I wanted to say that we've been trying to
develop a forum where we bring the people
whom we admire most to the University of Chicago
and we've been doing it in a way that crosses
over the regions of East Asia and crosses
over the disciplines.
It's done through a system of faculty who
nominate people whom they would most like
to see come to the University of Chicago.
The three committees of this Center, the Japan
Committee, the China Committee, and the Korea
Committee.
And then we have the Executive Committee.
Put together, we form the program, we invite
everyone, and we're quite honored with the
people who we've invited and who accepted
our invitation this year.
With that, the real honor of introducing Professor
Gerow is with Takuya Tsunoda, who will go
ahead and introduce our speaker.
Hi, my name is Takuya Tsunoda.
I teach Japanese cinema here at UChicago.
Professor Gerow is my adviser.
I was always meeting him, basically, I knew
him while I was in Tokyo, so it's so nice
to see him here at UChicago.
[inaudible]
Professor Gerow is one of the
most advanced and sought after scholars on
Japanese film, media, and visual culture in
North America.
He's currently a Professor in Japanese film
and media, with a joint appointment between Film
and Media Studies and East Asian Languages
and Literatures at Yale.
Before arriving at Yale in 2004, he spent
nearly 12 years in Japan working for the Yamagata
International Documentary Film Festival and
teaching at Waseda University, Yokohama National
University, and Meiji Gakuin University.
He has published extensively in English, Japanese,
and other languages on such topics as Japanese
early film and modernity, contemporary directors,
documentary, film genre, censorship, film theory,
Japanese manga comics, and cinematic representations of minorities.
At Yale, his teaching covers an unusual range of
subjects, from Japanese television, pop culture,
and world animation to comparative cultural theories.
One of his recent books, 'Visions of Japanese
Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation,
and Spectatorship, 1895-1925' proposes the
radical reconsideration of early Japanese film culture,
not only set a new standard for Japanese film
history, well, history writing, but also offering
the possibility of counter-history to cinema
as such.
His scholarship on Japanese cinema has sparked
great critical interest, not only in North
America but also in Japan,
bring received as an intellectual challenge and
also a wake-up call for those who take on the study
of Japanese cinema in Japan as self-evident.
In other words, his works not only offer rigorous researched history of Japanese cinema, but also provide
complex and reflexive history of
Japanese film studies itself.
To rephrase, his scholarship questions both what Japanese cinema is, and what it is to study Japanese
cinema.
Similarly, his current project on Japanese
film theory easily traverses multiple
disciplinary and epistemological communities.
Now especially for graduate students and
Ph.D. candidates here in this room, you
might get the impression that to work under someone like Professor Gerow was extremely rewarding,
but also a sort of nightmare.
My colleagues there signed up to this almost impossible endeavor to impress him.
We often failed, but we kept challenging.
But at the same time, Aaron has been indeed
one of the warmest mentors for many of us,
always inviting his students to his place,
watching Japanese televised singing contests,
and Japanese variety shows together.
Basically, we enjoyed them, sometimes we reject them.
Along with amazingly delicious Japanese food
on the table.
Among fellow faculty and graduate students at Yale,
Aaron's place is also known as the best restaurant
in New Haven.
I would just like to end with a note that
we should probably welcome him back to UChicago.
Although he didn't attend the University of Chicago
as a college student.
He went to Columbia University in New York instead.
He was a student of UChicago Lab School
between the ages of 8 to 17.
So I was just having coffee before the talk and thinking I would show him around the area,
but instead he was just guiding me
all through the area with all the histories.
Essentially, his life at the cinema started
here, watching Doc Films every night here.
So without further ado, please join me in
welcoming Professor Gerow.
Thank you very much, Takuya.
I'm getting to that age where my students
are starting to find jobs here and there.
I'm starting to feel like an old parent, so
happy when your little babies who have left
the nest have done well for themselves.
I'm very proud of Takuya.
And I'm really glad to all of you.
In a every Japanese way, one of course has
to "please treat him well".
It is a great pleasure to be back at Chicago.
First, as Takuya mentioned, I lived here for
a long time.
I remember nights studying in this library,
even when I was in high school.
I never imagined then that I would come
here to actually give a talk.
But there are also so many friends that I
have here in Chicago.
It's great to see so many of them here today.
I want to thank all of you, especially the
Center for East Asian Studies and all the
faculty here, and all the students for coming
out in supporting my visit here today.
As Takuya mentioned, today's talk is part
of a larger project.
Trying to work through the history of Japanese
film theory.
I've done a series of these talks.
Each one on a particular theorist.
