojo no reikon), a film which on
first viewing seems like a homage to D.W. Griffith in its
parallel editing, narrative complexity, sentimentality and
costuming, was previously the founder of the modern theatre
movement in Japan who had studied the Stanislavsky method at
the Moscow Art Theatre and worked in Max Reinhardt's theatre
in Berlin. The story of Souls... was based in part on
Gorky's The lower depths. [6]
For details of the influence of the progressive modern
theatre on jidai-geki, see S.A. Thornton, "The
shinkokugeki and the zenshinza: western
representational realism and the Japanese period film",
Asian cinema 7, no 2 (Winter 1995): 46-57. The earliest
jidai-geki were scenes from kabuki stage
productions, shot from one fixed position in wide shot, as
if viewed from a fixed seat in the theatre auditorium. The
persistence of long static takes, rendered intelligible and
entertaining only by the off-screen performance of the
benshi, into the 1920s, is attested to by Kinugasa
Teinosuke, who joined Nikkatsu, then the major film company,
in 1917, after training and starring as an oyama
(onnagata) in the kabuki and shimpa
theatres in Osaka. He recalled: Between
1917 and 1919 I performed in about 90 films for
Nikkatsu, always following the same ways, since the
benshi demanded that shots last at least five minutes.
I wanted to modify these rules but [director]
Oguchi, man of the theatre, took no notice of my
wishes... In 1919 I
made my first film, in which I was both writer and
female lead... I loved going to the labs to learn
technique and I discovered there that montage meant
actors didn't have to freeze in mid-action while the
cameras re-charged. I then requested - without success
- that they use montage in films... As an actor
at Nikkatsu, I was directed by Tanaka Eiji in several
films. He was far superior to my normal director,
Oguchi. Still very young, Tanaka had started as an
actor in the modern theatre [Shingeki]
whence arose the movement (led by Osanai) for the
renewal of the Japanese theatre. At Nikkatsu he was
mainly a scriptwriter but he also directed several
films, such as The Living Corpse (1919), an adaptation
from Tolstoy, one of the most important post-war
[i.e. post World War 1] films - where I played
the role of a young Russian girl...
[7] [7]
Kinugasa Teinosuke, "Le cinema japonais vers 1920",
Cahiers du cinema 166/7 (May-June 1965): 44, 46. My
translation. In the late
1920s, fast cutting, dramatic angles and moving camera were
increasingly employed in jidai-geki, and swordplay
scenes became much more exciting, in part through studying
the action and shooting style of the Hollywood western. But
the stories were taken from the Japanese theatre - late
kabuki plays about the escapades of disreputable
ronin and yakuza and popular sentimental plays
about wandering outlaws (the sub-genre known as
matatabi-mono); and the swaggering gait, wild
grimaces and macho posturing of the heroes in scenes of
confrontation followed the aragoto style of
kabuki performers. The stars of jidai-geki -
Bando Tsumasaburo, Hasegawa Kazuo (called Hayashi Chojiro at
Shochiku, before he worked for Toho), Kataoka Chiezo, Arashi
Kanjuro - were all trained in the theatre. There was more
experimentation with film language in the independent film
companies started by star performers breaking away from the
major companies, and taking some keen younger directors
frustrated by the conservatism of the majors with them, but
these independent companies were dependent on the majors for
distribution and were eventually frozen out or re-absorbed
by them. Chiezo Productions and Makino were two such
companies attracting dynamic directors. One female star,
Irie Takako, a shimpa-style melodrama actress, also
went into independent production in the early 30s, luring
Mizoguchi Kenji away from Nikkatsu with her. Mizoguchi had
his first critical and popular success (Taki no
shiraito, 1933) while working for her company and
employing her as star. He was able to indulge in ambitious
stylistic exercises in the use of flashbacks, long mobile
takes, and lyrical dissolves while working for Irie and then
another semi-independent company, Dai-Ichi Eiga, which he
joined in 1934. But Taki no shiraito, like the
earlier Nihonbashi (Nikkatsu, 1929) and the later
Orizuru osen (Dai-Ichi Eiga, 1934), was an adaptation
of an Izumi Kyoka melodrama that had been a hit in the
shimpa theatre. It was not just the story that was
lifted from the shimpa theatre, but the gender
stereotypes (passive romantic hero, active tragic heroine)
and the performance style (described by Sato Tadao as
excessively sentimental and declamatory, and marked by an
extreme aestheticisation of self-pity and melancholy). Sato
claims that the renunciation scenes from shimpa, in
which a handsome young man faces the woman he loves and,
standing at a distance from her with sadly lowered head, on
the edge of tears, explains to her why they must renounce
each other, were popular set-pieces that were translated to
the screen and remained popular with Japanese film audiences
right up to the 1950s[8]. [8]
Sato Tadao, "Theatre et cinema au Japon", in Cinema et
litterature au Japon de l'ere Meiji a nos jours (Paris:
Editions du Centre Pompidou, 1986), 35. While
shimpa-style melodrama and kabuki-style
jidai-geki were the staple genres at Nikkatsu in the
early days, these genres were soon to be modified through
the influx of directors and actors trained in the modern
European-style theatre, the shingeki, and through the
avid cinephilia of young directors who followed the latest
trends in European and American cinema with great interest.
