Japanese Ghosts, Demons, and Haunted Spaces

Film Studies Approaches b>In order to familiarize oneself with the language of film, the Yale Film Studies Film Analysis Website http://classes.yale.edu/film-analysis/ provides a useful primer. I will not devote time to recreating this site here. The page states: "The Film Analysis Guide was developed to meet the needs of faculty and students at Yale who are interested in becoming familiar with the vocabulary of film studies and the techniques of cinema." (2) While the Film Analysis Website does provide teachers with a useful primer in the language of film, its purposes do not extend to explaining the ways in which different cultures develop their own sense of filmmaking. In order to help students explore our second essential question about the cultural differences in storytelling, there are a few Japanese aesthetic principles that should be explained. First, even more than in the west, the major influence in the development of filmmaking in Japan was drama. As a result, realism was of less import to some prominent Japanese filmmakers. They viewed film as an "extension of the stage." Because visual realism was not a goal of the Japanese stage, it meant less to the Japanese filmmaker than it would to a western filmmaker that regarded a film as a combination of photographs.(3) Traditional Japanese painting did influence Japanese filmmakers, however. The Japanese films of Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Masaki Kobayashi (the first and third of whom we will discuss later in this unit) were built around the assumption that a camera frame was a canvas to be filled, and that reality is contained within it. Western filmmakers typically regard the camera frame as an eye that follows the movie's action in the world.(4) This difference is particularly noticeable in Kwaidan by Kobayashi, who was a painter before he began making films. A final aesthetic consideration relates to traditional uses of space in Japanese art, and the effects these traditions may or may not have on some Japanese filmmakers. In Japan, woodblock printing, standing screens, and scrolls that are read from left to right are important artistic media, and directors such as Kurosawa have had their works compared to these traditions numerous times.(5) One example of this is in the film Rashomon, wherein characters who have given testimony sit by a wall in the background. The first character abuts the right edge of the frame, while the others fill in to his left, giving the appearance of characters being written on a scroll. One might ask, is this an allusion to the scroll as an artistic medium? Is it a paean to the traditional standing screen, which does not employ perspective as it is used in the West? These aesthetic questions may prove useful to some teachers. Noticing subtle variations on these themes will allow students an opportunity to see how older Japanese notions of art that differed from western notions led to a different sense of how one makes a film, of how one tells a story on film.