Слово — плод
Это отрывок из книги Masao Miyoshi "Off center: power and culture relations between Japan and the United States" (вчера специально ездила за ней в библиотеку). Если кто-нибудь захочет помочь с переводом, будет здорово - потому что я, конечно, попробую, но промт и то справится лучше.
Japanese Prisoner of War WardensJapanese Prisoner of War Wardens
The consideration of three films, British, American, and Japanese — David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun (1987), and Oshima Nagisa's Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) — and their similarities and dissimilarities in the representation of the Other, may throw light on the Japanese consciousness of alterity. These three movies are thematically identical: they are all stories of Westerners in Japanese prisoner of war camps, in which the authoritarian and inhuman Japanese captors brutalize the powerless but resourceful white prisoners. They are set in closed-off spaces controlled by the Japanese army; the camps are located in the Western colonies of Burma, Shanghai, and Java, respectively. They depict interracial, intercultural contacts — or even understandings and alliances — though in varying modes and degrees. The majority of the characters are military figures, although the principal roles in Empire of the Sun are given to civilians, one English boy in particular. I will go over the British and American films quickly, since they will mainly provide a context for Oshima's film.
The Bridge on the River Kwai, the oldest of the three, depicts a company of British soldiers under the command of a British colonel in a POW camp directed by a Japanese colonel. On both sides, the commanders tower in significance over their subordinates. There are a few other officers, but they merely serve as commentators. The plot is, briefly, as follows: The Japanese try to use the British officers to build a strategic railroad bridge, which however is impossible because the Japanese lack engineering skills and the British refuse to submit to the enemy's will. The struggle is soon embodied in the persons of the two colonels — one proud, Japanese, and therefore aesthetic and unskilled; the other proud, British, and therefore practical and competent. A peculiar understanding is established between the two eventually: the bridge will be built, because the Japanese need it for a logistic purpose, and because the British need it in order to demonstrate their superior engineering skills and reaffirm their imperial prerogatives as a colonizing power. Power is at the heart of the two colonels' conflict, but even this struggle is soon so internalized as to render the British-Japanese rivalry forgotten. Colonel Nicolson's strife-ridden interior (as acted by Alec Guinness) gradually replaces the external battlefield: he must assert his, Britain's, and the West's supremacy, and to accomplish that mission all other concerns and persons must be overpowered. In other words, The Bridge on the River Kwai has only one side to present. The Japanese colonel and the Allied officers prove to be no more than stage props, just as the whole encounter between two armies and two cultures is in fact a shadow-boxing in which no Japanese ever participates. In this self-filled and Other-absent world, a bridge is built, but before a train can cross it, the bridge is blown up by the master builder himself. As it shatters to smithereens, nearly everyone is killed, friend and foe alike. In a much later film, David Lean reexamines E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1984) and concludes somewhat more wistfully than did the novelist that the bridge to the Orient is still unbuildable. I wonder if for over twenty years Lean hasn't been simply rebuilding the same bridge that merely connects one side with itself. (I might add that the Burmese population in The Bridge on the River Kwai is represented mainly by lovely women whose sole mission in the film is to turn Jack Hawkins/William Holden's dangerous commando assignment into an idyllic sex picnic.)
One of the most striking features of Empire of the Sun is the way it, too, erases the local people — in this case, Chinese — from its drama. The masses and masses of people constitute merely the background against which something really important is presumably taking place. What is this event that obviously involves but categorically ignores the existence of the Shanghai people? It is an English boy's survival in alien city streets and then in a Japanese prison camp, having been separated from his wealthy colonial parents in the confusion of the Japanese invasion. During his struggle, he encounters a Japanese boy of the same age who — like himself — loves aviation and airplanes. A quiet friendship grows between the sons of the two colonial functionaries. Just as the Japanese army is facing defeat, the Japanese boy is shot to death by an American who misunderstands his movement beside the English boy. Their friendship, which had developed by ignoring the incomprehensible grown-ups' war, is destroyed by the same uncomprehending grown-ups. At the end the only way the English boy can greet any stranger is to repeat, "I surrender."
The film romanticizes the friendship of children from warring imperialist countries. In so doing, it sets aside the possibility of mature cultural encounter, as if it were too remote to be considered seriously. In two memorable scenes, the English boy bicycles around and around in a frenzy — the first time inside the deserted mansion of his parents, and the second time in the camp, also completely deserted — as if he were trapped inside the escapeless prison by his absent parents and absent grown-ups. The Japanese boy, too, seems always abandoned to play by himself. In Empire of the Sun, the colonized natives just do not enter the picture. As they press themselves against the windows of a Rolls-Royce, these colonized poor seem to see only a privileged group of whites who inhabit a totally different dimension. And as the English family inside the Rolls-Royce cannot be concerned with the staring eyes of the unknowable outsiders, so Spielberg's camera is oblivious to the interiors of the Chinese people. The empires of the sun are built, one realizes', in a discriminatory political space that unflinchingly excludes the alien Other (примеч. 1).
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, a Japanese film, is sharply different from those by Lean and Spielberg in several significant aspects, and such variances might indeed offer us a clue to the current, nearly unanimous silence in Japan. Although all three films are based on English-language novels, The Bridge and Empire were both written and directed by Westerners who belong to the same side of the schism from which the films presumably gaze across at the non-West. Merry Christmas, on the other hand, based on a novel (actually two works that were later published under one title), The Seed and the Sower, by South African-British writer Laurens van der Post, was directed by Oshima Nagisa, a Japanese. Van der Post, who was born in South Africa, had lived in Japan before he joined the British army and was held captive in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Indonesia until 1945 (примеч. 2). Thus the fiction writer's perspective and the film director's would seem to conflict; but Oshima loves to confront conflicts. He cast in the two principal roles rock idols of England and Japan, David Bowie and Sakamoto Ryuichi, who were both extremely good-looking, not a little androgynous, and inexperienced in film acting, as if the introduction of the similarly different and the similarly unfamiliar were a meaning in itself. The film's crew, too, came from several nations, including New Zealand, the United States, Japan, and Britain (примеч. 3). This assortment of backgrounds is unusual in any film, but particularly for the normally homogeneous Japanese picture.
According to Oshima, he read The Seed and the Sower in 1978 and completed the film in 1983 (примеч. 4). He seems to believe that the film represents the novel accurately. Although there is no reason that he should be any more inhibited in his interpretation of the source materials than any other filmmaker, the film and the novel are, of course, different. In what way does this Japanese film depart from the South African novel — aside from the obviously different features between a written novel and an audio-visual motion picture as media of representation? How do the two works intersect within the context of intercultural encounter?
The Seed and the Sower (1963) consists of three more or less discrete tales loosely connected around the main narrator (the unidentified and authorial "I") and a Colonel John Lawrence, his comrade during the Pacific War. The three parts were not written and published together originally, and in spite of the evident efforts to cement them together, they clearly remain disparate. Part I, called "Christmas Eve," is followed by "Christmas Morning" and "Christmas Night." Van der Post's emphasis on Christmas is perhaps an afterthought, since the holiday is intrinsic only to the first story, published years earlier than the subsequent parts. It is likely that the author tried to give the impression of coherence to the three separate tales by placing them all in one Christmas setting where the storytelling takes place. The emphatic Christian theme in Parts II and III may also be attributable to the same circumstance (примеч. 5).