At Nikkatsu, the younger directors seemed more interested in
modern European theatre and European cinema; at Shochiku
(which only started film production in the early 1920s) they
were Hollywood fans. All the Hollywood majors had
distribution branches in Japan[9]
and Hollywood films were exhibited in Nikkatsu and Shochiku
theatres alongside local films. European films were imported
by independent distributors and had a more limited
circulation but their audience included people of
significance to film culture - critics, writers, actors and
film production personnel. [9]
Dai-nihon Universal was founded in 1915; United Artists and
Paramount established branches in 1922; MGM and First
National in 1925; Warner Brothers in 1932; Columbia and RKO
in 1934; Twentieth Century Fox in 1935. See Tanaka
Junichiro, Nihon eiga hattatsu shi, (History of
the development of Japanese cinema), Vol lll (Chuei
Koron, 1976), 80-81. During the1920s,
film culture proliferated. Apart from an expansion of film
fan magazines, two serious film journals devoted to the
documentation and criticism of recent trends in local and
overseas cinema were founded - Kinema jumpo in 1919
and Eiga hyoron in the mid 1920s. In 1924 Kinema
jumpo instituted its critics' poll of the Best Ten
Japanese films of the year, a listing which has been made
annually to the present day and has provided incentive and
recognition to innovation and artistic achievement within
the industry. Some influential film critics of the 1920s and
1930s were left-wingers, active in the short-lived
prokino movement, the proletarian film movement. They
promoted and rewarded films that exhibited awareness of
social problems and highlighted social injustices; they
wanted Japanese cinema to be more social realist. It is not
surprising in these circumstances that, in 1936, when
Mizoguchi (with the aid of a progressive new scriptwriter,
Yoda Yoshikata) abandoned the shimpa conventions and
Meiji period setting for a tougher, more social realist
style and a sharply critical focus on the contemporary urban
social scene, in his last two films with the
semi-independent Dai-Ichi Eiga company, they were awarded
first and third place in the annual critics' poll (for
Gion sisters and Osaka elegy,
respectively). Some of these
critics were graduates of German language and literature
departments and keen fans of European cinema. They not only
helped promote interest in and knowledge of the European
cinema - Expressionism, Impressionism, surrealism, soviet
montage, social realism - but also translated scripts,
articles and books on film from German into Japanese.
Munsterberg's The photoplay, its psychology and
aesthetics was published in Japan in 1924; translations
of Pudovkin and Eisenstein's theories of film (from the
German versions) in 1932[10]. [10]
Tanaka Junichiro, Vol 2, 386-388. Shochiku's Kamata
studio (the centre of their contemporary production)
departed from theatrical tradition more quickly and more
sharply than their older theatre-bound rival, Nikkatsu. They
were the first to use female actors to play women's roles,
to employ so-called amateurs (actors untrained in the
theatre) as performers, and to produce Hollywood-style
genres - urban family melodrama, silent slapstick comedy,
contemporary crime movies and detective films. So they
became associated with modernity, American culture, and
light-hearted fun. Ozu Yasujiro trained there under a
director of "nonsense films" - a genre derived in part from
American slapstick but also rife with toilet humour - and
went on to experiment with a variety of genres during the
1920s. But by the1930s, under the guidance of the studio
boss Kido Shiro, the studio developed its own distinctive
genre of "home drama", which combined the pathos of family
melodrama with comedy routines and some degree of social
realism. The combination of pathos with humour won audiences
over and the social realist elements pleased the critics.
