A Flash in Japan

A review of The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan, Eric Cazdyn, Duke University Press, 2002.

The “flash of capital” refers to the way the underlying structure of a national economy “flashes” or reverberates through the films it produces, and how cinema critique can highlight the relations between culture and capitalism, film aesthetics and geopolitics, movie commentary and political discourse, at particular moments of their transformation. A flash is not a reflection or an image, and Eric Cazdyn does not subscribe to the reflection theory of classical Marxism that sees cultural productions as a mirror image of the underlying economic infrastructure. Karl Marx posited that the superstructure, which includes the state apparatus, forms of social consciousness, and dominant ideologies, is determined “in the last instance” by the “base” or substructure, which relates to the mode of production that evolves from feudalism to capitalism and then to communism. Transformations of the mode of production lead to changes in the superstructure. Hungarian philosopher and literary critic György Lukács applied this framework to all kinds of cultural productions, claiming that a true work of art must reflect the underlying patterns of economic contradictions in the society. Rather than Marx’s and Lukács’ reflection theory, Cazdyn’s “flash theory” is inspired by post-marxist cultural theorists Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson, and by the work of Japan scholars Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian (the two editors of the collection at Duke University Press in which the book was published). For Cazdyn, how we produce meaning and how we produce wealth are closely interrelated. Cultural productions such as films give access to the unconscious of a society: “What is unrepresentable in everyday discourse is flashed on the level of the aesthetic.” Films not only reflect and explain underlying contradictions but, more importantly, actively participate in the construction of economic and geopolitical transformations.

 Reflection theory and flash theory

 The Flash of Capital concentrates on those critical moments of Japanese modern history during which the forms of both cinematic and capitalist categories mutate. The author identifies three such mutations of Japanese modernity: (1) between being colonized and being a colonizer nation of the pre-World War II moment; between the individual and collective of the postwar moment; and between the national and the transnational of the contemporary situation. Colonialism, Cold War, globalization: these are the three moments that Cazdyn addresses through thematic discussions of cinematic visuality, of film historiography, of literary adaptations, of amateur acting, of pornography, and of aesthetic experiments. Rather than a linear history, he prefers to concentrate on key moments of transformation during which formal inventions on the level of the film aesthetic figure a way out of impossible situations before a grammar becomes available to make sense of them. By paying close attention to the details of cinematic texts, he reads the works of Japanese directors and film critics as so many symptoms of the most pressing social problems of the day. Cazdyn borrows from Fredric Jameson and other literary critics the technique of symptomatic reading, a mode of reading literary and cinematic works which focuses on the text’s underlying presuppositions. A symptomatic reading is concerned with understanding how a text comes to mean what it does as opposed to simply describing what it means or represents. In particular, it tries to determine what a particular text is unable to say or represses because of its ideological conviction, but that transpires at the formal level through flashes, allegories, and aesthetic choices. The films that Cazdyn passes under review occur at historical junctures in which the social and political events are difficult to articulate. There does not seem to be an effective language with which to express the transformations taking place at key moments of Japanese modernity. But, as Cazdyn notes, “some filmmakers take more risks than others. They risk speaking in a language for which there is no established grammar.”

 Japanese cinema has a peculiar affinity with the history of capitalist development. The movie industry is literally coeval with Japanese modernity: in the case of Japan, the history of film and the history of the modern nation share approximately the same span of time, both emerging in the 1890s. In addition, the one-hundred-year anniversary of film in Japan coincided with the fifty-year anniversary of the end of World War II. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that almost every history of Japanese film has used the history of the nation to chart its course. The three moments that The Flash of Capital choses to concentrate on are key turning points in Japanese modern history. They are also periods when Japanese cinema was particularly productive, with successive “Golden Ages” that have marked the history of Japanese cinema for a worldwide audience. The 1930s, the postwar period up to the late 1960s, and the 1990s were times fraught with contradictions. The antinomies and tensions between colonization and empire, between the individual and the collective, and between the national and the transnational made an imprint of the films produced during these periods, both at the level of content and in the formal dimension of aesthetic choices and scenic display. It is interesting to note that these moments have also produced canonic histories of Japanese cinema, both in print and through cinematic retrospectives. Cazdyn conducts a formal analysis of six histories of Japanese films, two of which are themselves films. The first historiographic works in the 1930s and early 1940s set the terms for a theory of cinema that was heavily influenced by Marxism and by nationalism; the 1950s saw the publication of Tanaka Jun’ichirō’s monumental encyclopedia of Japanese movies and Donald Richie and Joseph Anderson’s The Japanese Film; and the 1990s was marked by the one-hundred anniversary of Japanese cinema, with yet another four-volume encyclopedia and a film retrospective by Oshima Nagisa. Among scholars and students in the West, Richie and Anderson’s book has been a constant reference and has gone through a series of republications; it is, however, distinctly anticommunist and heavily marked by the Cold War context.

