Abstract

The “Japanese” of Japanese Film Theory 
Narrations of the history of film theory overwhelmingly center on Europe and North America. At least in the English language, major anthologies or historical guides have devoted the vast majority of their pages to European or North American theorists, despite the fact that there are rich lodes of theoretical writing about cinema elsewhere in the world. As I and other scholars have shown, Japan, for instance, was one site of long-standing, original, and dynamic debates over the nature of cinema that up until recently have been virtually ignored, even in the field of Japanese film studies. But why study Japanese film theory? Is it a tool to help us understand Japan or Japanese cinema? Perhaps so, but modes of thought outside the Euro-American center are often only recognized to the degree they fit the rubric of area studies. While Euro-American theory often pretends to the universal—to be about cinema itself—that from the rest of the world is relegated to the particular—to be about one slice of cinema. Simply asserting that Japanese cinema is also universal, however, threatens to reproduce this neo-colonial dynamic of universal and particular. Questioning that requires us to re-interrogate the act of adding the word “Japanese” in front of “film theory.” This paper will consider the meaning of that act, in particular by analyzing how select film theorists writing in Japanese have used “Japanese”—or not.

Bio note

Aaron Gerow is Alfred W. Griswold Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Film and Media Studies at Yale University. He currently chairs the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. He has published extensively on Japanese and East Asian film history, television, cinema in the Japanese empire, film theory, censorship, and spectatorship, among other topics. His books include Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895-1925 (2010); Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies (co-authored with Markus Nornes, 2009 [Japanese edition 2016]); A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan (2008); and Kitano Takeshi (2007). His co-edited anthology Rediscovering Classical Japanese Film Theory—An Anthology (in Japanese) appeared in 2018. He is currently preparing a monograph on the history of Japanese film theory. He also runs his own Japanese film website Tangemania (www.aarongerow.com).