The first part was originally published under the title "A Bar of Shadow" (published in The Cornhill) (примеч. 6). The story is told by the "I," whom Colonel Lawrence visits for Christmas. The two men reminisce about their Japanese POW experience, and Lawrence tells a timely Christmas story that is more or less identical with the Colonel Lawrence and Sergeant Hara episode in the film. Lawrence is released one Christmas by the brutal noncommissioned officer Hara from an isolation cell while waiting for execution. For some reason Hara seems to believe that Christmas is an important occasion for everyone, even non-Christians. The Hara of the story matches the movie representation in general with his supposedly samurai code of behavior — that is, cruel and inhuman, but in his own way decent. At the end of the war, Hara is arrested to be tried before the War Crimes Tribunals. Lawrence pleads for him, but without success. As in the film version, Hara sends for Lawrence on the eve of his execution, and their last conversation ends with Hara shouting to Lawrence, "Merry Kurisumasu, Rorensu-san."
This part is told entirely from Lawrence's point of view, and the "I" merely listens. The narrative situation is often awkward, revealing at various points that Colonel John Lawrence, the "I," and Colonel Laurens Van der Post are barely distinguishable. The story of Hara and John Lawrence is complete in itself, not involving Major Jacques Celliers and Captain Yonoi, who are the principal characters of Merry Christmas as a whole. Very much like Van der Post in his nonfictional work on Japan (примеч. 7), Colonel Lawrence is full of theories about his enemy country and its people. Hara as he sees him is "faithful and responsive to all the imperceptible murmurings of Japan's archaic and submerged racial soul" (p. 16). Hara can't help himself, according to Lawrence, because "it is not he but an act of Japanese gods in him" (pp. 17-18). The "moon-swung" Hara and his countrymen are "still deeply submerged like animals, insects and plants. . . . They [are] subject to cosmic rhythm and movement and ruled by cosmic forces beyond their control to an extent undreamt of in the European mind and philosophy" (pp. 21-22). So goes the Lawrentian anthropology, which quite obviously receives Laurens Van der Post's fullest endorsement.
The next part of Van der Posts book, "Christmas Morning," contains nearly all the major components of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, except for the Hara story. The nameless "I," who was the listener in Part I, is now the storyteller, filling in the earlier life of Jacques Celliers. Actually, the story, told via a bundle of notes left by Celliers to the narrator, is a confession of his betrayals of his younger brother in South Africa. It recalls the similar device used in Conrad's Lord Jim, which Merry Christmas in many ways resembles. While in the film Celliers' acts of betrayal, described in a series of flashbacks, seem irrelevant to the main story, in the novel it is quite clear that Celliers' bravery and heroism in a remote colony would redeem the earlier betrayals, again very much as in Lord Jim (примеч. 8). The memoir lasts for four chapters, more than a third of the whole book; its is radically shortened in Oshima's film.
The second part of the novel returns to Celliers' pre-incarceration career. There is a good deal of religiosity in this part, which Oshima more or less erases from his rendition (примеч. 9). Also, of Van der Post's South African background — he has been a liberal anti-apartheid activist — no trace is left in the movie. On the other hand, several episodes — such as a Korean guard's rape of a Dutch soldier; Hara's decapitation of the guard (примеч. 10); Yonoi's sword practice; Celliers' numerous defiant acts such as smuggling in a shoitwave radio, distributing food among his fellow prisoners, and attempting escape; and many details that powerfully suggest homoerotic tension among the two male couples — are new additions in the film. Celliers' reckless act of kissing the Japanese captain before the entire Japanese and British companies, his subsequent punishment by being buried alive, and Captain Yonoi's clipping of Celliers' hair, the film's climactic events, survive from the novel. In both versions, the officers from the upper classes are depicted — without any self-consciousness or criticism — as more poised, sensitive, and intelligent than those from the lower classes. There is no explicit scene of mutual attraction between Celliers and Yonoi either in Van der Post's version or in Oshima's, but there is a discernible difference in the modes of representation. In the film, the Japanese officer is hopelessly infatuated with Celliers, who remains almost completely indifferent. In the novel, however, Celliers is very much aware of the effects of his good looks on the Japanese officer — in fact, this self-awareness is presented as deeply enmeshed with his sense of guilt over the betrayal of his physically unattractive but spiritually gifted younger brother (примеч. 11). Oshima seems intent to present the Japanese-English relationship as more one-sided than in the novel.
The third part of The Seed and the Sower describes Colonel Lawrence's encounter with a young Englishwoman. The romantic story in which the two fall in love under the threat of Japanese invasion is compressed in Oshima's hand into a verbal (unimaged) reference lasting only a few minutes — an element that is quite superfluous even at its brief length. Merry Christmas, it seems, tries hard to retain much of the novel, with the result that several of its episodes are not only irrelevant but unintelligible.
In addition to the confusing narrative situation, Van der Post's various themes refuse to intersect. Encounter with the alien Other is the most pronounced concern in the Lawrence-Нага episode; the conventional moral motif of betrayal and redemption dominates in the Jacques Celliers portion; the Celliers-Yonoi affair is an intensification of the male bonding that is always implicit in any war story; the heterosexual and ethnically homogenous romance in the last part offers an apology, so to speak, for the exclusion of the female from the rest of the book. In fact, gender politics is carried into the narrative framework itself in the quarrel between the narrator's wife and Colonel Lawrence about the propriety of a sword and a doll as Christmas gifts for a boy and a girl. (The book ends — rather inexplicably — with the critically aware wife accepting Lawrence's and her husband's sexist views.) These components are placed in discrete sections and parts that neither suggest an integral meaning nor interact as fragments.
Oshima's job was to devise a film out of these materials. First, he eliminates the narrative frame, together with its placement on Christmas years after the event. There is no equivalent of the "I" or his wife, thus also removing the concern with feminism or, simply, women. Merry Christmas is self-consciously male and homosexual both in intention and execution. For this purpose the removal of the "I" (who is absorbed into the character of Colonel Lawrence) is both necessary and successful. Instead of the two pairs (Hara and Lawrence, Yonoi and Celliers) being observed by the "I" or described to him, the film audience is directly introduced to them, in their pairings and in occasional criss-crossings between Hara and Celliers, Yonoi and Lawrence. This male concentration is complicated further by Oshima's invention of the rape of a Dutch prisoner by a Korean soldier, an episode expanding the context of the central pairs. The most physical relationship between the Korean and the Dutch soldier lines up with the largely unconscious intimacy between Hara and Lawrence, and finally with the self-conscious Yonoi-Celliers affair. Oshima seems intent to provide a complement to his two immediately preceding films, Empire of Passion and In the Realm of the Senses, in which he tried to make sexuality overwhelm pornography. To present eroticism in homosexuality before a presumably heterosexual audience, and to have homosexuality represent friendship and love in general, and finally to prove that love and friendship are possible between enemies are among the objectives of this film, according to Oshima (примеч. 12).
