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| Friday, February 26, 2010 01:00 PM |
| Book Report - A Hundred Years of Japanese Film |
 by Fëanor |
Donald Richie is considered the preeminent Western scholar on Japanese film. He's written a number of books on the subject, as well as on Japan in general. This book, published in 2001, is his most recent survey of the history of Japanese cinema, and takes us from the very beginnings of the medium right up through the works of Takashi Miike and Takeshi Kitano (or Miike Takashi and Kitano Takeshi, as he puts it; I never know the best way to write Japanese names). Richie tries to avoid cramming the history of Japanese film into some artificial structure, like a "rise and fall" storyline, and simply tells us the major events, focusing on the most important films by the most important directors, but also speaking in general terms about various genres and influences. What's most interesting is how he's always careful to set the history of Japanese film in a general cultural context. He points out that Japanese cinema - indeed, Japanese art in general - is far more presentational than it is representational. He means by this that the world seen in a Japanese film is more likely to be a stylized one, separate from the "real" world, and not meant to be particularly realistic. Western films, on the other hand, are generally far more representational than presentational. Japanese film held onto traditional theater conventions far longer than Western film, even keeping live narrators called benshi well into the arrival of sound technology. Richie also sees a repeated pattern in Japanese history of artists, and art media in general, experimenting with new things, then incorporating them into the tradition, and then finally returning to older traditions.
I was struck again and again while reading this book by how different a time, place, and mindset Japanese film evolved out of as opposed to American film. All the same film vocabulary is there - the closeup, the long shot, the pan - but it's used in different ways, to mean different things. There are genres I've never heard of with their own sets of conventions I didn't know about. It made me realize how much subtle cultural and historical subtext I'm probably missing when I watch a Japanese film, and how much of that same type of subtext I'm picking up and taking for granted when I watch an American film. Of course I was aware of Japanese culture being different from American culture, but this book underlined for me how different it really is.
That being said, Japanese and Western film and culture are not entirely different, and in fact Western film and culture influenced Japanese film and culture a great deal. But it's interesting how Japanese cinema took those things in and made them its own.
Reading this book is kind of like reading a novel with about a thousand characters. Because I'm not familiar with that many Japanese filmmakers, and I was reading a lot of these peoples' names for the first time, I found it pretty hard sometimes to remember who was who, and to get a strong feeling for a specific artist's oeuvre. I was a little surprised, too, that the Japanese filmmakers I am familiar with didn't always get much coverage from Richie. Of course he mentions Kurosawa's work and his influence on Japanese film a number of times, but more recent filmmakers and genres get pretty short shrift. Miyazaki and anime get only a few quick mentions at the end, and Richie dismisses Miike almost entirely, pegging him (unfairly, in my opinion) as a director who's just churning out garbage to appeal to a young audience obsessed with violence and style over substance. There's no question that Miike puts out some garbage, but I think overall his work is a little more complex than Richie allows for.
Ultimately I found the book fascinating, informative, and thought-provoking. I'd be curious to try to track down some of these films now and see them for myself - I feel like I should give Ozu another try, for instance, although I still feel pretty sure he's not for me - and indeed in the back of the book Richie provides a list of the films that are available on DVD and home video. It's sad and kind of shocking that so much of early Japanese film has been lost, and so many of the movies Richie mentions have an "n.s." next to them, meaning "not surviving." But there's still a lot to see. Even the films I've already seen I'd be interested to see again - to try to watch them with new eyes, informed by Richie's analysis. |
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