Books Around: All that Avant Garde

By Chris Gehman

The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan
Duke University Press, 2002, 316 pp., ill.

Eric Cazdyn’s recent book The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan has been mentioned before in these pages by Olaf Möller, but merits further exploration. Cazdyn’s project provides an alternative methodology to the canonical histories of Japanese films by looking at the nation’s cinema not in terms of Japan’s , its traditional culture and literature, etc., but in terms of the relationship between Japanese cinema and capitalism. In this way, Cazdyn emphasizes the continuities of the Japanese experience of modernity with the experience of capitalism and modernity in other parts of the world, while allowing for the particularities of its situation and history.

Cazdyn’s method shifts fluidly between synchronic and diachronic methods, thinking through a century of Japanese modernity and cinema through categories such as Adaptation, Acting, and Pornography. The Flash of Capital is bracing and inventive in subject, methodology, and execution, and leads to the discussion of a number of films, filmmakers, and genres generally neglected or ignored in previous histories. Chris Gehman spoke to Eric Cazdyn at the University of Toronto, where he is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of East Asian Studies, Comparative Literature, and Cinema Studies.

Cinema ScopeQ: What is your background; how did you come to study Japanese film in terms of economics and geopolitics?

Eric Cazdyn: I grew up in Southern California, (where Asian-American culture was flourishing), so Japan was really never anything exotic to me. I had an interest in Japan and went there, but I think going to London, or Paris, or even Toronto would have been more intimidating. There was none very little of that an exotic orientalist draw for me. I studied a couple years of Japanese language in university, and then ended up in Japan in the late 80s, in rural areas and in Tokyo and Osaka.

What I realized at first in Japan was that it was a very interesting place from which to look at the world and look at myself. It was a personal reaction, and it seemed to fly in the face of the experience of a lot of my peers there. For many of them Japan was a place one would go to obsess over that thing called “Japan,” and to forget about the rest of the world. For some many reasons, Japan in the late 80s really did feel like the centre of the world –— there was so much energy there, unlike today, when there’s this thing called “Japan fatigue.” But at that time it was a really energizing place to be, to think about myself, to look at the world outside Japan and Japan’s relation to the rest of the world. What frustrated me, both within Japan and in people thinking and talking about Japan from thethe outside, was that it was always just Japan.

I was always interested in various aspects of Japan, including politics, and never quite knew how to bring together Japan and the world, and also politics and the aesthetics. Because it was aesthetic qualities that drew me to Japan as well –— an attention to form, an interesting transparency of structure, these things that I didn’t really have a language for when I was first there, but which I felt and had an affinity for. I didn’t know how to develop those connections at all, except instinctively. But I happened to come across this guy, Masao Miyoshi, a prettyan wildinfectious, a sharp, eccentric manthinker, probably one of the more important contemporary intellectuals working today, who left Japan and ended up in the US academy. He was at Berkeley and then moved to San Diego, where I went to study with him. He was doing something that I was immediately attracted to:. hHe hated Asian studies, he hated literary studies, he hated film studies, he was just one of these cantankerous, interesting, all-embracing thinkers that I seemed to connect with. He helped me to form a language to speak about Japan and the world, to speak about culture and politics, in a way that I didn’t find anywhere else.

And then in Japan, in terms of film itself, the experience of watching certain filmmakers’ work was so profound, it made me think, “Tthis can help me deal with a lot of questions I’ve been asking.” In particular, the films of Ogawa Shinsuke, including his long documentaries from the 80s, which were shown at the Japan Foundation in Kyoto in the late 80s. There I learned something about how to think politically with an attention to the aesthetic, and how to think aesthetically with an attention to the political. I knew Ogawa had his own moment, he had his own politics, he was doing his own thing, but I realized this was only the tip of the iceberg. He wasn’t coming out of nowhere, in terms of filmmaking. His influence from Japanese cinema was tremendous, and this led me much deeper into film, until I realized that I could look at Japanese film, and it would let me do this kind of work. I didn’t have to get stuck in film, I didn’t have to get stuck in Japan. I could keep moving outward from film, but the subject was rich enough that I could focus on it as an object of study.

