Dialectics without Synthesis

“Film theory is just a pain in the ass.”After a somewhat testy exchange with the film critic Jonathan Romney, the celebrated filmmaker Claire Denis expressed her sense of frustration and, with these words, brought the interview to a close. This sweeping dismissal—in context, bemoaning the ostensible narrowness of film theory—may not be wholly surprising. Nonetheless, it also may not be as simple as it appears. Responding to the above exchange between artist and critic, Darren Hughes has written that despite this dismissal, “Denis is actively engaged in conversations about her work—visiting festivals, giving masterclasses and public forums, sitting with critics, mentoring younger filmmakers.”1 In other words, she does not neglect ideas about film—ways of shooting, colonial legacies, critical interventions—but the expression of frustration does open up the question of what constitutes something called “film theory” and what its purpose might be in the present.In Dialectics without Synthesis: Japanese Film Theory and Realism in a Global Frame, Naoki Yamamoto wrestles with such questions. He does so from a singular perspective that, as the book's title suggests, is at the same time never a unified or stable one. In the book, Yamamoto tracks Japanese writings on realism, one of the key elements of what has long been called “classical film theory.” The question arises as different people—writers, philosophers, activists, filmmakers—tried to define the contours of cinema not only as a new art but as a reflection on and engagement with the shifting world around them. The urtext in this regard is perhaps the writings of André Bazin, with the question “What is cinema?” Yamamoto's book shows that, regardless of its historical framing, the answer is as evasive as ever and that a return to it now (a “turn” he sees more broadly, inspired by the end of analog film especially) might pay dividends.Beginning with an investigation into the ways that cinema disrupted, sublated, and redefined “naturalism” (ari no mama, or “things as they are”) in theater and literature, the book winds its way through the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century, highlighting realism in each chapter always through a specific rubric: machine realism, textual realism, epistemological realism, and ultimately, a nondualistic realism via a specific kind of phenomenology. These intersections bring theory and history together to explore a set of connections and their political tensions. In his chapter on “machine realism,” for example, Yamamoto focuses on the writings of the idiosyncratic thinker and artist Itagaki Taruho, specifically Itagaki's response to Vertov's famous articulation of the “Kino-eye” of the camera. Could the “mechanical eye” of cinema offer a new perspective on the world otherwise unavailable to human vision? Is another kind of nonhuman subject possible?The ostensible “universality” of such questions obscures the historical and material tensions within which they function. In this case, Yamamoto clarifies the ways this emphasis on technology's capacity for revealing the world anew stood explicitly in contradistinction to “proletarian realism.” In this juxtaposition, the repudiation of the human sensorium in the celebration of machine realism offered no means to address let alone counter the effects of alienation central to modern experience more broadly but especially potent in thinking through class struggle. Since these debates and battles took place on the eve of Japan's colonial expansion, as the state cracked down violently on proletarian movements, the difference is not insignificant, and the sense of “machine realism” cannot be reduced to abstract questions of technology divorced from the historical moment.Chapter by chapter, Yamamoto's ability to crystallize the extensive and complex debates within this broader purview in admirably clear prose is one of the pleasures and benefits of his rich analysis, while the menace of encroaching war forges the critical context for his discussion. Yamamoto does not shy away from critical assessments, including of such celebrated thinkers as Imamura Taihei (whose wartime works were republished by Studio Ghibli, while his translated pieces on animation have appeared in the journal Mechademia). Nowhere is this ambivalence stronger than in his assessment of Nishida Kitarō, Japan's foremost philosopher of the twentieth century. Nishida's rigorous philosophical endeavor laid the groundwork for any number of thinkers—especially the more “phenomenologically” inclined film theory of Nagae Michitaro and, to a lesser extent, Nakai Masakazu. But what is striking is that it is precisely in its most ambitious and far-reaching philosophical program—in the effort to overcome the dualistic ontologies of Western metaphysics—that this thinking was complicit with wartime demands of the Greater East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.Ultimately, then, herein is the crux of the book: film theory cannot remain an abstract or “universal” project, in which image ontologies, or camera eyes, can be grasped solely in transcendental terms. This might be familiar, but the way it plays out here remains distinct. To wit, one target of critique has been the relentless Eurocentrism of so much “film theory” within the Anglo-American context. There is a kind of colonialism pervasive in film theory and practice more broadly. We can find this everywhere from Eisenstein's contention that Japanese cinema “lacked” montage (while it was pervasive in