Working under Kido at the Kamata studio, Ozu gained critical
approval in the early 1930s with films that employed some
slapstick but also dealt feelingly with serious social
issues (unemployment, social inequality, poverty); and
Naruse Mikio made movies that more jarringly mixed high
melodrama and social realism with slapstick routines. The
latter's films have a heavier, darker tone than the Kamata
signature product - which is light and witty, charming and
entertaining - and it is not surprising that he left
Shochiku for PCL and Toho in the mid-1930s. The other Kamata
studio directors - Gosho Heinosuke, Shimizu Hiroshi and
Shimazu Yasujiro - largely unseen in the West - played by
the rules, keeping the tone light and witty. There was one
amazingly experimental avant-garde film made in 1926 outside
the industrial studio system. Directed by Kinugasa, the
former female impersonator and Nikkatsu director, it seems
to have been a product of the literary avant-garde as well
as Kinugasa's desire to experiment with the medium in ways
that the studios did not allow. Kurutta ippeiji (A
page of madness) was made with the money he had saved
from his earnings as a star performer, and the unpaid
assistance of fellow enthusiasts in the contemporary arts
world (performers and writers, including the young novelist,
Kawabata Yasunari). His original intention to set the film
in a circus was abandoned when they were refused permission
to shoot in the Big Top, and Kawabata suggested they shift
the setting to a mental hospital. According to Kinugasa, the
scenario was largely improvised from day to day; and he told
Georges Sadoul in 1965 that: [11]
Kinugasa Teinosuke, 46. He claimed then
to be influenced by The cabinet of Dr Caligari
(Germany 1919), Abel Gance's La roue (France,
1923) and a Universal Bluebird film directed by Rupert
Julian. But it is possible that he under-emphasised the
contributions of his collaborators. The mental
hospital setting suggests the influence of Caligari,
but the loosely associational narrative and the spartan sets
bear little comparison. The brilliant opening montage of
expressive images suggests some debt to French impressionist
cinema. The dazzling display of experimental camera work,
distorted and processed shots, and plethora of editing
devices, demonstrate total intoxication with the
possibilities of the film medium. Burch compares the film to
Dziga Vertov's The man with a movie camera (USSR,
1922)[12]
but, apart from sharing an intoxication with the medium, it
is quite unlike Vertov's work, which harnessed the medium in
the service of didactic and celebratory documentary, while
this film uses it to create a brooding atmosphere,
hallucinatory effects and a subjective representation of
madness - an interior world more akin to that of German
Expressionist art. In its structure, based more on a loosely
associational psychological logic than narrative coherence,
and in its use of distorted eye imagery and histrionic
performance, the film also prefigures the early surrealist
films of Bunuel. [12]
Burch, 128. James
Peterson[13]
has argued that the film was a product of the literary
avant-garde, in particular the group of writers known as
shinkankakusha, or New Impressionists, whose work
experimented with a wide variety of modernist styles -
Constructivism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism and
Expressionism. They employed startling images and abrupt
transitions and refracted raw sensation through the minds of
their characters. Peterson's thesis gains support from a
comparison of this film with Kinugasa's later work.
Kurutta ippeiji is unique in Kinugasa's oeuvre, which
is otherwise strongly indebted to his theatrical origins.
