Josai University Educational Corporation

My Theory of Film: A Logic of Self-Negation

Author(s): Yoshida Kijū and Patrick Noonan
Source: Review of Japanese Culture and Society, Vol. 22, Decentering Theory:
Reconsidering the History of Japanese Film Theory (DECEMBER 2010), pp. 104-109
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press on behalf of Josai University Educational
Corporation
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/42800644
Accessed: 17-06-2019 23:02 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Josai University Educational Corporation, University of Hawai'i Press are collaborating

with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Review of Japanese Culture and
Society

This content downloaded from 132.174.251.250 on Mon, 17 Jun 2019 23:02:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
My Theory of Film:
A Logic of Self-Negation
Yoshida Kijū

Translated by Patrick Noonan

I was given the opportunity to make my first film in the midst of the 1960 Anpo struggle
(demonstrations against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty). I remember it was June 15 [one
of the dates marking the peak of the struggle] and we had finished editing the footage we
had shot; the sun was coming up as we were adding music to the soundtrack.1 Finishing
the film on that day was perhaps, in some sense, chance.
A decade has passed since then. In that time, I had intended to make films at a
leisurely pace, but I already have over 10 films under my belt. When I look back on the
past ten years and reflect on the many films I have tried to make as eloquently as
possible, I realize that, in the end, I have persistently repeated just one single thing. That
thing, I think, has been the intense realization of a paradox: while being in the position
of making films, I have been trying to disavow cinema, or film itself. I have made an
impossible wager to distance myself as much as possible from film, or the cinema, while
being at the center of it. That contradictory venture has emotionally worn me down. It
is a feeling now firmly rooted in me.
Naturally, I started making films inside the studio system. The opportunity I was
given to make a film at the behest of the studio, that opportunity itself may certainly have
been a coincidence.2 Yet, in trying to change, out of necessity, the production methods
of the studio, I first encountered film.
At that time, I could not help but doubt our pursuit and inquiry of "pre-fabricated"
films. I worried that I might repeatedly make films according to the same methods. The
production company invests capital in a film. The filmmaker assumes responsibility for
the film and manufactures it. The audience receives it. One couldn't help but feel that
these three parties should form a perfect balance and that each should loyally perform
its assigned role. This sort of circulation of film is, to some extent, a matter of luck, a
hallucinatory honeymoon, if you will. But this relationship between the company,

104 REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY DECEMBER 2010

This content downloaded from 132.174.251.250 on Mon, 17 Jun 2019 23:02:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Yoshida Kijū

director, and audience is precisely, to those who make films, nothing other than a form
of rupture, of alienation from the very films that they have made.
The director closely observes the general reaction of an audience and then, in turn,
completes a film calculated to produce that response. The audience has been made
accustomed to receiving a film with ambiguous obedience, operating under the logic that
it was a film that "was created." In this sort of relationship, what earns the greatest respect
is the individuality of the filmmaker and a refined directing technique. The director then
expects temperate, sensible, and appreciative behavior from the audience.
These balanced, alternating emotions, running parallel to one another, rapidly
increase to no end, as if at a speed corresponding to the principle of relativity, and spread
indiscriminately. Finally, coming to our senses, we discovered that our noses had been
rubbed up against a wall that none of us had anticipated. Actually, the truth was much
worse.

It seemed that the responsibility for making a film lay with no one. A
was the decay of cinema. For that reason, I thought to make not a "fi
been made," but "a film that has not been made yet," i.e., a "film tha
I, the filmmaker, already have within me an image of the comple
as I convey that completed film as an "object" to the audience, I am
However, in making such a film am I not simply providing a produc
the audience comfortably knows they "have already seen," and who
fixed?
Making a film is an act that transcends me, that pushes me forw
unknown. The audience that receives this film also transcends the "f
to watch," insofar as they themselves create it. Within this new relat
that is to say, film is not already offered as a fixed entity - the crea
enter into a free dialogue with one another, which begets film as a p
as a relational concept. The first image that engrossed me was of bei
in such a visual field. But that meant I had to completely turn my
because established film is stagnant; it has been offered up already
foot, by ideas overemphasizing practical realities.
I found resistance to my concerns everywhere. From the start
narrative in film. Until now the standard for prefabricated films, in wh
knows what they are trying to say, has been based on the quality of the
or failure of the narrative. In other words, such films peddle emot
filmmakers and spectators remain immersed in a cathartic emotional exch
will remain unperturbed, shut within their own walls, and unable to b
conventional attitudes. We doze off in a gently rocking crib of comf
not seeing what we should. I could offer no rebuttal to claims we we
Yet, making a film while rejecting narrative is agonizing. Duri
we were drilled to equate creation with narration or the representatio