Merry Christmas in this sense is another experiment by Oshima in perception and representation of the strange Other. He offered in an interview that Van der Post's novel had intrigued him because he thought its representation of the Japanese was "remarkably good" and wondered what it might be like to reexamine the foreign representation of the Japanese (примеч. 13). When asked for his opinion of Van der Post's ambivalent representation of the Japanese, he said that perhaps the present generation of Japanese would take the vantage point of Colonel Lawrence, although he himself would be a Yonoi or a Celliers, a soldier committed to his own side. He also said that "although he might take an objective viewpoint like Colonel Lawrence's, he himself could empathize ["kanjo inyu dekimasu" — as a Japanese?] with Yonoi and Hara" (p. 417). What is interesting about this confusing exchange is that Oshima seems to believe that Lawrence — and by extension Van der Post — is not a partisan but a disinterested observer who can see the Japanese in the true light.
Oshima published a book titled I Answer! (Kotaeru!, 1983) that collects in self-celebration all the positive and enthusiastic reviews and comments the movie received while he went on a promotion tour to England and the United States. This book includes quotations from interviews in which he makes self-promoting remarks about the movie; it also approvingly quotes numerous brief mentions of the film that appeared in British and American publications. Throughout he insists that the film's representation of the Japanese is accurate. In support, the European and American views of the film are accepted as the final word on the film by its maker, just as Van der Post's novel is accepted as the accurate representation of the Japanese. And therein lies the clue to Oshima's interpretation of the Japanese, which many intellectuals of Japan seem to share with him.
Let me reflect on Oshima's career for a moment. During the sixties he made a number of political films. One of his preoccupations in them was the racial conditions of Japan. The Catch (Shiiku), based on Oe Kenzaburo's wartime story, depicts a black American flier who parachutes from a bomber only to be captured by country villagers. The villagers keep him alive but blame him for all the trouble that befalls them; they finally slaughter him just as Japan is about to surrender. The film presents people's greed and stupidity, which their children clearly see through. Oshima also made The Forgotten Army for television, which treats disabled Korean veterans of the Japanese imperial army who are abandoned by both the Japanese and the Korean governments and are now reduced to panhandling on the streets. Perhaps the best known in this category is Death by Hanging, based on a true story of a Korean boy who passed for a Japanese until the life of deprived identity and welfare led him to murder two Japanese women in an act of rage and revenge. The boy ruthlessly analyzes the relations between race, sex, crime, law, and death. Throughout, Oshima is determined to locate himself in the place of the Other and to look back at himself, the Japanese, and their complicity in the boy's murder of the women as well as in the legal execution of the boy (примеч. 14).
Merry Christmas is a continuation of this program of recognizing and representing the Other. In contrast to The Bridge on the River Kwai and Empire of the Sun, it stares at the enemies without absorbing them into their self-reflection. Whereas Oshima's earlier films look at Japan and the Japanese from the viewpoint of the victims of racism, Merry Christmas observes them from the vantage point of the white prisoners of war. Oshima seems to regard racial minorities and prisoners alike simply as victims of Japanese control and brutality. Furthermore, Oshima's acceptance of Colonel Lawrence, a.k.a. Sir Laurens Van der Post, as an authority on Japanese people and culture is so uncritical and unexamined that one cannot but conclude that he is unconcerned with the fundamental difference between the victimization of Asians and the brutalization of British prisoners of war.
Quite obviously I am not excusing the latter atrocity, which is as damnable as any other. Japan's imperialism in Asia, however, plays a more structurally constitutive part in world history and requires a different dimension of argument. Let me simply refer back to Japan's experience of the Western imperialist threat in the nineteenth century. As has been discussed earlier, the country's answer to this threat was to utilize maximally the ideology of emperorism to centralize and "homogenize" its people domestically, to assert their uniqueness at home and abroad, and at the same time to represent them as an equal to the "advanced" peoples. Japanese nationalism sought to coerce internal agreement and loyalty. To the extent that Japanese nationalism was a response to Western aggression and domination, and strictly to that extent, Japan's aspiration was understandable — if not laudable — like many other decolonization attempts. The fundamental problematic of Japanese liberationism, however, was that unlike Pan-Arab nationalism, Pan-African nationalism, or any other independence movement, it immediately inverted, or perverted, the program into its own colonialism and imperialism, and initiated its own agenda of aggression and suppression in the Pacific islands and continental Asia as well as at home. It was a semicolonized country attempting to colonize others without a dominant metropolitan culture. During the process, Japan desperately needed legitimation of its claims by the "advanced" nations. Its cultural exceptionalism, for instance, is a logical extension of a strategy to place itself outside the categories of both "advanced" nations and "underdeveloped" nations. And despite its economic leap into a high-growth phase twenty years ago, this cultural self-consciousness has remained unchanged to this very day. As far as the Indonesians are concerned, Oshima, too, evacuates them from Merry Christmas: there is not a single Javanese character in it. The film's background music, which apparently is meant to suggest the native presence, was entirely composed by Sakamoto Ryuichi (who plays Captain Yonoi). The supposed Javanese music is a synthesized gamelan whose New Age simulation placed against a rock rhythm is an insult to the highly sophisticated Javanese music — insofar as the film attempts to represent the encounter of cultures.
Oshima has known all along the absurdity of Japan's exceptionalism. Thus he has been consistent in objecting to the discrimination against Koreans and other minorities on the basis of difference. At the same time, his concern with the minorities in Japan was humanitarian, that they be regarded and treated equally and identically with the Japanese. His idea of social structure did not suggest the reality and desirability of heterogeneity, but the equal absorption of all into an assimilated and homogenized Japanese nation, which is after all no more than an imaginary. Exactly in the same fashion, humanity means for Oshima that of the modern West, Europe in particular, which supposedly embodies "common humanity" ("jinrui kyotsu," Kotaeru!, p. 177). Oshima may have intended to pursue in Merry Christmas the fundamental ambivalence the Japanese feel toward the West — love and envy pitched against hatred and contempt — and its disastrous outcome in the last war (Sato, Oshima Nagisa, p. 415), but his own resolution seems to accept the hegemonic and hierarchic view that would rank nations and races on a scale of progress and development. He displays an unconcealed aspiration and admiration for Europe and the Europeans. This is the only way to explain Oshima's unembarrassed infatuation with David Bowie's white skin, blond hair, and blue eyes (called "God's gifts," "to be born so beautiful" — "kami no medeshi hito," "annani utsukushiku umarete kite"; Sato, Oshima Nagisa, p. 427) which Oshima ecstatically exclaims as he reminisces about his collaboration during the film's production in New Zealand.
The one puzzle that remains unsolved is the question of the film's intended audience. Does the film require particular familiarity with both societies? Does Oshima as a grand container of cultural differences understand the effects of particular scenes and images on different viewers? Is a Canadian, not to say an Egyptian or a Hungarian, audience supposed to know what Yonoi means when he refers to the February 26, 1936, army insurrection in Tokyo? For another instance, when the same captain mumbles in the courtroom scene "To be or not to be, that is the question," the audience in the theater where I sat in Berkeley, California, responded with a ripple of embarrassed giggles (примеч. 15). (Cultural literacy!) Was the laughter calculated? To what effect? Oshima says in a recent article that his films are no longer for the Japanese (who have ceased to invest money in such risky ventures) but for an "international audience." What does this internationality mean precisely? In 1986 Oshima made Max, топ amour with a French producer, in which a French actress sleeps with a chimpanzee, and the film's effects seem to hinge on her English husband's response to the menage a trois. It is a completely French film without a trace of Japanese life. Is this the final destination of Oshima's search for Otherness? (примеч. 16)
Unlike the visitor to San Diego, who needed to travel to Paris to discover alterity, Oshima earlier saw Koreans and other Asians for what they are. And yet when he became engaged in the program to represent the Japanese, he had to fall back on a European observer for an interpretation. Thus while his earlier films powerfully '.ndicted all Japanese for the act of exclusion and discrimination, Merry Christmas, his first big-budget, big-name production, almost eagerly participates in European hegemonism (примеч. 17). Oshima the lifelong rebel has finally rebelled his way into intercultural agreement.