But then the question became: How to do it? I could concentrate on Ogawa’s films or on documentaries, but this seemed limiting. Finally I came to the conclusion that I just had to do the whole hundred 100 years! This is where the interesting correspondence lies, because Japanese modernity begins very late, so it’s been about 100 years, depending upon how you date it, and that’s pretty much the history of Japanese film as well. There aren’t many film histories that havewhich have such a clean chronological correspondence. The way Japanese modernity and, Japanese capitalism, had moved, and the way the film history had moved –— it seemed so elegant. I thought, here’s something I can really move back and forth on, thinking about the transformations in modernity and capital, and the transformations in film. That’s what led me to organize the book the way I did.

Scope:Q: In The Flash of Capital you spend a good deal of space dealing with questions of historiography and methodology. Did you feel that your book was enough of a departure from standard national film histories, as well as other ways of situating film in relation to political and economic structures, that its methodology required a fairly detailed explanation?

Cazdyn: That is the key problem of the work I’ve been doing, leading up to this book and since. When you talk about politics and film it usually gets really reductive: eEither you get a discussion of films about political subjects, or you get an avant-gardist argument about the politics of form. What I really thought needed to be foregrounded in a discussion of the relation between capitalism and film was that it obviously had to do with more that just the film studios, shifts in the business, profits and losses, and so forth. Certainly within the field of Japanese film studies, no one had done this type of work, either in Japan or outside Japan, as far as I could see. And that meant I had to ask myself how most people write these histories, which led to the question, “What does it mean to write a national film history today?” I was writing in the 90s, when doing a national film history almost seemed like a throwback. Apart from all the methodological questions, it was a moment when the nation itself appeared to be coming apart, or was at least being called into question by the processes of globalization.

I didn’t feel that these were questions that could simply be dealt with in an introduction, which is the way it’s usually done. It seemed to me that the way you wrote the history, the way you organized it, would determine the kind of history you were going to write. It’s not just a question of adding new material within an existing form: iIf I write a different type of history based on problems I think are important, what’s going to emerge? And I think a different one does. Which isn’t to say that my history is right, it just means that when you ask different questions, different directors problems and different types directors and of films emergeissues rise to the surface. I always felt that the narratives that were being written about Japanese film just kept closing back in on Japan –— it was about Japan and only about Japan. My hope was that this book would make it impossible to think about Japan and Japanese film history without factoring in the larger geopolitical questions, the logic of capitalism.

It was tricky writing that chapter on historiography, because obviously I had learned a great deal from the other scholars I was writing about, the Richie and Anderson book [The Japanese Film, 1959] in particular. I have a lot of respect for Donald Richie, and for the type of work he did, as well as for Sato Tadao, the great film historian of Japan. Yet at the same time I did feel the need, not to criticize them, but to criticize almost their unconscious, what they didn’t even know they were doing when they were writing these histories. It’s incredibly arrogant, to put yourself in the position of saying, “I’m going to analyze your unconscious” –— it’s the arrogance of a psychoanalyst, I suppose. But it seemed really important at the time.

I noticed that when the Japan Times reviewed the book they had somebody else write about it –— Donald Richie is the usual reviewer, and I was interested in what he would have to say. I doubt he would respond badly. He’s an eminently generous person, and I think he would understand the project better than a lot of others.

ScopeQ: How did you settle on the categories thatwhich form the main sections of the book— (Historiography, Adaptation, Acting, Pornography, Re-reading—), and the subdivision of each of these into three additional categories?

