■Topics 2018
2018-06-21 NichibunkenNews
Evening Seminar (June 7, 2018) “Scenario Culture: Rethinking Authors and Audiences of Postwar Japanese Cinema”
“Scenario Culture: Rethinking Authors and Audiences of Postwar Japanese Cinema,” Lauri Kitsnik (film historian, JSPS postdoctoral fellow at Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies at Kyoto University)Lauri Kitsnik’s lecture focused on the work of post-World War II Japanese screenwriters and their readership. The general image of screenwriters in old Hollywood movies is of individuals silently working alone at their typewriters in dimly lit rooms. In Japan, by contrast, as represented by the screenwriting division founded at the Shochiku Film Studio in the 1920s, scenario writing was traditionally done as a collaborative process with the participation of the film director, screenwriter, and other staff. Kitsnik cited the well-known director-screenwriter teams of Mizoguchi Kenji/ Yoda Yoshikata and Ozu Yasujirō/ Noda Kōgo, as well as, in the 1950s and after, Kurosawa Akira and a group of screenwriters (including Hashimoto Shinobu), Ichikawa Kon and his wife Wada Natto, and so on. Conveying the passion of film makers who often secluded themselves at a hot spring inn to devote themselves to creating a script, Kitsnik brought to life the times when movies flourished as part of the lifeblood of popular culture.
Regarding the trends of the 1950s, the decade known as the golden age of Japanese cinema, he drew special attention to the cultural phenomenon in which film shooting scripts gained popularity as “scenario literature,” attracting a new readership separate from film fans. With the rapid growth of the economy, a number of scenario journals and film magazines were founded that published film scripts as independent works. Moreover, there was also a ferment of publishing collections of masterpiece scenarios (meisaku shinario shū) and collections of classic scenarios (shinario koten zenshū). Kitsnik described the phenomena as symbolic of the creation of the canon of Japanese cinema. Even today, he said, there are fervent collectors of film scenarios.
(Reported by Shiraishi Eri, assistant professor, Office of Digital Resources, Publications, and Public Information)
