Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 227 pp. (Tables, figure, graph, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$120.00, cloth. ISBN 978-90-8964-773-3.
A pathbreaking collection of essays, The Culture of the Sound Image in Prewar Japan masterfully re-reads the history of early twentieth-century Japanese cinema through a careful and thorough examination of the “intermedial relations between the record industry, radio, and cinema” as “an extensive field of diverse sound practices” (10). In their Introduction, co-editors Michael Raine and Johan Nordström attempt to reframe the history of film in Japan through a critical approach associated with film historian Thomas Elsaesser (and others) that has come to be known as “media archaeology.” Most significantly, media archaeology rejects teleological and progressivist narratives of technological development from primitive to ever more complex.
As an iconoclastic practice, then, media archaeology is admittedly more like an attitude or a phenomenon than a well-delineated discipline with a coherent methodology. Such an open, exploratory spirit is precisely what the editors offer with this carefully planned anthology. The Introduction presents a thoroughly researched yet concise overview of the era, including the material substrate (e.g., phonograph records, radio, film, and architecture), theory/criticism, economy (labor, regional differences), politics, and aesthetics of what they call the sound image. The editors emphasize that none of these factors exists independently of the others. Subsequently, the volume’s array of essays by individual scholars collectively illuminates various relationships between cinema and sound. Grounded in archival research about ephemera ranging from film and gramophone discs to newspaper advertisements, the essays invite us to explore the dynamic and multi-directional relationships among aesthetic, economic, and political conditions. Thus, while the anthology focuses on a narrow window of time from the 1920s to 1930s, with its “attention on cinema as a changing intermedial field” (9), their case studies of the conversion to synchronized cinematic sound help us see the significance of this approach and how it might be applicable to other media histories. The editors aptly describe such dynamic interconnectivity: “there is no single dimension by which to measure the transition to sound in Japan” (26) and argue that “the complex mix of emerging, dominant, and residual technologies and practices, and the multiple forms of ‘sound’ and ‘talking’ cinema in Japan, are not so different from the cinemas of Latin America, Asia, and the European margin with their undercapitalized but cosmopolitan and intermedial mix of films sonore and films parlant” (9–10).
The book features eight articles. Raine and Nordström are among the contributors, but the other six are scholars whose works have been published primarily in Japanese. Making their scholarly work available in English translation is itself a significant contribution to academic fields that study media, sound, and modern popular history. Sasagawa Keiko discusses popular songs’ shifting relationships with cinema in chapter 1. Taking up the genre of kouta eiga (popular ballad films) and tracing the lineage of various musical approaches in the film industry, she shows that the cinema was often accompanied by music and songs—either in person or via gramophone discs—from its earliest history. In chapter 2, Hosokawa Shuhei discusses Katsutaro, a former-geisha-turned-musical-celebrity, to shed light on the one-way connection between the popular music industry and Japanese films before the advent of full-fledged sound films. In particular, he demonstrates how popular songs were adopted into the cinema, but no original movie songs became hits outside the film. Niita Chie, in chapter 3, introduces two forms of radio drama that emerged during the transition from silent to “talkie” film, arguing that radio shows (usually comprised of actors’ lines, benshi’s narration, and music/sound effects) prepared film viewers for synchronized talkies. Ueda Manabu’s chapter 4 turns its eye to the film exhibition environment by examining the relationships between movie theaters’ architectural design changes and the new grammar of filmmaking prompted by such changes, leading to a standardized cinema experience. In chapter 5, Raine provides yet another keen observation on the cinematic soundscape at the intersection of economic crisis and technological shift to electronically mediated film sound by tracing the complex demise of benshi live oral interpreters. Chapter 6, by Nordström, traces the early history of a film studio P.C.L., which produced light entertainment infused with music and song, as an example of a new type of studio with modern facilities, recording technology, and labor composition. In chapter 7, Nagato Yohei re-examines the significance of Mizoguchi Kenji’s part-talkie Hometown (1930), giving it renewed attention by analyzing its role in Mizoguchi’s consequent directorial decisions. Itakura Fumiaki’s work in chapter 8 approaches cinema through the physical substrate of the early Japanese talkie film. More specifically, he examines the nearly square frame created as a result of adding a soundtrack to the 35mm silent film. Although this type of film was used only for a short period before transitioning to the Academy Ratio, his examples show the generativity of the material itself. For example, Ozu Yasujiro’s silent film Woman of Tokyo (1932) is the filmmaker’s first attempt at the now-iconic “Ozu-style” low camera position.
The book’s admirable challenge to both the mono-medial and mono-disciplinary approaches to cinema inspires us to look further into the subterranean strata of Japanese media culture. One area of additional exploration is the robust print culture that developed around cinema, specifically popular magazines, as further evidence of popular and modan (modern) responses to the sound image of the period. Another vein to mine would be the transnational nature of the media outlined in recent publications of Japanese cinema anthologies such as The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema (Miyao), The Japanese Cinema Book (Fujiki and Phillips), the Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema (Bernardi and Ogawa), and A Companion to Japanese Cinema (Desser). Using the productive tensions between national and transnational frames, we may take up the joyous task of revisiting these publications and considering the dynamic technological, cultural, aesthetic, and economic flows around the Pacific Rim.
Kyoko Omori
Hamilton College, Clinton