Читать книгу A Companion to Documentary Film History - Группа авторов - Страница 40

From the early 1930s until the end of World War II, Tsumura Hideo was one of most influential – and perhaps most arrogant – film critics in Japan. His reviews for the prestigious Asahi, written under the famous penname “Q,” nearly always condemned movies with “vulgar” entertainment values. Alongside these, Tsumura published longer essays either on films with high artistic values – he was a great supporter of Jean Renoir and French Poetic Realism – or on topical issues related to the ongoing restructuring of the domestic film industry under the militaristic government's increasing intervention. His critical activities were so visible even outside film journalism that he was chosen to be one of the participants in the now‐famous 1942 “Overcoming Modernity” debates (Kawakami et al. 1979 [1943]),⁴ and was also appointed as a member of the Central Association for National Mobilization. It thus comes as no surprise that Tsumura eventually became one of the most powerful advocates for the state control of domestic film practice, broadly preaching his dogmatic policy proposals in books like On Film Policy (Tsumura 1943) and Film War (Tsumura 1944). Such aggressive right‐wing turns were not rare among the Japanese cultural elites of the period, but the irony here was that Tsumura was also highly critical of the British model of state‐sponsorship for documentary film production, which Rotha proudly described in his book.⁵

When Tsumura brought out his 60‐page treatise “A Critique of Paul Rotha's Film Theory: On His Documentary Film” (Tsumura 1940), Japanese debates on nonfiction and documentary film were heating up due to the Film Law and the administrative support it granted to the production and distribution of bunka eiga. Atsugi's 1938 translation of Documentary Film had been published amid this turmoil surrounding the film industry, with the opportune title Bunka eigaron (Theory of the Culture Film), a significant change that helped create hype around the text. Quite naturally, Tsumura begins his critique by attacking this inappropriate Japanese title and the confusion it caused for readers. According to Tsumura, Rotha's conception of documentary is a sub‐category of bunka eiga and not vice versa, because the former excludes newsreel and other types of nonfictional genres (e.g. science film, exploration film, and educational or lecture films), whereas the latter covers them all (Tsumura 1940: 150). For this reason, Tsumura uses dokyumentarī, the Japanese transcription of the English term documentary, to refer to Rotha's specific use of the term, and in turn keeps the more conventional Japanese term kiroku eiga (usually used to mean “documentary film” in general) for the traditional category of nonfiction film practice more generally.

At first glance, Tsumura's counterargument seems reasonable to the extent that he rightly criticizes his fellow Japanese critics' lack of “critical mind” (hihyō seishin) toward film theories imported from the West and provides a point‐by‐point critique of Rotha's text by revealing its logical flaws (Tsumura 1940: 109). However, the true incentive for Tsumura to write this essay was Rotha's relentless attack on all cinematic forms other than documentary. It is true that Rotha indicates in his introduction that he has no intention “to decry or limit the functions of the cinema as entertainment” (Rotha 1936: 15–16), but in the pages that follow he repeatedly stresses his opposition to the commercial use of the medium and the industry's exclusive reliance upon sugar‐coated delusive stories:

The fact is that under the limits defined by the present commercial system, entertainment cinema cannot possibly hope to deal either accurately or impartially from a sociological point of view with any of the really important subjects of modern existence. It is my contention, moreover, that whilst developed under the demands of financial speculation alone, cinema is unable to reach a point where its service to public interest amounts anything more valuable than, as Mr. Blumer has it, an emotional catharsis.

(Rotha 1936: 46)

Absolutely furious at this one‐sided judgment, Tsumura responds with a similarly aggressive rejection of Rotha's book project as a whole:

In other words, Rotha's book is very brave and heroic. While praising the documentary that is based on materialist socialism as the most valuable future form of cinema, it in turn smashes fiction film [geki eiga] into smithereens and verbally abuses it everywhere and as much as possible. Moreover, the way he assaults fiction film is totally reckless and idealistic, and I must confess that this is one of the reasons that gave me the guts to present my criticism of Paul Rotha.

