Tangemania

Satō Tadao is editing a very interesting project for Iwanami Shoten entitled Series: Documentaries of Japan (Shirizu: Nihon no dokyumentari). It is not only a 5-volume series of books, written with a general reader in mind, about various aspects of Japanese documentary, but also a 3-disk DVD box set containing some of the masterpieces of Japanese nonfiction film, many of which have not come out on DVD before. The first book volume of the series also contains a DVD with interviews and clips of some of the classic films. I have not seen a project like this in Japan yet.

The book series is composed of the following volumes:

1. Dokyumentari no miryoku

2. Seiji, shakai hen

3. Seikatsu, sangyo hen

4. Sangyo, kagaku hen

5. Shiryo hen (chronology, database, index)

Sato-sensei asked me to write a short piece on documentary and politics for the second volume, so I wrote about the relation of politics to film theory in the case of Prokino. This is the first thing I've written in Japanese for an anthology in a while, and it was again impressive how quickly it came out. The second volume is now on sale, with the remaining volumes soon to follow.

The DVD box is also now on sale and contains such masterpieces as Hani Susumu's Kyoshitsu no kodomotachi (Children of the Classroom), Kamei Fumio's Sunagawa and Ikite ite yokatta (It's Good to Live), Tokieda Toshie's Machi no seiji (Town Politics), and wartime propaganda films like Sora no shonenhei (Young Soldiers of the Sky). The DVDs unfortunately do not have English subtitles. 

Last week on KineJapan we had nice discussion of James Cameron's Avatar. The question was posed whether the film exhibits the influence of Japanese anime, particularly Miyazaki Hayao (flying; wondrous forests; big trees with spirits [Totoro?]; respect for nature; etc.) and Oshii Mamoru (metal suits, transferring "ghosts," etc.). Some noted some pieces on the web that explore the same issues.

In the many responses, Kukhee Choo mentioned her article in Post Script about the influence of Battle Angel Alita on Cameron's Dark Angel. And Jasper Sharp used anime to actually criticize Avatar on his blog. 

Here, in brief, was my response:

When you look at it at first, the similarities with Miyazaki are there: the image of the forest, the non-human world, of flying, etc. Oshii also deals with battle suit issues, and so do many other Japanese anime. But Avatar's ideology is quite different from either of these.

First, Avatar never explores the complex questions of identity and reality that Oshii does: Is the Self the suit or what is "inside" the suit? How can we distinguish a "reality" from our world of computer networks and simulations? The thorough ambiguity that Oshii pursues on these questions puts him in parallel with the other great contemporary director of ambiguity, Kurosawa Kiyoshi. Avatar just simplistically celebrates play with the "suit" while still holding out for a real "self" that is transferrable and thus separate from the suit.

I also think Avatar has a very different vision of nature from Miyazaki. Miyazaki's paean to natural forces is not unrelated to his insistence on sticking to some analog animation techniques (though Miyazaki's own use of digital animation is just one example of the contradictions that inhabit his vision of the natural). But Cameron's film is possibly more problematic: it falls into the contradiction that many cinematic celebrations of nature (like Koyaanisqatsi) do: they praise the premodern, pre-technological world using the most advanced technology there is. Avatar, I think, tries to avoid this, but only by radically re-defining nature in a way I doubt Miyazaki would approve. Many can of course see that the narrative situation of Avatar is essentially that of video games, especially online RPG where you, immobile at your station, get to roam the world, kill people, and get the girl via your avatar. Avatar plays off the discontent with contemporary technological reality by offering the fantasy of really escaping, of completely abandoning one's body for a game world that is pre-technological. But the trick here is that the Avatar planet, with its database of souls and memories, of creatures with Firewire plugs, of trees that allow one access to the network, is essentially the Internet rendered into a Gaia-like deity. In other words, I think Avatar tries to have its ideological cake and eat it too by spouting a critique of industrial technological capitalism (mining and machines and battle-suits) and praising a natural, premodern society, while all the while defining that idyllic society/world as precisely the new media technological capitalism that we have today (accessible via avatars, and marketable through massive international conglomerates). There's much more to be said about this, but at least I very much doubt Miyazaki, regardless of all his own ideological contradictions, would buy this.

That was my initial reaction upon seeing the film, but the wonderful irony was that I saw it in 3D at a theater in Japan with a bunch of technological glitches (during the last half, the film stopped a lot). Quite appropriate! Was this the revenge of old technology? Or of nature?

The Asahi reported today that the great film critic, Futaba Juzaburo, passed away last month on December 12, 2009. He was 99 years old. The family held the funeral in secret.

Futaba began writing criticism while working for Sumitomo, only quitting to concentrate on criticism in 1945. For nearly half a century, he rated films for the magazine Screen, showing no prejudice over what he would rate, looking at every thing from art films to B-films. Since Screen was a magazine centered on foreign film, however, he did not rate many Japanese films there, but his books on Japanese film include Nihon eiga hihan: 1932-1956 and Nihon eiga boku no 300-pon (he liked to compile lists). His most recent book, which came out in 2008, was Boku no tokkyu nijisseiki: Taisho Showa goraku bunka shoshi. He wrote a lot on American film.

He won many awards, including the Kikuchi Kan Prize, the Nihon Film Pen Club Award, and the Yamaji Fumiko Award. He also apparently translated mystery novels such as Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. 

He was one of the last giants of Japanese film criticism and a witness to his era.

Issue 26 of Screening the Past features a book review of my work, A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan, written by Frieda Friedberg, an Australian scholar of Japanese film. The same review also discusses Alexander Jacoby's A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors and the same issue also has reviews of  books on Kurosawa Akira and Naruse Mikio.