Today, I'm going to be talking about Terada
Torahiko.
I'll actually be talking about two things
today.
One, I'll be talking about Terada, who's actually
a fairly unique and interesting figure because
in reality, he was a physicist.
That's what his job was.
But in the last years of his life, he wrote
a lot about cinema.
So I want to talk about that kind of very
unique relationship between...so I want to
talk about his unique place.
But I also would like to place him within a larger
problem of what does it mean to do film theory
in Japan?
And what does it mean for us to talk about
film theory in Japan?
The first half of the paper is going to talk
about that latter issue.
And then, I'll move into a discussion of Terada.
Now, especially for those of you in film studies,
you know, the canonical histories of film
theory have overwhelmingly centered on Europe
and America.
Anthologies such as Marshall Cohen and Leo
Braudy's 'Film Theory and Criticism,' or historical
guides such as Dudley Andrew's major film
theories have devoted the vast majority of
their pages to European or North American
theorists.
Peripheral locations such as Japan, which
has had a vibrant and prolific culture of
film theory and criticism for over a century
are virtually ignored.
The problem is not really one of representation,
where the term "film theory" has come to represent
a select group of theorists and ideas emerging
from a powerful section of the globe, where
some theorists or their scholarly commentators
assume the right to speak about film.
It is also a problem of definition, in which
the very concept of what constitutes film
theory has been shaped by this selection.
Thus, even when Western cinema scholars are
open to non-Western film thinking, those concepts
are rarely admitted into the arena of film
theory because they do not seem "theoretical"
or address the central questions of film theory.
In the case of Noel Burch, his 1978 book,
'To the Distant Observer,' that absence of
non-Western theory might on the one hand be
seen as founding a positive critique of the
West, claiming that, quote, "the very notion
of theory is alien to Japan; it is considered
a property of Europe and the West," unquote.
And that could be one way that Burch constructs
Japanese culture as resistant to, and thus
a critique of, Western logocentrism and its
cinematic equivalent in classical Hollywood
cinema.
Yet on the other hand, this assertion not
only enables Burch to narrate Japanese cinema
as based on age-old, unquestioned, and thus
untheorized and conceptually uncontested traditions,
it allows him, the European theorist, to establish
a monopoly over the practice of theorizing
Japanese cinema and understanding its world
and global impact.
This is analogous to Edward Said's European
Orientalist, "for whom such knowledge of Oriental
society as he has is possible only for the
European, with a European's self-awareness
of society as a collection of rules and practices."
Just as Burch needs his version of Japanese
cinema to accomplish a critique of the institutional
mode of production, by presenting a cinema
that is radical, popular, and rooted in age-old
tradition, [inaudible] theoretical Japan becomes
necessary to establish his theoretical endeavor
by providing a post-structuralist textuality
that is other and without self-consciousness.
One that authenticates and renders natural
the deconstructionist project because it performs
an unthinking acceptance of that without being
tainted by logocentrism.
This provides contemporary theory with naturalized
authenticity while simultaneously giving the
Western theorist the honor of burying the
consciousness of that significance -- one
the Japanese other cannot assume.
This is not simply a European or Euro-American
phenomenon.
Curiously, the absence of non-Western film
theory or even Japanese film theory is also
evident in Japan.
One can open one of many books introducing
film theory in Japanese, such as Iwasaki Akira's
'Eiga no riron,' Okata Susumu's 'Eiga riron
ryumon,' or even Iwamoto Kenji and Hatano
Tetsuro's 'Eiga riron shusei' and find very
few Japanese names.
This is not because there is a dearth of profound
thinkers about cinema in Japan, a list that
could include such figures as Terada, Nakai
Masakazu, Imamura Taihei, Tosaka Jun, Gonda
Yasunosuke, Osaki Midori, Sugiyama Heiichi,
Nagae Michitaro, Haneda Kiyoteru, Matsumoto
Toshio, Yoshida Kiju, Matsuda Masao, Asanuma
Keiji, Yajima Midori, the list goes on.
But as Sato Tadao, the author of 'A History
of Japanese Film Theory' (Nihon eiga rironshi),
the only book on the history of film theory
in Japan, as Sato laments: "Japan also has
seen the publication of numerous books relating
to film theory, but most of them are either
translations of, or introductions to foreign
theory.
There are some tomes of film theory penned
by Japanese themselves, but for some reason,
these works are not examined by later generations
of theorists and, therefore, have not been
inherited and built upon."
Whatever film theory has sprouted in Japan
has seemingly been repeatedly nipped in the
bud.
