Books by Aaron Gerow
Nihon senzen eigaronshu: Eiga riron no saihakken is a groundbreaking publication, collecting many... more Nihon senzen eigaronshu: Eiga riron no saihakken is a groundbreaking publication, collecting many of the most exciting writings about the nature of cinema written before 1945 in Japan. If Euro-American film scholars have largely ignored film theory produced by the non-West—Noel Burch, for instance, once asserted that “the very notion of theory is alien to Japan”—and if Japanese scholars have mostly ignored their own tradition of film theory, this anthology proves that a rich and vibrant history of deep thinking about motion pictures existed from the 1910s on.
The volume is 746 pages in length with over 65 selections from over 50 authors. It covers writings on cinema before 1945, and is divided into 13 chapters, covering a variety of topics such as early cinema, sound, montage, machine art, Marxism, criticism, audiences, animation, Japanese film, psychology, time and the frame, and nation. Each chapter has its own commentary, and features four to six pieces, each piece accompanied by a specially written commentary.
The excerpt features the table of contents, plus the the introduction and the commentary for chapter one that I wrote.
Japan has done marvelous things with cinema, giving the world the likes of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, a... more Japan has done marvelous things with cinema, giving the world the likes of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Ozu. But cinema did not arrive in Japan fully formed at the end of the nineteenth century, nor was it simply adopted into an ages-old culture. Aaron Gerow explores the processes by which film was defined, transformed, and adapted during its first three decades in Japan. He focuses in particular on how one trend in criticism, the Pure Film Movement, changed not only the way films were made, but also how they were conceived. Looking closely at the work of critics, theorists, intellectuals, benshi artists, educators, police, and censors, Gerow finds that this trend established a way of thinking about cinema that would reign in Japan for much of the twentieth century.
The Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies provides a snapshot of all the archival and bibliogra... more The Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies provides a snapshot of all the archival and bibliographic resources available to students and scholars of Japanese cinema. Among the nations of the world, Japan has enjoyed an impressively lively print culture related to cinema. The first film books and periodicals appeared shortly after the birth of cinema, proliferating wildly in the 1910s with only the slightest pause in the dark days of World War II. The numbers of publications match the enormous scale of film production, but with the lack of support for film studies in Japan, much of it remains as uncharted territory, with few maps to negotiate the maze of material.
This book is the first all-embracing guide ever published for approaching the complex archive for Japanese cinema. It lists all the libraries and film archives in the world with significant collections of film prints, still photographs, archival records, books, and periodicals. It provides a comprehensive, annotated bibliography of the core books and magazines for the field. And it supplies hints for how to find and access materials for any research project. Above and beyond that, Nornes and Gerow’s Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies constitutes a comprehensive overview of the impressive dimensions and depth of the print culture surrounding Japanese film, and a guideline for future research in the field. This is an essential book for anyone seriously thinking about Japan and its cinema.
Kinugasa Teinosuke’s 1926 film, A Page of Madness (Kurutta ichipeiji), is celebrated as one of th... more Kinugasa Teinosuke’s 1926 film, A Page of Madness (Kurutta ichipeiji), is celebrated as one of the masterpieces of silent cinema. It was an independently produced, experimental, avant-garde work from Japan whose brilliant use of cinematic technique was equal to if not superior to that of contemporary European cinema. Those studying Japan, focusing on the central involvement of such writers as Yokomitsu Riichi and the Nobel Prize winner Kawabata Yasunari, have seen it as a pillar of the close relationship in the Taisho era between film and artistic modernism, as well as a marker of the uniqueness of prewar Japanese film culture.
