Those who dislike that branch of criticism and cultural studies that has come to be known as "theory" will probably not care for Eric Cazdyn's "The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan." In it he does many things that they are likely to deplore. He insists, for example, upon "pushing together into the same idea two elements [Japanese film and Japanese geopolitics] that seem to have nothing to do with each other," and then uses these apparently unrelated items as a springboard from which to speculate about, for example: "other cultural forms, philosophical concepts, economic policy, the international division of wealth and labor, [and] aesthetic theory."
The good news is, however, that those who can find it in themselves to give a project as daring as Cazdyn's a chance will be pleasantly surprised. In prose more lucid than the antitheory grumps might have lead one to expect, Cazdyn, rubbing Japanese film up against Japanese geopolitics, produces many fascinating -- to borrow his term -- "flashes."
One of the things at which the more theoretically inclined schools of literary criticism have excelled is in spotlighting what is not there -- the lacunae -- in this or that work of art. Postcolonialist critics, for example, have devoted a great deal of attention to the plantation slavery that makes the lives of so many of Jane Austen's characters possible but that is seldom even hinted at in her novels. Cazdyn, too, is interested in lacunae. He is interested in how Japanese film in the prewar years does not explicitly come to terms with colonialism, how Japanese film in the postwar years falls short of a solution to the problem of the individual's place in Japanese society, and how Japanese film in the 1990s does not quite resolve the problems posed by globalization. Cazdyn's lacunae, however, are not simply absences. Rather, he argues that although these pressing issues are seldom addressed directly in the films of their times, nevertheless, the issues do insist upon poking their heads up. While they are most often ignored at the level of narrative -- the stories tend not to be about colonialism, the place of the individual, or globalization -- these issues, Cazdyn suggests, nevertheless manifest themselves in the forms the most adventurous filmmakers have, in different epochs, given their films.