Walter Benjamin and Film Studies

SSHRC funded project 2009-2012

This project will build on the readings and interpretations of Benjamin’s theory that have provided the methodological frameworks for my three published monographs. In my first book, Narrative Mortality, I developed his theory of allegory for the analysis of death in film; for my second book, Experimental Ethnography, I used his concepts of historiography, modernity and media; and for my recent book The Cinema of Naruse Mikio, I developed his notion of rescuing critique for an analysis of the Japanese woman’s film. While these projects are focused on very different modes of film practice, their shared base is in my reading of Benjamin. This project will enable me to bring together the various approaches and insights that I have developed and synthesize Benjamin’s rich vocabulary and conceptual apparatus.

My emphasis on Benjamin’s concepts of “phantasmagoria” and “archive” is geared toward the development of a method of film criticism that may well be of interest to the general public. Journalistic film criticism of the expanding archive of film history released on DVD tends to be informally guided by tendencies in academia. Benjamin’s thought lends itself to historically-informed criticism of films as cultural documents as well as works of art, potentially adding a new “anthropological” perspective to the dominant critical models of auteurism and masterpieces. His criticism helps us recognize how films mediate social relations and how they have produced new forms of knowledge, memory and fantasy at specific historical conjunctions. As visual culture takes on an increasingly high profile in everyday life, we cannot have enough critical methods and perspectives with which to engage with the audio-visual image-bank and contemporary landscape. My emphasis, furthermore, on the oeuvres of Barbara Stanwyck and James Benning as objects of analysis, makes this project also an important treatment of two seminal but neglected figures in American culture.

Classical Japanese Cinema

Forthcoming from Continuum Press

The book will approach Japanese cinema as an industry closely modeled on Hollywood. The classical period refers to the years in which the studio system dominated all film production in Japan, from roughly 1930 to 1960. My approach to the most well known films of this period situates them within Japanese society and culture, the star system, the genre system and the film industry. While I am respectful and well-informed about the aesthetics and critical values of the canon, I am also critical of some of the ideological tendencies of this cinema, and my analyses tend to comment on class and gender dynamics. In this sense, this book is arguably a departure from the usual line of criticism on Japanese cinema. In my view Japanese Classical Cinema has had enormous influence on other Asian cinemas, especially in TV broadcast form, and it is important that the industrial production context be accounted for in discussions of the films.
This book collects eight DVD reviews that I have published in Cineaste since 2002, including one feature article on Kurosawa. I will add an introduction and five or six additional chapters, in consultation with an editor. In my Cineaste reviews of titles such as Tokyo Story, Ugetsu and Kurosawa’s films, my critical approach is to highlight the “everydayness” of Japanese studio-era cinema. The canon of great Japanese cinema has tended to be approached by Western and Japanese critics as an art cinema with auteurist, and at times, Orientalist, assumptions. This volume will demystify the films, while providing concise analyses of them.