But is this film really what it seems to be? Using meticulous research on the film’s production, distribution, exhibition, and reception, as well as close analysis of the film’s shooting script (which is not the script currently attributed to Kawabata) and shooting notes recently made available, Aaron Gerow draws a new picture of this complex work, one revealing a film divided between experiment and convention, modernism and melodrama, the image and the word, cinema and literature, conflicts that play out in the story and structure of the film and its context. These different versions of A Page of Madness were developed at the time in varying interpretations of a film fundamentally about differing perceptions and conflicting worlds, and ironically realized in the fact that the film that exists today is not the one originally released. Including a detailed analysis of the film and translations of contemporary reviews and shooting notes for scenes missing from the current print, Gerow’s book offers provocative insight into the fascinating film A Page of Madness was - and still is - and into the struggles over this work that tried to articulate the place of cinema in Japanese society and modernity.
The award-winning art film Hana-Bi, the stoic gangster elegy Sonatine, the surfer romance A Scene... more The award-winning art film Hana-Bi, the stoic gangster elegy Sonatine, the surfer romance A Scene at the Sea, the absurdist comedy Getting Any?, the entertainment samurai spectacle Zatoichi—very different films made under one name, Kitano Takeshi. Who is Kitano Takeshi?—an artistic auteur in the traditional sense or a new kind of star who manages multiple identities, strategically changing them from film to film and situation to situation? This book explores issues of auteurship and stardom in the films of Kitano Takeshi, especially as they relate to problems of personal and national identity in a Japan confronting an age of globalization. Aaron Gerow combines a detailed account of Japanese film and criticism with unique close analyses of Kitano's films from Violent Cop to Takeshis'.
Pamphlets by Aaron Gerow
Publicity pamphlet for the reprint (fukkoku) of the documentary film studies journal Bunka eiga k... more Publicity pamphlet for the reprint (fukkoku) of the documentary film studies journal Bunka eiga kenkyū (The Documentary Film Review), which was published between March 1938 and December 1940 and was unique in pursuing the theory and praxis of the "culture film" (bunka eiga) in an era of both increased militarization and intense debates over film realism. The pamphlet includes my short introduction to the project.
Publicity pamphlet for the reprint (fukkoku) of the film studies journal Eiga kagaku kenkyu (Scie... more Publicity pamphlet for the reprint (fukkoku) of the film studies journal Eiga kagaku kenkyu (Scientific Studies of Cinema), which was published between 1928 and 1932 and was unique in attempting to be a film studies journal where the authors were all film practitioners. The first editors were the directors Murata Minoru and Ushihara Kiyohiko. The pamphlet includes my short introduction to the project.
“Lone Wolves and Stray Dogs: The Japanese Crime Film, 1931–1969” is a continuing collaboration be... more “Lone Wolves and Stray Dogs: The Japanese Crime Film, 1931–1969” is a continuing collaboration between the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University and the National Film Center of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Ever since the success of the French crime film Zigomar in 1911, the Japanese film industry has produced numerous movies depicting criminals and the detectives who try to apprehend them. Chivalric yakuza, modern mobsters, knife-wielding molls, hardboiled gumshoes, samurai detectives, femme fatales, and private eyes populate Japanese cinema, from period films to contemporary dramas, from genre cinema to art film, from the work of genre auteurs like Makino Masahiro to masters like Kurosawa Akira. Cinematic representations of crime have served in Japan to draw the boundaries of society and the nation, define the nature of reason and epistemology, shape subjectivity and gender, explore the transformations of modernity, and even express the desire for political transformation. Surprisingly, little of this rich lode of cinema has been introduced abroad. The film series, which took place over a period of four weeks in January and February 2015, presented some of the masterworks of Japanese gangster film, detective cinema, and Japanese noir, in subtitled archive prints that have rarely been seen abroad. The series concluded with a symposium featuring an international panel of experts on Japanese crime film, and a world premiere screening of a newly struck English subtitled print of the classic gangster melodrama, Chutaro of Banba. All films were screened in 35mm with English subtitles. In conjunction with the series, the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University printed a pamphlet that features introductions to each of the ten films shown, as well as critical overviews of the genre penned by and Yomota Inuhiko (Kyoto University of Art and Design), Ōsawa Jō (The National Film Center, Tokyo) and Phil Kaffen (New York University). The publication was produced by the graduate students in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures and the Film and Media Studies Program at Yale under the supervision of Professor Aaron Gerow (East Asian Languages and Literatures; Film and Media Studies), and provides a detailed and enlightening introduction to this important genre of Japanese cinema. The film series was also supported by the Yale Film Studies Center and Films at the Whitney.