This is a parody of James Clifford's by-now-famous episode in which an ethnographer visiting Gabon asks for information about the meaning of a ritual term. In the story, the native chief runs back into his home and consults a sacred book, which turns out to be a work by an earlier visitor-ethnologist (примеч. 18). Oshima is the tribal chief here reading from Raponda-Walker/Laurens Van der Post, offering their representation as authentic. By accepting the international consensus concerning the world's center and its margins, he tries to join that center itself. Very much like Oshima's own reminder in Death by Hanging, the charge of "anata mo, anata mo, anata mo" (and you too, and you too, and you too) must now be directed to Oshima himself (примеч. 19). He must be indicted for his complicity in agreeing to the dominant. He may not have openly endorsed emperorism yet, but he certainly has embraced the universality of Christmas and the hegemony of the West. As the emperor sits at the center of Japan, so does the West preeminently preside over the affairs of the world — in the consciousness of the Japanese. Centrality demands agreement. Thus our own way out seems simply to insist on challenging that agreement. In today's Japan at least, disagreement is the only way toward the recovery of dialogue and argument, without which no serious and meaningful agreement can possibly be found.
ПримечанияПримечания:
1. As I looked for a film made by the Chinese or other Asians about a Japanese prison camp, I found that in 1989 a PRC-Hong Kong joint company produced a film titled The Black Sun: Unit 731. It is based on the notorious "Unit 731," an actual Japanese army division organized specifically to conduct biological "experimentations" on human subjects — mostly captured enemy soldiers and civilians — during the Fifteen-Year War. The film depicts the brutalities and atrocities in such sensational detail that at least this viewer was unable to sit through it. The acts of inhuman violence by the medical unit are historically "accurate," and the Chinese filmmakers' hatred is perfectly understandable. But unless the film was made for the purpose of revenge directed solely at a Japanese audience, its effect is sheer exploitation. The Japanese soldiers in the film are nothing more than sadistic brutes.
2. John Wakeman. ed., World Authors: 1950-1970 (New York: Wilson, 1975).
3. Sato Tadao, Oshima Nagisa no sekai (Tokyo: Asahi Bunko, 1987), p. 409.
4. Oshima Nagisa, Kotaeru! (/ Answer!) (Tokyo: Dagereo Shuppan, 1983), p. 8.
5. Laurens Van der Post, The Seed and the Sower (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1963).
6. Published first in 1954, it was incorporated into The Seed and the Sower in 1963. It was reissued as a book by The Hogarth Press in 1972.
7. See his ponderous and banal The Prisoner and the Bomb (New York: William Morrow, 1971), publisned in Britain under the title of The Night of the New Moon. Van der Post equates Japanese brutality in the treatment of prisoners of war with the American devastation by atomic bombs. But the problem of the book is not so much its wrong ideas as its self-important air.
8. I do not mean that Merry Christmas is as pregnant with possibilities as Lord Jim. But Van der Post has, it seems to me, obviously read Conrad. Aside from the novels' locations, the two share a great deal in form. Marlowe. Lord Jim's narrator, receives a bundle of papers by and about Jim after he returns to London, for instance. Even the last scene, in which Jim walks up to face his death, is not unlike Celliers* fully conscious act of self-destruction. Lord Jim's spotless snow-white dress and Jacques Celliers' pure white-blond appearance have a great deal in common, too, in their colonialist "difference" from the Asian natives. I suspect that it is precisely what attracted Oshima Nagisa.
9. In a special issue of Wide Angle devoted to Oshima Nagisa (Vol. 9, No. 2, 1987), Adam Knee argues that Celliers is a "Christ figure" (p. 58). There is nothing wrong with the idea, since I suppose Christ is meant to stand for — and died for — everyone. But Knee might have thought a little bit more about why Oshima wanted to introduce Jesus into his film. See note 33, Chapter 4.
10. Van der Post asserts repeatedly that the Korean members of the Japanese army were more brutal and fanatic (The Seed and the Sower, p. 140; The Prisoner and the Bomb, p. 138, e.g.) without any further explanation. This is likely to be Van der Post's adoption of general anti-Korean feelings from the Japanese. Oshima's addition of this episode, where the Dutch victim does not complain and even goes to the extent of killing himself after the Korean's execution, seems to suggest Oshima's sympathy with the Koreans in general. The "rape" here is a consensual relationship comparable to the principal liaisons of Yonoi and Celliers, Hara and Lawrence.
11. Van der Post seems more interested in the two brothers, one spiritual and the other physical, both beautiful in different ways, than in the two officers, one white and the other yellow, both beautiful, getting together somehow in the battlefield. The theme of betrayal and redemption is more conspicuous in The Seed and the Sower than in the film. Oshima seems to be more interested in reading it as a story of cross-cultural and interracial encounter.
12. Kotaeru!, pp. 26-27.
13. Interview with Sato Tadao, Oshima Nagisa, p. 416.
14. Oshima published a number of books explaining his films and the problems he faced in them. Among them are Sengo eiga: Hakai to sozo (Tokyo: Sanichi Shobo, 1963), Ma to zankoku no hasso (Tokyo: Haga Shoten, 1966), and Taiken teki sengo eizo ron (Tokyo: Asahi Sensho, 1975).
15. The quotation is Oshima's addition; it is not in Van der Post's text.
16. In an article called "Nihon eiga no tembo" ("The Prospect of the Japanese Film") that concludes an eight-volume study of the Japanese film, Nikon no eiga (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1985-88), Oshima Nagisa declares the end of the Japanese film. As for the future, he proposes ■internationalization.*' "A society or a race can maintain homogeneity until the wind of modernization begins to blow. Modernization is at the same time internationalization" (Vol. 8. 1988, p. 318). Are Max, топ amour as well as Merry Christmas his models for this internationalization? (Nihon no eiga was co-edited by Imamura Shohei. Sato Tadao, Shindo Kane hi to. Tsurumi Shunsuke, and Yamada Yoji.)
17. The budget for the film was six million dollars (Kotaeru!. p. 37). while his earlier films cost far less. The famed Ceremony (Gishiki, 197I). for instance, was the most expensive movie Oshima had made, but its budget was 20 million yen ($50,000). His Town of Love and Hope (Ai to kibo no machi. 1959). according to Oshima. cost 10 million yen ($30.000 at the exchange rate of the time). Taiken teki sengo eizo ron (Tokyo: Asahi Sensho, 1975), p. 292.
18. "On Ethnographic Allegory," Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), p. 116.
19. See Stephen Heath's reading of Death by Hanging in his Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1981), pp. 64-69.
