BurchTo The Distant Observer: Form and meaning in the Japanese cinema

by Noël Burch

 

 

 

Burch, Chapter 3 A Boundless Text

 

This chapter identifies two key characteristics of Heian era literature which bear on Japanese texts down to the present:

Polysemy--or more than a single meaning associated with the same phonetic sound--and

Intertextuality--the way in which one text incorporates a part of, references, or interfaces with another text

These two processes engage the reader in an act of creation in which “the profound equivalence of reading and writing speaks directly to modern artistic practice and theory" (he quotes the great Russian filmmaker Eisenstein here).


In his argumewnt, the “boundless text” that he proposes, contains--explicitly or implicitly--all the basic theoretical challenges that Japan offers Western thought and practice:


·  An inclination to read a given text in relation to a body of texts.


·  No value placed on originality and no taboos on “borrowing,” both of which are based on Western individualism.


·  No privileging of a linear approach to representation.


·  No precedence of content over form as in the West.

 

Polysemy

In talking about Polysemy, Burch follows other writers on Japanese literature, most notably Brower and Miner, who are convinced that a poet like Hitomaro, dating back to the Manyoshu era, was interested in "not so much the actors as the actions, not so much the issue of responsibility as the integrated nature of the process of complex experience."(46) In other words, it is less 'human-centered' or individualistic than it is conceptual, seeing the human experience as rooted in nature and the world and the flow of events that constitutes our world. It's not always about "us" which may be something that is less true of western literature.

Hence, Burch can say that by use of "Double-functioning verbs and adjectives...Hitomaro manages to integrate all the elements of the poem into one continuous poetic and linguistic process, into one experience." (pp. 46-47) And in doing so, Japanese writers and readers tend to be more open, more transparent about the whole process of transmitting human experience through language. It IS a process, and as such is kind of artificial, but Japanese writers and readers recognize this! They embrace or at least accept the process for what it is and don't try to cover it over and pretend that it is something else, some form of a pure, uncomplicated transmission of "the truth" by means of words or signifiers.

Kakekotaba or Pivot Words mean two or more things at once; for example nagame means both reverie and long rains (naga ame), while matsu can means both pine and wait. Burch notes:

In the West it was in the eighteenth century, which witnessed the rise of the bourgeoisie and the reassertion of logocentrism and the emergence of an ideology of representation suited to the needs of the bourgeoisie, that the masking of the process of the production of meaning became as important, on its own level, as that of the process of production of goods. This ideology continues to dominate our notions of representation to this very day. As we shall see in he next chapter, it is this ideology of the transparency of the sign which dominated the emergence of western film from its 'primitive' stage. Conversely, no Japanese artistic practice, from the earliest known poetry under discussion up through the theatre and literature of the Edo (i.e., Tokugawa) period, ever subscribed to such a notion. This observation may be regarded as central to my thesis. The poem by Hitomaro...is 'about language', it is about the process by which we make meaning and in the original Japanese can scarcely be called representational at all, so compressed is the syntax. It is this inscription of the signifying process in the 'text' which is such an essential characteristic of the traditional Japanese arts and which was to influence the development of Japanese cinema in this century. (Burch, p, 47)

 

Intertextuality

The other important concept for Burch is Intertextuality, a practice that connects various texts through incorporation of poems, sounds, ideas and imagery from one into the body of another. In this way, the reader can simultaneously be exposed to more than one "text" at a time. Burch finds that it is a practice which contests the western myth of the closed or "bound" text, sealed off from all others and independent, which, of course, is reinforced by the western notion of originality that he pointed to in Chapter Two. Hence his title for this chapter is "A Boundless Text" means that when we read Japanese texts, we have to consider the way in which it refracts, echoes, suggests or directly incorporates other texts within it. In talking about the poetic anthologies of classical times like the Kokinshu and the "New" or Shinkokinshu, Burch notes that "The organization of these anthologies, which is both intertextual and polysemous, manifests the fundamental need for refined patterning in all human activity--from religious sculpture and architecture to the arrangement of flowers and food--which has informed Japanese culture for centuries." (48)

