Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema by Daisuke Miyao

Abstract

Reviewed by: Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema by Daisuke Miyao Naoki Yamamoto (bio) Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema. By Daisuke Miyao. Duke University Press, 2020. xii, 210 pages. $99.95, cloth; $25.95, paper; $25.95, E-book. Daisuke Miyao's new book appears to be a very timely and provocative attempt to decipher the entangled relationships among Orientalism, early cinema, and Japanese modernization. The key term for his inquiry is "Japonisme," which first appeared in 1872 to designate the widespread obsession with "things Japanese" in the mid- to late nineteenth-century European art scene. Throughout the book, Miyao narrates a very informed and eye-opening story concerning "Japonisme-generated conversations and negotiations in the transnational flow of cinema during the period of global imperialism" (p. 8). It is well known that Japanese art, especially ukiyo-e woodblock prints that were initially used as wrapping paper for items imported from Japan, served as a major source of inspiration for impressionist and postimpressionist painters such as Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Vincent van Gogh. At the same time, early French films, especially those produced by or under contract with the Lumière Brothers have often been studied in comparison with impressionism. In spite of this, no in-depth study has yet been made into the equally significant link between Japonisme and Lumière films. The present book fills this gap in a way that is both empirically rich and theoretically stimulating. Drawing on Miyao's viewing of all 1,428 surviving Lumière films, it powerfully retrieves long-forgotten mutual influences between France and Japan from the very beginning of global film history. The book is divided into three chapters and an epilogue, with the chapters organized in such a way as to guide readers on a circular trip from Japan to France, then back to Japan, as we follow the global circulation of the discourses and practices of Japonisme. In the first chapter, Miyao suggests that "Lumière films need to be understood within their contemporary media ecology of photography, painting, and cinema, all under the sway [End Page 230] of the compositional principles of Japonisme and the new idea of a kinetic and corporeally grounded realism that arose from it" (p. 9). To producers of these visual media products, Japonisme meant more than a simple appropriation of exotic themes frequently appearing in Japanese art. Rather, it signified their serious learning of the principles and techniques that penetrated their beloved Japanese paintings. For this reason, Miyao argues, "[w]hat impressionist and postimpressionist painters valued most in ukiyo-e was the method of sketching and composition that not only captured moments and movements of the environment instantly but also physically mobilized the eyes of the spectator" (p. 10). It is easy to understand how Lumière cinematographers could readily accomplish the first task of instantaneously capturing living and moving objects with the aid of the movie camera's recording ability, but what about the second? Miyao's answer is that both impressionist painters and Lumière cinematographers frequently adopted a special compositional technique developed by famous ukiyo-e artists such as Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige. Alternatively termed "kinzō-gata-kōzu," "chūkei-datsuraku," and "en=kin-hō" by ukiyo-e specialists, this compositional technique intentionally stressed the contrast between the main object placed at the forefront (usually depicted with an extreme close-up) and the landscape and other small objects placed far in the background as if there were no middle ground in the frame. Because these two planes were usually drawn from two different perspectives—one in the newly imported Western linear perspective, and the other in the traditional "bird's eye" or "parallel" perspective—the technique also succeeded in creating a "heterogenous" or "equivocal" space in which the viewer's gaze is free to roam according to the viewer's subjective choices. This technique appeared to be well suited to French impressionists whose main enemy was academic painting and its uncritical reliance on linear perspective with a single, fixed vanishing point. Drawing on recent studies in the fields of psychology and physiology, impressionists and postimpressionists had already adopted the new idea that reality was composed of...