While his very next semi-independent film, Jujiro
(1928), continues to employ subjective camera work to
represent madness, includes some sequences of striking
visual patterning and is totally intoxicated with the use of
dissolves, it is a shimpa-style melodrama in setting
and narrative, and the performances are exceedingly
theatrical, even including a kabuki-signature
mie pose at the dramatic climax. Despite spending two
years in Europe (Moscow, Leningrad, Berlin and Paris) after
completion of Jujiro, and becoming familiar with
Pudovkin, Eisenstein, Romm, Lang and
Pabst,[14]
Kinugasa seems to have quickly reverted to the shimpa
and kabuki repertoire of stories, theatrical styles
of performance, and a more conventional film style, when he
resumed working as a jidai-geki director in the
studio system (at first for Shochiku, then for Toho) in
Kyoto after his return to Japan, judging from the films I
have been able to see. [13]
"A war of utter rebellion: Kinugasa's Page of madness
and the Japanese avant-garde of the 1920s", Cinema
journal 29, no 1 (Fall 1989). [14]
Kinugasa Teinosuke, 46-7. Like Hollywood,
the Japanese film industry was prolific in output. Each
company kept a stable of actors, directors and technicians
in full-time employment, churning out two new features per
week - one period film and one contemporary film. Kinugasa
recalls the schedule when he joined Nikkatsu in
1917: [15]
Kinugasa Teinosuke, 44. The number of
film theatres in Japan increased steadily from 470 in 1921
to 1,057 in 1926, and 1,538 in 1934. Attendances likewise
rose steadily from 153,735,449 (first recorded attendance
figures) in 1926 to 244,389,636 in 1934. [16]
There were few independent exhibitors; most of the theatres
were contracted to the big companies or owned by them. In
1929, almost three-quarters of the theatres were tied to the
big two, Nikkatsu and Shochiku; and the smaller companies
had to compete for the rest. The major companies employed
bullying tactics and blackmail to restrict competition. In
1925, when some independent companies (Makino in particular)
started to make popular comedies, Nikkatsu and Shochiku
ganged up with Teikine and Toa and these top four companies
threatened to withhold their films from exhibitors who
showed independent films, causing an effective ban in Kyushu
and a six-month delay in the release of the independent
films elsewhere. There were reputed links between the film
companies and the yakuza in Kyoto. In the mid to late 1930s,
when Toho had replaced Nikkatsu as Shochiku's main
competitor, and a number of actors and directors defected
from Shochiku to Toho, a defecting jidai-geki star
was slashed and injured by an unknown assailant - as
punishment for his disloyalty to the company. [16]
Yamada Kazuo, Nihon eigano gendai shi (Shinnichi
Books, 1970), 40. There was
resentment against the power of the majors but their
stranglehold over exhibition meant that they were able to
deal effectively with Hollywood competition. They did so by
screening popular Hollywood films alongside their own
products, in double and triple screenings; keeping their
production costs low and their rental rates cheap; and
making exhibitors shareholders in production companies, thus
giving them a vested interest in the local industry. As most
Hollywood films required both linguistic and cultural
mediation, they were not as easily consumed in Japan as they
were in Europe and especially the English-speaking world.
However, silent slapstick comedy was directly accessible to
audiences everywhere and Chaplin in particular was a great
hit in Japan[17]. [17]
See Miriam Silverberg, "Remembering Pearl Harbour,
forgetting Charlie Chaplin and the case of the disappearing
western woman: a picture story', positions 1, no.1
(1993): 24-76. By the end of the
1920s, Shochiku had replaced Nikkatsu as the major company.
