To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema

by Noël Burch

The re-issuing of Noël Burch’s pioneering account of Japanese film, To The Distant Observer, first published in 1979, restores to us the best book written on Japanese cinema, despite its author’s modest claims that he didn’t know much Japanese, and brings us back to the scene of the postwar history and the film’s historical duty to recall and narrate its world for us. But Burch’s book is also an often forgotten reminder that at the heart of capitalist modernity pulsates the ceaseless process of interaction between past and present where the latter is constantly called upon to conjure the former. Among other things, Burch’s book was written during the most intense moment of the Cold War and the heyday of modernization theory and the countless studies it spawned to tell us how societies like Japan, especially, were able to negotiate the challenge of change by relying on the mediation of received practices and values that had miraculously managed to survive the tumultuous transformations of history. Where Burch departed from this Cold War paradigm, which held area studies in the United States in its thrall, lay in his recognition that the interaction between past and present was far more complex than a simple game of seesaw rocking the binary of tradition/modernity back and forth against a background noise of world-competing ideologies. What his book showed was how older cultural practices and artistic forms had to be radicalized to make Japan’s modernity something more than simple imitation, even though this message was often drowned out by the din of eagerness to present Japan as a modular exemplification of peaceable and smooth evolutionary modernization.

Genres: Film, Japan, Nonfiction, Criticism

387 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Noël Burch is Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the University Charles de Gaulle in Lille. His book Theory of Film Practice is widely regarded as one of the key works of Western film criticism.

Reviews

[Patrick McCoy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found Noel Burch's study of Japanese cinema, To The Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema (1979), a curious book for several reasons. He is well-known for coining the phrase "pillow shot" for Yasujiro Ozu's use of still life shots in his films (which was subsequently refuted by David Bordwell in his comprehensive book on Ozu-Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema). I get the impression that Burch has bitten off more than he can chew with short overviews and summaries of Japanese history and cultural traditions. The films that Burch chooses to discuss seem somewhat arbitrary to me and he insists that the golden age of Japanese cinema took place from the late 20s and ended somewhere during the war or early post war era. Perhaps, he should have limited his book to the analysis of films from that era alone. That being said, he has some interesting observations to make about the films that he deigns to discuss, including several from Akira Kurosawa. However, I find it difficult to take him seriously since he practically dismisses all late period films by Ozu, Mikio Naruse, and Kenji Mizoguchi. Not to mention he fails to mention Shohei Imamura Masahiko Shinoda-two masters of the New Wave period at all.

The book is divided into Six sections. The first, "Part 1: Grounds, Premises," consists of 1. A System of Contradictions, 2. A System of Signs, and 3. A Boundless Text. This is followed by "Part 2: A Frozen Stream?" which consists of 4. A Machine Appears, 5. A Parenthesis on Film History, 6. A Rule and its Ubiquity, and 7. Bulwark of Traditions. "Part 3: Cross-Currents" has: 8. Transformed Modules, Lines and Space, 10. The Fate of Alien Modes, 11. Displacements and Condensations, 12. Surface and Depth, and the first chapter devoted to a single director, 13. Kinugasa Teinosuke. In the fourth section, "Part 4: Iron Trees, Golden Flowers," he discusses the films and period that he feels is the golden age of Japanese cinema with the following: 14. The Weight of History and Technology, 15. Some Remarks on the Genre Syndrome, 16. Ozu Yasujiro, 17. Naruse Mikio and Yamanaka Sadao, 18. On Architecture, 19. Ishida Tamizo, 20. Mizoguchi Kenji, 21. Shimizu Hiroshi and Some Others, ending with 22. Epilogue to a Golden Age. "Part 5. A Chain is Broken": 23. Film and 'Democracy,' has a discussion of important humanist directors (Keisuke Kinoshita, Masaki Kobayashi, and Kon Ichikawa) and other directors such as the postwar films of Mizoguchi, Daisuke Ito, and Shindo Kaneto. The next section, 24. Kurosawa Akira, makes some interesting observations about Kurosawa's films, but can not be taken seriously as he omits any discussion of Rashomon or Seven Samurai, meanwhile, he calls They Live in Fear "Kurosawa's first full-blown masterwork and the most perfect statement of his dramatic geometry." (It is one of my least favorites Kurosawa films, known as one of his least successful films among critics). I sometimes wonder if he is specifically contradicting and avoiding films championed by Donald Richie who at the time of Burch's writing was the foremost western critic of Japanese film. In "Part 6. Post-Scriptum" there are two chapters: 25. Oshima Nagisa and 26. Independence: it's Rewards and Punishments. It's not surprising that Burch is a big fan of Oshima, as are most academics, however, I find that most of his films leave me cold-save those in his late European stage and some of the others. But he is more concerned with ideas, theory, and making a statement rather than making an entertaining film. In the last chapter he states that the best films since Kurosawa's prime were: Matsumoto Toshio's Pandemonium (1971)[?!], Oshima's Death by Hanging (1968) [a well regarded film by many others], Sasumu Hani's Eros Plus Massacre (1970) [also a well-respected New Wave classic], and Koji Wakamatsu's two films: Violated Angels (1967) [a well-respected soft porn film] and People of the Second Fortress [not even sure which film this refers to an out-of-date title and probably also soft porn]-no Imamura, Shinoda, Seijun Suzuki, or Hiroshi Teshigahara?!