The Sword and The Screen: The Japanese Period Film 1915-1960, 2012
“The Sword And The Screen: The Japanese Period Film 1915-1960” was a groundbreaking collaboration... more “The Sword And The Screen: The Japanese Period Film 1915-1960” was a groundbreaking collaboration between the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University and the National Film Center of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, marking the first time Japan’s national film archive had co-sponsored an event with a foreign university. The film series presented rare Japanese samurai films from the collection of the National Film Center, highlighting the abundant variety of Japan's most famous film genre. There are social critiques, melodramas, comedies, ghost films and even musicals, directed by some of the masters of Japanese cinema who, in part because they worked in popular cinema, have rarely been presented abroad. The event, which took place over a period of four weeks in January and February 2012, culminated with a symposium featuring such scholars as David Desser (Emeritus, University of Illinois) and Itakura Fumiaki (Curator, National Film Center, Tokyo). In conjunction with the series, the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University produced a pamphlet that features introductions to each of the twelve films shown, as well as critical overviews of the genre penned by Desser and Itakura. The publication was produced by the graduate students in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale under the supervision of Professor Aaron Gerow (East Asian Languages and Literatures; Film and Media Studies), and provides a detailed and enlightening introduction to one of the major streams of Japanese cinema.The film series was also supported by the Whitney Humanities Center, the Film Studies Center, and the Film Studies Program at Yale University
Contributions to Books by Aaron Gerow
Theorizing Colonial Cinemas: Reframing Production, Circulation, and Consumption of Film in Asia, 2022
This chapter investigates the problem of internalization, or the colonization of the mind in rela... more This chapter investigates the problem of internalization, or the colonization of the mind in relation to colonial film culture of the Japanese Empire. Following on my earlier research on colonial-era Korean film which I argue problematizes the subjectivity open to such internalization, this chapter investigates the relation of film theory to colonization. What was the role of film theory in the imperial metropole and what valences did the film theory produced by colonial subjects bear in the empire? Such questions are complicated by the fact that Japanese film theory exhibited what I call a theory complex in which even Japanese did not recognize Japanese film theory. What was the effect on the film theory of the colonized when the theory of the colonizer itself was in a neocolonial relationship with Europe. Considering the possibility that theorizing spectatorship was one means of reflecting on the colonial theorist's own relationship to the metropole, I analyze a number of texts published in Japanese by writers in colonial Korea and the puppet state of Manchukuo, focusing in particular on articles
The Japanese Cinema Book , 2020
In this contribution to the Japanese Cinema Book, I not only review some of the major contributio... more In this contribution to the Japanese Cinema Book, I not only review some of the major contributions in the study of the first decades of Japanese film history, but also comment on how central research on early cinema was to the development of Japanese film studies, a centrality that has been lost. This is due in part to problems in recent early cinema research, but it also reflects on the field as a whole.
Reorienting Ozu: A Master and His Influence. Ed. Jinhee Choi. Oxford University Press. Pp. 45-58., 2018
Noting the often facile comparisons between Ozu Yasujiro and the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsi... more Noting the often facile comparisons between Ozu Yasujiro and the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, this article explored whether there was not a better way to relate the two filmmakers by considering the thinking of Hasumi Shigehiko, the famed film critic and university president who was a champion of both Ozu and Hou. Even if he denied any direct similarity between the two, his approach to the two reveals both how contemporary Japanese theoretical discourse articulates the cinema as well as the Ozu-qua-Hasumi context behind Hou’s reception in Japan. The article also serves as a good summary of Hasumi’s approach to cinema, which can be highly theoretical even as it resists theory.
Early Cinema in Asia. Ed. Nick Deocampo. Indiana University Press. Pp. 140-156., 2017
The article considers one of the oddities that tends to define early cinema in Japan: the fact th... more The article considers one of the oddities that tends to define early cinema in Japan: the fact that for much of the silent period, film studios only produced one print of the movies they made, even though they had technology to produce many more. In a play on one of the translations of the title of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” I ask why the Japanese film world seemed to be shunning the definition of cinema as an art of mechanical reproduction. As a form of industrial history, I put forward and test various hypotheses about the reasons for this practice, starting with the economic, but then proceeding to issues of society, politics, and culture. It is a way to start thinking about the material versus cultural determinations of Japanese cinema—or our inability to separate them.
Media Theory in Japan. Eds. Marc Steinberg and Alex Zahlten. Pp. 33–51. , 2017
If, as Lev Manovich as argued, new media often repeat older media, my essay considers how new med... more If, as Lev Manovich as argued, new media often repeat older media, my essay considers how new media theory can repeat that of older media. Focusing on one of the groundbreaking moments in development of television theory in Japan—the 1958 issue of Shisō devoted to the new medium—and in particular the ideas of its central figure, the sociologist Shimizu Ikutarō, I note how claims about television’s unique relation to the everyday forgot similar claims about cinema’s relation to the mundane made decades before by Gonda Yasunosuke and others. I argue that such forgetting functioned in part to repress the historical politics of the everyday, or more specifically, the history of media’s relationship with the everyday. In the end, the debate over the everyday was not just about which media was closer to the everyday or what constituted the mediated everyday, but also about the relation of theory to the everyday—the everydayness of theory.
Routledge Handbook of East Asian Popular Culture, eds. Koichi Iwabuchi, Chris Berry, and Eva Tsai. Pp. 86–92. , 2017
The 1990s was supposed to be the era when Japanese cinema revealed the true heterogeneity of the ... more The 1990s was supposed to be the era when Japanese cinema revealed the true heterogeneity of the archipelago’s population, exposed the porousness of its borders, and thereby opened up to the transnational flows that have challenged the long-standing myth of Japan as a homogeneous nation. Resident Korean (zainichi) directors such as Sai Yōichi (Choe Yang-il), Lee Sang-il, and Matsue Tetsuaki offered accounts of Japan’s largest minority population, while filmmakers such as Takamine G ō and Nakae Yūji explored the difference of Okinawan culture that was often suppressed in Japan’s rush to become a unified and modern nation state. Still other filmmakers, as varied as Miike Takashi, Yamamoto Masashi, Harada Masato, Zeze Takahisa, Yanagimachi Mitsuo, Iwai Shunji, and Ōtomo Katsuhiro, presented a Japan crisscrossed by transnational flows of Chinese, Pakistanis, Iranians, Brazilians, or Iranians, where multiple languages filled the soundtrack.
The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema, eds. Eds. Seung-hoon Jeong and Jeremi Szaniawski. Pp. 343–359. , 2016
In this paper, I consider Kurosawa Kiyoshi as a ghostly auteur, a different trickster behind the ... more In this paper, I consider Kurosawa Kiyoshi as a ghostly auteur, a different trickster behind the cinema who plays the doubleness of ambiguity against the singularity of meaning, and provides us with insight in how to negotiate media ecology during the supposed end of cinema and the birth of the digital age in Japan, especially against the background of Japan’s place as a nation in a globalized world. Kurosawa, I argue, uses the ghostliness of cinema to explore an ethics of looking, a reparative gaze that negotiates a space in the current geography of media and nations.
Beyond Godzilla: Alternative Futures and Fantasies in Japanese Cinema, 2016
A short history of prewar Japanese science fiction, fantasy, and special effects films, focusing ... more A short history of prewar Japanese science fiction, fantasy, and special effects films, focusing on their culturally marginal status. Tsuburaya Eiji appears as a recurring character.