It assumed financial control of Teikine in 1928, and founded
another subsidiary company, Shinko Kinema Co, in 1931, to
distribute independently-produced jidai-geki films
(made by Arashi Kanjiro and Bando Tsumasaburo, both
jidai-geki stars).[18]
Shochiku had the financial resources to cope (albeit slowly)
with the transition to sound[19];
Nikkatsu did not. A third company, Toho, emerged in the
later 1930s from an amalgamation of two separate production
companies with expertise in sound technology (PCL and JO
Studios) with the Toho theatre chain, under the auspices of
the railway magnate and theatrical entrepreneur, Kobayashi,
who had good connections with big business, and thus access
to investment capital. The new company adopted modern
methods of business management and the contract system of
hiring actors. With use of the best equipped sound studio
complex in Japan, at Kinuta, and premieres at the palatial
new movie theatres built by Kobayashi, Toho rapidly grew so
attractive that it seduced stars and directors away from the
other companies and threatened the supremacy of Shochiku. It
was deemed more patriotic than Shochiku, whose contemporary
films were tainted with foreign American influence. In
contrast to Shochiku, whose films were deemed frivolous and
criticized for showing Japanese women smoking and flirting
and generally dressing and behaving like their corrupt
western counterparts, Toho was seen as more responsible and
serious, more responsive to important national issues like
imperial expansion, military successes and patriotic
pride. [18]
Shinko later became a major production company, attracting
leading writers and directors and, under the astute
management of Nagata Masaichi, eventually became the main
player in the creation of Daiei in 1942, when wartime
regulations restricted the number of commercial film
companies to three. [19]
On the gradual transition from silent cinema to the talkie
in Japan, see Freda Freiberg, "The transition to sound in
Japan", in Tom O"Regan and Brian Shoesmith (eds), History
on/and/in film, Proceedings of the 3rd
History and Film Conference 1985 (Perth: History and Film
Association of Australia, 1987), 76-80. The silent
Japanese film industry, as mentioned above, was closely
connected to the theatre industry, and drew on the
theatrical repertoire for its narratives and performance
styles. Popular stage hits, as well as popular novels, were
adapted to the screen, and exhibited in theatres alongside
the live performance of a star dramatic narrator and
musicians. Japanese adaptations of European and American
stories were also made, but shifted to Japanese locations
and peopled by Japanese characters. European art
movies had restricted circulation, mainly confined to the
big cities, and were distributed by independent specialist
companies like Towa. These films had strong appeal to an
educated elite and to people involved in film culture but
were not big business. In the late 1920s, the narration of
foreign art movies was performed by specialist benshi
who explained and interpreted them to the local audience.
Kurosawa Akira's elder brother, an addict of Russian
literature, was one such specialist[20]
but the most famous one was Tokugawa Musei, who became a
film star at Toho in the talkie era. [20]
Akira Kurosawa, Something like an autobiography (New
York: Alfred Knopf, 1982), 74. The industry did
not dispense with benshi until talkie technology made
them redundant, and even then the audience of a silent film
enjoyed a dynamic theatrical experience, with no lack of
sound in the theatre, so producers were able to continue to
shoot and distribute silent films well into the 1930s. There
was no sudden transition to sound in Japan. Silent films
continued to be produced while experimentation with sound
technology and the occasional sound production
occurred.[21]
From the businessmen's point of view, this meant that the
costs involved in changing over to sound were spread over a
longer period, and the production crews could take their
time to master the new medium. [21]
For more detailed information on the transition from silent
to sound production, see Freiberg 1987. The industry was
in the business of entertainment, and that involved steering
a middle course between conservative and progressive
tendencies, between recycling the old popular indigenous
forms of entertainment and embracing the new equally popular
international trends, between restraining and encouraging
experimentation. The bigger companies derived profits from
exhibition and distribution, which they were able to invest
in production. By the 1930s the industry was concentrating
on refinements and variations of their three major genres -
the jidai-geki, the woman's melodrama and the home
drama - with a proliferation of sub-genres within these
categories. Kurosawa is given
credit for the revitalization of the jidai-geki in
the 1950s, but it had already been "revitalized" twice
before. In the late1920s, Ito Daisuke and Inagaki Hiroshi
enlivened the action with fast cutting, dynamic swordplay
choreography and camera movement; and employed a greater
degree of filmic realism than their predecessors in their
use of locations and direction of actors. In the mid1930s,
Itami Mansaku (father of Itami Juzo) and Yamanaka Sadao
further humanized the jidai-geki by importing some of
the humour and gentle pathos of the Shochiku home drama into
it, by mocking or even seriously questioning the macho
heroics and feudal values of the conventional
jidai-geki, and by characterizing the hero as a
reluctant, incompetent or failed hero. In the late 1920s
and early 1930s, under the influence of leftist ideas, the
