Films are not only to be passively watched, they are also to be actively "read." The viewer deciphers not just the story but all the other indications of the director's intent -- script inclusions and elisions, camera movements, editing. Only after this has been done can the full import of the film become apparent.
Such reading becomes more difficult when viewing "foreign" films, that is, those containing assumptions not our own. Such inferences and presumptions are based upon cultural norms accepted without question in the foreign country involved, but missing in that of the viewer.
The difficulty becomes aggravated when the cultural context is markedly different, as is the case with traditional Japan and the contemporary West. Cultural specificity is missing and there is a problem. It is to the solving of this that Dr. Keiko McDonald's interesting and valuable work devotes itself.
Born in Japan, and now working in the United States, the author has had long experience teaching a wide range of Japanese film and literature. She shares with us the texts she has used and the conclusions that she has drawn.
"How," she asks in her preface, "does a person from the Japanese tradition show Western viewers, primarily a general audience, how to see a Japanese film?"
She then proceeds, step by step, to show us how. Her methods, she tells us, are not merely theoretical, and we do not find her bending a film to meet the demands of any theory. Rather, hers is a pragmatic approach that asks "how does any particularly critical method work and what can it tell us about a film?"
If she were pressed for her own critical method in this book, she would describe it as "eclectic, a carefully considered combination of New Criticism, neo-formalism, and a cultural/historical approach." This method she applies to 16 Japanese films chronologically ranging from 1936 (Kenji Mizoguchi's "Sisters of the Gion") to 1995 (Naomi Kawase's "Suzaku").
A result is that, from each, the full "Japanese" meaning emerges -- that which is encoded by the Japanese director (whether he specifically intended to do so or not). The filmmakers' assumptions, inferences and suppositions are examined and exhibited; the result is a reading that displays the full content.
For example, her reading of Hayao Miyazaki's "My Neighbor Totoro" (1988) shows animation following a story line made from biblical, Shinto, and Buddhist sources. What these sources share is an assumption: "oneness with nature." This is the lost given, which is returned to us in a popular picture.
Tokorozawa, the home of Totoro, is now practically synonymous with urban pollution, but in the 1950s it was still natural countryside (a date is given toward the end of the film: Aug. 21, 1958). This is evoked in the mysterious Totoro creature itself.
Indeed, "Miyazaki's expressive intention [is] to alert his audience to a danger that . . . contemporary Japan may work to suppress one of childhood's greatest gifts -- the innate awareness of something inspiriting in nature."
In her excellent reading of Yasujiro Ozu's "Floating Weeds" (1959), MacDonald points out that the English "weeds" carries none of the connotations of "ukigusa" (the word used for the Japanese title of the film). She traces the implications of this term back to the work of the ninth-century poet Ono no Komachi, whose use of the trope was the same as Ozu's.
She compares Ozu's superb use of hiatus and parallelism to that found in traditional literature and discovers in his apparent simplicity an answering echo to the demands of classic authors. Yet, mindful of Ozu's equal debt to Western modernism, she finds reason for those accents of red (Ozu's favorite color, a red coffee pot often being among the perceived objects in the Ozu scene) in a poem by William Carlos Williams.
In her fine reading of Hirokazu Kore'eda's "Maboroshi"(1995), MacDonald shows us the duality suggested in the Japanese title "Maboroshi no Hikari" (phantom light). This contains, in miniature as it were, the entire film, but this is denied to the Western audience familiar only with the U.S. distribution title.
The author goes on to indicate how industrial Amagasaki (where "Maboroshi" begins) is contrasted with the rural Sukamo in Shikoku, and the still natural Sogoi in the Noto Peninsula, places where the heroine goes. MacDonald shows us cultural parallels in the funeral sequence, where there is the same kind of fruitful confusion between snow flakes and cherry-blossom petals that is also noted in the very early "Manyoshu" poetry collection.
At the same time we are shown that the cultural tradition extends not only from the distant pass but also from relatively recent film history. Kore'eda's use of the very long (both in distance and in time) shot is compared and contrasted with that of Mizoguchi, and the simplicity of the younger director is compared with that of Ozu leading to a conclusion that "Ozu makes us feel intuitively, while Kore'eda makes us think."
Judicially, but with a discernment born from years of teaching practice, MacDonald deepens our insight into every film. And at the end of this necessary volume we really have learned how to read a Japanese film.
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