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Studies of Japanese cinema of the 1910s begin with a now familiar qualification: except for a scant amount of mostly fragments and reconstructions, the actual films made during this period are believed lost. Today the people who worked on these films and the studios where they made them are identifiable by name only. Other than in the pictures in print materials, whole genres exist solely in our imagination, coloured by what we read about them, contemporary with the time or otherwise. Because of this, Japanese cinema of the 1910s is more than anything else a cinema defined by loss. This introduction to and translation of Norimasa Kaeriyama's scenario for his experimental production, Sei no kagayaki (The Glory of Life/The Glow of Life, 1919)1, is part of a study in progress of early screen-writing in Japan. Nearly all that remainsof the 'pure film' (jun'eigageki) genre of the 1910s, this scenario and, in a broader sense, this lost film, raise questions about our conception of this elusive decade. Given the ambiguous contexture of this period, I offer only a starting point for a consideration of The Glory of Life that I hope will be revisited as new materials surface for our consideration.
The question of 'pure film'
The Glory of Life has a poignantly privileged place in the traditional histories of Japanese cinema. Jun'ichiro Tanaka describes it as a beacon of hope, a 'brilliantly shining beam of white light' piercing through what he evidently perceived to be a gloomy future for the Japanese film.2 Its release was delayed for a year after its completion, which might account for some of the sensation when it opened. In addition, Kaeriyama, its director, had established a reputation as a frequent contributor to film magazines and was known as a major proponent of 'pure film', a term prevalent in the 1910s in discourse engendered by efforts to reform the industry. Kaeriyama was also a founding editor of Kinema Record (originally Film Record, 1913), Japan's self-proclaimed (in English) 'illustrated leading cinema trade journal', and the author of Katsudo shashingeki no sosaku to satsuei ho (The Production and Photography of Moving Picture Drama, 1917), the only technical handbook of its kind at the time. Because The Glory of Life was by no means...