woman's melodrama acquired a more socially critical bite,
accentuating issues of gender and class oppression, and the
economic struggle for survival. It also became less stagey -
with increased use of moving camera and/or cutting in both
indoor and outdoor settings. The female stars of this genre
had a strong screen presence, and attracted many fans. In
the performances of Irie Takako, Tanaka Kinuyo and Yamada
Isuzu, Japanese women are portrayed as strong, spirited,
assertive and defiant. Mizoguchi's experiments with long
mobile takes and flashbacks also enhanced the aesthetic and
emotional impact of films in this genre. The home drama in
the early 1930s also reflected concern with issues such as
unemployment and class distinction, but it was generally
light-hearted and optimistic in tone, in contrast to the
heavier, pessimistic tone of the melodrama. The home drama's
pathos was balanced by comedy, including slapstick routines
- in the vein of Chaplinesque comedy. As it was the least
traditional of the staple genres, it was the most open to
Hollywood influence. But if the cheeky behaviour of children
and undignified conduct of parents seem to embody American
manners as reflected in Hollywood comedies, rather than the
realities of Japanese family life in the period, the pacing
is more leisurely and the drama more low-key, less obviously
plotted, than in American family sit-coms. The Shochiku home
drama came to be seen as modern but non-threatening to
traditional family values. So one could say that the
Japanese industry domesticated the Hollywood film in more
ways than one. If some social
criticism was smuggled into the genre films, provided it was
neither strident nor disruptive to the generic conventions,
it was carefully monitored by the studio bosses, not only
because they did not want the entertainment value of their
films hampered by political polemics, but also because they
did not want trouble with the censors. With their tight
schedule of weekly releases, they could not afford delays
and disputes with the censors, who could hold up releases
and insist on re-cutting of the film to comply with their
criticisms. So the studio heads would self-censor in advance
to avoid these costly disruptions to their
schedule. The film industry
was in the hands of private businessmen and received no
financial support from the state. However, the state had a
strong indirect influence on the industry. In the early
period, its role was largely a censorious one, acting as
policeman through its censoring agencies. In the 1930s,
however, the state assumed a more positive supportive role,
albeit more in rhetoric than in practice. Initially, the
control of motion picture exhibition was in the hands of the
local prefecture police forces. They were empowered to close
theatres not complying with regulations, and stop screenings
of films and/or performances of benshi that had not
received prior approval from the censors. The Motion Picture
Regulations introduced in Tokyo in 1917 divided films into
two categories: those suitable for children and those not.
Film theatres had to be segregated, with separate seating
sections for men and women. Billboards were policed, to
prevent misleading or salacious advertising. A censorship
room was installed in police headquarters. Censors were
instructed to cut or ban the following content: These regulations
were adopted in all 47 prefectures of Japan, but there were
some variations in implementation and some films were banned
in one area but passed in another, causing some difficulties
to distributors and exhibitors. So, in 1925 censorship was
centralized and placed in the hands of the Naimusho, the
Ministry of the Interior of the national government. The
official reasons for the shift were (i) the need for special
expertise in the practice of censorship; (ii) the need for
uniformity in regulations and their implementation; (iii)
inefficiency and expense of local
regulation.[22]
One may note here the trend to increased bureaucratization -
with accompanying centralization and rationalization of
resources and personnel - common to all modern nation
states. But postwar Japanese commentators tended to
associate the shift with a shift to the right, towards more
conservative, nationalist and imperialist values, at the
start of the Showa era, following the relative liberalism
and internationalism of the Taisho era. One such historian
of censorship pronounced that: [22]
Speech made by Chief of Police Administration Section of
Naimusho to Naimusho-sponsored meeting of officials in
charge of entertainment, 4-6 August 1925. The main
purpose of the new censorship laws was to maintain the
sanctity of the Imperial family and to maintain feudal
ethics and the Confucian spirit as intrinsic to the
national character.[23] [23]
"The post-war film world and GHQ", in Endo Tatsuo, Eirin:
rekishi to jiken [Film ethics regulation: history
and incidents] (Tokyo: Kabushigaisha Pelican,
1973). Though
recognising that film was a medium of entertainment, the
paternalistic censors were concerned about the educational
and moral values thereby imparted. The major categories of
concern were labeled ko-an (public security) and
fuzoku (public morals). Infringement of ko-an
involved desecration of the sanctity of the Imperial
family, damage to national dignity, incitement to disorder
or anarchy, damage to relations between Japan and other
countries, and detailing of criminal behaviour. Infringement
of fuzoku involved desecration of religion, cruelty,
ugliness, obscenity, adultery, sexual license, contravention
of good family moral standards, ruining the ideas of young
people, obstructing the development of knowledge, revealing
