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JAPANESE DOCUMENTARY FILM: THE MEIJI ERA THROUGH HIROSHIMA
Abe Mark Nornes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003, 248 pp.
Given the wealth of literature available on the worldwide development of the nonfiction film, it is more than a little puzzling that, until now, nothing of note has appeared in English about the history of the form in Japan. This insightful new book on the first fifty years of the Japanese documentary leaves the reader wondering why it should have taken so long. Professor Nornes teaches film and Asian studies at the University of Michigan, and his book is full of references that reflect both areas of scholarship. He notes that the book is derived from his dissertation, and at times his academic prose tends to remind the reader of this fact, but those who persevere will be well rewarded.
During the first thirty years covered, Nornes notes a striking resemblance between the emergence of documentary in Japan and elsewhere in the world. This is explained, in part, by an abundant written record left by Japanese film activists and critics attesting to the influence of a small number of Western films and a larger body of Western film scholarship. From their first exposure to Lumière-style actualities in 1897, Japanese filmmakers recognized issues of actuality vs. art, of subjectivity vs. objectivity, grasping such subtleties as the distinctions between "constructed news films," which employed miniature models to recreate events, and "fake news films," which were staged and shot so as to look like actualities. An entire vocabulary came into use for differentiating between "news films" and "current events films," "war conditions films," "battle films," and so on. Nornes mines the writings of Japan's intellectual film community like a vein of gold to reveal the scope of its aesthetic development.
As was the case in other countries, the power structure in Japan was quick to grasp the potential of film to subtly subvert or promote its aims; it moved to ensure that the news organs chiefly responsible for the production of informational film would turn out products that promoted the government's increasingly imperialistic agenda. Also as in other countries, beginning around 1927, there developed a proletarian film movement that sought...