Cazdyn: I always am lookinglook for categories that slip elegantly between the different registers, from the cinematic to the economic, and that work in both. They might have a different logic in each, and they might have different meanings and effects in each, but there’s still something shared. So something like acting seemed like an obvious category to me, because this is such an important political category, and such a crucial cinematic one as well. I felt the same way about adaptation, and about the other categories, which helped me move side-to-side from film to capitalism, and also helped me to move through the history chronologically. With each category I go through both histories, film and capitalism, and from the beginning of film to the present. And these were the categories that lent themselves to this method. I didn’t start off with these categories, but as they emerged as I amassed material, watched the films, and read through the criticism and older film histories.

Scope:Q: The division of each section into three subcategories, or historical moments, reflects the idea that Japanese capitalism has moved through three main phases. Did it concern you that this tripartite substructure might be too schematic to reflect the complexity of the overlapping histories you’re exploring?

Cazdyn: If you don’t read the book carefully, it seems like a really schematic exercise. Some people who don’t actually read it think it’s simply a really reductive Marxist film history that’s saying here’s the economic, and here’s the cinematic, and here’s these three moments... And to some extent that is the inner structure, but in the very writing and the form of the book itself, these things are always contingent, and they’re always shooting through each other. What I’m trying to do is to show that you need these theoretical points of departure. On that level it’s also a criticism of a kind of very soft postmodern history in which anything that has a narrative drive, or wants to argue something, or wants to talk about structure, is being heavy-handed and overbearing, and too determining. And what you end with is the disappearance of capital, of the logic and history of capitalism. For me, that has to be there, but with an awareness that it’s complex and not simply determining. This is the central contradiction of doing this kind of work, which is to say, there is a narrative of modernity and capitalism in Japan, and film is related to it, but it’s not so linear. I think we need to argue for the importance of these structures, and of seeing capitalism as a system.

The way I tried to deal with this question explicitly was by talking about one of the great Japanese film historians, Iwasaki Akira, who wrote a book called Film and Capitalism in the 1930s, in which he did this very schematic Marxist analysis. It was a way of showing, “this is not what I’m doing,” while recognizing the importance of what Iwasaki did.

Whenever you’re talking about the relationship between aesthetics and politics you’re about to cut your throat, because you’re always about to say that these things determine each other. The moment you say how they relate is the moment you necessarily short-change the aesthetic. My strategy was to actually present the theoretical problem –— this there is something between aesthetics and politics –— but the way of addressing it is in the way you keep putting things together, side by side, instead of just declaring a solution. So, for example, I simply put political acting next to cinematic acting. I wasn’t necessarily saying “this is changing that,” but if you put things together that don’t obviously go together, and something fresh and significant emerges out of that, it’s important work. It was the only way I was going to argue for the relation between film and politics.

Scope:Q: One of the issues that arises at a couple of points is the unwillingness of a certain kind of critic to admit the importance of works which deal directly with the messy reality of social conflict, preferring a highly coded and aestheticized narrativization to a more direct confrontation with the facts;. fFor example, you criticize Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie’s dismissal of the leftist Prokino films of the 1919330s. Where do you think contemporary Japanese filmmakers stand in relation to this issue –— is there an explicitly political cinema in Japan today?

Cazdyn: Well, I’m interested in the politics that filmmakers espouse –— Oshima has his politics, Imamura has his politics, Haneda has her politics, Ogawa has his politics –— but I’m more interested in seeing how an almost unconscious argument is being made, on the level of form, that engages the most pressing social and political problems. This is one of my main arguments: ttThat filmmakers are engaged in that these extra-cinematic conversations, but and they’re engaged in them most significantly through formal invention. I’m interested in how I can see something in the films that is trying to figure a way through an absolutely crucial, more general problem that everyone has to deal with. That’s how I usually think about the politics of filmmakers.

