Scott Nygren,
Time Frames: Japanese Cinema and the Unfolding of History.
University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
ISBN-13: 978 0 8166 4708 8
US$25.00 (pb)
304pp
(Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press)

Scott Nygren’s prefatory caveats should dispel any expectation that his book title promises a history of film in Japan; an update, say, of Anderson and Richie’s The Japanese Film: Art and Industry (Princeton University, expanded edition 1982), which begins with the Edison kinetoscope’s instant popularity in 1896, and ends with the industry’s shrunken prospects in 1982. Nygren warrns that:

1. History is not a seamless narrative, but a complex and controverted discourse that reflects how events are variously interpreted by people who live them (viii). “Unfolding” in the title recalls origami, in which a square sheet of paper folds into multiple shapes and figures.

2. Until Rashomon won the Venice Film Festival grand prize in 1951, Japanese cinema was largely unseen in the West. World recognition began in the 1950s, but the sense of history implicit in Japanese films challenges and complicates the West’s notions of how history works.

3. The book is structured not as a sequential continuity, but as a montage of material that may seem disjunctive, extraneous and initially unclear. The reader is enjoined to work at deciphering connections and implications instead of relying on straightforward exposition (xiii).

4. The book may thus be said to be about the way representations of history in Japanese film generate alternative paradigms across cultural differences between Japan and the West; but even this phrasing “implies what is not true” – i.e., that a book can somehow be “about” anything, can have a neutral and categorical content (xvii).

Why does Nygren write like this? Because he is, more than film historian or critic, a devout postmodernist, with an abiding distrust of an ordered view of the world and of fixed ideas about the meaning of texts. Citing Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze as often as he does Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa, Nygren discerns ambiguity and contradiction wherever he turns, and says books on Japan, film, and history are “no longer possible to believe in as a basis for further work” (1), as assumptions underlying these concepts have been undermined.

Nygren notes, for example, that Japan is not just an Asian archipelago, but a post-diasporic presence in Hawaii, Peru, and Brazil. Uncolonized by 19th century Western imperialism, Japan’s experience, documented through film, reflects an intercultural set of relationships not governed by domination and hegemony (5-7).

History itself is not, as Francis Fukuyama imagines, a sequential, progressive march toward capitalist democracy. Time is inscribed more cyclically in China and Japan, and history has become “multiple, conflicted and achronic” (18).

The visual arts have always been more international in character than verbal language, and so film invites a break from logocentric habits for “those who wish to act constructively in a postmodern and postcolonial world” (9).

This isn’t exactly why we go to the movies, but it enables Nygren to argue that Rashomon is a pivotal work that induces a reexamination of our models of history. Initially hailed as a masterpiece, it has since been set aside as “a somewhat minor film” whose conflicted discourses mark it as an artifact of historical rather than artistic importance (16).

Rashomon’s cinematic reconstruction of history makes the film a hinge text not just between Japanese film as local product and Japanese film as global commodity, but between Japan as imperialist warmonger and Japan as modern democracy. It presents, and leaves unresolved, four conflicting versions of a violent crime; but after one storyteller adopts an abandoned infant, a priest affirms his continuing faith in man.

Nygren argues that the upbeat ending in Kurosawa’s adaptation of Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s nihilistic fiction depicts humanism as native to Japan, not imposed from outside by General MacArthur’s postwar Occupation. The militarism of 1941-1945 is thus an aberration, a throwback to a feudal era (112). From this standpoint, World War II ended not in defeat but liberation, and postwar Japan could, like Rashomon’s priest, contemplate the future with hope.

The irony, Nygren notes, is that the United States subsequently replaced its previous democratic policies with rightwing anti-communism, and rehabilitated the wartime political elite. The turnabout created a problem for Japanese filmmakers, who supported neither militarism nor the Liberal Democratic Party, and who had to construct a hybrid history that appropriates Western discourses for their own ends.

Ikiru (1952), another film by Kurosawa, illustrates this revisionism. The petty official who learns he has cancer is described in a voice-over as dead for the past 25 years – a period that covers the years of fascism, war and the US Occupation. The diagnosis jolts Watanabe into deciding to live fully and freely, but what the Occupation proposes as freedom “appears in the film as irresponsible self-indulgence… in alcohol, strip clubs and dissolution.” Watanabe eventually resolves to build a park to benefit slum children despite bureaucratic resistance. His refashioned self “combines Western agency with Asian respect for group process while rejecting both Western self-indulgence and feudal deference to authority” (120).

The main problem with Nygren’s insistence on the political content of Kurosawa’s films is their variance from those of more authoritative critics. Donald Richie, in The Films of Akira Kurosawa (University of California, 1984) – for years the only full-length English language study of the director’s body of work – maintains that Kurosawa is fundamentally uninterested in politics. “Other directors may be interested in personifying political ideas … Kurosawa is only interested in character for its own sake” (The Films …, 37). His signature heroes are quirky loners with a code of honor – a bodyguard for hire, a general and his fugitive princess, masterless samurai defending a farm village.

Rashomon, then, is not a disavowal of militarism, but as Stephen Prince argues, “a cinematically straightforward presentation of the sins of egotism.” In Kurosawa’s own words: “The script portrays … human beings – the kind who cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better people than they really are” (Prince, The Warrior’s Cinema, Princeton, 1991, 130-131).

Richie’s comment on Kurosawa’s 1946 film No Regrets For Our Youth would apply equally to Ikiru: “The clash of liberal and militaristic beliefs is far away indeed ….The girl’s going to the peasants is not motivated by political considerations [but by] personal salvation” (The Films …, 37). Ikiru’s counterpart of the girl’s countryside immersion is Watanabe’s tenacity in the face of official and yakuza opposition.

Of course a postmodernist like Nygren can argue that exegeses by Richie, Prince and Kurosawa himself are not the only valid ones, and that postcolonial discourse requires a recognition of “multiple historical trajectories” (244) undetected in conventional readings.

Well, yes. But Nygren’s book contains flaws that no film critic or historian should let pass, and that consequently diminish his plausibility.

Writing on p. 20 about diasporic Japanese, he says “Fujimoto becomes president of Peru.” The name is Fujimori. In the Appendix, he asserts that Kurosawa’s Those Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail (1945) is a “Pacific War propaganda version of Yoshitsune, undercut by Chaplin-like Benkei” (251). Benkei, in history and in the film, was considerably heftier than his master Yoshitsune. The Chaplinesque little fellow who serves them both is Kurosawa’s invention, a nervous, comic, and sublimely ordinary Everyman. Also in the Appendix, Nygren setsRashomon in 16th century Kyoto (252). The film script reads: “Kyoto, in the twelfth century ….” (Richie, ed.,Rashomon: Akira Kurosawa, director. Rutgers University, 1996, 35).

The principal hurdle to easy acceptance of Time Frames is its consistently turbid prose. Here are examples:

What does it mean to write history? What does it mean to write? What is writing? What is the body of writing that we read? What body is being written, marked, figured by and through writing? How is the body written before it can engage in the act of writing? (59)

The circulation of figures of history across cultural boundaries belongs to a generalizable figure of its own, that of dislocation. By dislocation, I mean the displacement of figures across cultural boundaries so that the asemic determinants of discourse produce new and often unanticipated effects. These effects are in some ways parallel to the process of translation, but specifically characterize the reconfiguration of discourse that occurs when asemic figures rather than semantic signs are at stake. (4)

Is there no plainer, crisper way of stating his point? Nygren’s insights may warrant further study; his view, for instance, that after the stylistic innovations of the so-called New Wave of the 1960s, the next generation of Japanese filmmakers reverted to classical continuity editing and narrative unity – in short, good storytelling. But plowing through his prose is arduous, and not always worth the effort. As Holofernes says of Armado in Love’s Labour’s Lost: “He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.”

Jaime S Ong,
Philippines.