Japanese Prisoner of War WardensJapanese Prisoner of War Wardens
The consideration of three films, British, American, and Japanese — David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun (1987), and Oshima Nagisa's Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) — and their similarities and dissimilarities in the representation of the Other, may throw light on the Japanese consciousness of alterity. These three movies are thematically identical: they are all stories of Westerners in Japanese prisoner of war camps, in which the authoritarian and inhuman Japanese captors brutalize the powerless but resourceful white prisoners. They are set in closed-off spaces controlled by the Japanese army; the camps are located in the Western colonies of Burma, Shanghai, and Java, respectively. They depict interracial, intercultural contacts — or even understandings and alliances — though in varying modes and degrees. The majority of the characters are military figures, although the principal roles in Empire of the Sun are given to civilians, one English boy in particular. I will go over the British and American films quickly, since they will mainly provide a context for Oshima's film.
The Bridge on the River Kwai, the oldest of the three, depicts a company of British soldiers under the command of a British colonel in a POW camp directed by a Japanese colonel. On both sides, the commanders tower in significance over their subordinates. There are a few other officers, but they merely serve as commentators. The plot is, briefly, as follows: The Japanese try to use the British officers to build a strategic railroad bridge, which however is impossible because the Japanese lack engineering skills and the British refuse to submit to the enemy's will. The struggle is soon embodied in the persons of the two colonels — one proud, Japanese, and therefore aesthetic and unskilled; the other proud, British, and therefore practical and competent. A peculiar understanding is established between the two eventually: the bridge will be built, because the Japanese need it for a logistic purpose, and because the British need it in order to demonstrate their superior engineering skills and reaffirm their imperial prerogatives as a colonizing power. Power is at the heart of the two colonels' conflict, but even this struggle is soon so internalized as to render the British-Japanese rivalry forgotten. Colonel Nicolson's strife-ridden interior (as acted by Alec Guinness) gradually replaces the external battlefield: he must assert his, Britain's, and the West's supremacy, and to accomplish that mission all other concerns and persons must be overpowered. In other words, The Bridge on the River Kwai has only one side to present. The Japanese colonel and the Allied officers prove to be no more than stage props, just as the whole encounter between two armies and two cultures is in fact a shadow-boxing in which no Japanese ever participates. In this self-filled and Other-absent world, a bridge is built, but before a train can cross it, the bridge is blown up by the master builder himself. As it shatters to smithereens, nearly everyone is killed, friend and foe alike. In a much later film, David Lean reexamines E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1984) and concludes somewhat more wistfully than did the novelist that the bridge to the Orient is still unbuildable. I wonder if for over twenty years Lean hasn't been simply rebuilding the same bridge that merely connects one side with itself. (I might add that the Burmese population in The Bridge on the River Kwai is represented mainly by lovely women whose sole mission in the film is to turn Jack Hawkins/William Holden's dangerous commando assignment into an idyllic sex picnic.)
One of the most striking features of Empire of the Sun is the way it, too, erases the local people — in this case, Chinese — from its drama. The masses and masses of people constitute merely the background against which something really important is presumably taking place. What is this event that obviously involves but categorically ignores the existence of the Shanghai people? It is an English boy's survival in alien city streets and then in a Japanese prison camp, having been separated from his wealthy colonial parents in the confusion of the Japanese invasion. During his struggle, he encounters a Japanese boy of the same age who — like himself — loves aviation and airplanes. A quiet friendship grows between the sons of the two colonial functionaries. Just as the Japanese army is facing defeat, the Japanese boy is shot to death by an American who misunderstands his movement beside the English boy. Their friendship, which had developed by ignoring the incomprehensible grown-ups' war, is destroyed by the same uncomprehending grown-ups. At the end the only way the English boy can greet any stranger is to repeat, "I surrender."
The film romanticizes the friendship of children from warring imperialist countries. In so doing, it sets aside the possibility of mature cultural encounter, as if it were too remote to be considered seriously. In two memorable scenes, the English boy bicycles around and around in a frenzy — the first time inside the deserted mansion of his parents, and the second time in the camp, also completely deserted — as if he were trapped inside the escapeless prison by his absent parents and absent grown-ups. The Japanese boy, too, seems always abandoned to play by himself. In Empire of the Sun, the colonized natives just do not enter the picture. As they press themselves against the windows of a Rolls-Royce, these colonized poor seem to see only a privileged group of whites who inhabit a totally different dimension. And as the English family inside the Rolls-Royce cannot be concerned with the staring eyes of the unknowable outsiders, so Spielberg's camera is oblivious to the interiors of the Chinese people. The empires of the sun are built, one realizes', in a discriminatory political space that unflinchingly excludes the alien Other (примеч. 1).
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, a Japanese film, is sharply different from those by Lean and Spielberg in several significant aspects, and such variances might indeed offer us a clue to the current, nearly unanimous silence in Japan. Although all three films are based on English-language novels, The Bridge and Empire were both written and directed by Westerners who belong to the same side of the schism from which the films presumably gaze across at the non-West. Merry Christmas, on the other hand, based on a novel (actually two works that were later published under one title), The Seed and the Sower, by South African-British writer Laurens van der Post, was directed by Oshima Nagisa, a Japanese. Van der Post, who was born in South Africa, had lived in Japan before he joined the British army and was held captive in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Indonesia until 1945 (примеч. 2). Thus the fiction writer's perspective and the film director's would seem to conflict; but Oshima loves to confront conflicts. He cast in the two principal roles rock idols of England and Japan, David Bowie and Sakamoto Ryuichi, who were both extremely good-looking, not a little androgynous, and inexperienced in film acting, as if the introduction of the similarly different and the similarly unfamiliar were a meaning in itself. The film's crew, too, came from several nations, including New Zealand, the United States, Japan, and Britain (примеч. 3). This assortment of backgrounds is unusual in any film, but particularly for the normally homogeneous Japanese picture.
According to Oshima, he read The Seed and the Sower in 1978 and completed the film in 1983 (примеч. 4). He seems to believe that the film represents the novel accurately. Although there is no reason that he should be any more inhibited in his interpretation of the source materials than any other filmmaker, the film and the novel are, of course, different. In what way does this Japanese film depart from the South African novel — aside from the obviously different features between a written novel and an audio-visual motion picture as media of representation? How do the two works intersect within the context of intercultural encounter?
The Seed and the Sower (1963) consists of three more or less discrete tales loosely connected around the main narrator (the unidentified and authorial "I") and a Colonel John Lawrence, his comrade during the Pacific War. The three parts were not written and published together originally, and in spite of the evident efforts to cement them together, they clearly remain disparate. Part I, called "Christmas Eve," is followed by "Christmas Morning" and "Christmas Night." Van der Post's emphasis on Christmas is perhaps an afterthought, since the holiday is intrinsic only to the first story, published years earlier than the subsequent parts. It is likely that the author tried to give the impression of coherence to the three separate tales by placing them all in one Christmas setting where the storytelling takes place. The emphatic Christian theme in Parts II and III may also be attributable to the same circumstance (примеч. 5).
The first part was originally published under the title "A Bar of Shadow" (published in The Cornhill) (примеч. 6). The story is told by the "I," whom Colonel Lawrence visits for Christmas. The two men reminisce about their Japanese POW experience, and Lawrence tells a timely Christmas story that is more or less identical with the Colonel Lawrence and Sergeant Hara episode in the film. Lawrence is released one Christmas by the brutal noncommissioned officer Hara from an isolation cell while waiting for execution. For some reason Hara seems to believe that Christmas is an important occasion for everyone, even non-Christians. The Hara of the story matches the movie representation in general with his supposedly samurai code of behavior — that is, cruel and inhuman, but in his own way decent. At the end of the war, Hara is arrested to be tried before the War Crimes Tribunals. Lawrence pleads for him, but without success. As in the film version, Hara sends for Lawrence on the eve of his execution, and their last conversation ends with Hara shouting to Lawrence, "Merry Kurisumasu, Rorensu-san."
