Montage, cinematic subjectivity and feminism in Ozaki Midori's Drifting in the World of the Seventh Sense

Abstract

Ozaki Midori (1896–1971) is an important modernist author whose work has only recently begun to be reassessed. This essay analyzes Ozaki's best‐known text, Dainana kankai hokō (Drifting in the World of the Seventh Sense, 1933). I argue that Dainana kankai hokō should be read in conjunction with Ozaki's film criticism as well as in the context of the theory and practice of montage and of avant‐garde film and photography in the 1920s and 1930s. This perspective in its turn should be linked to modernist mass culture, especially to the so‐called trends of ero guro nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense) in this period. Structured to a great extent by montage, Dainana kankai hokō stages an elaborate mimicry and/or anticipation of the speculations of critics and theorists such as Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Jean Epstein and Kitagawa Fuyuhiko which not only reveals itself as a parody and deconstruction of these discourses but at the same time suggests exuberant feminist fantasies of empowerment. The World of the Seventh Sense also articulates a feminist cinematic schizoanalysis representing both a remarkable anticipation, and a critique and transformation of the postmodern schizoanalytic project in Deleuze and Guattari. Ozaki's feminist schizo‐politics calls attention especially to the tendency to de‐corporealize, dehistoricize and atomize/render diffuse the subversive agency of gender, sexuality and the body in the writings of the two French philosophers.