Erratum: Toyoda and the Challenge of RepresentationAuthor(s): Ann MartinSource: Film Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Spring, 1997), p. 53Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1213618 .

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this epic film tutored its wartime audience in spartan aesthetics through "visual cues that appropriate the per- ceptual experience" of Yamato-e painting (the extensive crane shots and long takes of meticulously arranged scenes) and kare sansui dry landscape gardens (the slow, stately camera moves in the palace courtyard where Lord Asano attacks Lord Kira).

Davis views Mizoguchi as a parametric director who instructs the viewer on "the austere pleasure of duration and its concomitant virtues of patience and discern- ment"; Dudley Andrew similarly finds Mizoguchi five years later, in Utamaro and His Women (1946), obsessed with artistic process itself, particularly in his depiction of women and in the film's endorsement of ukiyo-e woodblock prints (which share many industrial, techno- logical, and ideological traits with movies) over court painting.

Woodblock printing also figures in Linda Ehrlich's discussion of Kon Ichikawa's An Actor's Revenge (1963) and Kathe Geist's essay on Ozu. Ehrlich's piece links that film's outrageous parodic elements and gen- der-bending use of actor Kazuo Hasegawa in multiple roles to the Meiji-Taisho era "Creative Print" movement, a style that rejected both Japanese prints and Western oil painting by asserting the individuality of the artist through a formal playfulness. Geist explores Ozu's adoption of woodblock techniques in the look of the flattened space, grid backgrounds, and playful depth cues in his interior scenes, highlighting as well Ozu's use of "the view into deep space framed by objects in close up," a technique she documents by juxtaposing a shot from End of Summer (1961) with an Utagawa Hiroshige print.

Considerations of widescreen and color film-mak- ing round out the volume. Cynthia Contreras links the new aspect ratio to scroll painting and to the horizon- tality of Japanese stages and domestic space, and extends her observations to a keen and unprecedented discussion of Masao Kobayashi's visual style. Here, dynamic com- positions and dominating diagonals enable the director to construct the claustrophobic settings in which rebel- lious samurai are trapped, as well as to evoke powerful forces and offscreen space in Kwaidan (1964) and The Human Condition (1959-61). By contrast, David Desser's perceptive essay explores how color was incor- porated into the Japanese cinema's aesthetic design, as distinct from its narrative functions in Hollywood style. In Ohayo (1959) and Dodeskaden (1970), Ozu' s realism and Kurosawa's expressionism both deploy color as a means of graphic patterning and generating humor. By contrast, Seijun Suzuki's "stylistically excessive" and "patently unrealistic" visual style (in films like 1964's Gate of Flesh) offers a third strategy, using color to explore film's formal potentials.

this epic film tutored its wartime audience in spartan aesthetics through "visual cues that appropriate the per- ceptual experience" of Yamato-e painting (the extensive crane shots and long takes of meticulously arranged scenes) and kare sansui dry landscape gardens (the slow, stately camera moves in the palace courtyard where Lord Asano attacks Lord Kira).

Davis views Mizoguchi as a parametric director who instructs the viewer on "the austere pleasure of duration and its concomitant virtues of patience and discern- ment"; Dudley Andrew similarly finds Mizoguchi five years later, in Utamaro and His Women (1946), obsessed with artistic process itself, particularly in his depiction of women and in the film's endorsement of ukiyo-e woodblock prints (which share many industrial, techno- logical, and ideological traits with movies) over court painting.

Woodblock printing also figures in Linda Ehrlich's discussion of Kon Ichikawa's An Actor's Revenge (1963) and Kathe Geist's essay on Ozu. Ehrlich's piece links that film's outrageous parodic elements and gen- der-bending use of actor Kazuo Hasegawa in multiple roles to the Meiji-Taisho era "Creative Print" movement, a style that rejected both Japanese prints and Western oil painting by asserting the individuality of the artist through a formal playfulness. Geist explores Ozu's adoption of woodblock techniques in the look of the flattened space, grid backgrounds, and playful depth cues in his interior scenes, highlighting as well Ozu's use of "the view into deep space framed by objects in close up," a technique she documents by juxtaposing a shot from End of Summer (1961) with an Utagawa Hiroshige print.