This part is told entirely from Lawrence's point of view, and the "I" merely listens. The narrative situation is often awkward, revealing at various points that Colonel John Lawrence, the "I," and Colonel Laurens Van der Post are barely distinguishable. The story of Hara and John Lawrence is complete in itself, not involving Major Jacques Celliers and Captain Yonoi, who are the principal characters of Merry Christmas as a whole. Very much like Van der Post in his nonfictional work on Japan (примеч. 7), Colonel Lawrence is full of theories about his enemy country and its people. Hara as he sees him is "faithful and responsive to all the imperceptible murmurings of Japan's archaic and submerged racial soul" (p. 16). Hara can't help himself, according to Lawrence, because "it is not he but an act of Japanese gods in him" (pp. 17-18). The "moon-swung" Hara and his countrymen are "still deeply submerged like animals, insects and plants. . . . They [are] subject to cosmic rhythm and movement and ruled by cosmic forces beyond their control to an extent undreamt of in the European mind and philosophy" (pp. 21-22). So goes the Lawrentian anthropology, which quite obviously receives Laurens Van der Post's fullest endorsement.
The next part of Van der Posts book, "Christmas Morning," contains nearly all the major components of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, except for the Hara story. The nameless "I," who was the listener in Part I, is now the storyteller, filling in the earlier life of Jacques Celliers. Actually, the story, told via a bundle of notes left by Celliers to the narrator, is a confession of his betrayals of his younger brother in South Africa. It recalls the similar device used in Conrad's Lord Jim, which Merry Christmas in many ways resembles. While in the film Celliers' acts of betrayal, described in a series of flashbacks, seem irrelevant to the main story, in the novel it is quite clear that Celliers' bravery and heroism in a remote colony would redeem the earlier betrayals, again very much as in Lord Jim (примеч. 8). The memoir lasts for four chapters, more than a third of the whole book; its is radically shortened in Oshima's film.
The second part of the novel returns to Celliers' pre-incarceration career. There is a good deal of religiosity in this part, which Oshima more or less erases from his rendition (примеч. 9). Also, of Van der Post's South African background — he has been a liberal anti-apartheid activist — no trace is left in the movie. On the other hand, several episodes — such as a Korean guard's rape of a Dutch soldier; Hara's decapitation of the guard (примеч. 10); Yonoi's sword practice; Celliers' numerous defiant acts such as smuggling in a shoitwave radio, distributing food among his fellow prisoners, and attempting escape; and many details that powerfully suggest homoerotic tension among the two male couples — are new additions in the film. Celliers' reckless act of kissing the Japanese captain before the entire Japanese and British companies, his subsequent punishment by being buried alive, and Captain Yonoi's clipping of Celliers' hair, the film's climactic events, survive from the novel. In both versions, the officers from the upper classes are depicted — without any self-consciousness or criticism — as more poised, sensitive, and intelligent than those from the lower classes. There is no explicit scene of mutual attraction between Celliers and Yonoi either in Van der Post's version or in Oshima's, but there is a discernible difference in the modes of representation. In the film, the Japanese officer is hopelessly infatuated with Celliers, who remains almost completely indifferent. In the novel, however, Celliers is very much aware of the effects of his good looks on the Japanese officer — in fact, this self-awareness is presented as deeply enmeshed with his sense of guilt over the betrayal of his physically unattractive but spiritually gifted younger brother (примеч. 11). Oshima seems intent to present the Japanese-English relationship as more one-sided than in the novel.
The third part of The Seed and the Sower describes Colonel Lawrence's encounter with a young Englishwoman. The romantic story in which the two fall in love under the threat of Japanese invasion is compressed in Oshima's hand into a verbal (unimaged) reference lasting only a few minutes — an element that is quite superfluous even at its brief length. Merry Christmas, it seems, tries hard to retain much of the novel, with the result that several of its episodes are not only irrelevant but unintelligible.
In addition to the confusing narrative situation, Van der Post's various themes refuse to intersect. Encounter with the alien Other is the most pronounced concern in the Lawrence-Нага episode; the conventional moral motif of betrayal and redemption dominates in the Jacques Celliers portion; the Celliers-Yonoi affair is an intensification of the male bonding that is always implicit in any war story; the heterosexual and ethnically homogenous romance in the last part offers an apology, so to speak, for the exclusion of the female from the rest of the book. In fact, gender politics is carried into the narrative framework itself in the quarrel between the narrator's wife and Colonel Lawrence about the propriety of a sword and a doll as Christmas gifts for a boy and a girl. (The book ends — rather inexplicably — with the critically aware wife accepting Lawrence's and her husband's sexist views.) These components are placed in discrete sections and parts that neither suggest an integral meaning nor interact as fragments.
Oshima's job was to devise a film out of these materials. First, he eliminates the narrative frame, together with its placement on Christmas years after the event. There is no equivalent of the "I" or his wife, thus also removing the concern with feminism or, simply, women. Merry Christmas is self-consciously male and homosexual both in intention and execution. For this purpose the removal of the "I" (who is absorbed into the character of Colonel Lawrence) is both necessary and successful. Instead of the two pairs (Hara and Lawrence, Yonoi and Celliers) being observed by the "I" or described to him, the film audience is directly introduced to them, in their pairings and in occasional criss-crossings between Hara and Celliers, Yonoi and Lawrence. This male concentration is complicated further by Oshima's invention of the rape of a Dutch prisoner by a Korean soldier, an episode expanding the context of the central pairs. The most physical relationship between the Korean and the Dutch soldier lines up with the largely unconscious intimacy between Hara and Lawrence, and finally with the self-conscious Yonoi-Celliers affair. Oshima seems intent to provide a complement to his two immediately preceding films, Empire of Passion and In the Realm of the Senses, in which he tried to make sexuality overwhelm pornography. To present eroticism in homosexuality before a presumably heterosexual audience, and to have homosexuality represent friendship and love in general, and finally to prove that love and friendship are possible between enemies are among the objectives of this film, according to Oshima (примеч. 12).
Merry Christmas in this sense is another experiment by Oshima in perception and representation of the strange Other. He offered in an interview that Van der Post's novel had intrigued him because he thought its representation of the Japanese was "remarkably good" and wondered what it might be like to reexamine the foreign representation of the Japanese (примеч. 13). When asked for his opinion of Van der Post's ambivalent representation of the Japanese, he said that perhaps the present generation of Japanese would take the vantage point of Colonel Lawrence, although he himself would be a Yonoi or a Celliers, a soldier committed to his own side. He also said that "although he might take an objective viewpoint like Colonel Lawrence's, he himself could empathize ["kanjo inyu dekimasu" — as a Japanese?] with Yonoi and Hara" (p. 417). What is interesting about this confusing exchange is that Oshima seems to believe that Lawrence — and by extension Van der Post — is not a partisan but a disinterested observer who can see the Japanese in the true light.