In terms of contemporary directors I think there are a lot of interesting things going on with people like Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Miike Takashi, and Tsukamoto Shinya, who I think are engaging contemporary problems in Japan and the world. I’m interested in the fact that a lot of these films don’t really immediatelyexplicitly point to anything outside themselves, whereas I think a lot of the directors of the 60s through the 80s necessarily did. You couldn’t help but think about the student movement and the new left when you watched an Oshima film from the 60s. You couldn’t help but think about the corporatization of Japan when you watched certain Imamura films from the 60s and 70s. But the political import of these younger filmmakers is that the films are not that precious—before you know it is itself, and then the next one has comes along. There is not so much canonization and fetishization of the films themselves, but they’re still doing something interesting, in a non-dramatic way, even certainly with Kurosawa, with Miike and his violence, certainly with Kurosawaeven with Miike.

For example, the enormous popularity of Miike’s films the world over is not necessarily about the prurient desires of his young audience. If it were only due to such schoolboy voyeurism then any number of contemporary directors would easily fill the bill. Rather, Miike shoots all of the gore, all of the decapitations, all of the sadistic shredding and stretching and spraying of the body with a desire not to shock or disgust, I think, but simply to see all of this on film. I think it is an unproductive question to ask how Miike’s films might or might not contribute to the growing amount of violence in the world today. Instead of quickly leaving his films for the larger historical context, we might want to look at them a little closer, to stay inside them and the experiences they provoke in us. .
I cannot help but see put this provocation in relation to the provocation of so much violence, inequaliltyinequality, and illness in the world today. these new films and filmmakers as directly connected to the problems that people at the Porto Allegra World Social Forums are trying to figure out, outside of the more traditional political mechanisms. Ironically, I think the relationship between politics and film is richer today than it’s been in a long time.

Scope:Q: Throughout the book, you acknowledge the simultaneously threatening and liberatory potential of moments of rapid transformation. Where do you think the strongest utopian or liberating potential lies at this moment?

Cazdyn: In Japan, in the larger social situation, there’s not that much to be hopeful about. There’s a rewriting of the constitution to allow the those in the military to do whatever they want, there’s an absolutely uncritical relationship to the United States by the Japanese government, and there’s not a lot of opposition. So unlike, say, what’s going on in various Latin American countries, it’s not that progressive. Much of South America seems to be really moving in a way that questions where the world is going, whereas Japan just seems worried about its relationship to the US, and what’s happening with China, and its own market socialism.

I would say that in film, though, there are things happening. To return turn to someone like Tsukamoto Shinya: hhHere’s a director who became a big star because of his Tetsuo films, and was always known as a kind of cyberpunk filmmaker, rethinking the body, and always seemed to me a pretty a very good decent filmmaker, a strong editor. If you look at Hhis most recent film, Vital, that played at the festival here (in Toronto), it’s a really different kind of film. A lot of it deals with the clinical dissection of a body. The main character is a medical student, and his lover dies in a car accident. Of course he ends up dissecting her body! Much of the film is taken up with slow and gorgeous shots of the decaying, wounded body, from a medium distance usually, and I feel like there’s something in that new clinicalness that I’m seeing with Tsukamoto, and with Kurosawa, Miike and others. It’s not a coincidence that Tsukamoto moves away from a science fiction body, with its contagionfantastic post-humanness and , its merging with machines and others –— where the liberation is other –— to focus on the thing itself, on the everyday, banal body.

I think this is centrally engaged with the main political questions that a lot of people are facing today. How dDo you imagine a new form of power, a new constitution, a new state structure? Are all your discussions about heading toward that? How do we exist in a long-term crisis without leaping to fix it in some inadequate way, or trying to find ways to escape hide from it? What I see in these filmmakers is a way into that question, a way of posing that question cinematically before it can be adequately be articulated in everyday life. New political movements are facing the same thing: ttThey feel desperately what they want to do, but they don’t know how to go about doing it. And they may get stuck in some older classic questions, like “DDdo we need a program, or a party?” The result can be that what gets lost is an awareness of the world itself, the body itself. And this brings us back to these films in which thereWhat’s happening today is a calm fixation onn attention to the body itself, without needing to be allegthe need for such long distance allegoriesorical. These films are not that special, and they are sort of disposable in a consumerist way, but they do allow the filmmaker and the viewer to engage with the thing itself, which seems to be, oddly enough, where a new politics will might emerge.