It's been refused the opportunity to grow,
adapt, morph and create a continuous history.
This may constitute a form of intellectual
self-colonization, one that, as I have argued
elsewhere, is established in the cinema world
in the 1910s around the time of the Pure Film
Movement, an effort by first, film critics
and then filmmakers to render Japanese film
more "cinematic.”
Critics from this era posited exporting Japanese
films not only as an economic or national
goal, but also a means of changing the domestic
cinema, since whether a film could be understood
by foreign audiences became the measure of
whether a film was a film.
Film study, or film theory, became a process
in which intellectual reformers assumed the
Western gaze in order to define not only cinema
in Japan, but also their elevated position
in that socio-political structure.
By the 1920s, a particular set of relations
was established between the terms “cinema,”
“theory,” and “Japan," wherein each
of these concepts is defined in relation to
the others, such that an often unspoken term,
the “West,” instituted not only the hierarchy
of its cinema and its theory over Japan, one
enforced on the ground by an elite class of
cinema intellectuals, but also a certain impossibility
in which cinema and theory are inimical to
Japanese film if not Japanese film culture.
Such a triangulation between cinema, Japan,
and the West, I would argue, complicates any
easy binary between East and West, but it
also could hide other terms, such as Asia
and the colonies, or the differences within
Japan and the West.
Domestic theory experienced a complex, if
not tortured history, one that resonated with
the contradictions of Japanese modernity and
the paradoxical class dynamics of leftist
intellectuals.
Again, there was no shortage of impressive
thinkers, but the question was whether what
they were doing was film theory.
Sato Tadao, for instance, doubts whether any
of this was really film theory.
In the introduction to his book on film theory,
he declares: "To the extent possible, I wish
to examine only those written works concerning
film theory.
In Japan, unfortunately, very few individuals
can be called film theorists.
Imamura Taihei is about the only person who
has consistently worked as a film theorist,
writing several theoretical books on film."
Now, Sato's definition is too straightforward.
If we were to follow it, most of the great
names in classical film theory, from Sergei
Eisenstein to Siegfried Kracauer, from Hugo
Munsterberg to Rudolf Arnheim, all of whom
had pursuits other than film theory, would
not be called film theorists.
But Sato is not alone in feeling that the
history of Japanese film theory is absent
of film theorists.
Not only do historians seem to forget film
theory in Japan, the theory that is remembered
is not even considered theory.
This may partially be a problem of the object
“theory” and its definition.
Dudley Andrew, I have at least one picture
here, states that the goal of film theory,
quote, “is to formulate a schematic notion
of the capacity of film,” unquote, an aim
that is different from that of film criticism,
for instance, which is, quote, “an appreciation
of the value of individual works of cinema,
not a comprehension of the cinematic capability,"
unquote.
Yet this comprehension, he says, exceeds the
practical.
While one could say that all filmmakers engage
in film theory, to the extent that they continually
test what cinema can do for them, their goal
is not one in which, quote, “knowledge of
an experience begins to substitute for the
experience itself,” unquote, and thus where
knowing about film becomes more important
than knowing how to use it.
Sato appears to be forwarding a different
definition.
He offers a more expansive one when trying
to identify where theory may really exist
in Japan.
To him, "It is hard to believe that such an
artistic tradition of Japanese film could
be sustained without theoretical inquiry.
Even if there is the transmission of technical
skill, it does not develop through simple
intuition or practices alone.
Then where do we find Japanese film theory?
Perhaps the succinct words passed in casual
conversation from a director’s mouth to
the ear of an assistant director, or another
member of the crew, have been of the greatest
consequence to film theory."
Sato is proffering what he considers a “Japanese”
conception of film theory that, in contrast
to Andrew’s definition, is centered on the
practical.
My concern here is not to adjudicate these
definitions, but rather to first spotlight
the compulsion in Japan to fret over the existence
of film theory in Japan -- what I have called
a “theory complex,” to both forget theory
and remember it in a different form, to insist
Japan has no film theory but still, quote,
“to formulate a schematic notion of the
capacity of film,” unquote.
It is this problem that haunts, and in many
ways shapes, how not only how the history
of Japanese film theory is narrated, but also
how such theories were pursued.
This problem, for instance, renders it difficult
for a historian of Japanese film theory to
justify its study simply through asserting
that Japan possesses a splendid history of
film theorization, one equal to or surpassing
that of the West.
That may be true, and the hope, that I certainly
have, is that renewing research on the history
of Japanese film theory will convince many
of its intellectual breadth and depth.
The danger is that this tactic might not only
repeat in the realm of intellectual thought
the modernization thesis of Japan catching
up to standards established in the West, but
also poses an impossibility in which Japanese
film theory is celebrated when film theory
itself in Europe and America has been defined
in part through its difference from the other
of a non-theoretical non-Western other.
It is this potential impossibility that, I
contend, the theory complex is aware of, or
perhaps even derives from.
The complex also problematizes any effort
to root Japanese film theory in a long-standing
traditional aesthetics.
Not only does that strategy threaten to descend
into an ahistorical self-orientalism, it obfuscates
how Japanese thinking on cinema often grapples
with theory’s “Western-ness” and modernity,
and thus how the struggle of theory is itself
distinctly modern.
The problem of Japanese film theory in some
ways resembles the aporia of a Japan attempting
to become modern even though modernity was
defined in the West through the non-West as
its pre-modern other.
Yet we should note that the supposed Western-ness
of film theory in Japan, as well as the modernity
of the medium, was less a given, simply imposed
from abroad or inherent in the object, than
an aspect constructed historically, well after
cinema’s entry into Japan, for very special
reasons, many of which were local and concerned
issues of class, modernity, and nation, such
as the rise of the urban masses, divisions
between city and country, the development
of the family state, and Japanese imperial
intentions in Asia.
The theory complex was as much a historically
contingent problem as a symptom of non-Western
modernity.
This also, I think, cautions the researcher
against exclusively focusing on what seems
familiar in Japanese film theory.
It is tempting to justify the study of Japanese
film thought by seeing in it versions of one’s
own cinema theory, for instance, finding Gonda
Yasunosuke to be an early form of British
cultural studies, celebrating Sugiyama Heiichi
for expounding the French theorist Andre Bazin’s
critique of montage a decade before Bazin
did, or seeing in Nagae Michitaro's theorization
of time in cinema an encounter with Henri
Bergson that predates, by many decades,
Gilles Deleuze.
Finding what one recognizes in it, however,
renders Japanese film theory important only
to the degree that it becomes one’s reflection,
in the West or in the present, confirming
one’s existence.
What does not reflect what is familiar is
forgotten and what does is refracted to conform
to our likeness, making Japanese thought work
for us, not for itself.
This desire overlooks the potential alterity
of Japanese film theory itself, elements of
otherness that may be irreducible to existing
concepts in the Euro-American canon.
It is important to consider this otherness
not simply for the sake of preserving difference
against the forces of homogenization, but
also because it was anxiety over such alterity
that shaped in part how the history of Japanese
film thought has been narrated inside Japan
and abroad.
Whoever reads film theory in Japan must consider
how it can be other, in terms of space or
time, in part because theory may be other
to it as well.
It is appropriate for a dialogue with film
theory in Japan to engage in self-interrogation
because, I would contend, much of that theory
itself, especially under the contradictions
of the theory complex, is significantly self-conscious,
if not self-critical.
An approach to the history of Japanese film
theory, then, beyond respecting its alterity
and remaining self-conscious of one’s own
perspectives, should consider at least partially
how it performs theory at the same time that
it is critical of the possibilities of theory
itself.
Japanese thinkers such as Gonda, Sugiyama,
Nakai, Nagae, Yoshida, or Hasumi Shigehiko
often engage, consciously or unconsciously,
in meta-level questions of what film theory
means in their particular historical context,
exhibiting a sort of double consciousness,
similar to Du Bois’s sense, in which they
do theory at the same time they are conscious
of what it might mean to perform theory, which
often includes a certain kind of consciousness
of a sort of neo-colonial foreign gaze.
They can engage in high-level thinking about
cinema, but critique it as theory or refuse
to call it theory.
They can perform under the banner of theory
but do operations that deviate from the canonical
form.
Such interrogations of theory often go hand-in-hand
with questioning terms such as “cinema”
or “Japan,” querying the relationship
of film to the nation, Japan to the world,
intellectuals to their object of study, the
educated classes to the masses, the word to
the image, and film and its study to academia.
Film theory can thus constitute a form of
cultural or political praxis in the historical
field, and so a history of that praxis must
interrogate its own assumptions about “film
theory,” “Japan,” and “cinema.”
Let me just take a [inaudible] and then move
into the second part of the paper.
Now, let's move onto Terada Torahiko.
Terada Torahiko, I think, becomes a really
interesting figure in this project.
Because he is arguably the only prewar film
thinker who seemingly was oblivious to the
theory complex.
Flaunting his position outside the Japanese
film critical world, he asserted his cosmopolitan
credentials by becoming the first Japanese
to publish a film theoretical piece in English
in a Western academic journal.
Seemingly far from suffering the contradictions
of the non-Western film theorist, attempting
to theorize when theory supposedly belonged
to the West, Terada openly called for a Japanese
film theory, one based in older aesthetic
traditions, as a means of founding a global
Japanese cinema.
He even asserted his own authority by telling
his readers that he thought up some of what
Sergei Eisenstein theorized before he even
knew of the Soviet director’s existence
and that he thought it through better.
This declaration of national film theory is
one response to the theory complex and the
larger geopolitics of film thinking, one that
certainly can be interrogated against the
background of Japanese militarization and
colonial aspirations in the 1930s.
The contradictions in Terada’s thought can
reflect those ideological fissures, as I will
show.
However, I would also like to ask whether
they also might not represent another dimension.
And that word to mention, as you will see,
is a word very important to the physicist
Terada, in which Terada is quite conscious
in fact of the theory complex and uses cinema
to imagine alternative ways of thinking, albeit
in sometimes problematic fashion.
Terada, here he is on a stamp, was born in
1878 and studied physics at the University
of Tokyo, eventually becoming a full professor
of physics at that, what is Japan’s most
elite university.
His research as a physicist was varied, covering
sound waves, x-ray diffraction, the physics
of ocean waves, and even seismology.
He was a world traveller, studying at the
University of Berlin, spending time in France,
the UK, and the United States, and publishing
quite a lot of research in English.
To most Japanese, however, Terada is known
less as a scientist than as a writer, particularly
as an essayist.
Quite famously he was a student of Natsume
Soseki’s, learning not just English but
also poetry from Japan’s most significant
modern novelist.
Terada’s scientific endeavors were thus
paralleled by his literary pursuits, as he
became an exemplary practitioner of the genre
of, what the Japanese call, the zuihitsu,
the prose narration of an author’s thoughts
or feelings about an experience or a subject.
Terada died in 1935 at the age of 57, but
interestingly it was cinema that served as
one of his major concerns in the last five
years of his life.
He actually did not see that many films.
He reports having seen a Japanese swordplay
film during the silent era that was narrated
by benshi and he was so repulsed by it that
for much of the silent era he did not actually
go to see the movies.
But it was eventually research that brought
him back to the theater, as he went to a few,
mostly documentary films in 1928 to view their
presentation of topics related to his research.
But, as he himself reports, a few films turned
into more and soon he was a film fan.
Terada’s film writing has mostly been discussed
in terms of his association of film, first,
with reality, and second, with Japanese traditional
arts such as haikai renku poetry and emaki
picture scrolls.
Few, however, have really attempted to understand
how all these approaches intersect.
To begin with the former, many have focused
on a 1933 essay he wrote entitled “News
Films and Newspaper Articles.”
Terada was an admirer of newsreels and in
this piece countered the conventional wisdom
that newsreel footage merely supplements or
illustrates an account written in words, by
comparing how such films and newspapers would
cover the same event.
In the case of the unveiling of a public statue,
for instance, a news article would follow
a conventional pattern describing in abstract
who was where, what they did, and when.
Film might be faulted for not capturing the
whole ceremony, but instead to Terada, "the
phenomena within the limits of the field of
vision of the camera, from the necessary to
the accidental, in the smallest detail and
in their entirety, are recorded and represented
without constriction or expansion.
For instance, small scale events such as a
scene of a tuft of white hair of an old gentleman
reading the ceremonial address standing on
end in the wind ... are recorded each and
every one in great detail."
This may sound like the proverbial “one
picture is worth a thousand words,” but
Terada is interested in this on the level
of perception.
Not only are such events beyond the control
of the cameraman or any director, but they
also particularize the event, presenting it
as an individual instance against the abstract
and conventional universality of the newspaper
narration.
To him, the lens and the celluloid “are
material, possessing no preconceived notions
or capacity to abstract—in a sense, stupidly
honest.
... The photographic image is less an inscription
of phenomena than the phenomena themselves.”
He recognized that the image therefore has
“no capacity to systematically grasp the
entirety of events," which must be provided
by the cameraman or the editor.
But he argued that unlike the conceptualized
and conventionalized newspaper article, there
is a chance in the news film to discover something
new and concrete.
This to Terada is not simply because it captures
even the accidental in detail, but because
the camera’s mode of perception reveals
what we, even if we were present at the actual
unveiling, would not notice.
To him the lack of color or of three-dimensional
space, for instance, enables the cinematic
image to project greater objectivity to the
scene.
In a grand claim, Terada asserts that through
the newsreel, “human beings have acquired
a new organ of cognition,” have even become
“new human beings.”
Terada, who 
read quite profusely, even in film theory,
is touching on many concepts in the history
of film and art.
Film is here a cinema of discovery, perhaps
in the sense of Andre Bazin’s realism, here
is a great image of Bazin and his cat, or that
resembles Dudley Andrew’s own description
of “what cinema is.”
That discovery, however, echoing Russian formalism,
involves the disruption of conventional modes
of perception and representation, seeing anew
what has in fact ceased to be seen.
The fact that it is the camera and photography
that enables this revelation possibly aligns
Terada with Dziga Vertov’s kino-eye or the
machine art of Itagaki Takao.
A vision of a new, mechanically based human
being even brings us nearer to the realm of
Futurism.
It may be going too far, but Terada’s celebration
of an image that exceeds our ability to describe
it in words can even resemble Roland Barthes’s
third meaning, especially since Barthes, like
ultimately Terada, ties the filmic to haiku.
Many, however, have criticized this piece,
this article, for being overly utopian, unsystematic,
or even naive.
Markus Nornes, another great photo here, and
Naoki Yamamoto note the anachronism of Terada
celebrating a cinematic image free of convention
at a point when Japanese documentary was exhibiting
in its march towards war a, quote, “hardening
of style,” in Nornes’s words, centered
on the process of editing that Terada seemingly
shunts to the side.
Sato Tadao blames Terada for not only failing
to consider how newsreels, especially during
the wartime, can themselves become conventional,
but also for not really fully considering
the problem of spectatorship.
Terada is thus criticized for forwarding a
naive realism, for ignoring the formal and
ideological devices by which the cinematic
medium warps reality.
Terada, however, more often than not highlighted
how cinema is not a reproduction of reality.
In many instances he echoes Rudolf Arnheim
in not only listing the differences between
reality and what we view on screen, but also
emphasizing that gap as the basis for film
art.
This can seem one of the many inconsistencies
that Nornes and others have noticed in his
writings on film.
However, instead of filing this away as a
mere contradiction by an amateur film theorist,
perhaps we can consider such inconsistencies
as consistent in another dimension.
One of the first manifestations of this physicist’s
approach to cinema was Terada’s emphasis
in essays like “Film Art” on film production
as essentially scientific, industrial, experimental,
and analytical.
Films require industrial means, in terms of
both machinery and capital, while filmmakers
need analytical skills from the script to
the editing stage.
This could mean that to Terada, like with
Imamura Taihei -- I wanted to show you this.
For those of you who are fans of 'Teito Monogatari,'
the Aramata Hiroshi sci-fi novel, Terada is
actually a character.
This is from the film version of that.
But anyway, getting back to Imamura Taihei.
Terada, like Imamura Taihei, can end up seeing
cinema as involving an epistemological relationship
with reality in how images are selected and
linked.
Yet just as he could celebrate the concrete,
the particular, and the accidental in a newsreel
image, he could not reduce cinema to becoming
a manifestation of abstract science.
Certainly he praised scientific films and
was an advocate for educational films, but
cinema for Terada seemed to reside in another
dimension, one that ran between the raw material
of the shot and the analytical result of industrial
filmmaking.
Recall that he considered that the flat, black
and white image appeared more objective, capable
of making us see the world anew.
The word he used there was “fuyo” or "to
bestow upon."
The cinematic image less reveals the world
than bestows or projects upon it a novel reality
in which its objecthood has been supplemented.
The spectator plays a crucial role in this.
In his essay “Film Art,” Terada considers
technological innovations in cinema from sound
and color to 3D.
While sharing some of Arnheim’s aesthetics,
which defined art as based in a divorce from
reality, Terada did not emulate Arnheim’s
aversion to sound film.
Sound he celebrated but not color.
To him, "Adding audio sound to visual cinema
gives rise to another, essentially different
dimension, while the addition of color
only supplements the visual quality.
Because of that, no matter how much the scientific
technology for the reproduction of color develops,
I cannot think that it will cause the fundamental
revolution that sound film created."
Terada used a similar argument to reject 3D
film.
To him, "The phenomena of stage and dance
are themselves part of three-dimensional space,
but because the spectator’s position is
fixed, the visual image in fact appears as
simply a projected two-dimensional image.
Against that, film produces a paradoxical
effect: the light on the screen is surely
flat and in two dimensions, but because the
camera eye is moving in three dimensions,
the eye of the spectator becomes capable of
truly observing phenomena in three-dimensional
space by acquiring the camera eye."
To Terada, 3D film ironically failed to add
a dimension to the cinema.
What interested him about cinema, particularly
as a physicist, was precisely the addition
and subtraction of dimensions, and the translation
of space time between them.
These not only could cause revolutions in
perception and art, they involved the spectator
in the process of thinking and perceiving
space time.
It was these jumps between dimensions, or
projecting the unseen details of reality,
that produced these leaps in perception and
thought.
Terada was conceiving of
cinema as almost literally a projection of
four-dimensional space.
As we have seen, "projection" was a
crucial term for him, in addition to "dimension,"
and involved more than just
the projection of light on screen.
Cinema, he wrote, "in exchange for removing
one dimension from the three-dimensions of
reality, and limiting it only to a two-dimensional
surface, can willfully control the passage
of time by projecting the fourth dimension
of time into a single spatial dimension."
Terada was interested not just in the adding
of dimensions, but also in the perceptual
and thought process involved in projecting,
for instance, a three dimensional object into
two dimensions, asking what is gained in that
process.
This is a process that involved other arts
as well.
Terada, for instance, was also discussing
emaki picture scrolls in this quote.
To the physicist, to Terada, cinema excels at this.
Film art to him "is an architectural art that
truly bundles space and time to build a pantheon
in so-called four-dimensional space.”
Eisenstein also discussed the fourth dimension
in film, but he was primary talking of the
new dimension of overtonal montage.
Terada, however, seems to be discussing physics.
That he is not simply addressing the addition
of time to three-dimensional space is evident
in his discussion of cinema’s relation to
modern physics in his article “Image of
Physical World in Cinematography,” which
he published in English in the Italian scientific
journal Scientia in 1933.
For much of the article he delineates all
the ways that movie physics run counter to
the physics of the real world, overturning
the laws of entropy
or the second law of thermodynamics, for instance.
In these sections, cinema serves as an example
in reverse, for instance showing the significance
of the irreversibility of time through reversing it.
Cinema’s importance is in showing reality
by not being reality.
But Terada ends by mentioning the new physics
of Einstein and quantum mechanics.
He says, "We may inquire, for instance, if
the physical world as it appears in the system
of classical physics is not but a very defective
facsimile of the real world, being only a
little better than the cinematographic one...The
suspicion has already been justified by Einstein’s
formulation of the principle of relativity.
This is a mystery only for the inhabitants
of the world of classical physics, while it
is a matter of plain fact, a fact plain and simple for those whose world’s image is substituted by the
mathematical picture of the universe projected
on the screen of new physics.
The movie man at the projector is the mathematical
physicist with their peculiar 'operator.'"
On the one hand, Terada is using film to argue
that physics produces images of the world
that may in fact be incorrect when seen from
new systems of knowledge.
And cinema may in fact not be wrong to reality
because sometimes it is the conception of
reality itself that is erroneous.
On the other hand, Terada is suggesting that
physics itself is cinematographic, projecting
multiple and complex dimensions onto fields
and surfaces in ways that transform our understanding
of the world.
Especially coming at the at the end of an
article listing cinema’s deviations from
classical physics, Terada is implying that
cinema itself is like a tesseract, which is
a three-dimensional projection of a four-dimensional object.
While it may not necessarily be a projection
of the new world of relativity and quantum
physics, it is a projection of a multi-dimensional
world that to Terada makes us revolutionize
our perception and actively conceive of added
dimensions beyond our own.
If cinema is realistic, it may be real to
the very different reality of modern physics.
What then of haikai renku, the other major
field to which Terada connected the cinema?
His discussion of film, reality, and physics
aims for the universal, with his act of publishing
his ideas in English in Europe adding a cosmopolitan
dimension to his film theory.
How does the particular nation enter the picture?
Terada’s linkage of film and renku can first
be understood in light of Sergei Eisenstein’s
own efforts to find montage in haiku.
Terada claimed that he made the connection
between cinema and Japanese poetry before
ever reading Eisenstein, and even criticized
Eisenstein for knowing nothing of renku,
a longer form of traditional linked verse
that he claimed exhibits more parallels with
cinema than haiku.
There is an element of montage in his conception
of renku, as he sees the addition of each
line in this linked verse, producing a new shift of image or a rhythm that creates a kind of motion.
Terada makes renku the epitome of this principle
of dynamic combination, but he, perhaps like
Eisenstein himself, finds it in most any art.
Terada is perhaps more open to forms of montage
than Eisenstein is, and that founds his interest
in a wide variety of films, from musicals
to abstract animation.
His concept of renku montage led him to de-emphasize
the role of narrative and even meaning in
film, as he described the relation of shots
as operating in the spectator on a mostly
subconscious level.
He declared his strong interest in experimental
film and admired Bunuel's 'Un Chien Andalou.'
While he is aware of the differences between
Eisenstein’s dialectical montage of conflict
and Pudovkin’s montage of bricks, his metaphor
is first from chemistry, seeing it as the
combination of chemicals.
But he can also return to physics.
Using an example from ikebana, Terada writes
that “What is produced in that combination
is in no way a 'flower' anymore, but something
that belongs to the world of a completely
different dimension.”
Renku or any other similar form of montage
in art is analogous to adding sound to a silent
image or projecting three dimensions on two.
It is a jump between dimensions that produces
new and dynamic images.
Haikai renku is then not itself a principle
exclusive to Japan.
Terada does begin “Film Art” by stating
that: "the theory of film art that I have
seen in Japan seems often to be work divorced
from the Japanese...Few of the theoretical
studies of cinema have looked at film through
Japanese history or national character."
Therefore he stated that his goal is to research
that.
To actually start establishing a Japanese film theory.
In fact, his biographer Ota Bunpei declared
the Scientia article itself was "not only
a memorable event in the history of our cinema,
but also valuable in the sense that it realized
first, on the level of film theory and its
superior content Torahiko’s hope and desire
towards film—to create a global Japanese
cinema."
His writings then may have been an attempt
to make film theory more Japanese.
Terada, however, was not engaged in a theory
of Japanese cinema.
“Haikai” could become an adjective for
him in his film criticism, a primary standard
for evaluating a film, effectively saying
that a film wasn't “haikai enough.”
But the films that were haikai-ish, or that
served as examples in his theory, were invariably
foreign films, especially those from France
and the Soviet Union.
Terada was brutally critical of Japanese film,
and often in contradictory ways.
He could complain that “At least among those
I have seen, there are barely any filmmakers
or critics in our country who are interested
in Japan’s unique culture and produce films
or write criticism on the basis of that.”
But then a few sentences later he could protest
that jidaigeki “are all still bound by the
old customs of the traditional kabuki stage.”
Japanese films could then seemingly fail to
be Japanese even if they were preserving Japanese
tradition.
Terada was repeating, in some ways, what I
have described in the Pure Film Movement,
an effort to construct a truly Japanese cinema,
but in a way such that its Japanese-ness was
expressed in a form recognizable to the foreign
gaze.
In this case, a modern and global gaze.
With his concept of a “Japanese global film,"
a peculiar "Japanese" there, his nationalism
aimed to be cosmopolitan.
Becoming Japanese was then, on the one hand,
a way of adding a global dimension to Japanese
film and film theory, one that was projected
on and embodied in the local dimension.
At the same time, it was also a projection
abroad, as Terada projects Japan onto foreign
cinema in order that it can establish and
recognize itself.
That can be a colonial or imperial move, with
projection becoming a projection of power,
but it also was a contradictory one as the
particularity of Japan could only be recognized
through the universal residing in the modern
West.
Terada Torahiko thus embodies the double bind
of the Japanese film theoretician.
How one can produce film theory that counters
the imperial dimensions of Euro-American theory
and asserts difference, without reifying that
difference in the nation or in a performance
of Oriental otherness.
One could say Terada sought one solution in physics,
in a physics of film, not just grounding it in
science, but in having it leap, jump, to other
dimensions, while projecting a revolutionary
new world view.
The problem is that he saw the nation itself
as such an extra dimension, a new revolutionary
realm, even as it needed to be projected onto
or even be a projection of Europe to achieve
its new dimensionality.
I still feel, however, that Terada also explored
another solution, one that did not involve
adding but rather subtracting dimensions,
such as removing the layers of convention
and signification from perception and looking
again at particularity without the frame of
abstraction or language.
Terada was often torn between a fascination
with particularity and a dedication to scientific
universality, and that was embodied in his
dual pursuit of zuihitsu essays, with their
attention to the personal and the everyday,
and academic papers.
The fact that he moved film theory beyond
the latter into the former reflects one of
his ways of dealing with the theory complex.
Ota, it should be noted, even argues that
zuihitsu was not just the vessel of Terada’s
film theory, but its embodiment.
His effort to render his particular, concrete,
even material physics of film equal to that
of the West, however, even publishing it abroad,
could not escape falling into the universal
form of imperial nationalism.
In a theory of film inspired by the theory
of relativity, Terada failed to relativize
the nation itself.
Thank you.