Oshima published a book titled I Answer! (Kotaeru!, 1983) that collects in self-celebration all the positive and enthusiastic reviews and comments the movie received while he went on a promotion tour to England and the United States. This book includes quotations from interviews in which he makes self-promoting remarks about the movie; it also approvingly quotes numerous brief mentions of the film that appeared in British and American publications. Throughout he insists that the film's representation of the Japanese is accurate. In support, the European and American views of the film are accepted as the final word on the film by its maker, just as Van der Post's novel is accepted as the accurate representation of the Japanese. And therein lies the clue to Oshima's interpretation of the Japanese, which many intellectuals of Japan seem to share with him.
Let me reflect on Oshima's career for a moment. During the sixties he made a number of political films. One of his preoccupations in them was the racial conditions of Japan. The Catch (Shiiku), based on Oe Kenzaburo's wartime story, depicts a black American flier who parachutes from a bomber only to be captured by country villagers. The villagers keep him alive but blame him for all the trouble that befalls them; they finally slaughter him just as Japan is about to surrender. The film presents people's greed and stupidity, which their children clearly see through. Oshima also made The Forgotten Army for television, which treats disabled Korean veterans of the Japanese imperial army who are abandoned by both the Japanese and the Korean governments and are now reduced to panhandling on the streets. Perhaps the best known in this category is Death by Hanging, based on a true story of a Korean boy who passed for a Japanese until the life of deprived identity and welfare led him to murder two Japanese women in an act of rage and revenge. The boy ruthlessly analyzes the relations between race, sex, crime, law, and death. Throughout, Oshima is determined to locate himself in the place of the Other and to look back at himself, the Japanese, and their complicity in the boy's murder of the women as well as in the legal execution of the boy (примеч. 14).
Merry Christmas is a continuation of this program of recognizing and representing the Other. In contrast to The Bridge on the River Kwai and Empire of the Sun, it stares at the enemies without absorbing them into their self-reflection. Whereas Oshima's earlier films look at Japan and the Japanese from the viewpoint of the victims of racism, Merry Christmas observes them from the vantage point of the white prisoners of war. Oshima seems to regard racial minorities and prisoners alike simply as victims of Japanese control and brutality. Furthermore, Oshima's acceptance of Colonel Lawrence, a.k.a. Sir Laurens Van der Post, as an authority on Japanese people and culture is so uncritical and unexamined that one cannot but conclude that he is unconcerned with the fundamental difference between the victimization of Asians and the brutalization of British prisoners of war.
Quite obviously I am not excusing the latter atrocity, which is as damnable as any other. Japan's imperialism in Asia, however, plays a more structurally constitutive part in world history and requires a different dimension of argument. Let me simply refer back to Japan's experience of the Western imperialist threat in the nineteenth century. As has been discussed earlier, the country's answer to this threat was to utilize maximally the ideology of emperorism to centralize and "homogenize" its people domestically, to assert their uniqueness at home and abroad, and at the same time to represent them as an equal to the "advanced" peoples. Japanese nationalism sought to coerce internal agreement and loyalty. To the extent that Japanese nationalism was a response to Western aggression and domination, and strictly to that extent, Japan's aspiration was understandable — if not laudable — like many other decolonization attempts. The fundamental problematic of Japanese liberationism, however, was that unlike Pan-Arab nationalism, Pan-African nationalism, or any other independence movement, it immediately inverted, or perverted, the program into its own colonialism and imperialism, and initiated its own agenda of aggression and suppression in the Pacific islands and continental Asia as well as at home. It was a semicolonized country attempting to colonize others without a dominant metropolitan culture. During the process, Japan desperately needed legitimation of its claims by the "advanced" nations. Its cultural exceptionalism, for instance, is a logical extension of a strategy to place itself outside the categories of both "advanced" nations and "underdeveloped" nations. And despite its economic leap into a high-growth phase twenty years ago, this cultural self-consciousness has remained unchanged to this very day. As far as the Indonesians are concerned, Oshima, too, evacuates them from Merry Christmas: there is not a single Javanese character in it. The film's background music, which apparently is meant to suggest the native presence, was entirely composed by Sakamoto Ryuichi (who plays Captain Yonoi). The supposed Javanese music is a synthesized gamelan whose New Age simulation placed against a rock rhythm is an insult to the highly sophisticated Javanese music — insofar as the film attempts to represent the encounter of cultures.
Oshima has known all along the absurdity of Japan's exceptionalism. Thus he has been consistent in objecting to the discrimination against Koreans and other minorities on the basis of difference. At the same time, his concern with the minorities in Japan was humanitarian, that they be regarded and treated equally and identically with the Japanese. His idea of social structure did not suggest the reality and desirability of heterogeneity, but the equal absorption of all into an assimilated and homogenized Japanese nation, which is after all no more than an imaginary. Exactly in the same fashion, humanity means for Oshima that of the modern West, Europe in particular, which supposedly embodies "common humanity" ("jinrui kyotsu," Kotaeru!, p. 177). Oshima may have intended to pursue in Merry Christmas the fundamental ambivalence the Japanese feel toward the West — love and envy pitched against hatred and contempt — and its disastrous outcome in the last war (Sato, Oshima Nagisa, p. 415), but his own resolution seems to accept the hegemonic and hierarchic view that would rank nations and races on a scale of progress and development. He displays an unconcealed aspiration and admiration for Europe and the Europeans. This is the only way to explain Oshima's unembarrassed infatuation with David Bowie's white skin, blond hair, and blue eyes (called "God's gifts," "to be born so beautiful" — "kami no medeshi hito," "annani utsukushiku umarete kite"; Sato, Oshima Nagisa, p. 427) which Oshima ecstatically exclaims as he reminisces about his collaboration during the film's production in New Zealand.
The one puzzle that remains unsolved is the question of the film's intended audience. Does the film require particular familiarity with both societies? Does Oshima as a grand container of cultural differences understand the effects of particular scenes and images on different viewers? Is a Canadian, not to say an Egyptian or a Hungarian, audience supposed to know what Yonoi means when he refers to the February 26, 1936, army insurrection in Tokyo? For another instance, when the same captain mumbles in the courtroom scene "To be or not to be, that is the question," the audience in the theater where I sat in Berkeley, California, responded with a ripple of embarrassed giggles (примеч. 15). (Cultural literacy!) Was the laughter calculated? To what effect? Oshima says in a recent article that his films are no longer for the Japanese (who have ceased to invest money in such risky ventures) but for an "international audience." What does this internationality mean precisely? In 1986 Oshima made Max, топ amour with a French producer, in which a French actress sleeps with a chimpanzee, and the film's effects seem to hinge on her English husband's response to the menage a trois. It is a completely French film without a trace of Japanese life. Is this the final destination of Oshima's search for Otherness? (примеч. 16)
Unlike the visitor to San Diego, who needed to travel to Paris to discover alterity, Oshima earlier saw Koreans and other Asians for what they are. And yet when he became engaged in the program to represent the Japanese, he had to fall back on a European observer for an interpretation. Thus while his earlier films powerfully '.ndicted all Japanese for the act of exclusion and discrimination, Merry Christmas, his first big-budget, big-name production, almost eagerly participates in European hegemonism (примеч. 17). Oshima the lifelong rebel has finally rebelled his way into intercultural agreement.
