Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2013. xi, 381 pp. (Figures.) US$27.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-5422-2.
Jean-Louis Comolli, building on the work of Jean-Louis Baudry, has argued that cinema functions as a mechanism for the imposition of Western or Eurocentric ideology precisely through the mechanical, chemical and aesthetic components necessary for its production (see for example essays by both in Philip Rosen’s Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, Columbia University Press, 1986). The very equipment of cinema, from lenses to projection apparatus, by necessity, the argument propounds, accepts the underlying ideologies of aesthetics which grow forth from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment to the present, in terms of what constitutes the look and the sound of reality—perspective, camera placement, the specific contrast ratios of film stocks, depth of field, even developments in stereophonic recording and playback—these exist not as universal givens in art but have come to project a dominant way of seeing through the medium of cinema. The cinemas of diverse countries, while presenting narratives in perhaps distinguishable ways, or articulating specific responses to specific social, historical or “national” situations, nonetheless and unbeknownst even to the works of art themselves, accept and adopt a form of hegemonic control: the domination of European-derived visuality.
It is against this backdrop of a technological/ideological analysis of film history that we must situate Miyao’s volume, for in it Miyao explicitly argues “that lighting technology in cinema has been structured by the conflicts of modernity in Japan, including the struggles over how to define cinema, subjectivity, and nationhood” (5). As Miyao himself suggests, his book is a valuable approach to film history, looking not at thematic issues—a valid and vital approach in itself—but at the technical history of cinema’s development as represented by one central studio, Shochiku, here in particular focussing on light, and even further: on the complex, powerful relationship between light and shadow.
Miyao writes well, placing his technical film history within a solid theoretical discourse on the nature of Japan’s tense negotiation between “kindaishugi (the ideology of modernisation, industrialisation, rationalisation, and scientific progress, modeled upon the West) and modanizumu (discourses of newness in everyday life and materials of consumer culture)” (7): that is, the process by which Japan throughout the early part of the twentieth century attempted to determine for itself the nature of its “modern” existence. Along the way, Japanese arts too underwent a self-reflective transformation, balancing their traditions against their current social contexts. Cinema, although a “new” art form—in Japan as well as Hollywood—participated in this transformation, and interestingly, did so in a way which quoted heavily from a “traditionalist” approach to beauty. The substance of Miyao’s film history is to describe the “process of how the aesthetics of shadow has been invented, developed, naturalised, and publicised in the discourse of modernity in Japan” (8), but in so doing, his work also describes the process by which a new, indeed even foreign, art form became “Japanese” through flirtations with Nihonjinron, the “theories of Japaneseness” which were emerging themselves throughout the same period of cinema’s explorations of light and darkness.
The volume is comprised of four chapters with an introduction and a conclusion, each chapter situating Shochiku Studios within a specific context: Hollywood; jidaigeki (period films); Germany; and Shochiku’s main rival, Toho Studios. Miyao highlights the contributions of specific cinematographers, utilizing frames not only from their work but also photographs of them at work, to illustrate his argument. Along the way, we have rich discourse on the Japanese film industry as a capitalist enterprise; the star system; textual analyses of films and their aesthetic and ideological implications; and a discussion of “how and why the aesthetics of shadow, arguably the most significant manifestation on lighting in Japanese cinema, emerged in the late 1930s to 1940s” (12)—the most intense period of Japanese fascistic nationalism. As we can see, Miyao focusses most effectively on an extremely important, formative period in Japan’s still-evolving film history, a period which has received considerable critical attention from both Japanese and non-Japanese scholars, but which still requires much further investigation. Abé Mark Nornes’ Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and Iwamoto Kenji’s Nihon eiga to nashonarizumu(Japanese Film and Nationalism, Shinwasha, 2004), for example, cover the same period, from very different vantage points, but both provide a good context into which we may favourably situate Miyao’s contribution. This is a solid work, creating an insightful and persuasive argument for the relationship between a particular aesthetic and a particular ideological environment. That Miyao has directed his energies and our attention to the role of the cinematographer in the creation of film meaning is an overdue aspect of Japanese cinema studies. So, too, is his focus on the ways in which aesthetics can both cooperate with and challenge ideological assumptions. Even while working within the confines of an imported, mechanical process, and so partaking of the ideologies which underpin it, filmmakers have the power within their art to articulate specific responses, specific resistances, to those ideologies and others which inform their contexts. Miyao’s volume is an excellent analysis of how they may do so, along the boundary between light and shadow.
Timothy Iles
University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada
pp. 615-617