Burch goes on:

The anthologies were marked by another feature which is also of interest to us here: with increasing frequency, the poems were prefaced by explanatory headenotes (kotobagaki), which generally amounted to a few lines about the situation in which the poem was composed....From our viewpoint, however, it primarily embodied the fact that poetry was an activity within a context, either private or public. This awareness is in sharp contrast with traditional Western attitudes which tend to close off the text, not only form other texts but, above all, from the social 'text' in which it is nonetheless inevitably inscribed. This presence of the context is a permanent feature of Japanese difference, in both Heian literature and modern film practice. (pp. 48-49)

We might add modern literature to Burch's list as well, for many modern authors, as their predecessors did also, might echo or refer to other well known literary texts in their own narratives. So we as the reader encounter the simultaneous presence in both a contemporary narrative and a narrative rooted in another time and place but which is present, again, in the text we are reading. Consider something like renga or linked verse from the Edo period where multiple authors composed and declaimed poetry together, word jamming or improvising like jazz musicians would do later, and then some of the participants edit, revise, reorder and integrate these diverse poetic expressions and create something new. Burch finds in this practice a "profound equivalence of reading and writing [that] speaks directly to modern artistic practice and theory. Eisentstein's materialist conception of film-making, as described in the following statement, can be seen as related to this attitude: "It draws the spectator into a creative act in which is own personality is not dominated by that of the author, but fully develops in harmony with the author's conception, just as the personality of a great actor fuses with that of a great playwright in the process of creating a classical image on the stage." (52)

This may also play into the way that Japanese readers and writers "process" the endings of their work: they are not necessarily expecting or providing "closure" in the same way that western readers and writers do. Going all the way back to Aristotle, western readers and writers have looked to Beginnings, Middles and Ends in their texts; there is something linear and goal-oriented about this approach which fits well with what Burch says above about "the rise of the bourgeoisie and the reassertion of logocentrism and the emergence of an ideology of representation suited to the needs of the bourgeoisie." Like the industrial production process itself, there is expected to be some kind of "product," an outcome, or some form of closure, like an ending, perhaps. But Burch asks us to remember that this may not be what all cultures expect or need from their narratives. So our desire for a certain kind of ending, a certain kind of resolution of matters of concern--indeed, to have a clear Beginning, Middle and End--may be a projection of what we feel we need as readers onto a text that may not be trying to address that specific need.

 

 

 

NOTE: While Burch makes some very interesting points that are useful for our view of literary textx in this course, his views are not uncontested. Aaron Gerow, in his book Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895-1925 (Berleley: University of California Press, 2010) points out that while Burch's notions do work for certain directors that he focuses on, like Ozu, and that his valorization of early Japanese cinema as kind of alternative film practice that is very different from the standard Hollywood approach is instructive, Burch is guilty of a kind of Orientalist reduction of Japan and the West as binary opposites. It is never that simple. "Burch," claims Gerow, "does not interrogate the actual contemporary discourses on tradition, modernity and intertextuality, instead assuming a figure such as the benshi [an in-theater narrator who speals to the audience and explains the film] to be a traditional object with a given meaning or effectiveness and never exploring how that might have been mediated in the intense debates over the relationship between benshi and text." (4--5)

 

For more on intertextuality click here. See also this brief definition of intertextuality taken from the online Britannica:

The complex interrelationship between a text and other texts taken as basic to the creation or interpretation of the text.


Copyright 1994-1999 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. and Merriam-Webster, Inc.

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/english/f2007/jameson/concepts/historicity.html

And also:

What is ‘Intertextuality’?


Terence Hawkes suggests in Structuralism and Semiotics that:


Most works of literature, in emitting messages that refer to themselves, also make constant reference to other works of literature. As Julia Kristeva has pointed out, no ‘text’ can ever be completely ‘free’ of other texts. It will be involved in what she has termed the intertextuality of all writing. (144)
Often our reading or understanding of a particular play is dependent on a working knowledge of other texts.