(Tsumura 1940: 111)

Before assessing the legitimacy of Tsumura's criticism, it is necessary to pay attention to an easily overlooked, but no less significant, miscommunication at work here. Throughout his book, Rotha prefers the term story‐film to fiction film to indicate a certain group of films that become the object of his criticism, that is, films that had been manufactured and sold worldwide “along the lines of prevailing methods of big business, with the financial reins held tighter and tighter by large‐scale capitalists” (Rotha 1936: 41). However, in Atsugi's translation, the term story‐film is not translated properly as monogatari eiga but as geki eiga (“fiction film” or more literally, “drama film”), and this terminological slippage caused a deal of confusion and misplaced criticism among Japanese readers (Sekino 1940). Perhaps the most telling is the logical inconsistency created in Rotha's main assertion: to the majority of the Japanese readers who had no access to the English original, he appeared to attack the harmful effects of geki eiga in general, while at the same time championing the unparalleled advantage of documentary film which he defines as “the creative dramatization of actuality” (genjitsutsu no sozōteki geki ka – notice the same Japanese word geki [drama] used here). To justify her rather sticky word choice, the translator Atsugi argued in 1940 that to her knowledge, Rotha himself did not ascribe any specific meaning to the term story‐film, and as if to confirm this, she continued, even the main commentators on Rotha like Tsumura made little of her translation even after he checked the English original (Atsugi 1940: 119). In reality, however, Tsumura – and many of his contemporaries, including Imamura – came to interpret Rotha by reading him in light of this artificially established distinction between fiction and documentary films, rather than by addressing how he tried to challenge that very distinction with what he called “dramatization.”

For this reason, Tsumura's counter‐argument often becomes misleading if not imprecise. For instance, he considers it shameful that Rotha ignores the “glorious” tradition of the German studio UFA's (Universum Film‐Aktien Gesellschaft) scientific films in his section on the “evolution of documentary,” even though it is a reasonable choice for Rotha in that he, along with Grierson, clearly differentiated their notion of documentary from such purely scientific or objective lecture films (Tsumura 1940: 122–123). Similarly, in dismissing Rotha's approving comments on G. W. Pabst's Comradeship (Kameradschaft, 1931) as a sign of the incongruity of his documentary theory, Tsumura goes on to argue that the finest examples of cinematic treatment of modern social problems are to be found not in the handful of films the British documentary film movement had produced so far but rather in recent Hollywood and French fiction films such as Heroes for Sale (1933, dir. William A. Wellman), La Bandera (1935, dir. Julien Duvivier), and La Grande Illusion (1937, dir. Jean Renoir) (Tsumura 1940: 119–120). As is clear with these examples, Tsumura persistently consigns documentary to the realm of nonfiction and thereby defends his beloved fiction films from its sweeping invasions. For him, the generic distinction between these two modes of filmmaking should be kept intact because they differ from each other not only in terms of how (form) but also of what (content) their filming processes demonstrate. Interestingly, Tsumura finds a way to prove his point in Rotha's definition of documentary as “the creative dramatization of actuality,” strategically interpreting it as assigning the two different domains of the world to each genre, namely, actuality to documentary and reality to fiction film.

This significant distinction between actuality and reality was not visible at all to most Japanese readers of Rotha's book, because in Japanese these two terms are usually translated into the same single word genjitsu (Atsugi followed this convention in her translation). However, Tsumura not only detected the distinction by reading the English original but went on to explain the substantial difference between these two domains by referring to their German equivalents, Wirklichkeit and Realität, respectively. According to Tsumura, actuality/Wirklichkeit emphasizes its immediate and external presence (genzon), a world characterized by force and motion, whereas reality/Realität designates an objective being (kyakkanteki sonzai) that will never be affected by anything but its essential determinants. In other words, the difference between actuality and reality can be understood by their opposing modalities, which Tsumura categorizes as “existence” (sonzai) and “truth/essence” (shinri) (Tsumura 1940: 144–145). And if Rotha's notion of documentary aims to offer a purportedly scientific analysis of the mechanism of actuality with its application of the dialectical method, he continues, fiction film has a no less important role in its exploration of the secrets of reality through what the Germans calls Dichter or Dichtung, or “the most important human intuitions and sensibilities that make art possible” (Tsumura 1940: 133). Moreover, Tsumura anticipates that the future direction of kiroku eiga – again, it should be stressed that Tsumura uses this term to indicate nonfictional film in general and not Rotha's particular use of the term documentary – must involve “the producer's effort to artistically express the purely humanistic emotions he receives from the actual world [genjitsu sekai] with his camera and editing skills” (Tsumura 1940: 149).