society) to Noel Burch's similar backhanded compliment that the radicalism of Japanese film practice “lacked” a theoretical component.At the same time, assumptions about an absence of theory, or a downplaying of its relevance, are not solely from non-Japanese. Theorists and critics from Sato Tadao to Yomota Inuhiko have made similar claims about the disjunct between film practice and theory in Japan. Such claims have thus provided a certain impetus to scholars of Japanese film to argue that film theory does exist in Japan. Yuriko Furuhata's Cinema of Actuality (2013) was among the earlier efforts to contextualize filmmaking practice within a broader theoretical and transmedia framework (worth noting in this regard is that Yamamoto's historical framing ends almost precisely where Furuhata's begins).One risk of insisting that Japan does have film theory, however, is that of mobilizing the same geopolitical structure, leaving those theorists caught in a trap of sorts (what Aaron Gerow has recently called “the theory complex”). But this book, while acknowledging this semi-colonial relationship, does not argue for Japan's seat at the table. It is not that film theory in Japan must be understood in its particularity against “Western” film theory as its excluded other; but rather, the book makes the broader argument that film theory—even when it circulates in seemingly abstract ideas and spaces—cannot be divorced from its historical and material conditions. Japan thus serves as an instructive example: the coincidence of war and realist film theory renders this division of theory and history untenable and politically troubling.This historical context is worth considering in light of other works that take up this framing. Influential texts that cover this time period, such as Peter B. High's The Imperial Screen (2003) or Darrell William Davis's Picturing Japaneseness (1996), largely downplay or leave open these questions of how ways of seeing and practice were at work, opting either to read the films through institutional and narrative elements (High) or present their own theoretical take (Davis). In this sense, Yamamoto's text, while less focused on film analysis, helps find a stronger sense of nuance and contradiction, providing a more fine-grained analysis without losing sight of the bigger picture.At the same time, the relationship of cinema to other arts also compels more thinking. Though it goes unmentioned, literature is perhaps the dominant site of cultural analysis through much of twentieth-century Japanese critique. This raises a question for Yamamoto's book as well because, although we can see the ways that writings on cinema participated in these broader debates, we don't always get a sense for their reach. To cite a couple examples, significant intellectual histories of twentieth century Japan by two different generations—associated broadly with the journals Shiso no Kagaku and Hihyōkūkan—both of which involved important film critics—make almost zero mention of cinema whatsoever. If film made inroads into the fundamental assumptions of naturalism as a contested ideal in modern Japanese literature, why has it been written out of the record? If Yamamoto were to further develop his writings in this regard, this gap would be a compelling one to explore as a kind of “missing link” between literature and cinema.Also missing is any mention of female film theorists or thinkers. Although not typically associated with “realism”—and explicitly repudiating the intellectualist stance of a theorist—Osaki Midori grappled with cinema's rerouting of subjectivity and objectivity, no less than some of the theorists here discussed more extensively. This leaves the idea that women weren't part of the conversation, already a concern for film history more broadly. The absence of any discussion then feels like a missed opportunity or, in more positive terms, an invitation to further research.The book by no means aims to close off such inquiry, and in this “absence of synthesis,” does indeed show that it is worth returning to these “classical” questions. Not only because of the rise of digital technologies and “post-cinematic” formulations but because the relationship of theory to practice is complex, contradictory, and entangled as different arts or media investigate broad questions about life and reality, or what Denis called “the mystery of the world.”Insofar as cinema has the potential to make us curious about this mystery, there will always be a host of questions attendant on this relationship, and thus room for thinking about these intersections. In many ways, Yamamoto's book might be seen as akin to Denis's own projects, which take up broad historical and geopolitical forces through relentless attention to their lived experiences. The refusal to separate these lives and experiences from abstract questions of mechanical eyes, or ruminations on mediations without a medium, or expressions of collectives of community is arguably a common project. And at the same time, Dialectics without Synthesis also emphasizes the ways that film practices are not reducible to a set of purely empirical or practical methods, as if cinema were not animated by broader ideas about the world and reality it faces and tries to capture. Film theory is a pain in the ass, indeed

Aesthetics · Art · Dialectic · Dismissal · Epistemology · Film director · Film studies · Film theory · Joke · Literature · Movie theater · Political science · Realism · Sociology · Cinema and Media Studies · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy