Blood and Soul (1923) and the Cultural Politics of Japanese Film Reform

Dados Bibliográficos

ID12424253
AutoresDiane Wei Lewis (0000-0002-1099-135X, autor correspondente)
Ano2018
Volume26
Fascículo3
Páginas450-482
Data de publicação2018-08-01
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
Periódicopositions asia critique (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1067-9847 • E-ISSN: 1527-8271
EditoraDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/10679847-6868239
OpenAlexW2885730475
IdiomaEN
Referências citadas11

Research Article| August 01 2018 Blood and Soul (1923) and the Cultural Politics of Japanese Film Reform Diane Wei Lewis Diane Wei Lewis Diane Wei Lewis is an assistant professor in the Program in Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is finishing a book manuscript on cinema, identification, and emotion in interwar Japan. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google positions (2018) 26 (3): 450–482. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-6868239 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Diane Wei Lewis; Blood and Soul (1923) and the Cultural Politics of Japanese Film Reform. positions 1 August 2018; 26 (3): 450–482. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-6868239 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll Journalspositions Search Advanced Search In the early 1920s, Japanese filmmakers increasingly adopted American-style production practices and strategies of representation. Resisting this trend, the Nikkatsu film company's Mukōjima studio advocated multiple approaches to filmmaking, challenging the rhetoric of "purity" that was used by both cultural conservatives as well as the pure film movement, which pushed for Hollywood-style reforms. Mukōjima defended heterogeneity as inevitable, given the ongoing process of modernization, and the forms of cultural mixture, conflict, and contradiction it produced. Its kakushin (reform)-era policies made it possible for young Mizoguchi Kenji to make Japan's first expressionist film, Blood and Soul (Chi to rei, 1923). Blood and Soul is based on a novella by the half-Russian, half-Japanese writer Ōizumi Kokuseki. It tells the story of a Chinese jeweler in Nagasaki who inherits murderous impulses from his mother and kills to reclaim the jewels he makes. The jeweler forbids his Japanese apprentice from marrying his daughter, fearing her blood is contaminated as well. After the apprentice takes the blame for his master's crimes, a painter attempts to understand his motivations and listens to his confession, in which taboo desires and absent mothers provide the key to the story's interlocking narrative strands. Blood and Soul is critical of reform-era discourses on cultural authenticity. Its complex exploration of fractured identity and intersubjectivity dramatizes irrational fears about cultural mixture and miscegenation. The impure body is depicted as a virulent aesthetic force that generates the dense intertextuality of the novella and the hallucinogenic mise-en-scène of the film. Interrogating the very concepts of identity and mastery of the self, Blood and Soul is an example of an experimental production that rejected the rhetoric of "purity" in a time of film reform, affirming cultural hybridity in the face of pure film demands. Japanese cinema, race, pure film movement, Ōizumi Kokuseki (1894–1957), Mizoguchi Kenji (1898–1956), Nikkatsu Mukōjima studio, expressionism The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2018 Duke University Press2018 You do not currently have access to this content

Art · Art history · Hollywood · Icon · Media studies · Movie theater · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Sociology · Soul · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Computer Science · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy

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