Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Evoking the title of Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's famous essay "In Praise of Shadows," Thomas Lamarre's Shadows on the Screen relates Tanizaki's focus on "Oriental" aesthetics in the 1930s to his earlier work on motion pictures. Whereas most critics have assessed Tanizaki's career in terms of a rupture between early experimentation and a later "return to Japan," placing Tanizaki's film work in the first category and literary brilliance in the second, Lamarre argues instead for the continuity of Tanizaki's interest in the "cinematic experience," a sensory understanding of the world that is applicable to literature, theater, and film alike.
Lamarre links Tanizaki's cultural nationalism to that of Kuki Shuzo and Watsuji Tetsuro, simultaneously situating his film philosophy in relation to Walter Benjamin, Jean Epstein, and Béla Balázs, with the result that Tanizaki's engagement with the new medium of film emerges as a way of exploring Japan's invention of itself as a modern nation. Tanizaki posits an alternative view of Japan's modernization process: not as a teleological history as narrative but as an oscillation between various sites of equal ambiguity--most notably, the "West" and the "Orient"--but also including the...