family secrets and demeaning the honour of
individuals.[24]
If the censors identified infringements, they could order
the film banned or oblige the producers to cut the offending
scene or scenes. [24]
From official history of film censorship section of Police
Administration Department of Naimusho, in Taikakai (ed.,
under Gojo Fumio, a former Minister of the Interior),
Naimushoshi [History of the Ministry of the
Interior], vol. 2, Part 4, no. 5 (Chiho Zaimu
Kyokai,1 November 1971). In practice, few
films were banned and cuts were ordered to only a small
percentage of total footage. Over the first eighteen months
of national censorship, only six films were banned outright,
and cuts ordered to local productions dropped from 1% of
footage in 1925 to 0.6% in 1926.[25]
European films suffered more heavily from the censors than
American films (1.5% v 0.8% in 1926). In the case of local
production, the grounds for offending the censors were more
often attributed to breaches of public morals than security
(two thirds v one third), but in the case of European films
objections were more evenly divided between the two
categories of offence. The Japanese companies seemed to
learn quickly what was acceptable to the censors. The second
annual censorship report of the Naimusho Film Censorship
Office reported that "Applicants withdrew films voluntarily
in advance when they thought they would be
censored".[26]
Makino had more trouble with the censors than either
Shochiku or Nikkatsu. In one documented case of censorship
violation, exhibitors and benshi were fined for
ignoring the censors' ban on the use of words (in
inter-titles and narration) that suggested that the
priestess Himiko was the founder of the Imperial royal
family rather than the goddess Amaterasu. This Makino film,
Nichi-rin, also had two scenes cut for excessive
"cruelty". The censors were troubled by the sexual
attractiveness of the women and the violence of the men in
the film, but ultimately were most upset by the slur on the
Emperor's purity.[27]
The censors' report claimed most cases of ko-an in
that period involved fighting and crime; while the major
cause for breaching fuzoku (public morals) was
"obscenity" - which included "kissing, embracing, naked
dancing, sexual innuendos, especially passionate kisses or
embraces." [25]
Statistical tables in "Film censorship measures July ,Taisho
14 - December Showa 1", in Gendai shishiryo
(Modern historical documents) vol. 40, no. 1,
Regulation of Mass Media, 21-28, Diet Library,
Tokyo. [26]
Naimusho Keihyo Kyoku, Annual Report on Film Censorship,
June 1927, Diet Library, Tokyo. [27]
Case no. 3, of "Main instances of violations", in Censorship
report for July 1925 - December 1926, in Gendai
shishiryo, 32-3. However, in the
later 1920s and early 1930s, the censors became troubled by
the leftist strain of thought infiltrating genre films and
the influence of the Prokino movement. In 1928,
another Makino film, one highly rated by the critics,
suffered heavy cuts, while a projected film with Marxist
leanings was halted in production.[28]
Socialist ideas were seen as a risk to public security, as
were criticism of state policies. The 1934 annual report of
the Film Censorship Bureau of the Naimusho speaks of these
matters in no uncertain terms: [28]
Anderson and Richie, 69. Over the
past few years, the popularity of left-tendency films
with a background of socialist thought, along with
impure obscene or erotic films, have caused the
censors much concern because of their adverse effect
on the audience. In March 1933, a
bill for the establishment of a national policy on film was
passed in the Diet, and in March 1934, Cabinet established a
Film Regulation Committee. Senior bureaucrats in various
ministries propounded the necessity for more regulation, on
the grounds that film was not only a popular medium of
entertainment but also a powerful medium of education and
propaganda, and so the local industry required more guidance
and control. They conducted research on national policies on
film in foreign countries (i.e. Fascist Italy and Nazi
Germany) and proposed the production of National Policy
Films. The proposal's rationale noted that, in the
past, Film is a
powerful medium that exercises more influence than
other media; on young people especially it exercises
more influence than schooling. There is a
danger that films introducing Japan overseas can give
the wrong impression of Japan, and damage the
reputation of Japan. It is impossible to rely on
private companies alone to project a pure and superior
image of Japan abroad. Therefore, it is necessary to
establish a special organization to guide and control
films...[29] [29]
Rationale for Proposal of National Policy Films, Genzai
shishiryo, 263. The government's
interest in the possibilities of the film medium as a tool
of national propaganda was doubtless influenced by the sense
of national crisis which followed Japan's withdrawal from
the League of Nations and the escalation of Japanese
military activity abroad. They recognized the need to engage
the co-operation of the local film industry to promote the
national cause; and their overtures were not unwelcome. In
November 1935, when the Dai Nippon Eiga Kyokai (The Greater
Japan Film Association) was founded, the presidents and
directors of the major film companies and prominent film
producers and directors were invited to join the committee,
alongside the Ministers of the Interior and Education,
leading politicians, senior bureaucrats, and prominent
scholars. The film industry personnel were doubtless
flattered to be included in a government-sponsored
enterprise, and to be sitting among such high status people.
The industry had not enjoyed a high status, nor much
respectability, so it was pleasing to finally receive
recognition of the value of their enterprise. The
Association was more active in production of rhetoric than
deeds, but it symbolized closer co-operation between the
industry and the state. It conducted screenings and
lectures, arranged consultations between government and
private industry personnel, and published a magazine devoted
to the promotion of Japanese cinema, called Nihon
eiga. The rationale for
the establishment of the Dai Nippon Eiga
Kyokai[30]
was the need to foster the production of high-quality
Japanese films, to increase exports and project a proud and
positive image of Japan and the Japanese both at home and
abroad. The weaknesses of the local industry were identified
as under-capitalization, a poor showing in the international
marketplace which was dominated by Hollywood, and industrial
reliance on quick and cheap production methods, and weekly
changes of the exhibition programme, resulting in a large
quantity of poor quality films. The industry was encouraged
to be more patriotic, more serious and more ambitious. The
government's recognition of the industry's national
importance and its upgraded valuation of the medium of film
doubtless contributed to the industry's increased
self-confidence in the mid to late 1930s and its efforts to
produce films that were serious works of art, rather than
mere entertainments. In the late
1930s, with the invasion of China and prolonged military
engagement on the mainland, the industry responded favorably
to the dominant nationalist ideology by producing films that
valorized qualities of discipline and self-sacrifice and
celebrated traditional Japanese culture in all its
forms. In Taisho and
early Showa Japan, the cinema, along with coffee shops and
moga (modern girls) and jazz, was associated with
modernity and embraced by artists and urban audiences in
particular. In the 1930s, the state increasingly came to
view all of these as tainted by corrupt Western influence -
a departure from the "pure" Japanese tradition - and
fostered the development of a national cinema based on the
valorization of Japanese tradition and the Japanese spirit.
Just as modern technologies of warfare and propaganda were
employed and prized in the service of nationalist ends, so
too were modernist tendencies in cinema - soviet-style
montage, social realism, abstract patterning - used to
endorse conservative values and accompany nationalist
rhetoric. [30]
Inauguration speech of Prime Minister, Viscount Saito, cited
in Genzai shishiryo, 650-651.
7094 words
Abstract
| Printer
version
Introduction
1. The
theatre
A
film of seven reels (nearly two hours long) consisted
of no more than 20 scenes, each shot from one single
point of view - and lasting the full duration of the
Pathe 70-metre film strip... We stopped at the cry of
"matta! " when the operator signalled that it was the
end of his strip. If the scene hadn't entirely
finished, we had to freeze in sometimes bizarre and
tiring postures so that the operator could link up the
movements when resuming the shooting after re-charging
his camera.
"The
story assumed less importance than the technical
research into tracking shots, close ups, fast montage,
flash-backs, fading dissolves, irises etc. I used in
this film almost all the avant-garde
techniques."[11]
2. The film
industry
"At
that time, an actor played a film a week: two days
were taken up by rehearsals, choice of costumes, wigs,
make-up, etc.; three days on outdoor shoots; two on
studio work."[15]
3. The
state
the
government allowed the private companies to make
profits and did not take measures to give positive
guidance ..