Divided Lenses: Screen Memories of War in East Asia. , 2016
An article on on Yamato (Otokotachi no Yamato, 2005), Sato Jun’ya’s box office hit that was produ... more An article on on Yamato (Otokotachi no Yamato, 2005), Sato Jun’ya’s box office hit that was produced by the maverick Kadokawa Haruki about the ill-fated battleship Yamato. Taking into consideration not only the long history of films on the Yamato, but also some contemporary kamikaze war films, I argued that the film is not just reworking wartime memory for the sake present-day historical revisionism towards WWII, but that it is utilizing its own depiction of violence to create a kind of “vicarious trauma” whose main effect is a forgetting of the postwar and its own traumatic history of the Cold War.
Directory of World Cinema: Japan, Volume 3, 2015
A short analysis of the director Zeze Takahisa's work that sees in his recent moving in between i... more A short analysis of the director Zeze Takahisa's work that sees in his recent moving in between independent and mainstream cinema a mirroring of his characters, who often are liminal, hybrid figures, who inhabit spaces in between nations, ethnicities, histories, and mythologies.
The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema, 2014
This article traces the historical role of film criticism in Japan, specifically focusing on its ... more This article traces the historical role of film criticism in Japan, specifically focusing on its relation to film theory and spectatorship. Starting from the Pure Film Movement in the 1910s and continuing to the postmillennium film world, it narrates the development of two dominant tendencies, impressionist and ideological criticism, as well as the alternatives to them explored before and after the New Wave by figures such as Tsurumi Shunsuke, Ogawa Tōru, and Hasumi Shigehiko. In this history, film criticism has functioned less to represent film reception than to serve as a site for struggle over the nature of spectatorship. But it is its inadequate relation to theory, especially its lack of self-critical awareness of its own role, the article argues, that has left it ineffective in responding to the decline of criticism in the age of new media.
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Books by Aaron Gerow
The volume is 746 pages in length with over 65 selections from over 50 authors. It covers writings on cinema before 1945, and is divided into 13 chapters, covering a variety of topics such as early cinema, sound, montage, machine art, Marxism, criticism, audiences, animation, Japanese film, psychology, time and the frame, and nation. Each chapter has its own commentary, and features four to six pieces, each piece accompanied by a specially written commentary.
The excerpt features the table of contents, plus the the introduction and the commentary for chapter one that I wrote.
This book is the first all-embracing guide ever published for approaching the complex archive for Japanese cinema. It lists all the libraries and film archives in the world with significant collections of film prints, still photographs, archival records, books, and periodicals. It provides a comprehensive, annotated bibliography of the core books and magazines for the field. And it supplies hints for how to find and access materials for any research project. Above and beyond that, Nornes and Gerow’s Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies constitutes a comprehensive overview of the impressive dimensions and depth of the print culture surrounding Japanese film, and a guideline for future research in the field. This is an essential book for anyone seriously thinking about Japan and its cinema.
But is this film really what it seems to be? Using meticulous research on the film’s production, distribution, exhibition, and reception, as well as close analysis of the film’s shooting script (which is not the script currently attributed to Kawabata) and shooting notes recently made available, Aaron Gerow draws a new picture of this complex work, one revealing a film divided between experiment and convention, modernism and melodrama, the image and the word, cinema and literature, conflicts that play out in the story and structure of the film and its context. These different versions of A Page of Madness were developed at the time in varying interpretations of a film fundamentally about differing perceptions and conflicting worlds, and ironically realized in the fact that the film that exists today is not the one originally released. Including a detailed analysis of the film and translations of contemporary reviews and shooting notes for scenes missing from the current print, Gerow’s book offers provocative insight into the fascinating film A Page of Madness was - and still is - and into the struggles over this work that tried to articulate the place of cinema in Japanese society and modernity.
Pamphlets by Aaron Gerow
Contributions to Books by Aaron Gerow