Colonialism, Cold War, globalization

 Cazdyn begins his discussion of the first period with an Urtext of Japan’s cinematography: the recording in 1899 of a scene from the kabuki drama Momojigari by the actor Ichikawa Danjūrō (the stage name of a lineage of actors that goes back to the seventeenth century down to the present). Attending a screening held at his private residence, Danjūrō was shocked by his own image staring back at him and made it clear that the film should never be screened during his lifetime. But he later agreed that a presentation of the movie reels at an event in Osaka he was unable to attend was more satisfactory than a performance by another kabuki troupe. This episode set the terms—repetition, reproductibility, ubiquity, copy rights, distribution networks, mass production—by which the movie industry later operated. By the 1930s, cinema had become well entrenched in Japan. The early figures of the onnagata (men playing women’s roles) and the benshi (commentator integrated into the story), taken from similar roles in the traditional performing arts (kabuki, noh, bunraku), had given way to the modern talkie movie, a star system based on female actors, and genres divided between jidai-geki (period dramas) and gendai-geki (modern dramas). Film adaptations (eiga-ka) of literary works of fiction (shōsetsu) served to gain legitimacy for cinema as an art form, circumvent censorship, consolidate a literary cannon, and affirm the superiority of the original through fidelity-based adaptations. The writer Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, who had offered his own theory of adaptation through his successive translations into modern Japanese of the Tale of Genji, criticized the filmization of his novel Shunkinshō by pointing out the erasing of multiple levels of narration and identity that was so central to his work. When Tanizaki’s novel is reduced to mere narrative content, “all that remains are the most reactionary and conservative elements.” For the author, Tanizaki’s aesthetic choices, and the films produced by the first generation of Japanese directors, were inextricably related to the most crucial issues facing the Japanese nation in the 1930s: the rise of militarism and the backsliding of democracy, the colonization of large swathes of Asia, the rejection of Western values in favor of Japanese mores. Remaining silent about these issues, like Tanizaki in his novels or Ozu Yasujirō in his early movies, are charges that can be held against the authors.

 The second Golden Age of Japanese cinema, and a high point of Japanese capitalist development, arose from the rubbles of World War II, found its most vivid expressions in the 1950s and early 1960s, and culminated in the avant-garde productions of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Out of this second period emerged not only a studio system modeled on Hollywood, but an impressive number of great auteurs that have become household names in the history of artistic cinema. Ozu’s challenging formal compositions, Kurosawa’s intricate plots, and Imamura’s nonlinear temporalities are immediately recognizable and have influenced generations of movie directors in the West and in Asia. The postwar period, which coincided with the Cold War, was marked by the subjectivity debate or shutaisei ronsō, which influenced popular ideas about nationalism and social change. For the postwar generation of left-leaning intellectuals, a sense of self—of one’s capacity and legitimacy to act as an individual and to intervene against the state and collective opinion—was crucial to keep the nation from ever being hijacked again by totalitarianism. But at the same time, the individual was summoned to put the interests of big corporations, administrative structures, and the Japanese nation as a whole before his or her own personal fulfillment, and to sacrifice the self in favor of economic development. In the context of the movie industry, the attempt to transcend the contradiction between the individual and the collective was resolved by positing a third term: the “genius” filmmaker who breaks out of the rigid structure and trumps the other two terms. The “great man theory” claims that an individual can rise up and produce greatness within—if not transcend—any structure. The same emphasis on the power of the filmmaker characterized film adaptations of literary works in the period. Encouraged by the Art Theater Guild, eiga-ka movies took liberties with the original text either by focusing on a particular section or adding content to the narrative. Shindō Kaneto’s 1973 adaptation of Kokoro, for example, deals only with the third letter of Sōseki’s famous shōsetsu, while in Ichikawa Kon’s Fires on the Plain the soldier-narrator of Ōoka Shōhei’s novel is shot and killed at the end instead of going to a mental hospital.

