Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. ix, 266 pp. (Illus.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-5504-6
Yuriko Furuhata’s new book on political filmmaking in 1960s Japan adds significant depth, nuance and context to a topic that has, for good reason, long captivated an audience of cinephiles, activists and researchers. She describes this project as a media history of cinema’s response to journalism’s shift to television, one that draws on film studies, media studies, cultural studies and art history to craft an understanding of the discourses on “actuality” (akuchuaritii) and the “image” (eizō). I would argue it to be more as well—this book is ultimately a genealogy of the cultural politics of radical Japanese filmmaking historicized within the global, mediatized “Long Sixties.”
Cinema of Actuality is organized into five provocative chapters on the following issues: intermedia experimentation, the event-nature of cinema, remediation of journalism, the “landscape” discourse (fūkeiron), and militant cinema against television. The filmmakers who figure prominently here include Ōshima Nagisa, Matsumoto Toshio, Adachi Masao and Wakamatsu Kōji, but equal treatment is given to major players in the creation of a rigorous and politicalized film discourse at the time—Matsuda Masao, Nakahira Takuma and Hariu Ichirō—as well as to an earlier generation of intellectuals with whom these figures engaged, such as art critic Hanada Kiyoteru or the materialist philosopher Tosaka Jun. These foundational thinkers were actively responding to international discourses on “actuality” (Aktualität, actualité) and positioning themselves against idealist tendencies in phenomenology, so the narrative’s movement to Adorno and Heidegger feels grounded here, not forced. Furuhata further enlivens her analysis through useful engagement with Rancière (on spectacle and policing), Derrida (on “artifactuality,” the construction of an actuality-effect), and Foucault (on governmentality and discipline).
The combined effect of Furuhata’s careful balance of close analysis of films, rich archival work, and theoretical framing is a series of bold insights into the political tactics at work in both filmmaking and art discourse. One example is in demonstrating Matsumoto’s praxis of Hanada’s theory of a strategic merger between documentary and the surreal in order to use “actuality” to shatter the illusions of socialist realism (replacing them with a more radical revelation of actuality-as-contingency). Another is a corrective to our understanding of Ōshima’s Death By Hanging from a reflexive restaging of a historical event (the 1958 Komatsugawa incident) to Furuhata’s reading of the film as a conspicuously artificial documentary of a historical event itself already deeply theatrical from its inception (since Ri reported his own murder, mediatizing it as it emerged into public consciousness). What is at stake in this shift is recognition of the complicity between the criminal and the journalist, the way they collaboratively generate the media spectacle.
By placing the so-called “landscape films” in the context of politicized directors’ turn away from media spectacle toward the everyday, Furuhata makes sense of work by Adachi and Ōshima that has often vexed analysis. The idea that a shift away from the thrill of conflict to contemplate the politicization of the most mundane of spaces is compelling and necessary to shift the consciousness of activists from myopic tactical blows to the riot police, say, toward a broader, strategic transformation of society. That said, Matsuda Masao’s close reading here of a portrait of a city street devoid of both police and protester as more political than a direct image of conflict still strikes me as odd. Had he left it alone, this argument might have some traction in its suggestion that the images of conflict between student and cop had already been coopted by the media machine. But by drawing our attention to the words on the manhole cover—“Imperial University Sewer”—the suggestion becomes one in which Japan’s imperialist legacy still pervades the very streets on which everyday citizens go about their day. The risk here, in overstating the pervasiveness of centralized government power, is that Matsuda himself becomes complicit with the hegemonic logic of the regime, which will always exaggerate its capacity to police. What gets downplayed is the extraordinary amount of underregulated social space available to citizens, space in which to begin the transformation immediately. It is this side of landscape cinema—the tension between these seemingly passive images of networks and the ready availability of them—that makes these films so disconcerting, and indeed (still) vexing.
Furuhata’s analysis of Adachi and Wakamatsu’s The Red Army / PFLP was carefully handled and sharp. The logic of the project was to juxtapose the violent spectacular imagery of the Palestine conflict captured from television sources together with footage of everyday life from militant refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria. Most remarkable here was the pushback Adachi received even from guerillas when he articulated his interest in documenting this radically different form of everyday life (in which one cooks meals with an AK-47 leaning against the kitchen counter). It is the everydayness of war in these camps, the way armed conflict and the threat of violent attack is woven into the fabric and necessarily desensationalized that Adachi seems to have identified as the important note on actuality that needed to be conveyed to activists back in Japan. While I understand the rationale for staying focused on the film, I did find myself curious to know how Furuhata would analyze the way the Japanese (and international) media has handled the Lod Airport massacre by the Japanese Red Army in relation to this film and these filmmakers. It seems that recent coverage has recast Okamoto Kōzō and Wakamatsu Kōji as a nostalgic human-interest story, almost spectacularizing the everydayness of their reunions.
Furuhata’s Cinema of Actuality is an important book that makes a strong contribution to research on Japanese cinema, 1960s political culture, and theoretical work on image politics. I expect that it will, as intended, provoke response and debate.
Steven Ridgely
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, USA