DECEMBER 2010 REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIE

This content downloaded from 132.174.251.250 on Mon, 17 Jun 2019 23:02:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Yoshida Kijū

just as I am trying to dismantle the story, I am forced to confront my conservative self

that unconsciously narrates it. The weapon I take up in resistance is a fine blade, which
I aim at the parts of myself that are still dormant. I have ended up battling the shackles
with which I have bound myself.
I think one can similarly critique an actor's performance in a film. For the time an
actor appears on screen, he duly completes his given role and disappears with the final
shot. Still, I am not the only one who feels the restrictions and imperfections of such a
classical, flawless performance. Why does an actor have to live only within the frame?
Is it perhaps his destiny? No, it is not.
Is it cruel to say that the actor must live within the frame probably because he is
considered a tool with which to create an emotion, the pre-determined value of a film?
An actor should have more freedom. An actor should transcend the frame that the director
chooses, face the audience, and reveal his entire personality, without makeup. Rather
than a well-calculated performance, I would prefer to see the power of an actor who
can destroy the plotted drama with a single emotion, the blink of an eye, or the tension
in his muscles. An actor's physical body can apply a jolt to the tacit collusion that the
audience and the director are apt to form. I have filmed actors without giving them any
direction. As a director, nothing makes me happier than when the actor's presence, right
there, expresses an incisive critique.
In no way does this downgrade an actor's performance. I think that it is absolutely
necessary for us to accept boldly that the actor does not express something through his
body, but that the body is expression itself. Every time an actor traces a path that has
been drawn in advance, he creates a spectacle that is expected, a spectacle to be seen.
No matter how skillfully an actor performs, for example, it is still the infinite repetition
of a "pre-determined" role.
I have tried to reject the use of an actor's performance to fulfill a pre-established
role, to assimilate it as one part of a pre-fabricated film, or as a tool to express a single
meaning. In my approach to the image, I assume a similar position. However beautiful
the meaning or sentiment an image expresses, as long as it is complete unto itself it is a
single picture that the creator has prepared in advance to use as a tool. It is nothing other
than a display "to be shown to," "to be seen by" a spectator.
Let's assume, for example, that we are shown a shot of a single man slowly crossing
a desolate landscape. Did the director need this shot to show that the man is going from
one place to another pre-determined spot? Or has the filmmaker chosen this desolate
landscape to represent something about the man ' s interiority ? In either case, he probably
filmed this scene with the expectation that it will be read as significant.
But these are manipulations in which we select images as if they were words. For
example, we can understand the image to mean the man is "wandering." If such an image
mimics what its creators intend to narrate, if it equals that word, then a film is nothing
more than a simple illustration of the narrative. Also, if a film is produced as an extension

106 REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY DECEMBER 2010

This content downloaded from 132.174.251.250 on Mon, 17 Jun 2019 23:02:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Yoshida Kijü

of this process of authorial intention, it in no way can be something that transcends the
filmmaker himself. Since the filmmaker already knows the entire film through language,
he completely dominates its production; people end up only scrutinizing his individuality,
fussing over the trivial details of how realistically he presented the fiction.
In this case, the filmmaker completely forgets the responsibilities he should bear
as an artist. He can thus perfectly conceal the limits of his abilities as a director. It is
true that when the creator is the only one who knows the beginning and the end of a
film, he might be able to finish it easily with the most suitable images. But that is just
like following the footsteps of someone who has come before you; the filmmaker is
absent from the start. No matter what single meaning, sentiment, or absolute beauty is
contained in the image, if that meaning, sentiment, or beauty itself completes the image
unto itself, then the image will have been violated at the hands of the filmmaker; it will
be completely lifeless. The image is not self-sustaining. For the image to be ripe with new
images, forming endless associations- for it to negate itself- it must exist in a single
moment. Wait. That is not all. The image also must not narrate anything.
If anyone can attribute language to the image, it is the audience. The film image
radiates the movement of the filmmaker's interiority, his spirit. The only one who can join
that movement, face the future, and give it meaning is the audience, not the filmmaker.
In that sense, the image does not belong to the filmmaker, he cannot own it.
In the ten years that I have been making films, I have quite persistently stuck to
the hope of producing a film that cannot belong to me even though I have made it. A
film that will reverse the relationship between looking and being looked at, between its
creator and audience. It is nothing but the realization of the paradox where, in the process
of making a film, I reveal all of myself and yet the film ceases to be mine.
When a filmmaker severs the all too static shared consciousness that is involved
in "showing" a film, one that transforms the interiority of a pre-existing author into a
film, then he becomes destabilized and emits himself before the audience as something
continually moving and vacillating. This creates a film that for the first time includes
the audience in its creation. Perhaps this dream of mine is impossible. But I think that
in its short, youthful history film has struck a common chord because it contains within
it the necessity of the audience's participation.
A filmmaker is not simply a performer who is looked at. He knows himself through
the image that he creates. Only when a film is caught between the two clear mirrors of
watching and being watched, situated in the middle of an endless reflection, does it become
opulent. Making such a film can be difficult work; but nothing is more honest than film
in exposing the filmmaker's own conservatism. The actor's movements, the stream of
light, the single sound, all of which exist in a single image, transcend the filmmaker's
intent and represent his interiority without hiding anything.
Of course, it goes without saying that film's tendency to overcome the filmmaker's
self, also equally works on the audience. An audience shut into a dark room is not simply

DECEMBER 2010 REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY 107

This content downloaded from 132.174.251.250 on Mon, 17 Jun 2019 23:02:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Yoshida Kiju

guided to the end. The audience, freely overcoming the film and the filmmaker, puts the
period at the end of the work. And that freedom will throw into question the audience
members' own conservative beliefs. They will not remain unscathed by this experience.
This means that the essence of cinema is the contraposition of two equal sides: those
who create and those who look.
I recently completed Eros Plus Massacre (Erosu + gyakusatsu, 1969). It treats
the great scandals in the love triangle between the anarchist Õsugi Sakae, Ito Noe,
and Madame K that led to the 1916 Hikage Chaya Incident.3 1 did not simply intend
to recreate an incident buried beneath more than half a century of history. I hoped
that we- the audience and I- situated between the Taishõ period (1912-26) and the
present could have a dialogue about our freedom. As a prologue to the film, I presented
the following:

We, the young, you and I, ambivalently join a decadent, joyous discussion about
the rebellion and eroticism of Õsugi Sakae, he who composed the poem, "Spring
in March, I, remain unhanged, dance amidst cherry blossoms," and Itõ Noe, who
lived a beautiful life of chaos.4

Here, in this essay, I have expounded a logic of self-negation. It is my theory of film.

Translator's Notes

This piece was originally published as United States began to re-negoti-of the government's return to the
"Watashi no mono de nai eiga no tame ate the terms of the original treaty,oppression of the war-time years and
ni: jiko hitei no ronri," Eiga geijutsu which provoked Japanese studentsimmediately became a rallying point
265 (September 1969): 56-58. This and citizens to demonstrate en masse for various groups who opposed the
translation is based on the version against the resigning and approval of state of Japanese politics.
"Watashi no eigaron: jiko hitei nothe treaty in the Japanese Diet. May See in this connection Wesley
ronri," in Yoshida Kijū: henbõ no19 and June 15, 1 960 marked the peak Sasaki-Uemura, Organizing the
rinri , ed. Hasumi Shigehiko (Tokyo:of the demonstrations. On May 19, the Spontaneous: Citizen Protest in
Seidosha, 2006), 71-77. day before the treaty was passed in Postwar Japan { Honolulu: University
I would like to thank Mark Roberts the House of Representatives, Prime of Hawaii Press, 2001).
for his insightful comments andMinister Kishi had the Japanese police 2.

generous editorial assistance on thisquell the protests by force, which Here, Yoshida's description of his
translation. elicited public condemnation of his opportunity to make a film as chance
administration. On June 15, four days may be because assistant directors at
1. before the final default passage of the the time would not normally have been
"Anpo" is the abbreviation of the treaty through the House of Council- promoted to director as quickly as he
Japanese term for the U.S. -Japan ors, the protests notoriously erupted and some of his contemporaries had
Security Treaty and the protests in violence when right-wing groups been. Other studios, like Nikkatsu and
against it. The first treaty was signed attacked citizen marchers, and a melee Daiei had had success in the mid- to late
in 1951 and allowed for the United broke out between student groups and 1950s with films directed by young
States to station its military onthe riot police. In the skirmish that directors about Japan's youth. Like
Japanese soil for the defense of Japan.ensued, a female Tokyo University most studios at the time, Shõchiku
The treaty is renewed every decade.student, Kanba Michiko, was killed. was losing viewers and revenue to
From 1959 until 1960, Japan and theFor many, her death was emblematic the rise of television. Shõchiku had

