Traveling film history: Language and landscape in the Japanese cinema, 1931--1945 (Shimizu Hiroshi)

This dissertation is an examination of traveling and rural films in the Japanese cinema from 1931–1945. It is an attempt to use the cinema to rethink the historical narratives of the period—of national sound cinema, of fascism and of Marxism—and to show the convergences of social and intellectual movements on the cinema of the times. The categories of landscape and language provide the basic framework for analyzing the cinema of nonurban spaces—spaces of domestic and colonial travel that have up until now been neglected from major cinema studies of the period.; Chapters I and II elucidate how the advent of sound cinema complicates the national framework of cinema histories by tracing role of the imperial and the regional on the development of the language used in the cinema.; In Chapters III to VI the cinematic countryside is examined as both a site of contested representations and new forms of spectatorship. An excavation of the forgotten genre of farm village films will show how the countryside functioned as both an axis of colonization and as the object of utopian desires. While cinematic representations of the countryside shifted from portrayals of pastoral playgrounds to depictions of the dire conditions of the farm village, they both reflected the socio-economic conditions of the times and functioned as interpretations of change, often expressing the historical worldview of their creators.; Chapters VII and VIII are an investigation of the space of travel represented in the road movies of Shimizu Hiroshi. An analysis of Shimizu's films shows how the cinema of this period was a traveling cinema, fundamentally transformed by the development of transportation and tourism. Reconceptualizing the cinema as a traveling cinema sheds light not only on what we normally define as travel films but helps us examine the ways in which travel transformed the genres, styles, and the subject of the Japanese cinema throughout the 1930s and 1940s.