From:http://www.mcauley.acu.edu.au/staff/delyse/intertex.htm

 

 

Important Recap:

Burch concludes Ch. 3 with 4 basic contentions:

 

 

1. Tradition inclines the Japanese reader to read any given text in relation to a body of texts.

 

2. The sacrosanct value placed on originality and the taboo against borrowing are absent in Japan as is the western notion of Individualism and the primacy of the person or subject.

 

3. The linear approach to representation is not the privileged one. Remeber, Burch argues that the Japanese writing system occupies a privileged middle ground between a LINEAR mode of representataion and a Non-Linear mode that constitutes, in effect, a challenge to or a CRITIQUE OF LINEARITY. A corollary of this could be that the need we feel in the west for CLOSURE may not be something on which Japanese writers and readers would insist. Instead, an open, ongoing "processual" approach to the human experience might be thought of as equally valid.

 

4. The precedence given in the west to content over form, and meaning over the process of its production or construction, is a specifically Western attitude and does not always predominate in Japan.

 

 

 

See also this review of Burch's book by Jonathan Rosenabaum:

The most ambitious and detailed study of Japanese cinema since Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie’s pioneering history appeared twenty years ago, Noël Burch’s To the Distant Observer adopts an overall approach that is radically different from that of its predecessor. Modernist and materialist in orientation where other critics have been realist and transcendental, Burch argues for a nearly total revision of the way we perceive Japanese film  – proposing a new set of criteria as well as an alternate canon of masterpieces.

To call his book controversial would almost be an understatement. Copies of a draft were circulated among a few film scholars in London more than four years ago, sparking a heated debate that has raged ever since. For Burch is arguing that “the most fruitful, original period” the Japanese film history coincided with the years between 1934 and 1943, when the Japanese people embraced “a national ideology akin to European fascism”.  Burch claims that these years saw Ozu and Mizoguchi produce their finest work, while Naruse, Shimizu, Ishida, Yamanaka, and many others “helped to perfect an approach to filmmaking that was not only uniquely Japanese but was equal, at its best, to the finest achievements of the traditional arts of previous centuries.”....

Burch has many intriguing notions about what he calls the “presentational” aspects of Japanese art and how they re­late to film history. Examining the stan­dard rules of editing that are taken for granted in the West, he is fascinated by the steady refusal of a commercial, supposedly “realistic” director like Ozu to comply with all of them and by the complex implications of this refusal.

In the process of formulating his theory about Japanese cinema, Burch explores a lot of suggestive background material about what has made the development of this national cinema unique. The figure of the benshi  — the livecommentator who accompanied films with vocal explana­tions throughout the silent period — is central to this development. As audience attractions and “stars” in their own right, benshi exerted a marked influence over film production. By assuming the role of storyteller, for example, he implicitly al­lowed movies a greater independence from this function.

The fact that early Japanese films were shot at twelve frames per second, rather than the customary sixteen-to-twenty-frame average, suggests to Burch that Japanese spectators were less irritated by the flicker effect — and presumably less dependent on the illusion of a nonflick­ering continuity of images. And the Jap­anese film industry’s belated adoption of sound, in the mid-thirties, is treated as further evidence of a reluctance to con­form with Western practices.

Burch also seems adept at interrelating films with other, more traditional aspects of Japanese culture. Parenthetical forays into architecture and the various spoken and written forms of Japanese are partc­ularly helpful. In an effort to link up cer­tain formal traits of Mizoguchi and Ozu with traditional arts, some of Mizoguchi” s camera movements are labeled “scroll shots,” while Ozu’s celebrated cutaway still lifes are designated “pillow shots,” after the “pillow word” of classical Japanese poetry...

