Matthew P. Bachand
Description
In my 10th grade world literature course, I will use Japanese cinema to teach students the ways in which setting can interact with character, plot, and symbolism in Japanese narratives in particular, and by extension, narratives in general. I will focus on ghost stories and other mysterious tales in order to capitalize on student interest in the macabre. Furthermore, by using kwaidanghost storiesas well as mysteries, students, will have to articulate elements of storytelling that they may have overlooked before, such as atmosphere.
We will situate the stories and films within Japanese mythological and historical contexts, and pay particular attention to the symbolic meanings associated with the settings in the films. With this background, students will be able to analyze the effects that the different settings have on both intended Japanese audiences and themselves as viewers of the filmsand readers of the texts.
Cultural Studies Approaches
Our primary tool for exploring these films will be a cultural studies framework, or cultural analysis. According to Kathleen McCormick, a professor of writing who has used cultural analysis to great effect, "Cultural analysis asks you to relate the values, practices, or beliefs of a text you are reading to other, often different or seemingly unrelated ideas, beliefs, or practices from the same time period in which the text was produced.(1
) "
An example may be in order. The Japanese samurai tale
Chushingura
is the true story of a group of 47 samurai who, after a long period of exile, return to avenge their fallen lord. Occurring in 1703, after approximately 100 years of peace, this story reminded many Japanese of the ideals of the samurai. In the Hiroshi Iganaki version of this story (1962), we see a catalogue of
daily practices
and
rules
that revolve around the idea of honor. Samurai must not draw their swords in the capital, for it is dishonorable. Also, deferenceand bribesshould be paid to those who have knowledge you seek, for to fail in bribing them is to miss essential knowledge, and risk dishonoring oneself (this is, in fact, what causes the lord's downfall). We also see samurai who disband to preserve the honor of their lord, and many characters commit ritual suicide in order to preserve their honor.
Through synthesizing these many practices and rules that involve the principle of honor, we can begin to form a rudimentary idea of what the Japanese consider to be honorable, and may even be able to figure out what is happening in the culture that is causing them to have these attitudes aboutin this casehonor.
After having unearthed these beliefs, students should be able to identify the underlying assumptionsthe beliefs about the culture that are taken as true on face, with no questioningoperating in the culture. In our example, students saw a series of statements and beliefs about honor, including a suicide. An underlying assumption that goes unquestioned in this culture is the idea that one should die with one's honor, even if that entails death at ones own hand.
At this point, students will likely start to look deeper: what beliefs did the Japanese have at this time that made them think honor was more important than life? Everyone who talks about honor in this way is a samurai. Is this a feature of the samurai class alone, or the Japanese people in general? Asking these questions will lead to the exploration of other texts and may even lead to the discovery of contradictory practices and beliefs, which students will have to resolve for themselves.
Why should we use such an approach? Because students are much less likely to suggest simplistic, either/or answers to complicated questions of
why
people within a culture behave in certain ways. Also, because it is very rare that this type of analysis will produce a single answer, students must either learn how to negotiate their differences and find consensus or learn how to allow simultaneous, yet opposing, viewpoints to exist in the same place and time.
Furthermore, students will inevitably connect their cultural analyses to their own culturethat of whatever United States communities to which they claim membership. At this point, the cultural analysis becomes intercultural, even if the teacher does not encourage it.
For our purposes, we can extend our exploration to include those practices and beliefs that seem
abnormal
and
supernatural
as well. After viewing and reading throughout the unit, students should have enough observations about the worlds displayed in the narratives to sort out operative definitions of what appears normal and what myths may lie behind that normalcy. This list can be used by students to answer their third essential question: do different cultures have different definitions of the supernatural?
Film Studies Approaches
In order to familiarize oneself with the language of film, the Yale Film Studies Film Analysis Website http://classes.yale.edu/film-analysis/ provides a useful primer. I will not devote time to recreating this site here. The page states: "The Film Analysis Guide was developed to meet the needs of faculty and students at Yale who are interested in becoming familiar with the vocabulary of film studies and the techniques of cinema." (2)
While the Film Analysis Website does provide teachers with a useful primer in the language of film, its purposes do not extend to explaining the ways in which different cultures develop their own sense of filmmaking. In order to help students explore our second essential question about the cultural differences in storytelling, there are a few Japanese aesthetic principles that should be explained.
First, even more than in the west, the major influence in the development of filmmaking in Japan was drama. As a result, realism was of less import to some prominent Japanese filmmakers. They viewed film as an "extension of the stage." Because visual realism was not a goal of the Japanese stage, it meant less to the Japanese filmmaker than it would to a western filmmaker that regarded a film as a combination of photographs.(3)
Traditional Japanese painting did influence Japanese filmmakers, however. The Japanese films of Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Masaki Kobayashi (the first and third of whom we will discuss later in this unit) were built around the assumption that a camera frame was a canvas to be filled, and that reality is contained within it. Western filmmakers typically regard the camera frame as an eye that follows the movie's action in the world.(4) This difference is particularly noticeable in
Kwaidan
by Kobayashi, who was a painter before he began making films.
A final aesthetic consideration relates to traditional uses of space in Japanese art, and the effects these traditions may or may not have on some Japanese filmmakers. In Japan,
woodblock printing, standing screens, and scrolls that are read from left to right are important artistic media, and directors such as Kurosawa have had their works compared to these traditions numerous times.(5) One example of this is in the film
Rashomon,
wherein characters who have given testimony sit by a wall in the background. The first character abuts the right edge of the frame, while the others fill in to his left, giving the appearance of characters being written on a scroll. One might ask, is this an allusion to the scroll as an artistic medium? Is it a paean to the traditional standing screen, which does not employ perspective as it is used in the West? These aesthetic questions may prove useful to some teachers.
Noticing subtle variations on these themes will allow students an opportunity to see how older Japanese notions of art that differed from western notions led to a different sense of how one makes a film, of how one tells a story on film.