The Culture of the Sound Image in Prewar Japan ed. by Michael Raine and Johan Nordström

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Culture of the Sound Image in Prewar Japan ed. by Michael Raine and Johan Nordström Kerim Yasar (bio) The Culture of the Sound Image in Prewar Japan. Edited by Michael Raine and Johan Nordström. Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 227 pages. €106.00, cloth; €105.99, E-book. The publication of Elisabeth Weis and John Belton's edited volume Film Sound: Theory and Practice in 19851 marked a watershed in Anglophone film studies: Here, at last, was a collection of historical and theoretical works that not only took the relatively neglected topic of film sound seriously, but put it front and center. The publication, in French, of Michel Chion's La voix au cinéma2 in 1982 signaled a similar renewal of interest in Francophone film circles. Film sound, as an object of serious and sustained academic inquiry, had arrived. Or had it? Even as film studies expanded its purview beyond canonical film theory into topics as varied as industrial and technological history, star studies, and historical poetics, the study of film sound, for whatever reasons, continued to seem relegated to the margins. This is not to say that the "sonic turn" of the 1980s was a false start; rather, the study of sound, like sound itself, seems always to be vanishing even as it comes into being. This sense of marginalization persists to this day, as can be seen in the opening lines of the present volume's introduction. Michael Raine and Johan Nordström begin by quoting a series of rhetorical questions posed by the late Thomas Elsaesser in his influential essay, "The New Film History as Media Archeology": "Have we been fixated too exclusively on 'the image', [End Page 478] and forgotten about sound; have we been concentrating on films as texts, and neglected the cinema as event and experience?" (p. 9). In this economical fashion, the aims and methodological coordinates of the collection are announced. The rest of the introduction is a tour de force and would alone be worth the price of admission if the price of the book were not so blisteringly high. Raine and Nordström offer not only a brief but dense history of the development of sound cinema and adjacent auditory technologies in Japan, but also an overview of previous scholarly approaches and a coherent and compelling theoretical framework for the variegated lines of inquiry that follow. As they explain, the individual contributions come together "to approach Japanese cinema as what Christian Metz, borrowing from Marcel Mauss, called a 'total social fact', embedded in technological and economic changes and framed by wider fears and aspirations" (p. 9). What this entails is not only an examination of the filmic texts themselves—which would be challenging when so few films from the prewar era survive—but also of the social, industrial, and technological contexts that conditioned both the production and the reception of those texts. In more concrete terms, the contributors examine the collaborations and tie-ins between film studios and other media concerns like gramophone record companies, radio stations, and magazines and newspapers; the changing roles of katsudō benshi (film narrator); the technological and aesthetic challenges of early sound film production; and even the changing architecture of exhibition spaces. In their effort to examine the "total social fact" of early Japanese sound cinema as both "event and experience," the editors and contributors leave few stones unturned. Those contributors represent some of the most prominent and innovative researchers working on early Japanese cinema today. All except Raine and Nordström are Japanese and teach at Japanese institutions; Nordström teaches at a Japanese university and publishes in both Japanese and English. In addition to its intrinsic merits, this volume thus represents a rare and exciting glimpse into the work of Japanese scholars who, with the exception of Hosokawa Shūhei, may not be as well known outside Japan as they deserve to be. Transnational scholarly collaborations of this kind are still not as common in Japan studies as one would hope, and that makes this volume even more welcome.3 I cannot do justice in this brief review to each individual contribution, but in the following I...