Considerations of widescreen and color film-mak- ing round out the volume. Cynthia Contreras links the new aspect ratio to scroll painting and to the horizon- tality of Japanese stages and domestic space, and extends her observations to a keen and unprecedented discussion of Masao Kobayashi's visual style. Here, dynamic com- positions and dominating diagonals enable the director to construct the claustrophobic settings in which rebel- lious samurai are trapped, as well as to evoke powerful forces and offscreen space in Kwaidan (1964) and The Human Condition (1959-61). By contrast, David Desser's perceptive essay explores how color was incor- porated into the Japanese cinema's aesthetic design, as distinct from its narrative functions in Hollywood style. In Ohayo (1959) and Dodeskaden (1970), Ozu' s realism and Kurosawa's expressionism both deploy color as a means of graphic patterning and generating humor. By contrast, Seijun Suzuki's "stylistically excessive" and "patently unrealistic" visual style (in films like 1964's Gate of Flesh) offers a third strategy, using color to explore film's formal potentials.

Whether addressing the works of pantheon directors or those of less familiar artists, the best essays in Cin- ematic Landscapes revel in the often neglected art of analyzing mise-en-scene and shot composition. The spe- cific emphasis here on visual traditions provides a sys- tematic and welcome complement to the usual focus on East Asian drama and literature (as in Noel Burch's To the Distant Observer [1979]). The fact that several es- says emphasize different traditions even in discussing the same film-or that the authors here disagree on how one "reads" a landscape or on how to construe the con- nection between art and cinema-gives the volume a productive tone of exchange and debate. This is sus- tained at the most general level: Cinematic Landscapes encourages us to compare strategies in the films of both China and Japan (their shared predilection for what Wilkerson calls "attenuated" narratives and for a focus on "non-narrative space and time"). Yet we can also contrast them, following Sherman Lee's landmark 1962 essay (included here) that distinguishes between Chi- nese artists' tendency toward moderation and rationality and the Japanese penchant for exaggeration and intu- ition.

Moreover, Ehrlich and Desser have selected and arranged the articles with an intelligence and care that is becoming rare in film studies anthologies. And I salute the University of Texas Press for allowing the editors and authors a lavish number of illustrations so crucial to the arguments: production stills, frame enlargements, reproductions of woodblocks and of landscape paint- ings- -13 in color! The result is an elegant volume whose luxury factor approaches the coffee-table book and whose superlative essays guarantee that the reader will not watch these films the same way again.

MATTHEW BERNSTEIN

* Matthew Bernstein teaches Japanese cinema at Emory University.

Whether addressing the works of pantheon directors or those of less familiar artists, the best essays in Cin- ematic Landscapes revel in the often neglected art of analyzing mise-en-scene and shot composition. The spe- cific emphasis here on visual traditions provides a sys- tematic and welcome complement to the usual focus on East Asian drama and literature (as in Noel Burch's To the Distant Observer [1979]). The fact that several es- says emphasize different traditions even in discussing the same film-or that the authors here disagree on how one "reads" a landscape or on how to construe the con- nection between art and cinema-gives the volume a productive tone of exchange and debate. This is sus- tained at the most general level: Cinematic Landscapes encourages us to compare strategies in the films of both China and Japan (their shared predilection for what Wilkerson calls "attenuated" narratives and for a focus on "non-narrative space and time"). Yet we can also contrast them, following Sherman Lee's landmark 1962 essay (included here) that distinguishes between Chi- nese artists' tendency toward moderation and rationality and the Japanese penchant for exaggeration and intu- ition.

Moreover, Ehrlich and Desser have selected and arranged the articles with an intelligence and care that is becoming rare in film studies anthologies. And I salute the University of Texas Press for allowing the editors and authors a lavish number of illustrations so crucial to the arguments: production stills, frame enlargements, reproductions of woodblocks and of landscape paint- ings- -13 in color! The result is an elegant volume whose luxury factor approaches the coffee-table book and whose superlative essays guarantee that the reader will not watch these films the same way again.

MATTHEW BERNSTEIN

* Matthew Bernstein teaches Japanese cinema at Emory University.

Erratum: In FQ vol. 50, no. 2, the still that ap- peared on page 28 is from The Temple of the Wild Geese (1962, dir. Yuzo Kawashima), not from Shiro Toyoda's The Geese. We regret the error. A.M.

Erratum: In FQ vol. 50, no. 2, the still that ap- peared on page 28 is from The Temple of the Wild Geese (1962, dir. Yuzo Kawashima), not from Shiro Toyoda's The Geese. We regret the error. A.M.

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