As Yuriko Furuhata rightly points out, Tsumura's philosophical interpretation of the difference between actuality/Wirklichkeit and reality/Realität might be somewhat too inventive, since Rotha himself seemed to pay no special attention to it in his own text and uses these two terms almost interchangeably (Furuhata 2013: 62–63). Yet it still deserves some consideration for the following reasons. First, reflecting his Romanticist background, Tsumura gives higher priority to reality than to actuality and privileges the human artist's intuitionist quest for truth. In regard to this, we should acknowledge that in his postwar writings Hanada criticized Tsumura precisely for the latter's underestimation of actuality as a secondary category by quoting Hegel's definitions that “actuality is the unity … of essence and existence, or of what is inner and what is outer” and “what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational” (Hanada 1977 [1954a]: 244).⁶ Hegel continued to argue that the idea, contrary to its common understanding, “is at once what is quite simply effective and actual as well” and sarcastically adds that only “practical men,” or those “who are devoid of thoughts,” treat actuality as mere “synonymous with external, sensible existence” (Hegel 1991 [1830]: 213–214). As we will see later, Hanada, following Hegel's warning, developed his documentary theory around the question of how to approach the unknowability of reality by scrutinizing the contingent existence of actuality as such.

Second, the distinction between actuality and reality – or rather between the actual and the real – itself constituted a central focal point in Grierson's (and not Rotha's) theorization of documentary. Indeed, in one of the untitled lectures he gave sometime between 1927 and 1933, Grierson offered the following remarks that seemed to foreshadow Tsumura's argument:

When documentary people like myself talk about the superiority of the world outside the studios and tell you how much more genuine our world is than the other worlds, it is wise to remember the philosophic meaning of reality. In documentary we deal with the actual and in one sense with the real. But the really real, if I may use that phrase, is something deeper than that. The only reality which counts in the end is the interpretation which is profound … So when we come to documentary we come to the actual world … but I charge to remember that the task of reality before you is not one of reproduction but of interpretation.

(Grierson 1998: 76–77)

This statement clearly tells us that both Grierson and Tsumura were working within the same intellectual tradition, even as they differed in some respects. Where Tsumura gave a somewhat esoteric account of the filmmaker's intuitionistic revelation of the secrets of the human world through fiction films, Grierson presented his motto of the “creative treatment of actuality” as the first and foremost step to get closer to what he called “the really real.” Despite their opposing attitudes toward the concept of documentary, both Tsumura and Grierson had much in common in their idealist search for the hidden and universal truth of reality/Realität.

Nevertheless, at the time of his commentary on Rotha's text, Tsumura was completely unaware of this unexpected affinity with Grierson, and Rotha, at least in his chapters in Documentary Film, seemed to pay no critical attention to Grierson's philosophical argument about the real and the actual. Consequently, what Tsumura found in Rotha was not an intellectual bedfellow, but a “clichéd and dogmatic materialist” who shamelessly invaded the well‐maintained territory of art and fiction films (Tsumura 1940: 132). “But in the world of art,” Tsumura contends, “there is nothing more dangerous than seeing the world by applying an ideology called ‘materialist dialectic’ [yuibutsu benshōhō] … Needless to say, I do not trust the success of the application of such a man‐made calculator in the world of art, so I can never agree with Mr. Rotha” (Tsumura 1940: 143). Seen from Tsumura's blatantly anti‐Marxist perspective, Rotha's term dramatization means a shallow interpretation of actuality through its economic basis alone, and for that reason, Tsumura refuses to see any positive value in Rotha's documentary theory by concluding that “the world of documentary is nothing but the materialist world that has nothing to do with the human spirit” (emphasis in the original) (Tsumura 1940: 133). As his final words, Tsumura warns the reader that he is not totally dismissive of the potential of nonfiction films in general, but never forgets to stress that its healthy development must lie in the producer's proper understanding of its stylistic, thematic, and ontological difference from fiction film (Tsumura 1940: 149).