[Ad · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book, published in 1979, Burch argues that the cinema of Japan, at least until 1945, was the only national cinema to derive fundamentally from a non-European culture. That means that those Japanese films diverge in many ways from the standard Hollywood style of shooting and editing. In other words, the great Japanese masters of the cinema like Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Shimizu and Naruse, de-construct Western modes of film making and, refine and systematize certain Japanese traits. As these elements are stronger in the 1930s, Burch shifts the so-called "golden age" of Japanese cinema from the 50’s to the 30’s. He argues that there was relatively little influence from militarism on the films of that period (he is right). Burch calls attention to early Ozu films as "The Only Son"; films Mizoguchi made in the 1930s rather than the 1950s, as "The Late Chrysanthemum"; and speaks about his preference for Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood", while deriding Kurosawa's samurai films as "Yojimbo." I agree with Burch that the 1930s were a golden age, but would argue that the films from the 1950s just as much form a golden age; and I also would point out that it is difficult to fully enjoy the Japanese movies from the 1930s as for various reasons the physical quality of the copies is rather bad. And, how much we may regret it, Japanese film today has completely adopted the Hollywood style - it only differs in atmosphere and type of story.
Please see my take on Japanese cinema in the 1930s here at my blog: https://adblankestijn.blogspot.com/20...

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been aware of this book for many years. Robert Kolker claims it as a major influence on "The Altering Eye." I found it used but it's been sitting in my stack for more than a year. I've recently seen films by Ozu and Mizoguchi so I thought I'd be done with it.

Burch did some major research for the book--including a stay in Japan--so he's seen films unknown in the West. His main theme is that Japanese cinema enjoyed a Golden Age in 1930-1945. At that time Japanese cinema was employing native Japanese aesthetic principles and was operating outside Western principles of representation.

It's shocking to learn that less than three hundred Japanese films survive from the period 1897-1945. Burch also has an informative chapter on Japanese pro-war "propaganda" features, which offered surprisingly drab, un-heroic visions of soldier life.

Burch is also a Marxist and tries to recruit Japanese cinema to the cause as a "materialist approach to film art." But he is honest enough to admit that this Golden Age corresponds to the rise of a militarist-nationalist regime which sought the "reactivation of traditional cultural values," which were essential for the development of a distinctly Japanese cinema. He claims that all the major filmmakers of the period were objectively complicit with the new authoritarian regime. He calls this contradiction a "basic, irreducible dialectic."

This opens an interesting question which haunts modern criticism: can a bad political situation produce valid art? If art is shaped by its social context can it be dismissed because of its political context? If so, where do we draw the line?

For many, pro-Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl is beyond the pale, while pro-Soviet filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov are okay--perhaps because they were eventually censored by the state and Riefenstahl was not.

Perhaps "irony" is a better word than "dialectic." It is ironic that the Japanese cinema at its height (as Burch sees it) and the militarist regime which led the country to ruin drew upon common elements of Japan's national heritage.

Or perhaps it isn't ironic at all. Perhaps such a development can be expected. Political nationalism leads to domestic reaction and foreign adventurism. Cultural nationalism, at its best, can lead to reconsideration of dormant or underused subjects and styles and eventual creative resurgence. It can also advance the study, appreciation, and adaptation of regional/folk arts (in contrast to "international" modes of modernism).

But good outcomes are not guaranteed. The "Volkish" art made during the Nazi era was patronzing, perfunctory kitsch. The "American Scene" or "Regionalist" artists in America of the same period made works of lasting interest.

Frankly, I haven't seen enough films of the Japanese Golden Age to know if Burch is right. Is 30s Mizoguchi better and more authentically Japanese than 50s Kurosawa or Ozu? I don't know. I'm also doubtful if Japanese cinema of 1930-1946 was as un-Western and anti-illusionstic as Burch claims.

Most fictional narrative films tend towards illusionism because the camera records images through the same basic process the human eye does. That's why we consider photographs and movies more realistic than painting or drawing. 1930s Mizoguchi employed long takes and often kept the camera far from the actors--unlike the Hollywood style which employs a lot of editing and brings us very close to the actors. But that doesn't make Mizoguchi "anti-representational" in my book.

Burch may be right that Japanese cinema, since it developed in relative isolation from Western cinema, developed out of Japanese aesthetic principles--the rhythms of Noh and Kabuki theater rather than vaudeville, Broadway, and Coney Island. The more Japan became economically, politically, and culturally linked to the West the more Japanese cinema resembled Hollywood or French New Wave cinema.

Or perhaps it was a happy accident that in the 1930s Japanese film studios gave filmmakers the freedom to make spare, elegant, formally ambitious films for the mass audience--indeed engaged in a type of formal experimentation (4 hour films, ten minute takes) that has always been rare in most commercial studio systems.

If you can read only one book about Japanese cinema "To the Distant Observer" is probably not it, although it has a fair amount to offer the patient reader and is probably required reading for a serious student of Japanese cinema.

JPG

[Evan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've referenced this book many times from the library but never really read it in its entirety. It's a bit heavily academic for my taste, but it was, for a long time, one of the very few in-depth studies of the aesthetics of Japanese film. And it had an excellent filmography at a time when most of the films and data about them were simply unavailable. Includes very good screen shots demonstrating Burch's points.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Noel Burch is a French film theorist and this book is regarding Japanese cinema. Not in print any more and that's bad. But this is probably one of the most unique books on Japanese cinema where he goes into the structure and the framing of the images that go on the screen. He also has some interesting comments regarding Benshi's. An important book for me.