Japanese Horror Cinema and Deleuze

Interrogating and Reconceptualizing Dominant Modes of Thought

Rachel Elizabeth Barraclough

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781501368301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Using theories of national, transnational and world cinema, and genre theories and psychoanalysis as the basis of its argument, Japanese Horror Cinema and Deleuze argues that these understandings of Japanese horror films can be extended in new ways through the philosophy of Deleuze. In particular, the complexities and nuances of how films like Ju-On: The Grudge (2002), Audition (1999) and Kairo (2001) (and beyond) form dynamic, transformative global networks between industries, directors and audiences can be considered. Furthermore, understandings of how key horror tropes and motifs apply to these films (and others more broadly), such as the idea of the "monstrous-feminine", can be transformed, allowing these models to become more flexible.

PART ONE

Theory

1

Theoretical intersections: National, transnational and global flows and the Japanese horror genre

Before new lines of thought can be produced, an exploration of the assemblages of thought that have previously coalesced at the site of Japanese horror cinema must take place. Whilst not all modes of thought, concepts and commentaries can be accounted for in this book, this chapter seeks to outline some of the foundational ideas that have broadly informed understandings of Japanese horror cinema. In particular, these centre around the overriding themes of national, transnational and world cinema, as well as horror cinema and psychoanalysis.¹

National, transnational and world cinema

Perhaps some of the most developmental, vibrant areas of research in recent years have been the interconnecting fields of national, transnational and world cinemas. Whether focusing on a specific instance of national, transnational or world cinema, or producing a more general mapping out of the field, there is a plethora of interesting, exciting work continuing today.

Traditionally, since the ‘early days of the institutionalization of film as an academic discipline’ (Hjort and Mackenzie, 2000: 2), scholarship, particularly from the West, has analysed films from all over the world under the paradigm of the national. This is perhaps largely due to the development of national film industry frameworks across the world since cinema’s inception and thus the dominance of nationally based production contexts. Such nationally based industries are primarily funded and maintained by state governments in various ways. The state, the main proponents of the national imaginary and its community, can influence and shape the cinematic output of the industry, tailoring it (to different extents) to its specific ideologies of the nation. As Chaudhuri (2005: 3) argues, ‘a nation-state’s involvement in cinema can take the form of state investment, state protection, industrial assistance, intervention, [and] national festivals with prizes’ which motivate the production of certain films.

Under ideologies of the national, films produced within a particular territory are perceived to reflect its culture and its people. As Athique argues, ‘films were seen as naturalistically indicative of a nationally specific aesthetic and, by extension, as presenting a literal forming of the cultural identity, behaviours and beliefs of the producing society’ (in Khorana, 2013: 107). Regarding Japanese cinema studies in particular, texts such as Donald Richie’s Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Character (1971), Keiko McDonald’s Reading a Japanese Film: Cinema in Context (2006) and Colette Balmain’s Introduction to Japanese Horror Film (2008) each explore national paradigms (some, particularly Balmain’s text, do contain transnational inflections, however), discussing how various Japanese films are reflective of Japanese people, arts and culture. Within these texts, such arts as noh, bunraku and kabuki theatre, as well as woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) and rokyoku (storytelling with a shamisen instrument accompaniment) (Raine, in Miyao, 2014: 103), are perceived to influence the narratives, themes and aesthetics of various films.² That is, of course, if they are not direct adaptations of theatre plays (like Nakagawa Nobuo’s Tōkaidō Yotsuya Kaidan (Ghost Story of Yotsuya in Tōkaidō) (1959)). As Richie states, when cinema was first introduced to Japan in 1897 it was perceived to be ‘a new form of theatre’ (2005: 22).

Folktales and religious concepts too (from Shintōism and Buddhism most commonly) are perceived to be encoded within Japanese cinema, alongside various moral, communal values (notions of filial piety and obligation to family members and superiors, for instance), which are understood to be shared amongst and distinct to the Japanese people. Richie, in particular, takes the stance that ‘much of what is considered most typical in Japanese aesthetics stems from zen [Buddhism]’ (Singer, in Miyao, 2014: 40). This perspective is at odds, however, with Noël Burch’s famous text, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema (1992). While these texts are ‘united in posing Japanese cinema as an outgrowth of deep-rooted Japanese traditions’ (Singer, in Miyao, 2014: 39), Burch contrastingly stresses ‘a genealogical link between Japanese cinema and kabuki’ (Miyao, 2014: 40–41), along with other traditional arts, such as noh theatre.

The disparity between the two highlights the problem with essentializing and generalizing cultures and cinemas under national paradigms. They are more multifaceted than scholars (particularly of the past) perhaps anticipate, taking influence from multiple different sources. The issue with over-essentialization is one which film scholarship today (particularly transnational cinema studies) seeks to address. A redress of such essentializing perspectives has been positioned by some scholars as particularly significant for Japanese cinema studies. As Bordwell argues, ‘in no area of film studies do generalizations about national temperament circulate so blithely as in this one. We constantly encounter claims about what the Japanese are … and what they are like’ (1979, cited in Singer, in Miyao, 2014: 47–8). The drawbacks of such generalizing studies, however, should not cloud the interesting and useful contributions to knowledge that national cinema studies make.

Using the national paradigm, films and societies from all over the world can be easily categorized and understood by scholars, critics, marketers, distributors and audiences alike. The national paradigm gives films and the cultures they derive from a language, a framework from which their themes, aesthetics representations and differences from other bodies of film and culture (proclaiming their ‘otherness’) can be understood. This model is therefore a very useful implementation within analyses of cultures and cinemas, as nations each have their own separate, comprehensive networks of ideologies, detailing unique traits, cultural discourses and rituals, which come to be rendered in communications such as cinema.³

The utility of the model of the national and its dominance within the film studies field, however, does not only derive from its ability to reveal the encoded national-cultural specificities of a cinema and the individual films that make it. As Crofts (in Church-Gibson and Hill, 1998) argues, national cinemas can be qualified as such and analysed in several ways, other than exploring their encoded national-cultural specificity. Highlighting the diversity that can exist within studies of national cinema, Crofts asserts that national cinemas can be analysed in terms of: ‘production’, ‘audiences’, ‘discourses’, ‘textuality’, ‘the cultural specificity of genres’ and ‘nation-state cinema movements’ (Church-Gibson and Hill, 1998).

Such models as the national also, despite their hermeneutic core, are nevertheless able to become flexible and mutate, transforming their utility to suit changing contexts. This is a particularly important observation when one considers the ungrounded nature of today’s global, transnational societies. As Smith argues, nations are often understood as unchanging; however, they ‘can also signify a gradual movement of change and transformation, or an accumulation of layers of past states’ (2001: 29).⁴ Thus, the idea of national cinema, as an extension of the concept of nation, too, can be conceptualized as unfixed or transformative. Illustrating this, in the 1970s and 1980s, through influxes of psychoanalysis, semiotics and feminism in film theory, scholars began to understand that analysis should be ‘a matter of problematising notions of the national, while sustaining national cinema as a descriptive category’ (Hjort and Mackenzie, 2000: 3). Therefore, national cinema was reconceptualized in a more fluid, mutable manner, as a site of conflict where the nation’s transformations in state or movements over time could be represented, understood and debated. Films then were no longer understood ‘to simply represent or express the stable features of a national culture’ and became one of ‘the loci for debates about a nation’s governing principles, goals, heritage and history’ (Hjort and Mackenzie, 2000: 4). The ideologies of nation within a film were now understood to not be pre-given, static and determined, but flexible, and open to interpretation by filmmakers and audiences. As Hill argues, national cinema was reconceptualized as being ‘characterised by questioning and inquiry’ and ‘critical of inherited notions of national identity … [not assuming] the existence of a unique, unchanging “national culture”’ (1992, cited in Higson, in Hjort and Mackenzie, 2000: 70–1).

Under this reconceptualization, however, alternative interpretations of nation formed within films would still have to remain strictly within the given ‘parameters set by the culture and traditions of the nation in question and its distinctive heritage’ (Smith, 2001: 20). Alternative manifestations of nation and national identity within this reconceptualization then are not particularly radical or ungrounding and a fundamental coherence and progression of the nation is perceived to be maintained. Thus, this particular conceptualization of national cinema was not quite as flexible as it first appeared and arguably, in light of the hybridized, multicultural natures of many nations today would need to be mutated further to contribute significantly to understandings of cinema and nation today.

