| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺南藝術大學 === 動畫藝術與影像美學研究所 === 99 === In 1944, Japanese director Kinoshita Keisuke directed “Rikugun / The Army” for the purpose of army propaganda. It was banned after screening due to the sensational farewell ending between a mother and her son. For a long time, this noted event in Japanese film history has been disputed, which resulted in two interpretations. One takes “Rikugun / The Army” as one of Kinoshita Keisuke’s anti-war film series. The other still considers this film as military propaganda.
However, the two interpretations ignore the contradictory aspects of this film and hinder the possibility for further discussion. This paper intends to explain how “Rikugun / The Army” presents the chaotic political contradiction of Japanese film and society during 1920s to 1940s. They went from embracing western modernity (1920s) to anti-western modernity (1930s) and ended up turning into the militarist (and the most successful modernized Asian nation), declaring war on the West. As a film production, “Rikugun / The Army” is more than a product from 1944, but also an everlasting rippling from the era of 1920s and 1930s.
Somehow, the following questions are much more significant than classifying “Rikugun / The Army” as an anti-war film or a pro-war film. We shall ask: When this western modern technological invention becomes a Japanese national apparatus against western modernity, what kind of role does it play? How does it work in this paradoxical stand? Or we may ask, has film really done its job in the movement against western modernity?
If we presume, as Noël Burch said, that the Western Film Institutional Mode of Representation (IMR) is a diegetic and stylistic concept centering on the human being (individualism) which was found in the Renaissance ideology; then, while a film becomes the medium of anti-western modernity (anti-individualism), its style will concern a series of questions such as the composition of character(s) in a scene (individuality/collectivity), the signifying system (IMR / anti-IMR), diegetic strategy (plainness/ambiguity) and so on.
This paper will trace back to the social issues during the 1920s, such as the victory of WWI, the reconstruction of Tokyo, the bringing in of industrial Fordism, the rationalization of family life, and the arising of individualism. Then, there will be a further discuss on the connection between these external social circumstances and the appearance of Shochiku “Kamata Style” along with IMR, which were regarded by the Japanese filmmakers as the film “essence.” Second, the paper will focus on the anti-western modernity ideology in the 1930s, triggered from the national and global events such as the Great Depression, Japanese invasion of China and the retreat from the “League of Nations.” The anti-west thinking had a great impact on Japanese filmmakers such as Ozu Yasujiro, Shimizu Hiroshi and Mizoguchi Kenji, who overturned the concept of IMR. Lastly, the paper will try to demonstrate how the film “Rikugun / The Army,” though succeeded the film style notions from the previous twenty years, formed its paradoxical subject through swinging between diegetic plainness and ambiguity under the circumstances of ant-individualism and national ideology.
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