Читать книгу A Companion to Documentary Film History - Группа авторов - Страница 41

It should be remembered that Tsumura published his counterargument when Rotha's prestige in wartime Japan was at its zenith; it thus provoked significant criticism from his fellow critics. This criticism, however uncompromising, focused mostly on Tsumura's misunderstanding – or rather, intentional dismissal – of Rotha's basic terms and political standpoint, therefore leaving behind his philosophical questioning of the categorical difference between reality/Realität and actuality/Wirklichkeit (Takakiba 1940: 525–528). This theoretically unfruitful situation did not change much until after World War II, as was also the case for the Marxist film critic Imamura Taihei, who commented only sporadically on Rotha before 1945. During the war, Imamura had already earned a reputation as “the best film scholar of our time who has most beautifully proved the theoretical character [rironteki seikaku] that we could ascribe to the Japanese” (Ōkuma 1938: 411) for his very prolific and systematic writings on cinema. Indeed, Imamura published 10 monographs between 1938 and 1943, including The Form of Film Art (Eiga geijutsu no keishiki) (Imamura 1938), Theory of Documentary Film (Kiroku eigaron, 1940), and Theory of Animated Film (Manga eigaron) (Imamura 1941), to name but a few. Today, Imamura is recognized as the founder of Japanese animation theory (Lamarre 2014), but the focus of his theoretical writings always revolved around the camera's ability to offer an immediate and objective “document” of events or phenomena that took place before its lens, or around what Michael Renov has once called “a direct, ontological claim to the ‘real.’ ” (Renov 1986: 71). It thus seems natural that Imamura, unlike Tsumura, found common ground with Rotha – there is a portrait of him reading Documentary Film (see Figure 3.1) – and detailed his favorable interpretation of the book in the last chapter of his 1952 Introduction to Film Theory.

Figure 3.1 Imamura Taihei.

Imamura begins his chapter by pointing out his fellow Japanese critics' conventional misunderstandings of Rotha's documentary theory. While these local interpretations frame Rotha as a kind of “formalist” who rejected fiction film tout court, Imamura rightly reminds the reader that what Rotha criticized was not fiction film as a whole but the capitalist basis of the film industry that had privileged this genre as the most important form of film practice. Similarly, Imamura speaks highly of Rotha's promotion of documentary as the most effective tool for mass propaganda, writing that Rotha's documentary theory “reflects [his] strong social consciousness … and is based on the contemporary mass public's most urgent/real demand,” and that it thus should be respected above all for its unflinching aim to “enlighten the people politically, to turn their eyes to fundamental contradictions in the modern social system” (Imamura 1952: 153–154). Highly sympathetic to Rotha's promotion of documentary's mission of social reform, Imamura goes even so far as to declare that “under Rotha's opinions lies the idea of socialism, and in this sense his ‘documentarism’ shares commonalities with that of the Soviet Union” (Imamura 1952: 154). As a Marxist writing before Nikita Khruschev's critique of Stalin's cult of personality, Imamura uses a comparison with the legacies of Soviet Union's revolutionary model of film practice in the 1920s – which had huge impact on the Japanese left in prewar Japan despite severe state censorship – as the highest compliment for Rotha's political consciousness.⁷

Despite these general accolades, Imamura is highly critical about Rotha's own theorization of documentary. For instance, he condemns Rotha's inclusion of Potemkin and other examples from the Soviet Union within the category of documentary, arguing that these films should be treated as what he calls “semi‐documentary.” Although they use some basic methods borrowed from documentary, films that present us with a reenactment or reproduction of historical events, he argues, must remain in the realm of fiction because “they did not record the facts [jijitsu] themselves” that took place in front of the camera (Imamura 1952: 160–161). Moreover, after concisely paraphrasing Rotha's idea of dramatization – “rather than showing the fact as it is, one should change it at one's discretion by filtering it through our subjectivity so that certain principles behind it are revealed” – he abruptly dismisses it by saying “this statement is so illogical that it is hard to grasp its meaning” (Imamura 1952: 166). Likewise, Imamura's unsympathetic judgment is applied to Rotha's application of dialectics. “It seems apparent,” he writes, “that this [Rotha's reference to dialectics] is nothing more than a mere repetition of Eisenstein's dialectic of collision, and in this instance, too, the term ‘dialectic’ serves as a magic spell. In depicting anything, this position deems it to be enough to see the collision of things, and, as a result of this collision, lead to the dialectical formula composed of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. This is the most foolish part of Rotha's Documentary Theory” (Imamura 1952: 176).⁸ Imamura concludes his reading with a highly self‐contradictory remark: “As I have shown, Rotha's Documentary Theory contains a lot of inaccurate terms used in an idiosyncratic manner, but if we try to understand what he meant to say as a whole, then we come to realize that it has very correct views” (Imamura 1952: 167).

Imamura's schizophrenic interpretation of Rotha's text was inseparable from his own determination to fight against domestic opponents of documentary film practice. In other words, he deployed Rotha as a mouthpiece through which his own theory of documentary could be disseminated. What are, then, main characteristics of his theory, and how do they differ from Rotha's? First, in contrast to Tsumura's discussion of the philosophical difference between actuality and reality, Imamura introduces a third term “fact” (jijitsu) as the foundation for what he considered to be kiroku eiga (Imamura uses this category in the same way as Tsumura, meaning nonfictional films in general). To be sure, Imamura does not ignore the creative intervention of the human agent in the capturing of the fact, as he likens the operation of montage to that of the human cognition in his earlier publications such as Theory of Documentary Film (Imamura 1940: 26). But his film theory in general repeatedly emphasizes that the factuality of filmic representation is guaranteed by the mechanical nature of the photographic image, which is able to capture what has been invisible or unknowable to the human perception, to grasp an object's motion as it simultaneously moves before the camera, and to reproduce identical images at all times. In Imamura's view, it is this mechanical nature of the photographic image that distinguishes cinema from the traditional arts, and, just like the late Kracauer, he argues that “one can understand film's property by knowing the features of the photography that constitutes this medium's basic units, structural elements, and historical origin” (Imamura 1957: 97–99). And as long as it makes use of those mechanical/photographic features properly, kiroku eiga – or what he now calls the “cinema of facts” (jijitsu no eiga) – must be placed higher than geki eiga – or the “cinema of fiction” (kakū no eiga) – in the historical development of film practice (Imamura 1957: 137). As expected, Rotha's documentary theory is evaluated only in this light; although Rotha clearly differentiated his conception of documentary from the descriptive and objective treatment of the facts found in newsreels or educational films, Imamura tactically interprets him as someone who “paid attention to the film's recording ability and came to believe that the real beauty lies only in the documentation of the fact” (Imamura 1952: 154).

Another, and perhaps most telling, characteristic of Imamura's documentary theory is his tireless effort to make generic distinctions between fiction and nonfiction films, and, ultimately, to defend the latter as a superior form of film practice. Like Tsumura's argument on the philosophical distinction between reality/fiction and actuality/documentary, Imamura's formula appears to be somewhat schematic, but with a different emphasis. In fiction film, Imamura argues, all aesthetic efforts are made “to exhibit the necessity [hitsuzen] as the contingent [gūzen],” whereas documentary film aspires “to reveal the necessity among the contingent” (Imamura 1955: 107). Imamura tries to prove the legitimacy of his formula by connecting it to recent trends in postwar film culture. After its long, indulgent tenure in the dream‐like world of fiction, he says, cinema is now consciously beginning to recuperate its social function through different uses of the medium, as represented by the recent upsurge of the so‐called “semi‐documentary” films such as Roberto Rossellini's Paisan (Paisà, 1946), René Clément's The Damned (Les maudits, 1947), and Jules Dassin's The Naked City (1948). One the one hand, this ongoing move toward a more concrete and down‐to‐earth filmic representation/documentation of the actual world outside the studio is a necessary result of the catastrophic destruction of reality as such brought about by the world war, for contemporary audiences “are eager to see in the movies not melodramas but vivid reflections of their own life due to radical changes in their living conditions” (Imamura 1955: 113). One the other hand, the continuous development and increasing availability of recording devices (e.g. small‐gauge cameras and cheaper film stocks) through mass production promises progress toward the perfect realization of what Béla Balázs once called the period of “visual culture.” In this period, he argues, individuals would no longer remain in the position of mere passive receivers segregated by language barriers but would begin to directly communicate with each other by becoming witnesses, reporters, and even protagonists of ongoing historical events. According to Imamura, a new and promising form of film art should arise from this “vernacularization of cinema” (eiga no nichijōka) as a personal mobile tool for the documentation of the everyday (Imamura 1955: 114).