Contributing to these developments within concepts of national cinema during the 1970s and 1980s, two seminal texts emerged, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (2006) and Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (2009). Perhaps the most important premise, highlighted especially in Anderson’s work, is the idea that nations are ‘imagined communities’ where the members of ‘even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (2006: 6). In other words, nations and nationalisms are invented, imagined and fabricated by the nation state and its people who conceptualize that each member lives within the territorial boundaries of the nation participate in the same cultural events and discourses and resonate with or adhere to the ideologies which pertain to the nation’s cultural identity. Central to the construction and maintenance of national imagined communities are understandings of how each one is distinct from others. As Anderson states ‘nations … cannot be imagined except in the midst of an irremediable plurality of other nations’ (1983, cited in Higson, 1989: 38). Notions of differentiations bring a sense of unity and cohesion to the national community.

However, national communities, as they are imagined, can be constructed or understood differently amongst individual members or groups of members. Over time, understandings of the make-up of the national community and its identity (both official, state and public conceptions) can also mutate in response to certain events or developments. However, under this conceptualization (as mentioned above) strict parameters for understanding the nation and the national community are in place so that differing ideologies of national identity and belonging are still compatible with each other and not damaging to an overall sense of unity and cohesion.

Within Japan, the notion of the imagined, national community is exemplified within the term kokutai which expresses ‘the Japanese nation as a racially homogenous entity linked by blood to a single imperial family’ (Taylor-Jones, 2013: 203). Under this concept, Japanese people find commonality in their ethnic background and their reverence of the figure of the emperor. Terms such as Nihonjinron and Nihonbunkaron, expressing the unique character of Japanese people and culture respectively and how they differ from other peoples and cultures around the world, also emblematize Anderson’s (2006) notion of the imagined community. These ideologies construct imaginary images of how Japanese people are united through their shared, unique qualities and their experiences of a distinct national culture.

Imagined notions of communion, especially, can be effectively communicated through cinema. Scholars of the national and national cinema aligning with ‘social communication theory’, ‘the bedrock of national cinema studies’ (Schlesinger, in Hjort and Mackenzie, 2000: 29), highlight how cinema and other such communications are integral to the formulation and maintenance of imagined nations. As Karl W. Deutsch argues ‘the essential aspect of the unity of a people … is the complementary or relative efficiency of communication among individuals’ (1966, cited in Schlesinger, in Hjort and Mackenzie, 2000: 19). Such communicative devices band the nation people together and create feelings of comradeship, solidarity and shared experience. Often, such communications of the national become invisible, habitual or ‘banal’, as Billig (1995) argues, so that nation people no longer ascribe such a significance or meaning to them, making the nation appear natural, ingrained within culture and as the only conceivable way to formulate conceptions of community and ways of life.

Smith (2001, 2007), developing upon Anderson (2006), discusses the ways in which nations are constructed and how national cinema draws upon a panoply of symbols and representations to reify the nation and create an imagined sense of community amongst audiences. In particular, cinema invokes collective memories of past golden ages, ‘which may be political and economic, ages of wealth, power and splendour … they may be religious, times of ascetic faith and saintliness and wisdom … or they may be cultural and artistic, when great thinkers, writers and artists congregated in cities and empires’ (Smith, 2001: 140). Within cinema, the spirit and values of these ages are often attempted to be recaptured and made relevant to the modern era. Furthermore, films may also invoke concepts of boundaries and territories and foster the growth of attachments to notions of a historic homeland and its poetic landscapes and architecture. They may also cultivate myths of election, where divine protection and blessing or a special task or mission are conferred upon the nation people (Smith, in Sturm, Young and Zuelow, 2007: 21), or relate to ‘the cult of the glorious dead’ (Smith, 2001: 144) and represent heroic figures and their acts of self-sacrifice for the sake of the nation. Within cinema, national heroes do just take not only the form of military personnel but also sports figures or geniuses within the arts and sciences.

