Economies of culture: the Taishō bundan dallies with the movies

Abstract

As a critical term, visuality can be understood to combine a relentless organization of vision in the formation of modern social institutions with the constant destabilization of these formations by the image‐technologies, mass‐cultural spaces and economic energy that proliferate around them. This paper will explore such a moment of destabilization in the encounter between a consolidated literary field and the emerging medium of cinema as recorded in the pages of an early Shōwa period journal called Eiga jidai. As one might expect given the cultural field of the time, the authority of literature vis‐à‐vis the new medium structures the space of interaction (Mizoguchi goes to Izumi Kyōka, not the other way around). But there is a sense in the surveys, articles and taidan (interviews) that fill the journal's pages that the superimposition through accident and editorial policy of other axes of difference, such as gender and ethnicity, worked less to reinforce the genre hierarchy between literature and film than to create, through a series of highly visual strategies, an articulated space of maneuver for its participants. This becomes particularly salient in the one‐on‐one interviews between male members of the bundan (coterie of recognized writers, critics and publishers) and female actresses that were a frequent feature of the journal, where conventions of the taidan format, nuances of dress, speech and deportment are deftly used to deflect this doubly loaded hierarchy, allowing participants to maneuver the highly heteronomous capitals introduced by the mass, visual medium of film.