For example, one thing I haven’t always agreed with in thein the anti-globalization movement is that they’re it’s always looking for the transgression: Where is the exploitation of labour, where is the contract being broken, where is the corrupt official? That Of course this needs to be done, because there’s a lot of injustice that goes on as a result of corruption. But it can be an even more difficult struggle to analyze what goes wrong when things go right. When Nike cleans up and everything is supposed to be okay, there will still be terriblesystemic inequality and environmental degradation due to the larger commodity systemit’s still going to be bad, —--but how are you going to articulate what’s wrong with it then? This requires a way of understanding economicslarger formal and structural problems. , systemic questions, larger issues. We have to look at it not only from the moment of crisis, but from the moment when things are going okay and there’s still something fundamentally wrong.It is this type of understanding, this type of feeling and thinking that I see provoked by some of the best contemporary Japanese films.

ScopeQ: I was struck by a genre of highly confrontational personal documentary when I was previewing work at Image Forum in Tokyo in 2000. Hara Kazuo is the best- known and probably most accomplished practitioner of this sort of thing, but there are many people making works in roughly the same manner. I am thinking, for example, of Shirakawa Koji’s Discipline for the Left-Handed (1999) or Onishi Kenji’s A Burning Star (1995). For these artists, the camera seems to be a kind of catalyst, motivating them to confront the most difficult issues. This kind of work can be painful to watch, and at the same time it strongly contradicts the western stereotype of the Japanese person who submits to social demands, suffering silently. It seems like the ultimate anti-Ozu position!

Cazdyn: It can be particularly painful given a certain history of repression, or the way in by in which argumentation occurs or doesn’t occur in Japan. There’s so much energy already there, boiling up, that when a confrontation occurs it’s eminently cinematic. Confession has always been an important trope in Japanese literature. The “I” prose narrative defines modern literature in Japan, and in certain ways there’s an some equivalency between the “I” narrative and a certain type of first- person, reality-based confession or provocation filmmaking, which is now also the stuff of reality culture. Not to feed into stereotypes, but for the most part these things don’t come up. It’s not that people are oblivious to them, it’s just that there’s a lot that’s unspoken, but seen and understood. It’s a cinematic problem, too: How do you film that?

At the same time, you can’t force the truth out of people by confronting them. Take Hara’s film The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987), and the problem of World War II. Hara’s subject, Okuzaki Kenzo, seems to think that you can confront people and punch the truth out of them, but of course you can’t. Well, you can’t do that as a filmmaker either. It’s a question of how you can get something to emerge and not make it so heavy-handed, not just make it part of your own desire. It’s the problem of a lot of filmmakers who are working in a kind of documentary that has to deal with the problem of time and the real, like Shoah (1985) does, like Ogawa does, like Hara does. Where it goes now, this merging of the documentary and the non-documentary, this desire for the unpredictable, I’m not sure. But I think a lot of filmmakers are struggling with it, and that’s why reality culture seems so important to focus on.

ScopeQ: Are there some great, unrecognized Japanese films that haven’t circulated much outside of Japan that and that you think people should see?

Cazdyn: Well, I still don’t think that the Ogawa films, especially the later filmsones, have been seen enough. Jean-Pierre Gorin has told me that at the time he was involved with Godard in the Dziga Vertov group, they knew there was something special happening in Japan, and they may have seen some of the Narita airport films, but most of them weren’t seen. Of course, Ogawa wouldn’t travel, since he refused to use the airport. I’ve also been writing a lot about Haneda Sumiko –— she’s the subject of the epilogue to my book –— and I think her work is really special. But I am more interested ininterested in looking again— (in different ways)— at the films that do circulate outside of Japan. Some of those documentaries are the ones I’d be most interested in raising awareness about.

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