Illustrating this, within the Japanese Jidaigeki (period drama) genre of films, a past golden age of feudalism (typically during the Edo or Tokugawa period between 1603 and 1868) is invoked. This links the Japanese people of the present with a glorious history, where men and women had clearly defined roles and places within society, people lived in harmony with nature and the Japanese landscape and the heroic samurai protected the nation people and the prosperous shogunate (the military government). Through these renderings, cinema may also play a part in generating the strong, emotional resonances the nation people feel and come to associate with invocations of their nation, something which ‘only religions had previously been able to encompass’ (Smith, 2001: 2).

According to Gellner (2009), national cultures are often derived from earlier, folk cultures, which the nation then reimagines and reshapes, creating an impression that the national culture is constant. However, unlike Anderson (2006), Gellner (2009) argues that the formation of nation states ‘is the inevitable outcome of industrialization’ (Schlesinger, in Hjort and Mackenzie, 2000: 21). Nations provide a stable societal basis with ‘political centralization … [and] a costly educational infrastructure’ (Gellner, 2009: 110) which standardizes and homogenizes the thoughts and skills of the nation people. National structures provide the right, cohesive environment for the dissemination of generic training to the nation people which is required for functioning and working within an industrialized society.

Higbee reiterates and extends Gellner’s (2009) idea, stating that ‘the origins of nation are perceived in Western thought to be “coeval with the birth of universal history” (a linear collective past) and the development of post-enlightenment discourses of progress, modernity, liberty and humanism that coincide in the nineteenth century with the rise of industrialism and democracy’ (in Bâ and Higbee, 2012: 86). In other words, as Anderson (2006) himself also asserts, the concept of nation was formed when functional, linear conceptions of time, through clock and calendar, were formed. Where a coherent past informs the present and leads into the future (a historicism), where everyday life is marked by national, state-sanctioned calendric events (for instance, bank holidays) and measured by specified periods of work and leisure. Concepts of national linear time, organization and belonging therefore, help to create and maintain coherent, progressive, productive, as well as democratic societies.

Gellner (2009), Anderson (2006) and many other scholars of the national and national cinema also agree upon the idea that cultural products constitute a ‘necessary shared medium’ (Gellner, 2009: 36) through which these ideologies of linear, progressive national time and cohesion are disseminated. Cinema has been conceptualized as a ‘device for the presentation of simultaneity in homogenous empty time’ (Anderson, 2006: 25) where the community steadily moves through history.

As part of the functioning of this device, to maintain the cohesion of the nation, cinema must also help to refute all other notions and constructions of community and identity. It must position its notion of community and identity (the national) as the only true, viable construction for progression. Something, which, due to accelerations in the processes of globalization, continues to become increasingly difficult, as evidenced by the emergence of new forms of scholarship on transnational and world cinema.

Within scholarship, there has recently been a shift away from the national towards considerations of world cinema and the transnational, where films and the cultures they are produced within are perceived to be much less static and contained and more fluid, hybrid and border-defying. A multitude of texts, from Chaudhuri (2005), Ezra and Rowden (2006) to Ďurovičová and Newman (2010), attest to this scholarly shift. This development has occurred in conjunction with accelerations in the forces of globalization, which have caused nations and cultures to become even more closely interconnected.⁵ Particularly since such infrastructures as transportation and communication have advanced, the flow of people, materials and ideas between nations has increased. Naturalizing many of these border-crossing elements, individual nations become more diverse and multicultural and the indigenous becomes less visible. As Iwabuchi notes, ‘cross border interaction, fusion and mobility … seriously put the clearly demarcated national cultural borders into question’ (2015: 1). Travel, immigration and the sharing of goods across national boundaries have led to the formation of more multifaceted and multicultural societies, where one encounters many different conceptualizations of community and being in the world. Speaking about Japan specifically, Tezuka theorizes that ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ has largely replaced ‘banal nationalism’, where ‘everyday life is largely sustained by producing and consuming goods and symbols from and for many different and faraway parts of the world’ (2012: 2).

Cinemas, reflecting and commenting upon the nature of societies around the world, are also affected by these transformations and appropriate these transnational flows into their language. In particular, the processes of globalization have ungrounded understandings of film industr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Japanese names and terms
• Introduction: A boom, a crash and a death rattle
• Part one Theory
• Part two Case studies
• Conclusion: Reconceptualizations of Japanese horror and beyond
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index
• Imprint