This is a parody of James Clifford's by-now-famous episode in which an ethnographer visiting Gabon asks for information about the meaning of a ritual term. In the story, the native chief runs back into his home and consults a sacred book, which turns out to be a work by an earlier visitor-ethnologist (примеч. 18). Oshima is the tribal chief here reading from Raponda-Walker/Laurens Van der Post, offering their representation as authentic. By accepting the international consensus concerning the world's center and its margins, he tries to join that center itself. Very much like Oshima's own reminder in Death by Hanging, the charge of "anata mo, anata mo, anata mo" (and you too, and you too, and you too) must now be directed to Oshima himself (примеч. 19). He must be indicted for his complicity in agreeing to the dominant. He may not have openly endorsed emperorism yet, but he certainly has embraced the universality of Christmas and the hegemony of the West. As the emperor sits at the center of Japan, so does the West preeminently preside over the affairs of the world — in the consciousness of the Japanese. Centrality demands agreement. Thus our own way out seems simply to insist on challenging that agreement. In today's Japan at least, disagreement is the only way toward the recovery of dialogue and argument, without which no serious and meaningful agreement can possibly be found.
ПримечанияПримечания:
1. As I looked for a film made by the Chinese or other Asians about a Japanese prison camp, I found that in 1989 a PRC-Hong Kong joint company produced a film titled The Black Sun: Unit 731. It is based on the notorious "Unit 731," an actual Japanese army division organized specifically to conduct biological "experimentations" on human subjects — mostly captured enemy soldiers and civilians — during the Fifteen-Year War. The film depicts the brutalities and atrocities in such sensational detail that at least this viewer was unable to sit through it. The acts of inhuman violence by the medical unit are historically "accurate," and the Chinese filmmakers' hatred is perfectly understandable. But unless the film was made for the purpose of revenge directed solely at a Japanese audience, its effect is sheer exploitation. The Japanese soldiers in the film are nothing more than sadistic brutes.
2. John Wakeman. ed., World Authors: 1950-1970 (New York: Wilson, 1975).
3. Sato Tadao, Oshima Nagisa no sekai (Tokyo: Asahi Bunko, 1987), p. 409.
4. Oshima Nagisa, Kotaeru! (/ Answer!) (Tokyo: Dagereo Shuppan, 1983), p. 8.
5. Laurens Van der Post, The Seed and the Sower (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1963).
6. Published first in 1954, it was incorporated into The Seed and the Sower in 1963. It was reissued as a book by The Hogarth Press in 1972.
7. See his ponderous and banal The Prisoner and the Bomb (New York: William Morrow, 1971), publisned in Britain under the title of The Night of the New Moon. Van der Post equates Japanese brutality in the treatment of prisoners of war with the American devastation by atomic bombs. But the problem of the book is not so much its wrong ideas as its self-important air.
8. I do not mean that Merry Christmas is as pregnant with possibilities as Lord Jim. But Van der Post has, it seems to me, obviously read Conrad. Aside from the novels' locations, the two share a great deal in form. Marlowe. Lord Jim's narrator, receives a bundle of papers by and about Jim after he returns to London, for instance. Even the last scene, in which Jim walks up to face his death, is not unlike Celliers* fully conscious act of self-destruction. Lord Jim's spotless snow-white dress and Jacques Celliers' pure white-blond appearance have a great deal in common, too, in their colonialist "difference" from the Asian natives. I suspect that it is precisely what attracted Oshima Nagisa.
9. In a special issue of Wide Angle devoted to Oshima Nagisa (Vol. 9, No. 2, 1987), Adam Knee argues that Celliers is a "Christ figure" (p. 58). There is nothing wrong with the idea, since I suppose Christ is meant to stand for — and died for — everyone. But Knee might have thought a little bit more about why Oshima wanted to introduce Jesus into his film. See note 33, Chapter 4.
10. Van der Post asserts repeatedly that the Korean members of the Japanese army were more brutal and fanatic (The Seed and the Sower, p. 140; The Prisoner and the Bomb, p. 138, e.g.) without any further explanation. This is likely to be Van der Post's adoption of general anti-Korean feelings from the Japanese. Oshima's addition of this episode, where the Dutch victim does not complain and even goes to the extent of killing himself after the Korean's execution, seems to suggest Oshima's sympathy with the Koreans in general. The "rape" here is a consensual relationship comparable to the principal liaisons of Yonoi and Celliers, Hara and Lawrence.
11. Van der Post seems more interested in the two brothers, one spiritual and the other physical, both beautiful in different ways, than in the two officers, one white and the other yellow, both beautiful, getting together somehow in the battlefield. The theme of betrayal and redemption is more conspicuous in The Seed and the Sower than in the film. Oshima seems to be more interested in reading it as a story of cross-cultural and interracial encounter.
12. Kotaeru!, pp. 26-27.
13. Interview with Sato Tadao, Oshima Nagisa, p. 416.
14. Oshima published a number of books explaining his films and the problems he faced in them. Among them are Sengo eiga: Hakai to sozo (Tokyo: Sanichi Shobo, 1963), Ma to zankoku no hasso (Tokyo: Haga Shoten, 1966), and Taiken teki sengo eizo ron (Tokyo: Asahi Sensho, 1975).
15. The quotation is Oshima's addition; it is not in Van der Post's text.
16. In an article called "Nihon eiga no tembo" ("The Prospect of the Japanese Film") that concludes an eight-volume study of the Japanese film, Nikon no eiga (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1985-88), Oshima Nagisa declares the end of the Japanese film. As for the future, he proposes ■internationalization.*' "A society or a race can maintain homogeneity until the wind of modernization begins to blow. Modernization is at the same time internationalization" (Vol. 8. 1988, p. 318). Are Max, топ amour as well as Merry Christmas his models for this internationalization? (Nihon no eiga was co-edited by Imamura Shohei. Sato Tadao, Shindo Kane hi to. Tsurumi Shunsuke, and Yamada Yoji.)
17. The budget for the film was six million dollars (Kotaeru!. p. 37). while his earlier films cost far less. The famed Ceremony (Gishiki, 197I). for instance, was the most expensive movie Oshima had made, but its budget was 20 million yen ($50,000). His Town of Love and Hope (Ai to kibo no machi. 1959). according to Oshima. cost 10 million yen ($30.000 at the exchange rate of the time). Taiken teki sengo eizo ron (Tokyo: Asahi Sensho, 1975), p. 292.
18. "On Ethnographic Allegory," Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), p. 116.
19. See Stephen Heath's reading of Death by Hanging in his Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1981), pp. 64-69.
@темы: Подробности, Селльерс/Йонои, Дэвид Боуи, История создания, Нагиса Осима, Публикации, Музыка
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23.07.2009 в 15:08-
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23.07.2009 в 17:45а для меня важно было, кроме этого, еще In a special issue of Wide Angle devoted to Oshima Nagisa (Vol. 9, No. 2, 1987), Adam Knee argues that Celliers is a "Christ figure" (p. 58). There is nothing wrong with the idea, since I suppose Christ is meant to stand for—and died for—everyone. But Knee might have thought a little bit more about why Oshima wanted to introduce Jesus into his film. - потому что флудер об этом говорила )
а еще странно было, как именно Миоши пишет имя Джека )))))
еще вот это тронуло: Van der Post seems more interested in the two brothers, one spiritual and the other physical, both beautiful in different ways, than in the two officers, one white and the other yellow, both beautiful, getting together somehow in the battlefield
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23.07.2009 в 19:29