Abstract
ABSTRACTThis article critically engages with the politics of the gaze and the melodramatic mode in Nessa no chikai/Vow in the Desert (Watanabe, 1940). Staged in the Chinese mainland during the Second Sino-Japanese war (1937–1945), this adventure-melodrama film features ‘border-crossing’ multilingual actress Yamaguchi Yoshiko (aka Li Xianglan or Ri Kōran) and the Japanese male star Hasegawa Kazuo. Japan's cultural adaptation to western hegemony through technology, i.e. ‘modernization’, was a hybrid process and interconnected with similar endeavours by their counterparts in the Chinese mainland. I argue that the film was a site for Japanese film-makers to assert their entitlement to modern technology in general, and the cinematic gaze in particular. While architectural metaphors and actors‘bodies anchor the phantasm of modernized national self, the gaze at the actress's body is orchestrated so as to blur national identities and mediate film spectators’ longing for whiteness and the West.
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