The withering away of the nation-state

 The era of globalization, the third period in Eric Cazdyn’s survey of movie history, marks a transformation in the operations of the nation-state and in the aesthetics of Japanese cinema. The problem of globalization is the problem of a globalized system in which nations are steadily losing their sovereignty but where state structures and ideological models cling to an outdated form of representation. The political-economic and the cultural-ideological dimensions do not move at the same speed: at the precise moment in which the decision-making power of the nation-state is declining, nationalist ideologies and identities are as strong as ever. Some authors combined a renewed emphasis on the nation with the full embrace of globalization. For Ōshima Nagisa, the enfant terrible of the Japanese New Wave, national cinema is dead, and Japan is being bypassed by the transnational forces of capital. In Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), he represents the Japanese from the viewpoint of the white prisoners of war. In L’Empire des sens (1976), the pornographic nature of the film does not lie in the content (although the actors Matsuda Eiko and Fuji Tatsuya are “really doing it”) but in the form of reception: the Japanese conversation about the film was almost entirely consumed by questions of censorship, while in France, where it was first released, the film was geared towards a general audience—and foreign visitors: Ōshima noted that one out of every four Japanese who traveled to France had seen the movie. For Cazdyn, a film that makes history is “a film that represents a transformation before it has happened, a film that finds a language for something before a language has been assigned, a film that flashes the totality of modern Japanese society in a way that is unavailable to other forms of discourse.” Rather than commenting on blockbuster movies and costly productions, he choses to read political allegories in experimental films such as Tsukamoto Tetsuya’s Tetsuo (1988) or the documentary films of Hara Kazuo such as Yukiyukite shingun (Naked Army, 1987). He even finds inspiration in adult videos, which he sees as a compromise between guerrilla-style documentaries on the left and reality TV on the right. He notes that approximately seventy-five percent of current adult-video films in Japan are documentary-style—that is, their narratives are not couched in fiction, but follow a male character walk the streets looking for sex and engaging women to that end. Similarly, in his documentaries, Hara Kazuo can often be heard asking questions and provoking situations. His films make change happen into the real.

Eric Cazdyn is well-versed in the history of Japanese Marxism and makes it a central tenet of his theorization of Japanese cinema. He refers to the pre-war Marxist debate between the Kōza-ha (the faction that remained loyal to the Japanese Communist Party and the Komintern) and Rōnō-ha (the faction that split from the JCP in 1927 and argued that a bourgeois revolution had been achieved with the Meiji Restoration). Another school of Marxism, the Uno-ha, was the school of the late Tokyo Imperial University economist Uno Kōzō, who was probably the single most influential postwar Japanese economist on the domestic academic scene. Uno drew a distinction between a pure theory of capitalism, a theory of its historical phases, and the study of concrete societies. He concentrated on the first, and dedicated himself to working through the most theoretical problems of Marx’s Capital, such as the labor theory of value, the money circuit represented by the M-C-M’ formula, commodity fetishism, and the recurrence of crises. Moving to the present, Cazdyn pays tribute to Karatani Kōjin, a contemporary philosopher and interpreter of Marx’s thought that has attracted a vast followership. Marxism has had a lasting influence on Japan’s intellectual landscape, and has impacted the work of many filmmakers in the course of the past century. Cazdyn recalls that many intellectuals joined film clubs in the late 1920s and early 1930s because they were some of the only places where members could read Marx’s Capital without falling prey to censorship and repression. But this utopian space was soon discovered, and by 1935 Marxist intellectuals were either behind bars, had retreated to their private space, or had embraced right-wing nationalism. Illustrative of this wave of political commitment is the Proletarian Filmmaker’s League or Prokino. Cold War histories of Japanese cinema have disparaged this left-wing organization by pointing out “the extremely low quality of its products.” Cazdyn rehabilitates the work of its main theorist, Iwasaki Akira, and of film documentarist Kamei Fumio, who treated montage as a “method of philosophical expression.”

New publics for old movies

What is the relevance of these references to Marxist theory and obscure works of documentary or fiction for contemporary students of Japanese cinema in North America and in Europe? Cazdyn highlights the changing demographics of the classes that enroll in his discipline: “Students were primarily attracted to the arts and Eastern religion in the 1960s and 1970s; in the 1980s, they were chasing the overvalued yen; and today, they are consumed by (and consumers of) Japanese popular culture—namely manga and anime.” He also notes that the study of national cinema as an organizing paradigm has lost much of its appeal. The academic focus is now on films that address issues of minorities in Japan—post-colonial narratives, feminist films, LGBT movies, social documentaries—or on transnational productions in which Japanese identity is diluted into a pan-Asian whole. But academics should not project their current global and professional insecurities onto the screen of cinema history. The demise of the nation-state, and the dilution of national cinema into the global, is not a foregone conclusion. Movies produced in Japan today do not seem to appear less Japanese than the ones made one or two generations ago. There is still a strong home bias in the preferences of viewers, who favor locally produced movies over foreign productions. Japanese films that are popular abroad do not necessarily make it big in Japan, and the art movie theaters or international festivals often include films that are completely unknown in their domestic market. The economic and geopolitical context matters for understanding a movie, but not in the sense that Cazdyn implies. The author’s knowledge of the real functioning of an economy is inversely proportional to his investment in Marxist theory. He confesses that his interest does not hinge “on the profits and losses incurred by the film industry in Japan.” But supply and demand, profits and losses, and production and distribution circuits matter for the evolution of cinema over the ages, and a theory that claims to conceptualize the link between films and their socio-economical context must grapple with economic realities, not just outmoded Marxist fictions.