Aside from its prophetic tones, Imamura's documentary theory is problematic for its uncritical determinism. He argues that documentary must differ from fiction in its exclusive focus on the facts, and that the filmic documentation of those factual events (both historical and mechanical) would almost automatically attain both perceptual and epistemological credibility due to its “photographic objectivity” (shashinteki kyakkansei). But this statement immediately raises a question: What if either governmental powers or individual filmmakers appropriate such a strong “reality‐effect” generated by the cinematic apparatus to cover up their malicious will to manipulate the viewer's world‐view? To be more precise, hasn't the term fact in its philosophical sense been always relative and not absolute, radically changing its value and meaning according to the particular set of each receiver's empirical perception, preexisting knowledge, and sociocultural background? Similarly, one could take issue with Imamura's argument on contingency and necessity. As a sympathizer of socialism, Imamura may well have said that every necessary step to be taken in modern history had always been indicated in the success and progress of the Soviet Union. And in fact, he writes, “it is socialist society that has unraveled more significance in documentary than in fiction film. Having started with documentary film, Soviet/Russian film created a method of fiction film based on the documentary method” (Imamura 1955: 115). Nevertheless, we should also be aware that this sort of political posture is always relative and changeable over time; in a series of essays he published during the war, Imamura repeatedly expressed his view that the liberation of film practice from the hands of capitalists could only be possible under total state control of the film industry, a model that, in his view, had been most completely accomplished in Nazi Germany. When asked in the postwar years about his past appraisal of Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia (1938), Imamura had little choice but to depoliticize his standpoint:

It is, as it cannot be denied, the Nazis Government that produced this film, but what it expressed to us was not the government's will; it was rather the international, humanistic, and peaceful sprit of the Olympics. This was a film that foiled Nazis' trap. And it was possible only because it was a documentary.

(Imamura 1957: 135)

If the revelation of such a “respectful” or even “universal” mission in the modern Olympics speaks to Imamura's belief in documentary's power to present what he considered to be a “fact,” this “fact” tells us nothing about the reality of the world system around 1938, in which so many countries and peoples were ruthlessly exploited and suppressed by colonial powers, including Japan itself. In this sense, Imamura's theorization of documentary as the “cinema of fact” is useful, at best, to technological determinists, and, at worst, to political conformists, given its lack of concern about the role of the viewer, or about the actual condition under which we see and admit the factuality of given film texts.

In its own context, Imamura's adamant promotion of documentary as a superior form of film practice also led to a famous debate called kiroku eiga ronsō in 1956–1957. The debate originated in Imamura's aggressive – indeed, offensive – review of another Marxist film critic Iwasaki Akira's 1956 book Film Theory (Eiga no riron). Imamura reproached this book for Iwasaki's complete ignorance of documentary as a legitimate genre within film theory, and for his alleged plagiarism from Imamura's own previous book Introduction to Film Theory. In response Iwasaki wrote a lengthy refutation which can be summarized as follows: (1) Imamura is a “dogmatic documentarist” (kiroku eiga shijō shugisha) who never admits the value of fiction film; (2) Imamura's focus on the photographic nature of the film medium leads only to an animism of the camera‐eye, or to the formalistic equalization of realism and mechanical recordings of the events; and (3) there is no substantial difference between fiction and documentary because in both instances what really matters should always be the filmmaker's creative and conscious treatment of the subject matter as such (Iwasaki 1957: 32–49).

Twenty years after its publication, one cannot not help but see Tsumura's initial counter‐argument against Rotha make a full circle here. Of course, Imamura tried to dispel Iwasaki's polemical criticism by clarifying his standpoint further, but the result was far from fruitful (Imamura 1957: 199–226). The reason for Imamura's failure, I contend, rested not so much in his promotion of documentary's own legitimacy as in his inability to overcome the conventional dichotomy between fiction and nonfiction. Despite his Marxist leanings, Imamura's documentary theory, as one critic points out, is modeled not after dialectical meterialism but after August Comte's positivist theory of evolution that, when applied to film theory, delineates a highly teleological course of progress from the mechanical reproduction of the theater to the development of fiction story‐telling, and finally to the dominance of nonfiction or documentary film (Nakamura cited in Sugiyama 1990: 184). In this irreversible line of thought, it is technically impossible to address the mutual transformation of fiction and nonfiction genres which was in effect taking place in postwar cinema, because with it Imamura tended solely to pin down and compare the static modes of being – and not of becoming – they had already developed in the 1920s and 1930s. In retrospect, the déjà vu‐like appearance of the Iwasaki‐Imamura debate in the late 1950s clearly marked the impasse of the traditional Japanese discourse on documentary, and, as is must be clear by now, it is against this particular discursive backdrop that Hanada Kiyoteru made his theoretical intervention.