In striking contrast is Roland Barthes’s beautiful and untranslated book about Japan, L’Empire des signes (The Empire of Signs), whose radically imaginative ap­proach to its subject has guided many of Burch’s insights — with mixed results. “If I wish to imagine a fictional people,” Barthes begins his book,

I can make a name for them, treat them declaratively, like an entity in a novel….I can also, without claiming to represent or analyze any reality whatsoever (such being the major endeavors of Western discourse), gather, somewhere in the world (out there), a number of features (in both the pictorial and linguistic sense), and with those features deliberately form a system. It is this system which I shall call Japan.

Without taking Barthes’ s poetic license quite so far, Burch nevertheless oscillates between an ideal, theoretical Japan and a material, historical one. He never quite balances the two. As a “distant observer,”  he lacks the tools to attempt an ideological analysis of films he has many perceptive, formal insights about. Eschewing the graceful rhetoric of a Barthes, he can’t sweet-talk his way out of any of the contradictions he encoun­ters — and he encounters quite a few.

Indeed, it’s often hard to agree with Burch about anything, even when he’s right, because of the peevish combativeness that often creeps into his tone. Yet the singular virtue of this provocative study is that one is continually learning something from it, even while one argues back. Burch’s Japan, however incomplete, is still another country – and one that is certainly worth knowing about.

(http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/1979/07/from-a-far-country-review-of-burchs-to-the-distant-observer/)

 

 

And yet another take on Burch:

To The Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema

by Noël Burch

 

Burch aims to do something akin to Bordwell/Thompson/Staiger in The Classical Hollywood Cinema, namely, a formally driven approach to constructing a system of standard narrative film within the bounds of a particularly nation during it’s so-called “golden age.” Burch notes that the period he wants to identify as the golden age (1917-1945) has no consensus, but he offers what is at least a compelling possibility for reconsideration. Japanese cinema’s golden age has historically been considered to begin in the postwar period, but Burch notes that the ideological shift that Japan underwent during its “democratization” following occupation allowed Western audiences to identify with the films in a way that they did/could not prior to 1945. Burch argues, following a number of months in Japanese film archives reviewing hundreds of films, that this earlier period constitutes Japanese cinema’s golden age by its more essentially Japanese character.

As this suggests, Burch does imply an essentialist view toward national identity, ideology, and form. He uses Roland Barthes’s theoretical un-reading of Japanese culture as a beginning point, noting, for example, the decentered nature of Japanese homes, a fundamental shift from a more Western ideology that focuses on content rather than form and conceives of space in terms of capital and property. Burch acknowledges that his approach is geared toward particular auteurs, although he promises to explain why this is necessary later in the book. Revealingly, however, Burch recounts his time spent in film archives by noting that he attempted to see at least one film from every Japanese director from 1917-1945. It would seem that, however much the form of the films (or any other factor) supported an auteur-driven approach, Burch’s loyalty to the auteur existed a priori. (That is to say, Burch does not lay out any other self-imposed requirements, such as films including certain actors, a percentage of films produced by particular studios, and so forth.)

Burch’s historical moment in 1979, during the heart of the Cold War, and his biography, having lived some time in France during the period of Theory, situate the context of the book. By following Barthes, Burch subjugates content to form and argues that “theory” is a European construct, something that can only be derived from Japanese art and culture rather than from theoretical writings, as such. Burch identities auteurs like Akira Kurosawa and Nagisa Oshima as noteworthy in the context of postwar, post-golden age Japanese cinema. In Kurosawa’s case, we have a director who was able to transcend, or at least surpass, the ideological norms of the postwar period. In Oshima’s case, a radical new subjectivity came to bear, shifting from victimization to aggression and updating Japanese film form. This update referred to history while untethering itself from it. In so doing, Burch reconceives of Japanese cinema and finds in its golden age a period of relative lethargy, sandwiched between the formally pure period before the war and revolutionary period that Oshima trailblazed.

https://andrewsidea.wordpress.com/2014/07/17/to-the-distant-observer-noel-burch/