108 REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY DECEMBER 2010

This content downloaded from 132.174.251.250 on Mon, 17 Jun 2019 23:02:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Yoshida Kijü

Yoshida and a few other assistant with Itõ, and in 1916, while they were Tsuzuki Chushichi, "Kotoku, Ösugi,
directors like Õshima Nagisa and staying at the Hikage Chaya Inn, she and Japanese Anarchism," Hitot-
Shinoda Masahiro direct films so the stabbed Õsugi. The attack created asubashi Journal of Social Studies
public scandal and brought the anar- 3:1(1966): 38. Ösugi wrote the haiku
studio could tap into the youth market
in an attempt to draw audiences back chists to public attention. Ösugi and quoted here in 191 1 after 12 of his fel-
to the theaters. Itõ were killed in what became known low leftists were executed for treason.
3. as the Amakasu Incident, when the On May 20, 1910 officials uncovered
Ösugi Sakae (1885-1923) was an Japanese police used the Great Kantõ a plot to assassinate the emperor and
anarchist who published independent Earthquake of 1923 as motive to arrest overthrow the government, which led
newspapers and journals and trans- and kill these high profile anarchists to the arrest of a number of leftists
lated a number of European thinkers claiming that they would have at- in what became known as the High
into Japanese, many for the first time. tempted to overthrow the government Treason Incident (tai gy aku jiken).
Although married, he had affairs with in the chaos that ensued after the Ösugi 's mention of not being hanged
the author Ito Noe (1895-1923) and quake. Kamichika went on to become refers to the fact that he outlived his
the political activist Kamichika Ichiko a prominent member of the Socialistcomrades with whom he had spent
(1888-1981), whom Yoshida refers Party in the 1950s and the 1960s. time in jail.
to as "Madame K." She eventually 4.
grew jealous of Ösugi1 s relationship Translation of haiku modified from:

Note on the Author

Yoshida Kyū (1933-, born Yoshida television and returned to feature film jiko hitei no ronri), he theorizes his
Yoshishige), debuted as a director production in 1983 with The Human own filmic methods by reflecting on
with his 1960 film Good For Nothing Promise (Ningen no yakusoku). his past decade of filmmaking. The
(Roku de nashi). In the early 1960s, Some of his most highly acclaimed title of the piece was later changed
along with other young directors at films range from The Affair at to "My Theory of Film: A Logic of
the Shõchiku studios, like Õshima Akitsu (Akitsu onsen, 1962) to Self-Negation (Watashi no eigaron:
Nagisa and Shinoda Masahiro, he the highly experimental Eros Plus jiko hitei no ronri) when it was
was part of what journalists called Massacre (Erosu + gyakusatsu, included in Yoshida's first com-
the "Shõchiku nouvelle vague" He 1969). In addition to being an ac- pilation of film criticism, A Logic
worked as a director for Shõchiku until tive director, he has also been anof Self-Negation: Transformation
1964 when the studio cut the final active film critic and theorist. In Through Imagination (Jiko hitei no
scene of his film, Escape From Japanthis piece, originally published in ronri: sõzõryoku ni y oru henshin,
(Nihon dasshutsu). He immediately the September 1969 issue of Film 1970). (Yoshida Kijū, "Watashi no
resigned from the studio and went on Art (Eiga geijutsu) under the title eigaron: jiko hitei no ronri," in Jiko
to produce films independently. After "For a Film That Is Not Mine: A hitei no ronri : sõzõryoku ni y oru
his 1973 film, Coup D'Etat (Kaigen- Logic of Self-Negation" (Watashi henshin [Tokyo: Sanichi Shobõ,
rei), he produced documentaries for no mono de nai eiga no tame 1970], ni: 119-25.)

DECEMBER 2010 REVIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY 109

This content downloaded from 132.174.251.250 on Mon, 17 Jun 2019 23:02:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms