Cinema Is a Cat

Cinema Is a Cat
A Cat Lover’s Introduction
to Film Studies

Daisuke Miyao

University of Hawai‘i Press

Honolulu
© 2019 University of Hawai‘i Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
24 23 22 21 20 19    6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Miyao, Daisuke, author. | Miyao, Daisuke. Eiga wa neko de aru.

Title: Cinema is a cat : a cat lover’s introduction to film studies /
Daisuke Miyao.
Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019. | Loosely based
on the author’s Eiga wa neko de aru, Tokyo, 2011. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019021389 | ISBN 9780824879709 (paperback) | ISBN
9780824879693 (cloth)
Subjects: LCSH: Cats in motion pictures. | Motion pictures. |
Cinematography.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.A5 M59 2019 | DDC 791.43/629752—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019021389

Cover photo © Paramount Pictures Corp. All Rights Reserved.

University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free

paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and
durability of the Council on Library Resources.
In memory of Charles Silver, a lover of cats and cinema
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Prologue: Cinema Is a Cat 1

Part I: The Languages of Cinema7

      1. Cats Love Small Spaces: Framing in Breakfast at Tiffany’s9
Blake Edwards, USA, 1961
 2. Cats Love Dark Places: Lighting in Cat People29
Jacques Tourneur, USA, 1942
   3. Cats Love Chases: Editing in To Catch a Thief 55
Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1955

Part II: Theories and Histories of Cinema77

Cats Are Prima Donnas: Feminist Film Theory and
4. 
Auteurism in Dishonored79
Josef von Sternberg, USA, 1931
Cats, Mixed and Hybrid: Genre and Stardom in
   5. 
Shozo, a Cat and Two Women95
Toyoda Shirō, Japan, 1956
Drawing Pictures of Cats: National Cinema and Anime in
6. 
Jungle Emperor Leo112
Takeuchi Yoshio, Japan, 1997
  7. Moving Like a Cat: Realism in Take Care of My Cat129
Jeong Jae-eun, South Korea, 2001
 8. Cats Old and New: Modernity in Samurai Cat141
Yamaguchi Yoshitaka and Watanabe Takeshi, Japan, 2014

vii
viii CONTENTS

Epilogue: Cats Like Watching: History in The Cats

of Mirikitani154
Linda Hattendorf, USA/Japan, 2006

Glossary 163
Filmography 167
References 171
Index 177
 Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to the unchanging enthusiasm, encouragement, and

generosity of my editor at the University of Hawai‘i Press, Pamela Kelley,
who helped make this book possible. She meticulously read my manuscript
and made a number of insightful and caring comments and suggestions.
I would like to thank two anonymous readers at the University of
Hawai‘i Press for their valuable suggestions. I also want to thank Jennifer
McIntyre for scrupulously and gracefully copyediting my manuscript.
Special thanks go to Shibata Motoyuki and Mari Yoshihara, who read the
first draft of the Japanese edition of Cinema Is a Cat; Markus Nornes, who first
suggested that I write an English edition; Matsui Jun and Mizuno Yoshimi of
Heibonsha, who published the Japanese edition in 2011 and supported the publi-
cation of this English edition as well; Marianne McDonald, Cristina Della Coletta,
and Yingjin Zhang of UCSD, who have provided generous institutional support;
Larry McCallister of Paramount Pictures Theatrical Library; Paul G. Alberghetti
and Michael O. Crain of the Audrey Hepburn Estate, who have given permission
to use the photograph of Audrey Hepburn and a cat for the book cover.
A very early version of chapter five appeared in The Journal of Japanese
and Korean Cinema 8.2 (2016) with support from the editors of the journal,
Hye Seung Chung and David Scott Diffrient.
To Yoko, Dica (who has crossed over the Rainbow Bridge), Dot, and
Hoku, the loves of my life, I am truly grateful for the happiness that you have
brought to us. I could not even think of writing this book or the Japanese
edition without you.
Last of all but equally importantly, I would like to express my deepest
gratitude to the humane societies and the rescue groups around the globe.
Thank you so much for the brave and selfless work you do on behalf of those
who cannot advocate for themselves.

ix
 PROLOGUE

Cinema Is a Cat

“. . . should you wish to learn about cats, only a cat can

tell you.”
—Natsume Sōseki, I Am a Cat

The nameless cat of Japanese author Natsume Sōseki’s acclaimed 1905

novel laments that cats are beyond human comprehension. The cat is abso-
lutely right. Even for a cat lover like me, cats are like phantoms. I know my
cats like small, dark places. I have seen that they enjoy watching and chasing,
and I consider them to be good performers and fussy eaters. To be honest,
though, I still don’t understand how they think and what they really like. But
I am very attracted to them.
I am also a cinephile. To me, cinema is like a cat. Until very recently,
cinema has existed in (relatively) small and dark places called movie theaters.
It is something to be watched and enjoyed visually. Many films are about the
chase, and of course acting is an integral part of cinema. Screening schedules
are usually rigid, as firm as mealtimes. I have been watching cinema for more
than forty years and have been studying it for more than twenty-five. I have
read a book by André Bazin, an influential French film critic, entitled What
is Cinema?, but to be frank, I still don’t know how to define it. Yet I am
strongly attracted to cinema.
Film scholar Rey Chow calls cinema “phantomlike” (Chow 2001,
1391). In her essay that surveys the history of the academic study of cinema,
Chow suggests that cinema will remain an “ambiguous” object of study

1
2 PROLOGUE

because both teachers of the humanities and amateur film lovers without
formal training contribute to knowledge production around it (Chow 2001,
1391–1392). But in such phantomlike ambiguity, concludes Chow, “may lie
its most interesting intellectual future” (Chow 2001, 1392).
In this book, I hunt for the phantoms. I pursue the “interesting intel-
lectual future” of cinema using the cat, a “phantomlike” being, as a guide.
I admit this is an arbitrary and very personal choice. I am doing this because
cats and cinema have had tremendous influences on my life during the last
two decades. I was born and raised in Japan.When I first came to the United
States in the mid-1990s to study cinema in New York, I became friends with
a cat who belonged to my future partner. She had adopted the cat, which she
named Dica, from a rescue organization, and the three of us watched films
together in our apartment in Brooklyn (we only had a very small TV, not
even digital, and a VHS deck). After several years I found a job teaching film
at a university on the West Coast, and we three crossed America together.
The cat died in 2008, and I wrote a Japanese forerunner to this book, Cinema
Is a Cat (Eiga wa neko dearu), soon afterwards.When the book was eventually
published in 2011, it seemed like my requiem to our beloved cat.
Dudley Andrew, a film scholar whom I deeply admire, wrote, “Every
genuine cinematic experience involves décalage, time-lag” (Andrew 2009,
914). Unlike later media, including TV and the internet, which strive for
immediacy, cinema exists in “a gap between here and there as well as now and
then” (Andrew 2009, 914). The film image that we see now is always the one
filmed and edited in the past. Filmmakers and spectators are separated by time
and space. Andrew concluded that “perhaps it took later media—and particu-
larly the new media of video games, the interactive internet, and virtual reality
—to let us recognize that cinema has never really been about immediacy. Its
spontaneity and contingency—its neorealism—has always been the lure by
which it offers an experience that, properly speaking, is not immediate at
all, but reflective, resonant, and voluminous” (Andrew 2009, 915). Perhaps it
took the death of my cat to make me realize how important she had been in
my life. I had taken her existence for granted when she was alive. My genuine
experience of my cat can now exist only in “décalage, time-lag.” When I wrote
my Japanese-language book about cats and cinema, it was the first time I had
seriously thought about the fact that cinema can only exist in time-lag.
This English-language book, Cinema Is a Cat, is loosely based on the
2011 Japanese version. It is about cinema, which is “reflective, resonant, and
voluminous” in nature, a point that is especially important to remember
now when a number of people in both the entertainment and academic
worlds, facing the dominance of new media, address the “death of cinema.”
 Cinema is a Cat 3

Acclaimed filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese and Ridley Scott have

charged that filmmakers have become overly reliant on digital techniques
and computer-generated images, that the industry has become risk averse
and franchise obsessed. They lament that cinema has become more televi-
sion-like, more game-like, and that moviegoing is no longer a community-
building activity. To them, the cinema that they love is dying. Scholars, too,
facing the shift from celluloid to digital filmmaking and from moviegoing
to social networking, have had to adapt. The academic field of film studies
has morphed into media studies and cultural studies. For some scholars, the
celluloid cinema has become an archeological object.
Still, I don’t think this book is an archaic project facing only toward
the past. Indeed, in this world of new media, our lives are surrounded by
moving images: television, video, YouTube, streaming, GPS, virtual real-
ity. As long as our moving image culture continues, cinema will always be
shown somewhere, somehow; therefore, the practical and theoretical study
of cinema by filmmakers and critics/scholars/cinephiles will not disappear.
The methodological and philosophical endeavor to define what cinema is
will continue, along with a new question: What are these new media? Thus,
the legacy of film studies—how to read audiovisual materials aesthetically
and culturally—has a limitless value for the future. I hope this book will
be an introduction both to that legacy and to the expanding universe of
film studies. After all, the field of film studies has been expanding since the
1950s, when literature teachers first started offering film analysis in their
courses. And over the years, other disciplines including art history, sociology,
anthropology, history, psychology, and economics have recognized cinema’s
attractions (Andrew 2009, 882–883).
This book is also about cats. A major difference between the Japanese
and English versions of Cinema Is a Cat is that this one faces firmly toward
the future. The English edition is not a simple translation of the Japanese one.
It contains brand-new chapters and this new prologue. All other chapters
have been substantially reimagined and rewritten for new readers.While the
Japanese book was written in memory of my deceased cat, I am writing this
book with two new cats at my side. We watch films together every night.
In the chapters that follow, I make a number of connections between
cats and cinema. One reason for this is that cats have played important roles
in the history of cinema. There are four historically significant films that
all have close connections to cats. One of them is Avatar ( James Cameron,
2009), the highest-grossing film of all time. Cats inspired the creators of the
aliens in this film, and the cute, feline-like appearance of the aliens helps
strengthen the audience’s emotional attachment to them.
4 PROLOGUE

Another is The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949), considered the best Brit-
ish film of the twentieth century by the British Film Institute in 1999 and
the best film of all time by Kinema Junpō, the most influential film magazine
in Japan. In the film Harry Lime (Orson Welles), who has been in hiding, is
forced to make his first appearance in the film when his cat draws close to
him, exposing his presence.
In The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), the second-best film in
the American Film Institute’s 100 Years . . . 100 Films list (2007), the tough
gangster Don Corleone (Marlon Brando) holds a cat in his arms while pet-
ting him very gently. His act is a stark contrast to the brutality that he shows
on different occasions even as it mirrors the affection he shows his loved
ones. (It is said that Brando, a cat lover, found the stray cat on the set and
worked it into the scene).
Finally, one of the oldest films in the world, a thirty-second film pro-
duced by Thomas Edison, the king of inventors, in 1894, is entitled The
Boxing Cats. In the film, two cats wear boxing gloves and fight in a tiny ring.
Behind them is “Prof. Welton,” who smiles and lets them fight on (a cruel
act, from a cat lover’s point of view).
The Lumière brothers (Auguste and Louis), Edison’s rivals, whose first
paid public screening of their films on December 26, 1895, is considered by
many to be the beginning of cinema, also produced at least seven films with
cats between 1896 and 1900.
Today in the new media landscape, cat videos are a major genre of
popular Web culture. One star in particular was born from the genre: Maru,
a Scottish Fold cat. As of September 2016, videos featuring Maru had been
viewed over 325 million times. The appeal of the cat in visual media has
been strong and enduring.
Another reason why I’ve chosen to highlight cats in cinema is that
there are similar characteristics between these two “phantomlike” subjects.
By directing your attention to the fascinating relationships between cats and
cinema, I offer a unique and intimate view of the history and theories of
cinema. Cats are major representational subjects in the nine films explored in
this book (nine because people say cats have nine lives), and in each chapter,
I juxtapose a feline characteristic—“Cats love small spaces” or “Cats love dark
places”—with discussion of the languages, theories, and history of cinema.
In Part I, I focus on three basic elements of the language of cinema:
framing, lighting, and editing. It was Yoshimura Kōzaburō, the acclaimed
Japanese director of The Ball at the Anjo House (Anjō ke no butōkai, 1947)
starring Hara Setsuko, who selected Cinema Is a Frame! (Eiga wa furēmu da!)
to be the title of his 2001 book. Painting with Light is the title of a 1995 book
 Cinema is a Cat 5

on cinematography by John Alton, who received an Oscar for An American

in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951). Francis Ford Coppola of The Godfather is
often quoted as saying, “The essence of cinema is editing.” I illuminate these
three essential functions of film by invoking three well-known passions of
cats: small spaces, dark places, and the chase.
My emphasis in these first three chapters is on close analysis of the
audiovisual text of cinema, and I introduce some of the “bedrock informa-
tion” of how to read the cinematic text (Andrew 2009, 905). In the US, it
has been predominantly film scholar David Bordwell who has addressed the
importance of close analysis in order to establish film studies as an academic
discipline. To do so, Bordwell has chosen to pay “attention to the specific
and systematic character of the medium” (Andrew 2009, 902). In Japan, it has
been Hasumi Shigehiko who has similarly focused on close analysis. Using
the term “surface criticism” (“hyōsō hihyō”), Hasumi emphasized the signifi-
cance of paying attention to the details of techniques in order to distinguish
film studies from literary criticism or journalistic reviews (Hasumi 1990,
180–214). My arguments in these three chapters are inspired by Bordwell
and Hasumi.
After introducing the analytical methods in the first three chapters, we
move on to the contexts in which films are made, exhibited, and viewed
by turning to the theory and history of cinema. In the chapters that follow,
paying attention to the language of cinema that we have learned in Part I,
I introduce the major theoretical and methodological concepts of film stud-
ies that have developed first in France and England, and then in the United
States over the fifty years following World War II.The concepts are as follows:
auteurism, realism, genre, feminist film theory, stardom, national cinema, and
modernity theory.
Auteurism, realism, and genre can be attributed to the French film
critics of the journal Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s. Auteurist critics began
to closely analyze the visual styles of cinema in order to distinguish cinema
from literature or screenplays. Those critics considered filmmakers who
impart their own styles to their films, regardless of the genre, to be auteurs.
Auteurs, according to those critics, were conscious of the movie camera’s
capability of mechanical reproduction, which is what separates cinematic
realism from painting and even from photography.
Later, with the emergence and flourishing of feminist film theory in
1970s England, a psychoanalytic essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cin-
ema,” by Laura Mulvey, became influential. Her essay shifted the focus
of film studies from analysis of the film form to that of the film viewing
experience. In particular, she attacked mainstream cinema for the way it
6 PROLOGUE

turned female characters into objects of the desiring male gaze. Star studies
developed along with feminist film theory and paid particular attention to
Marxist analysis, in which a star is seen not so much as an individual but as
an image or commodity.
Then, in the “explosion of American film studies” since the 1980s
(Andrew 2009, 900), attention has turned to cultural studies of film produc-
tion and reception, focusing on issues of racism, nationalism, colonialism,
and historical specificity, including modernity and modernization.
Thus in Part II, we make use of the methods and theories of film stud-
ies, asking questions such as: Who is the author of a film? How does a film
connect to reality? What connections does one film have to other films?
Who is represented in a film and how? How is a film produced and viewed
differently by people with different cultural and social backgrounds? How
is a film located in history? Our focus on the innate behaviors of cats offers
what I hope will be a memorable and appealing approach to these questions.
There are, of course, many more technical, theoretical, and historical issues
in film studies than what I deal with in this book. It would be my great
pleasure if you, whether a cat lover, a film lover, or both, become interested
in film studies after reading this book and find new ways to enjoy watching
and talking about cinema . . . and cats.

Author’s note:
In this book, translations from Japanese-language books are my own unless
otherwise noted. Japanese names are listed family name first, except for the
ones that are commonly used in English (e.g., Sessue Hayakawa). Macrons/
diacritics are not used in English translations of Japanese titles: The Period that
Toyo Miyatake Looked into (Tōyō Miyatake ga nozoita jidai, 2008).

Note:
Epigraph. Natsume Sōseki, I Am a Cat (1905, 2001; 19)
 CHAPTER 1

Cats Love Small Spaces

Framing in Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Blake Edwards, USA, 1961

Having Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. Early in the morning. The city is quiet. A taxi
slides onto the screen from afar, where we see the Empire State Building in
the distance. The soft melody of “Moon River” by Henry Mancini begins.
The taxi stops in front of 727 Fifth Avenue. A slender woman in a black
dress, long gloves, and black sunglasses, carrying a brown paper bag, gets out
and looks up at the name on the building: Tiffany & Co. The clock under
the name shows five forty-five. When she walks toward a show window, the
credit appears right next to her slender body: Audrey Hepburn.
Standing in front of the show window, where expensive jewelry is dis-
played, Hepburn opens the brown bag and takes out a paper cup of coffee

Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) stands in front of

Tiffany & Co.

9
10 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

Holly is captured in the glass window.

and a pastry. She bites off a small piece of pastry, sips coffee, and moves to the
next window. She is vaguely reflected in the glass. The following shot shows
Hepburn’s face from inside the building, as seen through the glass window.
Hepburn’s face is so perfectly framed by the window that she herself looks
like a beautiful mannequin with expensive jewelry, sunglasses, and a Given-
chy dress. Critic Rachel Mosley writes that for Marilyn Monroe, clothes
were about showing off her body, but for Hepburn the reverse was true: her
body was for showing off the clothes (Mosley 2002, 179).
Then, the camera moves outside again. Hepburn slowly starts walk-
ing north on Fifth Avenue and turns right onto 57th Street. She tosses the
breakfast that she has barely touched into a trash bin. The moon is no longer
in the sky, but she walks in the direction of the East River to the melody
of “Moon River.” The morning sunlight is faint, and she casts almost no
shadow on the street. Hepburn’s steps are slow but look very light because
of that. In fact, the name of the character that Hepburn plays in this film is
Holly Golightly. Holly goes lightly. In the original novel by Truman Capote,
Holly’s mailbox reads, “Holly Golightly:Traveling.” Is traveling her occupa-
tion, or is she on a trip? In fact, Holly is a high-class call girl. She must be on
her way back from work. She never takes off her sunglasses. She may want
to hide rings under her eyes. But her steps and behavior are so light, almost
casual, that it looks as if she happened to wake up early and come out for a
walk in a deserted city with her breakfast. Just as a cat takes a walk early in
the morning.
According to Iwagō Mitsuaki, a popular animal photographer in
Japan, early morning is the best time to meet cats in any town and photo-
graph them. Many cat owners experience their cats waking up quite early,
climbing up on the bed, kneading the blanket, tapping on their face with
 Framing in Breakfast at Tiffany’s 11

their paws, and requesting breakfast. Iwagō writes, “The beauty of cats
in the morning light is particularly noteworthy. So every moment in the
morning is precious for me to meet as many beautiful cats as possible”
(Iwagō 2007, 23). Early morning seems to be the best time to meet Holly
in the city, too.

Holly Behaves Like a Cat

This is how Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a sophisticated urban romantic comedy
starring Audrey Hepburn, begins. As this opening scene implies, Holly is
depicted throughout this film as if she were a cat. First of all, many of her
actions and behaviors remind us of a cat. While Holly scornfully calls the
men she dates for work “rats,” her job is to make “trips to the powder
room” for them. She cannot live without putting powder on her face, dress-
ing up in Givenchy dresses, going to parties, and hunting those rats. Holly
says she has dined with (as opposed to “upon,” one might surmise!) twenty-
seven rats in only two months. In order to emphasize the “rat”-ness of
her customers, or their lack of high moral status, most men in this film are
shorter than the women. For instance, in a party scene at Holly’s apartment,
Hollywood producer OJ (Martin Balsam) takes a girl named Irving into
a bathroom. Yet, Irving is much taller than OJ, so it looks as though it is
she who takes him. Irving is most likely another call girl. She has probably
caught a rat that evening.
In addition to her early morning walk and her job hunting rats, Holly
behaves like a cat in other ways. After her breakfast at Tiffany’s, she goes
back to her brownstone apartment building on the Upper East Side (East
71st Street, to be exact). She runs up the steps of her building as if she
were running away from the sunlight, which has suddenly become stronger.
Once inside, she lightly climbs the stairs after asking Yuniyoshi, the building’s
Japanese super, to unlock the door. Yuniyoshi, played by Mickey Rooney,
horribly made up with lifted eyes, round black glasses, and protruding teeth,
loudly complains because Holly always forgets her key and bothers him,
relentless as a cat. And just as cats like to climb, Holly goes up and down
stairs many times in this film, including the staircases of the apartment and
the emergency stairs outside her window.
In her apartment, Holly often uses a kitchen drawer as a step and climbs
up on the counter to reach for a liquor bottle at the top of a cupboard.
She sits on the counter with her legs sticking into the kitchen sink. This
cupboard and the sink are the favorite places of Holly’s cat as well. The cat
is called Cat because it does not have a name.When Holly comes home, Cat
12 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

Holly and her cat, Cat.

usually waits for her in the sink. When Holly has a party in her apartment,
the cat escapes to the top of the cupboard. The favorite drink of Cat and
Holly appears to be milk. At night, Holly drinks a cocktail in a martini glass.
Is it a glass of Kahlua and milk, a white Russian? In the morning, she sleepily
opens her refrigerator and has milk in a martini glass. Holly gives the same
milk to her nameless cat. (In reality, however, many cats are lactose intolerant
and allergic to milk.)
Cat is a so-called shoulder cat and particularly likes to perch on the
shoulders of men. When the young author Paul, who will fall in love with
Holly, visits her apartment for the first time, Cat jumps up on his shoulder
right away. Cat climbs on another man’s shoulder during Holly’s party—and
so, surprisingly, does Holly. In fact, she climbs onto men’s shoulders quite
often. For example, when she sees her husband, Doc Golightly (Buddy Ebsen),
a veterinarian whom she married in Texas when she was thirteen, after many
years, this strong man of the West picks her up and carries her on his shoulders.
It is veterinarians who save and protect animals, and likewise, young Holly
may have been protected by the veterinarian as if she were a cat.

Is Holly Free? Are Cats Free?

Holly’s behaviors are not the only thing that connects her to cats; they also
share similar living conditions. Holly insists that she is a “free spirit.” She is a
“wild thing” and will not succumb to men, including Doc Golightly. Holly’s
insistence on being a “free spirit” anticipates the cultural upheaval of the
 Framing in Breakfast at Tiffany’s 13

1960s when freedom was invoked in matters of race, sex, and politics all over
the world. Cats, too, have long been a symbol of freedom and independence
in cultures around the globe. Many a cat owner has felt a little lonesome
when their cat does not react as they hope, especially when they call their
names or try to play with them.
Still, the equation of cats and freedom may be overly simplistic. In fact,
as early as 3,500 BC, wild cats were domesticated and turned into pets in
Egypt. Egyptian farmers needed them to hunt the rats and moles that ruined
their fields. A Chinese character for cat is a combination of an animal and a
seedling. In both cultures, cats that fulfilled this role were provided with a safe
home and sufficient food. Thus, cats have been kept and enclosed by humans
for a long time. They have been far from free or wild in any true sense.
In this film, Holly’s nameless cat cannot go outside. Just as the cat is
confined in the apartment, Holly in this film is depicted as a captive, especially
by way of framing. There is always a square frame in cinema. It is the space
enclosed by the frame of a camera. The shot can be close-up (camera tightly
frames an object or a human face), medium shot (or waist shot), long shot
(typically shows the entire object or human body), high-angle (camera looks
down), or low-angle (camera looks up). The aspect ratio between the width
and height of the frame can be 1.33: 1 (standard), 1.85: 1 (widescreen)—like
this film—or 2.66: 1 (CinemaScope).The camera can move or zoom.Yet, the
square frame always exists. Breakfast at Tiffany’s uses the square frame effect-
ively and expressively to emphasize the sense of confinement around Holly.
For instance, Holly is often caught between the two doors at the
entrance of her apartment building because she keeps losing or forgetting
her keys. On those occasions, the camera captures Holly from the ceiling
(a high-angle shot), and frames her within a very tiny space surrounded by

Holly is surrounded by handrails.

14 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

two walls and two doors. She looks exactly like a prisoner. After she enters
the building, Holly often stands behind the staircase banisters, looking as
if she were in a cage. To Yuniyoshi, who lives on the top floor, Holly looks
surrounded by the numerous handrails.
Moreover, on many occasions Holly fits into square frames within the
camera frame itself, such as window frames, glass show windows, and mirrors
(for example, a mirror stand in her room, a bathroom mirror, the mirror of
a powder compact; even her mailbox has a tiny mirror). It is as if she were
imprisoned by frames.
Further strengthening the theme of imprisonment, even though Holly
herself is not serving time or under probation, she must travel to Sing Sing
Prison by train from Grand Central every Thursday, where she visits an Italian
mafia boss. In the end, the police discover that the don has been using her as
a courier: she has been a messenger of the crime syndicate without knowing

Holly framed in a mirror.

Holly still looks like a prisoner.

 Framing in Breakfast at Tiffany’s 15

Paul also looks like a prisoner.

it. She is arrested, handcuffed, and locked in jail. The following morning
when she is released, her figure is shown “through the barred windows”
(Lehman and Luhr 1981, 62). As such, even when she exits the jail, it looks
as if she were still a prisoner.
Curiously, it is not only Holly who is depicted in this film as a cap-
tive. So is the other protagonist of this film, Paul Varjak (George Peppard),
who calls himself a writer. Paul lives his life being “kept” by a rich married
woman dubbed 2E (Patricia Neal). In a scene in which 2E receives Paul’s
phone call in her luxurious apartment, she sits on a comfortable-looking
sofa and gently pets a dog by her side, almost as if she were caressing Paul.
While Holly is like a cat, Paul is like a dog, faithful to its owner; like Holly,
he is also confined into a small space. When 2E looks up at Paul’s window,
a low-angle shot shows him standing inside the window as if he were a
prisoner and not allowed to go outside without her permission.

When the Two Prisoners Meet: The Framed World

There are two particular scenes in which the framing effectively emphasizes
the enclosed situations of the two, like a cat and a dog: the first is when
Holly meets Paul for the first time, and the second is when they spend their
first night together. The framing in these scenes also underscores the strong
bond that forms between the two protagonists.
The first scene takes place when Paul moves into the apartment build-
ing where Holly lives. Holly opens her door slightly and looks out into the
corridor. In a close-up, Holly’s face is caught in a slight space between the
door and the wall. This white door also has numerous vertical lines on it,
giving her the appearance of an animal looking out from its cage. Similarly,
16 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

in a medium shot, Paul stands behind the handrails of the staircase looking
as if he, too, were behind the bars of a different cage. The shot reverse shot
technique, where one character is shown looking at another character and
then the other character is shown looking back at the first character, is used
here between Holly’s face (in a close-up) and Paul standing on the staircase
(in a medium shot). The framing of these shots places each character in their
own cage and makes it look as though there is a great distance between the
two. In addition, Holly wears the earplugs she sleeps with, so there is a sound
barrier between them in addition to the visual barriers.
After some exchanges of words that do not make sense, Holly takes
out her earplugs. When the camera captures Holly at a closer distance
within its frame (in other words, in an extreme close-up), those vertical lines
almost disappear from the screen. In a close-up of Paul’s face that follows,

Paul is caged behind the handrails.

Holly is caught between the door and the wall.

 Framing in Breakfast at Tiffany’s 17

Close-up of Holly.

Close-up of Paul.

the handrail “bars” vanish, too. As such, the audio and visual cages that
have separated them disappear. The framing used for these shots visually
shows that the two main characters are making a psychological and emo-
tional connection.
Unfortunately, reality brings them back to their confined situations. It
is Thursday morning, and Holly has to hurry to Sing Sing. Cat-like, Holly
jumps over her sofa and runs to her bathroom. She brushes her teeth in
front of a Japanese-style screen, which also resembles a lattice cage. A bath-
room mirror, a mirror stand, and the mirror on the mailbox appear one after
another and capture Holly within their square frames over and over again.
Finally, Holly crawls under the bed like a cat and fishes out a pair of high
heels—called “kitten heels” in the 1960s. Wearing kitten heels was consid-
ered to be a first step to adulthood for girls. But the height of the kitten heels
still restricts Holly’s action.
18 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

The 180-Degree Rule in Hollywood Cinema

In the second example, the scene in which Holly and Paul spend the night
together for the first time, framing plays an important role once again in order
to emphasize the situations of the two prisoners. One evening, in the middle of
a party in her apartment, Holly cannot help running away from the chaos cre-
ated by her “rats.” Seen from outside the building, Holly looks doubly captured
by the window frames and by the dark handrails of the emergency staircase.
Holly manages to get out of a window, goes up one floor using the
emergency staircase, and peeks into Paul’s room. A close-up shot shows only
the top half of Holly’s face in the window frame. Here again, she looks like a
cat peering out of a hiding place. Holly’s eyes are shining and look as curious
as those of a cat.
The following long shot frames Holly’s face in front and Paul and 2E in
a bright room at the back—a composition with depth. Such framing further
emphasizes Holly’s cat-like behavior, hiding in a dark emergency staircase
and sneaking a look inside where Paul is sleeping in his bed; he is tightly
confined in a window frame in the shot.
After 2E leaves the room, Holly opens the window slightly and con-
tinues to look at Paul. A white curtain with numerous vertical lines, hung
beside the window, makes another cage for her. Paul jumps up, surprised at
Holly’s sudden intrusion, but covers himself in the sheets because he is only
wearing underwear. Thus, he is also figuratively “tied” to the bed for the
sake of decency. Smoothly jumping into the room from the window, just like
a cat, Holly enters Paul’s room for the first time. She then walks around rest-
lessly, again just like a cat. Cats are nervous when they are in an unfamiliar
space and must sneak around and investigate their surroundings first before
calming down. Holly lightly sits down on a chair, stretches out her arms and
leans on a table, again like a cat. But she stands up right away and pours some
liquor (not milk) into a glass that she will never drink. Trying to keep Holly
at the center of the frame of long shots, the camera keeps moving gradually
from right to left and from front to back. Holly then finds Paul’s book, Nine
Lives, a reference to the expression, “A cat has nine lives,” at the back of the
room. In Truman Capote’s original novel, Paul is yet to publish a book, and
there is no Nine Lives. In the film, Paul’s completed book has been added in
order to emphasize the role of cats in it. At this point, Holly finally sits lightly
on a chair. She leans on a table, again like a cat, and speaks to Paul.
Suddenly, as film historians Peter Lehman and William Luhr point out, a
shot taken from the opposite side of the room is inserted (Lehman and Luhr
1981, 65). Up to this point, ever since Holly came into Paul’s room, all shots
 Framing in Breakfast at Tiffany’s 19

have been taken from the side where Paul’s bed is. In contrast, the shot that
appears now is taken from the window from which Holly entered—from 180
degrees opposite. Before this shot, when Paul and Holly are seen together
within a frame, he is in the bed in the right front and she is near the window
at the back left. Now they are abruptly framed from a completely opposite
direction: Holly is now in the right front and Paul is in his bed at the back left.
In Hollywood cinema, there is a technique of framing and editing
called the 180-degree rule. (We will discuss editing further in chapter three.)
According to this rule, the initial shot of a scene draws an imaginary line,
called the axis of action, which divides the action space into two halves. The
first one is where the camera is located, while the second one is on the other
side of that line. This setup allows the camera position to be varied between

Paul is in the bed in the right front, and Holly stands near
the window at the back left.

Violation of Hollywood’s 180-degree system.

20 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

shots, as long as the centerline is not crossed. Once a camera is placed, it

must stay on the same side of that line and cannot cross the axis of action in
the scene. For example, in this scene of Holly and Paul’s conversation, once
the camera is set at the side of Paul’s bed, it cannot cross the 180-degree line
between Holly and Paul.Yet, it does.
The 180-degree system is a general rule in Hollywood cinema not to
be broken. In this scene, however, the rule is broken and the couple are pho-
tographed from the opposite side. As a result, it may look to the viewers that
they have moved and switched their positions. If the viewers are perplexed
like this even for a moment, then they may come to their senses instead of
remaining absorbed in the story of Holly and Paul. In order to avoid such
confusion and a disruption from the storyline, Hollywood filmmakers need
to follow a number of rules, including this 180-degree system.
There must be a special reason, then, behind the adoption of the
reversed framing here that breaks the golden rule. In this scene, Holly freely
moves around like a cat, while Paul is stuck in bed. They apparently have
two different characteristics. The reversed framing and the violation of the
180-degree rule may imply that they are actually in the same situation. By
positioning the two actors in the same places in the “new” camera frames,
the compilation of these shots indicates that they are both prisoners. Even if
there is a risk that we the viewers may feel awkward for a moment, the dir-
ector, the producer, or the cinematographer probably thought it important
to indicate the similarity between the two characters.
After this one shot, the camera goes back to its original position and
never again crosses the 180-degree line. It is as though the breaking of the
rules makes the point, and then things go back to normal, underscoring
visually the common conditions that Holly and Paul are under.
After this brief but imposing framing is inserted, Holly resumes her
wandering around the room, and the confined situation that she and Paul
share becomes more and more visible. When the camera moves and follows
Holly in a long shot, we notice that there is another room in front of Paul’s
bed. A beaded curtain separates the two rooms. The curtain creates a number
of vertical lines within the frame, which makes it appear that Holly and Paul
are in jail. Holly then opens the curtain and comes into the room in front.
She stands in front of a mirror on the left wall and throws the amber liquor
from the glass into a flowerpot. (She probably does not like it because the
drink is not a milky color.) She is captured in a mirror again. But if we look
closely, it is not only Holly who is caught in the mirror: Paul is also reflected
in the mirror behind her.The two are now caught together. Holly goes back
to the room behind the curtain and sits on the bed where Paul is.
 Framing in Breakfast at Tiffany’s 21

The following shot of the two does not show the mirror or the bead
curtain any longer. Instead, for the first time, their bodies touch. Holly slips
into the bed and draws close to Paul’s naked chest in a closer shot (a medium
shot). The barriers between them appear to have vanished. Still, the sense of
being caught remains, this time because of content regulations. Under the
Production Code, the Hollywood film industry’s self-regulation of films’
content, which was first enforced in 1934, films could not show sexual rela-
tionships between unmarried couples because premarital sex was considered
immoral. Showing nudity, either male or female, was not banned, but was
nonetheless severely controlled as well.
Here, Holly says, “We’re friends. That’s all,” to Paul, to herself, and to
us the viewers, and falls asleep right away. The couple spends their first night
together in one bed in the same frame, but under very regulated conditions.

Escape from the Framed World

The two prisoners continue to attempt to escape from their situations. As
we have seen, the enclosed conditions of Holly and Paul are expressed by
framing in conspicuous ways. Now the color scheme within the frames starts
to play an important role to highlight their escape attempts.
Holly’s framed world has been monotonous until Paul appears. In
Holly’s apartment, both the bedroom and the kitchen are all white. Holly
and Cat sip white milk. Her pajamas, a man’s tuxedo shirt, are white. When
she visits Paul’s apartment from the emergency exit, Holly puts on a white
bathrobe. Her dress, gloves, and sunglasses when she has breakfast at Tiffany’s
are all black. On Thursday morning, she wears a black dress, wide hat, and
kitten heels to visit Sing Sing. At the Port Authority, she puts on a white scarf
when she sees off Doc Golightly. When she becomes drunk at the strip club
that evening, she is in a black shirt with black sunglasses and drinks a white
cocktail.
Paul is depicted as a person who brings color to Holly’s black-and-
white world. When he enters Holly’s apartment for the first time, color
suddenly appears in the monotone space within the frames. As Paul stands
beside a shelf, we see for the first time that colorful photographs have been
casually placed on it. Holly invites him into the living room and sits on a
sofa that we haven’t seen before, decorated with red and purple cushions.
Then, when Holly impatiently prepares for her visit to Sing Sing, she asks
Paul to look for her shoes. He moves to her bedroom and sits on a vivid
red blanket. When Holly becomes drunk and Paul brings her back on his
shoulder, they are framed under a soft pink light. The light probably comes
22 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

from the neon sign outside, but it looks as if Paul has brought a warm color
to her room.
When Paul receives a check from his publisher, he takes Holly out,
saying, “We’ll spend the day doing things we’ve never done before.” The
scene that follows is the most colorful in the whole film. Almost all shots
have bright colors in their frames.
First, Holly seems to be naked when she sees Paul at the door. After
inviting him in, she says, “Would you turn around for a second?” and puts on
a vivid orange robe. After giving canned food to her cat (the cat looks happy
because this is the very first time that we see it being fed in the film), they go
out. Holly wears an orange coat that is as vivid as the robe. In a long shot, the
two wait for the traffic signal hand in hand, and we see the blue sky behind
them. Thanks to the blue sky, the confined nature of the camera frame seems
expanded around them. In other words, the couple appears to be in a wide
open space for the very first time. The “Don’t Walk” sign changes to “Walk,”
and it looks as though their escape from the framed world has begun.
The couple is headed to Tiffany’s, Holly’s dream place. As they push
open the revolving door to enter, the big store with its high ceilings wel-
comes them. The extreme long shot of the interior of Tiffany’s emphasizes
the openness of the space.
In the following shot, their figures are reflected in a mirror on the wall
and appear to be captured in a frame momentarily, but a clerk approaches
them quickly. As they move to the right, the camera follows. As a result, the
couple is emancipated from the mirror frame. The clerk liberates them from

The “extreme” long shot of the interior of Tiffany’s.

 Framing in Breakfast at Tiffany’s 23

their financial confinement as well. The couple can only afford to spend ten
dollars, but this kind clerk makes a fabulous suggestion. He says that Tiffany’s
is happy to engrave a Cracker Jack ring that Paul happens to have in his
pocket. Impulsively, Holly kisses him on the cheek.
The following scene at the New York Public Library is symbolic as
well. At first, Holly is excited to know that Paul’s book, Nine Lives, is owned
by the library. But she is disappointed when a librarian insists that she be
quiet. In contrast to the wide framing that is used to display the openness of
Tiffany’s, the framing of this scene at the library emphasizes the claustropho-
bic space. There is no extreme long shot used. Holly’s orange coat also looks
very out of place in these scenes. As if to emphasize the restrictive nature of
the space, Holly says she thinks that Paul’s book is a prisoner of the library.
The librarian does not allow Paul to sign the book that he authored, and the
couple quickly leaves, almost as if they are escaping.
Next, the couple approaches a five-and-ten store with a very colorful
display window. It is close to Halloween, and the display includes pictures
of black cats. Inspired, Holly and Paul start their trick-or-treating—a playful
bit of shoplifting. First, Holly thinks of putting a bowl of goldfish in her fur
hat because the orange color of the fish matches her coat.Too difficult. After
looking at various things, Holly chooses a cat mask and Paul, of course, a dog
mask. Sneaking out (like a cat and a naughty dog), they rush away from the
store—from a confined space to the outer world. A policeman is standing
at the corner, but they surprise him with their masks and run away. The
great escape of the cat and the dog is a success. Even when they come back

The cat and the dog.

24 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

to their building, they are not captured and framed in the space between
two doors at the entrance. There is no high-angle shot from the ceiling that
emphasizes the sense of confinement here. For the first time, Holly carries
the key. The two take off their masks and kiss for the first time. In a close-up,
there is nothing to separate them.

Return of the Framed World

But escape is not so easy. As the story continues, once again framing and
coloring emphasize the captured condition of Holly in particular. The fol-
lowing morning, Paul has an experience that makes him doubt the sense of
liberation that he had the day before. After waking up, Paul puts on the dog
mask again and visits Holly’s room from the emergency window. But her cat
does not welcome him; instead, Cat threatens him. The cat usually gets on
his shoulders, but today Paul is treated like an uninvited guest.
Paul sees 2E approaching the building, and he rushes back to his apart-
ment. He acts like a scared dog that does not want to be scolded by its
master for going out without permission. 2E comes into his apartment, finds
Holly’s cat mask, scornfully puts it on her face, and then throws it away. The
mask is a precious symbol of escape for Holly, though. Infuriated, Paul bids
farewell to 2E. He leaves the apartment, saying that he will never again put
on the suits (or straitjackets?) that she has given him.
Paul appears to succeed in his escape, even though it means he becomes
homeless. But what about Holly? Paul sees someone who looks like her
in front of the New York Public Library. He can scarcely believe it, but he
follows her back into the library from which he escaped with her the day
before. He finds her in the reading room where his book is kept. Bookshelves
and monotonous objects within the claustrophobic framing surround her in
a long shot. But why is she there? Holly said she did not like the place at
all the day before. She wore a vivid orange coat then, but now she has on a
very plain beige dress. Even though she is inside a building, she wears black
sunglasses while reading a book. Paul cannot understand what is going on.
Doesn’t she want to escape with him? Paul desperately tells her that he loves
her, but Holly resists and says, “Let me go!”
Holly appears to be conflicted, caught between the framed world and
the prospect of liberation from it. She is confused by the appearance of a
person who seems to love her not as a pet but as a person for the first time.
She may have stepped out of her “free” and egocentric life and started read-
ing his book at the library in order to understand Paul as a person. But it is
not easy to truly escape from the framed world. Indeed, cats love small and
 Framing in Breakfast at Tiffany’s 25

confined spaces even though they seem to move around freely all the time.
They were originally wild animals living in mountains and woods that were
full of dangers, so they may feel safe when they can hide themselves in small
spaces—or, in this case, the framed world. As I mentioned earlier, Holly’s cat
likes the small sink in the kitchen best.
Holly goes back to the life that she is used to and starts chasing “rats”
again. José, a rich Brazilian, is her next target. When Paul visits Holly’s
place several days later, she is knitting and practicing Portuguese with a
record player. Holly says she has decided to go to Brazil with José, but
Paul gradually finds out that she is not marrying him but only being “kept”
by him as a lover. At this very moment, a pressure cooker explodes in the
kitchen. It is as if the food inside has tried to escape its confinement. Does
this indicate that Holly’s true wish is to escape from her life of being kept
as a pet even though she appears to be jumping into a new “pet” situation
with José?
Holly and Paul decide to eat out and walk the city together once
again. A low-angle shot of the couple emphasizes how the lattice made by
numerous windows surrounds them from all directions, like a cage. During
the escape scene after they visited Tiffany’s and the five-and-ten, the sky was
wide open. In contrast, the claustrophobic framing of this exterior scene
is the opposite. Holly now says, “Oh, I love New York.” But she does not
sound happy. It sounds as if she is trying to convince herself.
When they return to the apartment building, they are handcuffed by
the police and literally become prisoners. Holly carries six keys so as not to
be caught between the two doors of the entrance, but they are useless with
the handcuffs. The police and Yuniyoshi have been waiting for them because
they are suspected of cooperating in the crimes of the Italian mafia.

“I love New York!”

26 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

Happy Ending = Happy Beginning

Can Holly and Paul escape from their prisons, or the framed world, in the
end? Paul comes to pick up Holly by taxi when her charge is dropped. He
has brought many of her belongings, including her cat, with him because he
thinks it is a good idea for Holly to stay away from her apartment for a while.
In the shots on the back seat of the taxi, the couple is framed tightly in a very
confined space. Paul tells her that she should give up going to Brazil. Holly’s
monotone colors emphasize her resistance—a black dress, black stockings,
and an off-white trench coat. She tries unsuccessfully to use a red lipstick;
her hand shakes, and she is unable to add color to her lips.
Holly screams, “I don’t know who I am. I am like Cat here, a no-name
slob.” She forces the cat out of the claustrophobically framed space in the
taxi. However, the cat, now liberated from Holly, clings to the black metal
fence by the sidewalk. The cat appears to be caught in a cage. Or, perhaps it
has decided to be captured in the framed world. The cat does not leave even
when it becomes drenched in heavy rain.
Paul responds, “You call yourself a free spirit, a wild thing. You’re ter-
rified somebody’s going to stick you in a cage. Well, baby, you’re already in
that cage.You built it yourself.” It may, indeed, be safer for Holly to stay in
her cage; it is tough to break away from the framed world. And of course
Paul, too, has been in a cage that he built himself. Paul tosses a box to Holly
and gets out of the taxi. Inside the box is the Cracker Jack ring they had
engraved at Tiffany’s with their ten dollars.
Holly starts crying when she looks at the ring. Tears that she has tried
not to show pour out of her eyes. Of course, she has known that she has
not been free and wild; she understands that she has been in a cage. But she
has finally met a person who points that out to her. For the first time, she
believes that she and Paul can go out to the world outside together and go
after “the same rainbow’s end,” referred to in the lyrics of “Moon River,”
the film’s theme song.
Putting on the ring, Holly jumps out of the taxi, out of the claustro-
phobic framing. To the strains of “Moon River,” which plays in a minor key,
she runs into the pouring rain. Drenched, Holly appears to be crying with
her whole body; the rain is her tears. She runs to the alley where she has left
her cat and calls to it over and over again, but the cat is nowhere to be found.
When she has almost given up, she hears the cat’s meow. The cat is shown
in a close-up as “Moon River” goes back to a major key. Paul reappears now
and embraces Holly and the cat. They kiss in the pouring rain.
We the viewers know that the world outside will surely try to frame
these two. As the camera retreats, we see the sky behind them. In this extreme
 Framing in Breakfast at Tiffany’s 27

Happy ending = Happy beginning.

long shot, the sky is not bright; it does not seem to be foretelling a bright
future. In contrast to the image of Fifth Avenue in the beautifully vague
morning light in the opening scene, what we see now is a dark alley filled
with garbage bins and surrounded by dirty buildings. In the framing of this
extreme long shot, the couple and the cat still look very confined in the
valley of buildings. We know that there will be no more lavish parties. No
more Givenchy dresses. Tiffany’s jewelry is out of the question. The Cracker
Jack ring may be the only jewelry that they can afford unless Paul becomes
a bestselling novelist.
Even so, their bodies are sparkling in the pouring rain. A bright female
chorus is heard with the score of “Moon River,” which seems to indicate
hope for the couple’s future even though their lives might be tough. Holly,
a call girl who has been wandering the city of New York like a stray cat, will
become a human being. Together with Paul, she will live independently, not
as someone’s pet, even if it is in a dirty alley. Probably the cat will finally have
its own name; it, too, will go from nobody to somebody. Then, Holly will
never say, “I am like cat here, a no-name slob,” again. Her life and the cat’s
life will become independent. The future is not fully bright, but this is still
a happy ending, or rather, a happy beginning.

Framing Hollywood Cinema in Sexual Morality

There is no ending like this in Capote’s novel. In the novel, Holly leaves
New York for Brazil. She is said to have been seen somewhere in Africa,
where she must be still chasing “rats.” In contrast, in the film version, Holly
28 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

will most likely marry Paul and build a family because she has put on the
ring. Leaving the wildcat-like “polygamous” situation behind, she will start
a new life as a monogamous human being.
Because of this moralistic ending, in which the two protagonists find
their true love and seem poised to start a family, Breakfast at Tiffany’s was
able to be produced despite its main characters including prostitutes and
mistresses and despite its critical view toward the American society of the
period, which confined people with financial hardships. It is also possible
that this ending had to be added to ensure its successful production.
Still, it was unusual in the earlier days of Hollywood cinema for a pros-
titute to have a happy ending even if she made a moralistic choice. A year
before the premiere of Breakfast at Tiffany’s at Radio City Music Hall, The
World of Susie Wong (Richard Kwan, 1959) was released at the same venue.
Its protagonist, also a prostitute, needed to be portrayed as having a “heart
of gold.” Had the filmmakers not emphasized the moral aspect of the char-
acter, it is unlikely that the film would have been released. Interestingly, The
Children’s Hour (William Wyler, 1961), Hepburn’s next film, dealt with the
issue of lesbianism. As such, by the early 1960s, Hollywood’s self-regulation
in matters of sex had gradually softened.
It is said that Capote wanted the voluptuous Marilyn Monroe to play
Holly instead of the slender Audrey Hepburn. I have no doubt that if the
glamorous Monroe had played Holly, she, too, could have conveyed a sense
of being captured like a cat in a big city. In fact, in the film, Don’t Bother to
Knock (Roy Ward Baker, 1952), Monroe delicately plays a young woman with
a mental problem who has just arrived in New York from the countryside.
A pilot played by Richard Widmark first looks at her in a room across a
stairwell in a skyscraper hotel, and, like Holly, she is seen framed in a square
window.
Hepburn was a perfect fit for the catlike Holly in this film, but Monroe
might have been similarly fascinating. If the latter had played the part, how-
ever, I think she would have looked more like a fluffy Maine Coon.
 CHAPTER 2

Cats Love Dark Places

Lighting in Cat People

Jacques Tourneur, USA, 1942

Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Cat People

If Breakfast at Tiffany’s is the story of a cat-like young woman, then Cat People
is about a young woman (Simone Simon) who is, in fact, a cat. The story
of Breakfast at Tiffany’s closes with the happy ending of a young couple’s
marriage. Cat People begins with a marriage that is not really happy. While
Breakfast at Tiffany’s depicts the beginning of a couple’s journey from a con-
fined monochrome world to a liberated colorful world, Cat People shows the
tragic failure of such a journey. One is a romantic comedy and the other is a
horror movie; the former was produced twenty years after the latter.
Still, these two films are like sisters. Both are set in New York City. The
heroines are non native New Yorkers and outsiders (Holly is from Texas;
Irena is from Serbia). They are both haunted by the past (Holly was married
to an elderly veterinarian in Texas; Irena believes that she is a descendent
of the cat people of Serbia). In both films, young men fall in love with the
heroines at first sight and try to save them. But both young men are engaged
to other women, which makes for triangular relationships. While Breakfast
at Tiffany’s uses framing to emphasize Holly’s confinement in small spaces,
Cat People uses lighting to show the heroine’s entrapment in dark places.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s makes us realize that the world of cinema begins in the
square frame of the screen. Cat People makes us remember that cinema is
made of light and shadow.
Cinema is a medium of light. It does not exist without the electrical
light beam that passes through the celluloid strip to throw an image onto a
screen before a viewer. Even before the process of projection, the production
of moving photographic images was a construction in light. Without light,

29
30 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

the location, set, costume, and make-up, as well as the actors’ expressions and
performances, are invisible to the viewer.
At the very beginning of the history of cinema in the late nineteenth
century and the early twentieth century, the primary purpose of lighting in
cinema was to provide visibility. For instance, “Clarity first, story second”
(ichi nuke, ni suji), the slogan introduced in the first decade of the twentieth
century by Makino Shōzō, “the father of Japanese cinema,” clearly indicates
the importance of light and lighting in the early period of filmmaking. As
the term nuke (clarity) suggests, what early Japanese filmmakers emphasized
was not the expressivity of artificial lighting but the brightness itself, which
would make images visible even in worn-out prints screened at theaters not
equipped with bright light bulbs for projection. The priority was to make
actors and sets visible to the audience. Hollywood films were lit in the same
manner, making particular use of sunlight, until around 1915.
American filmmakers started to consider this style of lighting to be old-
fashioned only a few years later. Most likely inspired by theatrical lighting,
filmmakers became aware of the expressive effects of strong, weak, frontal,
back, top, bottom, and side lighting, and the shadows that lighting creates.
The impact of lighting is immense for the narrative, the atmosphere and
mood of scenes, and the psychology and emotion of characters, among other
elements. Inevitably, the use of light and technologies of lighting started to
occupy the center of discussions in filmmaking. In April 1934, Earl Theisen,
the honorary curator of The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, wrote
in International Photographer, the journal for Hollywood’s cinematographers’
union, “The most important of the dramatic devices of the motion picture
is light. Light and shade are the most vital of the cinematic tools. Emotions
are literally painted with light” (Theisen 1934, 10).
Cat People appears to be a horror film with monster cats. But producer
Val Lewton does not make a film in which a fake monster ostentatiously
appears; instead, he tells a tragic love story. The title sounds like a remake of
The Wolf Man (George Wagner, 1941), in which a hero turns into a werewolf
after he is attacked and bitten by a wolf-like creature of folklore. But in con-
trast to The Wolf Man, it is not really important in Cat People to show how
the heroine turns into a cat person or to explain what kind of monsters the
cat people are. Instead, the film focuses on the sorrow of a young cat person
who happens to fall in love with a human.
Director Jacques Tourneur and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, in
particular, responded with conspicuous use of lighting in this film. Early film
theorist Rudolph Arnheim claimed, “[T]he use of shading does not neces-
sarily originate from the observation of nature, and certainly is not always
 Lighting in Cat People 31

used in accordance with the rules of illumination” (Arnheim 1974, 321).

Tourneur and Musuraca emphasized that artificial lighting is essential to cin-
ema. Constructing shadows with lighting, Cat People sensitively expresses the
heroine’s pain that the man she loves cannot understand what she really is.
Without any special publicity, the film became a word-of-mouth hit
after it was released on Friday the thirteenth in November 1942 and stayed
at theaters in Hollywood for thirteen weeks (Newman 1999, 64). Even
Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), which was released in the previous year
to great fanfare, played for only twelve weeks. Clearly many people were
caught up in the fate of Irena, eloquently expressed in the play of light
and shadow.

Irena Loves Dark Places: Three-point Lighting and Lasky Lighting

Cat People begins with a picture of a black panther. After the credits of cast,
staff, and director, a cheerful accordion tune takes the place of the orchestral
theme score. The tune is played at the Central Park Zoo, where the story
begins. A black panther paces in a cage. As the camera retreats, we see Irena,
the heroine of this film, eagerly making sketches in front of the cage. Her
mouth is pointed and her eyes are a little separated from each other. Her face
looks like a kitten’s. Simone Simon, who plays Irena, was a French actress
who had appeared in Jean Renoir’s La Bête humaine (1938) two years before
in the role of a young wife with a kitten.

Irena (Simone Simon) sketches a black panther at

the Central Park Zoo.
32 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

Irena tears up a sketch she does not like and throws it toward a hollow
tree stump that serves as a waste-bin. Oliver (Kent Smith), a young marine
engineer, sees the paper miss the bin and warns Irena about it. It seems that
both are favorably disposed to each other. But Irena does not seem to care
for Oliver’s moralistic advice: “Let no one say, and say to your shame, that
all was beauty here before you came.” Does he mean that the public mor-
ality of a human society doesn’t affect cats? This scene of the first encounter
between Irena and Oliver ends with a close-up of another sketch thrown
away by Irena. It drops on to the street, is blown away by a gust, and stops at
a fence.The sketch shows a black panther stabbed by a stiletto.The panther’s
cage, which is not seen on the screen, creates a dark shadow on the paper.
The lighting, together with the score, which suddenly changes to a minor
key, adds an ominous tone to the future of the couple that has just met.
As such, from the very beginning, artificial lighting and constructed shadows
play a significant role to develop the narrative and formulate certain moods
for the scenes in Cat People.
We should note one more significant thing in this opening scene: it shows
that Oliver is the kind of man who starts flirting with another woman without
a word to the woman he is with.There is a woman right next to Oliver, drink-
ing Coca-Cola with him. We only see her back, but her suit, blonde hair, and
hairstyle indicate that this is Alice ( Jane Randolph), who appears again later in
the film. Alice is Oliver’s colleague at the marine engineering office, and she is
secretly in love with him. While a love triangle will be formed along the way,

A dark shadow appears on Irena’s sketch of a black panther.

 Lighting in Cat People 33

there is no shadow cast on Alice, a very cheerful woman, at this opening scene.
She simply stands under the sun in this exterior scene, in flat lighting (even
lighting on a subject, producing little contrast or shadow).
The shadows become thicker after Irena and Oliver enter the apart-
ment building where Irena lives. In a long shot of the two standing at
the entrance, the handrail of a long staircase and the window frames cre-
ate strong lattice-shaped shadows on their faces and bodies because of the
sunlight coming in from the windows. Irena has been joyfully conversing
with Oliver up to this point but shows her first hesitation in those shadows.
“I’ve never had anyone here.You’re the first friend I meet [sic] in America.
Oh, I know lots of people in business. Editors, secretaries, other sketch art-
ists, you know. But you might be my first real friend.” Irena’s words signal
her shyness and anxiety at being alone with a man in a foreign land. Oliver,
though, is enraptured by the fact that he has been invited into an apartment
by a woman whom he has just met. He merely smiles at Irena.
The first close-up of Irena in this film follows. This may be regarded
as an image of how Irena appears in Oliver’s eyes. This is because all the
shadows on her face in the previous long shot are completely gone. Three-
point lighting, which Hollywood cinema perfected in the 1920s in order
to show off the beauty and glamour of their stars, makes Irena’s hair, eyes,
and face glow softly but gorgeously. Three-point lighting consists of three
lights—key light, fill light, and backlight. The key light brings the primary
light to the subject and highlights the form and dimension of it. It is not

Long shot of Irena and Oliver in the shadowy apartment

building.
34 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

placed directly in front of the subject but instead slightly off to the side. The
hard (or focused) key light clearly illuminates the contours of the subject,
in this case, Irena’s face, and creates the splendor of her eyes. But as it is, the
rectangular angle of the light beam in relation to the subject also creates
darkly shaded areas on the subject, in this case on Irena’s face, because of her
nose, cheekbones, etc. The fill light, usually a soft and indirect supplement-
ary light that does not change the character of the key light, is used to erase
darkly shaded areas on the subject, in this case again Irena’s face. The fill
light is usually placed at a vertical angle to the key light. The fill light allows
room for controlling the appearance of the subject. The dimmer the fill
light is, the harsher the subject looks. In this case, Irena’s face does not look
harsh at all, compared to the more contrasty long shot that precedes. Finally,
the backlight, which is placed behind the subject at a slightly higher angle
in order not to be seen by the camera, distinguishes the subject from her
background and provides a sense of three-dimensionality. In this case, Irena’s
face is clearly distinguished from the darker background. In addition, and
more importantly, the backlight gives a halo effect to her hair. Along with
the glamorous effect that the three-point lighting brings to this close-up of
Irena’s face, a romantic tune is heard.
Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942), which was released in the same year
as Cat People, is another film that utilizes three-point lighting effectively
in order to depict the glamour of the heroine. Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) tells
Sam the pianist (Dooley Wilson), “Play it, Sam,” and implores him to play

Close-up of Irena in three-point lighting.

 Lighting in Cat People 35

“As Time Goes By.” Hearing the tune that he has forbidden Sam to play,
Rick storms over in fury. There he sees Ilsa in a close-up. A spotlight illumin-
ates her eyes, which are blurred by tears, and her lips, which are slightly open;
a fill light softly embraces her face, and a backlight gives an almost sacred glow
to the blonde hair of Bergman, who was originally from Northern Europe. In
the background, we hear more romanticized orchestral sound swelling over
the sound of Sam’s piano, hinting that Rick is idealizing Ilsa here.
In Cat People, Irena does not stay in the soft three-point light for long.
As soon as she opens the door of her apartment and the two enter, we move
to the next scene. Irena’s room is in darkness. Weak light from streetlamps
and a building across the street enters the room through windows at the back.
A statue of a man on horseback on a table is in silhouette. The man holds a
raised sword, upon which a cat is speared. Standing by the table, Irena hums
a gentle tune and explains.The man on the horse is King John of Serbia.The
cat pierced by his sword is a symbol of the Mumluks, who worshiped Satan
and made the people slaves. When King John drove out the Mumluks, some
escaped into dark mountain villages. Irena says she is a descendent of one of
those villages, which has become steeped in the legends of witchcraft. She
murmurs, “I like the dark. It’s friendly.” Contrary to the ideal image created
by the three-point lighting, presumably from Oliver’s point of view, Irena
appears to be herself in shadows.
Indeed, cats love dark places. Cats are nocturnal. They are more active
during nighttime hours than during the day. Cats are originally from moun-
tains and forests, where the sunlight is dim. Anyone who has lived with a
cat has experienced finding his or her cat sleeping in a closet or a drawer.
Surprising but funny. They feel very comfortable in those dark places, and
the black pupils of their eyes become wide open and round. They look cute,
but if we see them on a dark street, their gleaming eyes can be scary, too.
Unlike the glamorous splendor of the three-point lighting in the previ-
ous scene, Irena is here lit by so-called Lasky lighting, in which not only light
but also shadow are conspicuous. As in a Rembrandt painting, a spotlight is
directed to a limited area within a frame, which not only creates clear shad-
ows but also indicates the source and direction of light. Around 1915, when
cinema was silent, Cecil B. DeMille, who would later direct such spectacu-
lar films as The Ten Commandments (1956), and his cinematographer Alvin
Wyckoff developed a lighting style with strong contrasts in order to create
dramatic effects in cinema. Adopting carbon-arc equipment, such as Kliegl
spotlights (called klieg lights), in particular, DeMille and Wyckoff moved the
film lighting practice in Hollywood away from a dominant use of diffused,
overall illumination toward a concentration on “effects” lighting (Bordwell,
36 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

Sessue Hayakawa in Lasky Lighting.

Steiger, and Thompson 1985, 223). In particular, they used “spotlights . . . to

produce low-key lighting effects in several productions” (Bordwell, Steiger,
and Thompson 1985, 224–225). Their lighting style was called Lasky light-
ing, which film historian Lea Jacobs defines as “confined and shallow areas of
illumination, sharp-edged shadows and a palpable sense of the directionality
of light” ( Jacobs 1993, 408).
DeMille and Wyckoff had contracts with the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play
Company at that time. DeMille had a background in theater and brought
the lighting techniques of the theatrical stage to cinema. Lasky lighting was
directly derived from a popular theater lighting style developed by David
Belasco, who was inspired by Rembrandt’s treatment of light that empha-
sized the source of light from windows, lamps, or fires and created a dark
atmosphere. Sessue Hayakawa became the biggest Asian star in the history of
Hollywood cinema in part because of Lasky lighting. In The Cheat (1915), a
masterpiece by DeMille and Wyckoff, dramatic lighting with strong contrasts
enhanced the exotic and mysterious atmosphere surrounding Hayakawa’s
villain, giving a pleasurable shock to many female spectators.
Despite the impact of Lasky lighting, it did not become the mainstream
lighting of Hollywood cinema because the contrasts of light and shadow it
created were too extreme. By the 1920s, the majority of Hollywood lighting
had become bright and soft, without conspicuous contrast between lights
and shadow. Three-point lighting emerged as part of that trend. While
major characters and props that viewers should not overlook are clearly vis-
ible, such lighting is not so obvious that viewers are even aware of it, which
 Lighting in Cat People 37

focuses attention on the story of the film. Lasky lighting that emphasized
shadows fell into a secondary position, used to add effects to gangster genres,
among others, that Warner Bros. was particularly good at.
In the 1940s, when Cat People was produced, Lasky lighting was revived
in the films that would later be called “film noir,” which I will discuss in
more detail in chapter five. In film noir, the lighting was favorably used to
dramatically and realistically express the obsession or insanity of protagonists
who often became involved with urban crimes. RKO Radio, which pro-
duced Cat People, also produced a number of films noirs.
In Cat People, Lasky lighting is effectively used in Irena’s room. Behind
Irena, Goya’s 1784 painting, Boy with Cats (Manuel Osorio Manrique de
Zúñiga), hangs on the wall; in it, three cats gaze at a little bird from the dark.
Their eyes glow ominously, lit by a spotlight. In the following close-up of
Irena’s face, her left eye is strongly lit and shines ominously. The shining
eyes of the cats and Irena form some kind of a connection in the dark. Such
lighting makes us, the viewers, wonder whether the story about witches and
cat people is only Irena’s wild fantasy, or not.
After this scene, the love affair between the heroine and the hero liter-
ally turns into a battle between light and shadow. It is also one of three-point

Irena in front of a Goya painting.

38 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

Irena’s left eye is strongly lit and shines ominously.

lighting versus Lasky lighting under the strict scheme of cinematographer

Nicholas Musuraca, who would work on a number of masterpieces of film
noir after this film, including Out of the Past (1947), directed by Jacques
Tourneur. Can Oliver become Irena’s “first real friend”? Can he live with
her in the dark that she likes? Or, is he going to make her into the ideal
shining image that he has of her? And will he forcefully try to bring her into
the bright world that he likes?
Then the clock shows six o’clock. Oliver realizes that he has stayed too
long. He promises to have dinner with Irena the following day and leaves
her room. A truce. The battle of love and the battle of light and shadow have
just begun.

Oliver Likes Bright Places

Unlike Irena’s dark apartment, Oliver’s marine engineering office is very
bright. Except for the soft shadows of the circular frames of the chic, high
windows, created by the sunlight on the wall, the spacious room is lit
brightly and flatly. This is a typical lighting scheme of 1930s Hollywood
cinema. A number of people are working cheerfully in the room. Alice is
one of them. She notices a kitten’s meow. (In fact, the kitten’s voice is played
by actress Dorothy Lloyd. She is a cat person.) Alice finds a shoebox on
Oliver’s drawing board and a white kitten inside it. He intends it as a gift for
Irena—a bit insensitive, perhaps, for a woman suffering from a “cat curse.”
 Lighting in Cat People 39

Oliver’s bright office.

We quickly learn that there is another cat in Oliver’s office. Its name is
John Paul Jones, after the American Revolutionary War hero. It is a perfect
name for the office cat of a marine engineering firm. At the same time, the
name symbolically expresses an American attitude toward foreigners, repre-
sented by Oliver. This film never refers explicitly to contemporary political
issues. But the time was 1942, in the middle of World War II. The House
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which was originally created
in 1938, was investigating alleged disloyalty and subversive activities. Anti-
foreigner sentiments were stirring. At the same time, a pedagogical policy,
or a desire of conquest, to Americanize immigrants from foreign countries,
existed. Consciously or not, Oliver, as a typical white American man, seems
to have this type of attitude toward Irena. It is true that this film depicts
Oliver in a slightly critical manner. This might be because Val Lewton, the
producer of this film, was an immigrant from Russia and had experienced
discrimination as a foreigner in American society.
Irena has been living in the dark and is anxious about entering the
bright world where Oliver lives. But Oliver does not listen to her. “You’re
here in America. You’re so normal, you’re in love with me, Oliver Reed,
a good plain Americano. You’re so normal, you’re gonna marry me and
those fairy tales, you can tell them to our children. They’ll love them.” In
order not to offend Oliver the American, does Irena the foreigner have to
do what he says? America is bright and Serbia is dark, and never the twain
shall meet?
40 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

“Moia sestra, moia sestra.”

Will Oliver Learn to Like Dark Places?

In the following scene, Irena and Oliver are already married. They are in the
midst of their wedding reception at Belgrade, the only Serbian restaurant in
New York. Lots of candles stand on the table, which is brightly lit. Irena sits
next to Oliver and smiles as “normal” newlywed brides do. It is as if bright
America has enlightened dark Serbia.
But suddenly, the dark side strikes back. A woman from another table
comes by and speaks to Irena in a foreign language. “Moia sestra, moia
sestra,” she says. She wears a black dress that shines like a black cat’s fur and
has a black ribbon in her hair, which looks like cat ears. Irena cannot say
a word. With a vague smile, the woman puts a black, hairy scarf over her
shoulders and slips out into the snowy, dark street outside. Oliver’s colleague
whispers, “Looks like a cat.” At this moment, Irena clearly remembers that
she is not living in the same world as Oliver. With a frozen expression, she
says to Oliver, “She called me sister.” Because of the appearance of the cat
person, their wedding turns out not to be “normal.”
Even though it is their wedding night, Irena and Oliver do not sleep
together. They do not even kiss each other. In their darkened apartment,
a tightly closed door separates them. In Lasky lighting, Irena leans against
that door and sits down. She puts her right-hand fingernails onto the
door, as cats often do with their claws. A cat’s meow is heard from some-
where, too.
 Lighting in Cat People 41

Irena sits in a shadow.

“But I want to be Mrs. Reed, really,” she says. “I want to be everything

that name means to me. And I can’t. I can’t. Oliver, be kind, be patient. Let
me have time. Time to get over that feeling there’s something evil in me.”
On the other side of the door, in brighter light, Oliver replies, “Darling,
you can have all the time there is in the world if you want it and all the
patience and kindness there is in me.”
But, after all, Oliver cannot be patient enough to wait for this creature
from the dark.
Even though she asks Oliver to wait, Irena becomes more and more
feline-like after the wedding night. Has her true nature been revealed despite
her wish? Or, is she hoping that Oliver will accept her as she is? In any case,
the costume, the props, and above all the lighting emphasize her approach to
the dark side. Irena starts to wear a short-haired black fur coat, similar to the
one the cat person at the restaurant wore. When she visits a museum with
Oliver and Alice, she goes close to a statue of Bastet, a cat goddess of ancient
Egypt. (In the film, we actually see a statue of Anubis, a jackal-headed god.
The director wanted Bastet, but the prop department could not find one.)
When she works as a dress designer, she makes a sketch of the cat woman
from the restaurant. One day, during her work, she casually stands up, sticks
her left hand into a birdcage hung beside a window, and plays with a canary
inside. Irena’s face is shown in a close-up, and her right eye shines ominously.
Her white teeth are slightly visible, too. Cats become excited when they see
insects or birds; their pupils dilate and they show their teeth. What we the
42 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

Irena stands near a statue of Anubis.

viewers see next is a shot of the canary lying dead in the cage. Did Irena
kill it unexpectedly with her hand, just as cats kill other creatures without
knowing it when they play with them?
Seeing Irena acting strange, Oliver recommends that she see a psychia-
trist called Dr. Judd. He wants Irena to be able to lead a “normal” life in
American society. Dr. Judd uses bright lights for the treatment. When he
asks questions of Irena, he places a strong, tight spotlight on her face while
she lies in the dark.
“You were saying, the cats . . .” he begins, prompting her.
Irena answers with her eyes closed. “They torment me. I wake in the
night and the tread of their feet whispers in my brain. I have no peace for
they are in me. In me. In me.”
After hearing this, Dr. Judd opens the curtain and stands beside Irena
in the bright light from outside. “And the cat women of your village, too.
You told me of them. Women who, in jealousy or anger or out of their own
corrupt passions, can change into great cats, like panthers. And if one of these
women were to fall in love and if her lover were to kiss her, take her into his
embrace, she would be driven by her own evil to kill him. That’s what you
believe and fear, isn’t it?”
Irena nods.
Window frames create a cross-shaped shadow on the wall. Dr. Judd,
taking notes in front of it, looks like a priest with the Bible in his hand. Irena,
sitting on a sofa beside him, looks like a believer who needs his guidance.
 Lighting in Cat People 43

Irena’s face is placed under a strong and tight spotlight.

Jealousy, anger, and passion. These emotions wait for Irena when she
comes back from the doctor’s office. She opens the door of her apartment
and finds the room brighter than usual. She sees Alice lighting her cigarette
at the back of the room. While she was away, brightness has been brought
into her room by another woman and replaced the darkness that she loves.
Irena also finds out that Dr. Judd, who conducts the light treatment, was
actually recommended by Alice. At this moment, Irena realizes she is facing
an enemy. She wants to face the darkness in her only with Oliver. But light
has invaded in the shape of another woman.

Alice Does Not Like Dark Places

For Irena, Alice becomes an enemy. But to us, the viewers, this is not really true.
Rather, Oliver is the one who is to blame. He told Irena that she could have
all the time in the world, but after only a short while, he says to Alice, “I’ve
never been unhappy before,” and “I don’t even know whether I’m in love with
Irena.” Alice replies right away, “I can’t bear to see you unhappy. I love you too
darn much, and I don’t care if you do know it, Ollie.” Here a close-up with
the three-point lighting appears again. As in the first close-up of Irena, Alice’s
blonde hair and tearful eyes shine beautifully. Shown in such an enchanting
manner, Alice captures Oliver’s heart as well as ours. Alice is not a bitch who
steals Oliver from Irena, however. She is always cheerful and loves Oliver ear-
nestly. She is the other heroine of this film. So we sympathize with her.
44 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

Alice stands beside an illuminated table.

Irena stops seeing Dr. Judd. It is natural for her to do so because

Dr. Judd was recommended by her rival in love. But Oliver loses his temper
when he finds out. He says he has some work to do and leaves their apart-
ment. Irena makes up with him and calls his office. It is Alice who picks up
the phone. Alice’s worktable has a light bulb inside that illuminates her face
brightly. In contrast, Irena hangs up in darkness without a word. She puts on
her black fur coat and leaves the apartment with a hard expression. Alice also
leaves the office. When she turns off the table light, she places herself in the
dark for the first time in this film.
Alice finds Oliver at a café nearby and joins him. It is the worst possible
timing. Irena passes by on her way to their office, looks through the window,
and sees Oliver and Alice sitting together. Half of her face is hidden behind
the curtain and window frame. Her left eye is ominously lit by the light from
the café. The Lasky lighting emphasizes the fire of jealousy.
The shot that follows clearly shows Irena’s reflection on the window,
which makes it look as though Irena is split into two figures. Does the cat
woman reveal itself from inside Irena’s body? As closing time approaches, a
waitress starts turning off lamps in the café. The office and then the café—
both places that are usually bright—gradually go dark. Irena makes sure that
the couple leaves the café and goes out onto the dark sidewalk.
As if protecting themselves from the dark, Oliver and Alice stop at the
bright spot right under a street lamp.
“You cold?” he asks her.
 Lighting in Cat People 45

Irena spots Oliver and Alice, and her eye is fired by jealousy.

Irena is split into two figures.

“A cat just walked over my grave.”

Waving goodbye to Oliver, Alice walks into the shadow of Central
Park. Now the climactic chase begins. The lighting persistently emphasizes
the contrast between light and shadow. The editing creates an intense tempo
between the woman who chases and the woman who is being chased.
(We will focus on editing in chapter three.) Moreover, the sound heightens
tension and adds shock effects. These techniques make this chase scene truly
tense, like watching a cat on a hot tin roof.
46 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

The camera first captures Alice in a white coat in a long shot. She walks
on the pavement, first passing through a lit area under a street lamp, then
a dark area in shadow. The hard sound of her high heels on asphalt echoes.
Then, the camera switches to Irena in her black fur coat as she follows Alice
in a long shot. Exactly like Alice, she walks on the pavement, passing through
a lit area under a street lamp and a dark area in shadow to the sound of her
high heels. The shot that follows shows Alice’s feet in a close-up. Her feet
move continuously from light to shadow. We hear her high heels tapping on
the pavement.
A close-up of Irena’s feet follows. From light to shadow. The sound
of high heels. Remembering the silent phone call to the office, Alice starts
to feel frightened. She quickens her pace. Tap-tap-tap. Alice does not know
who is following her. She does not even realize that Irena thinks of her as
her enemy. But it is scary to be followed in the dark. Suddenly, the footsteps
that have followed her stop. Noticing that, Alice stops under a street lamp
and turns around. She walks again for a few feet and turns around again.
All she can see is the deserted pavement, a street lamp, and the darkness.
There is no sound at all. Panicked, she is about to start running.
All of a sudden, a hissing sound cuts through the air. At the same time,
from the opposite direction, a bus rushes into the frame and makes a sudden
stop. Together with Alice, our hearts seem to stop beating. The driver speaks
to Alice in a cheerful voice from the bright inside.
“You look as if you’d seen a ghost.”
But Alice does not have her usual gay attitude. She responds seriously,
“Did you see it?” Then she climbs quickly into the brightly lit bus.

Alice walks.
 Lighting in Cat People 47

Irena follows.

Alice gazes at the deserted pavement and the darkness.

After the bus leaves, a black bush sways above the stone wall beside
the pavement. The Central Park Zoo is beyond the wall. There is a sheep
cage there, in which an alarming event seems to be occurring. A caretaker
comes out with a lantern. A sheep has been attacked. The camera goes back
to the pavement under a street lamp, where we see the black footprints of
a big cat. After a while, the prints change into those of high heels. At the
same time, we start to hear the sound of footsteps again. Tap-tap-tap. Then,
48 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

Irena cries in a bathtub.

Irena appears out of the darkness. She is placing a white handkerchief on

her mouth. Is she wiping away blood from a sheep that she has just attacked?
All of a sudden, a taxi makes a quick stop nearby with a hissing sound, which
makes us jump once again.
Coming back to the apartment, Irena finds Oliver there but ignores
him. She takes off her stockings, fills the bathtub, and climbs in. Under the
bright light of the bathroom, drops of water shine on her naked back. She
holds her knees tightly and cries. It is a shocking revelation. She is a cat per-
son. This is the first time that Irena voluntarily places herself under bright
light, but she looks more distraught than ever. It seems as if she wants to be
cleansed by the light. This is the most excruciating shot in this film.
In 1942, when Cat People was released, the content that could be shown
in films was controlled by the Production Code. As discussed in the previous
chapter, showing nudity on the screen was severely controlled. Film critic Kim
Newman claims, “This affecting little vignette must have been fairly risqué for
1942: Simone Simon stripping her stockings and exposing a little naked back
in a non-sexual situation wouldn’t have counted as ‘hot stuff’ before the impos-
ition of the Production Code in 1934, but here it indicates Lewton’s intention
to push the envelope on censorship” (Newman 1999, 46). Looking at Irena’s
naked back, people watching this film in 1942 must have felt that they had just
seen what they should not.That makes this scene even more painful.
When the dark night falls, Irena cannot help chasing Alice again; it is,
after all, a cat’s nature to pursue its prey. Alice is going to exercise at a YWCA
 Lighting in Cat People 49

swimming pool. A black cat follows her from the front desk when she goes
downstairs to the locker room. Following the black cat, Irena in her black
fur coat appears at the front desk without a sound and asks the woman there
where she can find Alice. In the locker room, Alice, now in a bathing suit,
happens to look up the stairway. She sees a moving shadow of a panther-like
creature. The shadow is too big for the black cat at the front desk. Panicked,
Alice jumps head first into the brightly lit pool. At that moment, the growl
of a panther begins.
Floating in the middle of the pool, Alice looks around the poolside. The
light leaking from the locker room is reflected on the water and creates various
shadows on the walls and the ceiling.Those shadows ominously keep moving.
The whole room becomes dark for a moment. Something has blocked the
light from the locker room. It becomes light, and then dark again. Alice is
desperately treading water and cannot clearly see what it is. All she can see is
the light and the shadow swaying on the wall and the ceiling. A shot of Alice in
the pool and a shot of the light and the shadow on the wall and the ceiling are
repeated. The shot lengths become shorter and shorter. Then, a clear shadow
of a panther moves at the poolside. (During the actual shooting, a panther was
never used. Director Jacques Tourneur created the shadow with his fists.) Alice
screams. A shot of the poolside. A shot of the light and the shadow on the
ceiling. Alice desperately moves her arms and legs in panic. Because of Alice’s
frantic movements, the swaying light and shadow on the wall and the ceiling
move much more quickly and haphazardly.All of a sudden, Irena appears at the
poolside. She turns on the light and looks down at Alice.
“What is the matter, Alice?”

Alice screams in the swimming pool.

50 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

The light and the shadow swaying on the wall.

Cats hate water. Of course, there are some cats, including mine, that play
with water dripping from faucets or scoop water from a bowl to drink. But I
do not think there are many cats that like to bathe in a bathtub or in a swim-
ming pool. I am sure that I’m not the only person who, trying to wash a cat in
a bathtub, has been resisted with unbelievable strength, and has been scratched
by their claws. Such experiences are traumatic for both cats and human beings.
Most likely because Alice was in the water, Irena could not catch her
game again. Instead, Alice’s bathrobe, left in the locker room, becomes the
victim. It has been torn to pieces. Now Alice clearly knows. She is Irena’s
target, and Irena is a brutal cat woman.

Irena’s Death: Can I Leave the Dark Place Now?

“I love Alice. Irena, it’s too late . . . Well, there seems only one decent thing
for me to do. I’ll give you a divorce. Believe me, it’s better this way,” Oliver
tells Irena when she comes home.
“Better? Better for whom?”
Oliver cannot answer. He leaves the dark apartment. Left alone, Irena
crawls on hands and knees and buries her face in a sofa. Fire rises up in the
fireplace. The contrast between light and shadow becomes stronger because
of the firelight. At that moment, Irena’s right fingers rip the sofa.
Oliver finds Alice at the office. Unlike Irena’s dark room, the drawing
table of his office emits bright light and illuminates them brightly.The phone
 Lighting in Cat People 51

rings. Shortly after, a shadow of a panther appears on the office wall, and the
growl is heard, too. Irena is back again to chase Alice. This time there is no
place to escape—no bus and no swimming pool. The only thing in hand that
can become a weapon is a t-shaped ruler for drawing. All Oliver and Alice
can do is place themselves in the light and pray. As Kim Newman describes,
“With the strong underlighting from the drafting tables shining merciless
spotlights on Oliver and Alice as they back into a corner, the scene uses light
as inventively as shadow to terrify. The cat inhabits pools of dark low-down
in the room, prowling between items of furniture, but its potential prey are
frozen in harsh, bright whiteness against the walls” (Newman 1999, 59).
Covered by the bright light from the drawing table, Oliver says. “Leave
us, Irena. In the name of God, leave us in peace.” The t-shaped ruler in his
hand creates a cross-like shadow on the wall.The shadow of a panther circles
around the couple in the bright light. Is she hesitating? For Irena, Alice is an
enemy. But how about Oliver? She has hoped he would accept her as she is,
someone who cannot help living in a dark place. She has tried to become
fond of bright places so they could live a “normal” life together. After a little
while, the shadow of the panther, or the shadow of Irena as a cat person,
vanishes from the office as if it has forgiven the couple in the light.
Irena goes back home alone. But Dr. Judd waits for her there. Irena’s
face in a close-up is lit by the three-point lighting. It is a beautiful image of
Irena as seen through Dr. Judd’s lustful eyes. But in the extreme close-up of
Irena’s face that follows, the lighting has clearly changed. It is Lasky lighting

“Leave us, Irena. In the name of God, leave us in peace.”

52 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

The t-shaped ruler in Oliver’s hand creates a cross-like

shadow on the wall.

Close-up of Irena in the three-point lighting.

with stronger contrasts. Irena’s face is in shadow now. Ominous light dwells
in her eyes. She has forgotten Oliver and spared Alice. But now she must
face the one who uses light to hypnotize her and invades her territory of
darkness. This is the final battle of shadow against light. A black shadow of a
panther attacks Dr. Judd, who defends himself with a sword cane.
Fatally injured, Irena heads to the dark and misty Central Park Zoo.
She opens the cage to let the black panther escape. Then she falls down.
 Lighting in Cat People 53

Close-up of Irena in Lasky lighting.

Irena’s body lies under the bright street lamp.

The blade of Dr. Judd’s sword cane is in her shoulder and reflects light dully.
Oliver and Alice arrive, and the love triangle ends where it all began. Irena’s
body is lying on the pavement under the bright street lamp. Only when she
dies is she able to give herself to bright light.
Oliver murmurs, “She never lied to us.” Only when she dies is she
understood by Oliver. The panther that has escaped also dies. The moment
he jumps out into the city of New York, he is hit by a car. Its dead body is
also brightly lit by the car’s headlight.
54 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

The two inhabitants of the bright world, Oliver and Alice, are united
as an American couple. The monster from a foreign country who lives in
the dark is gone. But is this a happy ending? In the end, Oliver could not
believe. He could not wait. Fully utilizing artificial lighting and constructing
shadows, Cat People tells a story about light and shadow that cannot live
happily ever after.
 CHAPTER 3

Cats Love Chases

Editing in To Catch a Thief

Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1955

Cary Grant Is the Cat

If Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Cat People are stories about female cats, To Catch
a Thief, a romantic comedy that Alfred Hitchcock directed in Southern
France, is that of a male cat. Cary Grant plays the role of John Robie, who
was once a notorious burglar called “The Cat.”
Grant already had a close cinematic connection to cats—he had starred
in a hilarious comedy about a pet panther, Bringing Up Baby (Howard
Hawks) in 1938. Despite his masculine figure and gentle appearance, Grant
was once a vaudeville acrobat, and this agility makes him perfect for the
role of “The Cat.” He carries himself well, moving steadily on tiled roofs.
So does Brigitte Auber, who plays Danielle, a young French woman, and
who also had experience as an acrobat. The climactic rooftop chase between
Grant and Auber is the highlight of To Catch a Thief.
As Holly of Breakfast at Tiffany’s aspires to be liberated, the most pre-
cious thing in life for The Cat is to be free. Before World War II, Robie was
a jewel thief in Paris. According to his own account, he never worked in
a group but always acted alone. He was once caught and imprisoned but
escaped when the war began and the prison was destroyed in a Nazi attack.
He participated in the Resistance, fighting the Nazi occupation, which of
course deprived many millions of people of freedom. But he claims no
righteousness for his work as a thief; rather, he calmly relates how he kept all
the money he stole for himself in order to eat the delicious food he preferred
whenever he wishes. Now he is retired and lives alone, free from worldly
cares, at a luxurious mountain villa that overlooks the Côte d’Azur. Cats love
high places.

55
56 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

A black cat prowls.

Robie hears news of jewel robberies taking place at luxury hotels and
is surprised. Every night, a thief appears on the roof, steals jewelry from dark
hotel rooms, and leaves again via the roof. In order to convey the thief’s light
moves, the camera shows a black cat coming and going on the roof—or is he
actually leading the thief? Except for a pair of black gloves stealthily taking
the jewels, we the viewers cannot see who this thief is in this opening scene.
The only thing left behind is the outcries of the ladies whose jewelry has
been stolen.
Robie becomes the suspect right away because the modus operandi of
the robberies is very similar to his signature style. We see a black cat sitting
on a sofa in Robie’s house. Even though this black cat is asleep for now, it
looks as though he has been in a bad mood. The headline of a newspaper
on the sofa reads “The Cat Prowls Again?” and the paper has been torn by
a claw. Is the cat irritated, perhaps, by the appearance of an imposter of his
master? In order to catch the new “Cat” and clear his name, Robie begins
an investigation of his own.
Superficially, To Catch a Thief is about the real Cat coming back to
chase the false Cat. Indeed, cats love to chase. My own two cats begin a
chase in my apartment out of the blue when they are refueled with food
or something stimulates them. They run upstairs at full speed, jump on cat
trees, and grapple with each other. They look like they’re fighting because
they hiss and growl at each other. But the next moment, they will be licking
each other affectionately. They apparently love chasing each other.
The interesting thing about this film is that the one who is chasing is
also being chased at the same time. Robie is chased by the police as a suspect
in the jewel robberies. He is also a target of both Francie (Grace Kelly), the
daughter of a deceased Texas oil king, and Danielle, a French girl working
 Editing in To Catch a Thief 57

The newspaper is torn by a cat’s claws.

at a local restaurant. Both are young, jealous, and primed for romance. They
are trying to catch the male cat who loves freedom and make him a lovely
pet, or a husband. Among his pursuers we can also count Mrs. Stevens ( Jessie
Royce Landis), widow of the oil king and Francie’s mother, who is happy to
buy Robie for her daughter regardless of cost.Thus, To Catch a Thief is about
chases on multiple levels. Hitchcock himself said in an interview a few years
before the release of To Catch a Thief, “Well, for one thing, the chase seems
to me the final expression of the motion picture medium” (Gottlieb 1995,
125). If so, To Catch a Thief is one of Hitchcock’s ultimate films.

Editing of the Chase: Crosscutting

The chase is the basis of cinema. The action film genre, in particular, has
existed since the very beginning of the history of cinema. For instance, The
Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter, 1903), arguably the first narrative film,
is about a chase between a steam locomotive seized by a gang of robbers and
a group of sheriffs on horseback. Even in the Star Wars saga, the epitome of
contemporary mega-hits, the most thrilling scene of all is the chase between
the Rebel Force, including the Millennium Falcon commanded by Han
Solo (Harrison Ford), and the imperial battleships.
Along with the chase came editing, the essential technique in cinema,
which developed together with framing and lighting. Editing is a technique
that connects two shots that were photographed at different times and places
to create some kind of a story. (A shot consists of the film that is exposed
from the time the camera is started to the time it is stopped.) It is very dif-
ficult to show the chaser and the chased in the square frame of the screen
at the same time, especially if they are widely separated. It is possible for the
58 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

camera to capture the two actors in a single shot if it is placed at a distance or

moves from one person to the other. But viewers will not fully experience
the actors’ speed or tension with either of these techniques, no matter how
fast those two people are actually running.
The editing technique called “crosscutting” developed as one method
for overcoming this difficulty. Crosscutting helps to establish that seemingly
separate actions are occurring at the same time. For instance, the camera
captures two running people in two separate shots. If the camera cuts away
from one action to the other and shows these two shots by turns, one seems
to be chasing the other even though the two are never in the same shot
together. The shorter a shot, the more intense the tension becomes.
The scene in Central Park at night in Cat People, which I analyzed in
the previous chapter, is a typical example of crosscutting. Because Irena and
Alice are shown by turns, the tension of the scene is heightened. Brief shots
appear one after another and create the sense of speed. Close-ups can also
be included in a crosscut to emphasize nervous or frightened expressions.
Editing also involves sound. To return to the example of Cat People, we
see Alice running away from the sound of high heels following her. When
the sound stops, Alice turns back. The following shot shows the deserted
pavement, a street lamp, and the darkness beyond in silence. Thus, editing—
both visual and audio—craftily manipulates time and space by shortening
shots or by zooming in on objects. As a result, this editing technique height-
ens viewers’ tension and emotions.
In the midst of To Catch a Thief, there is a car chase between a sports
car that the hero and heroine are riding in and the police car that tails
them. Crosscutting heightens the tension of the scene. The shots of Robie
and Francie’s sports car and those of the black police car appear in turn.
On the one hand, there is Francie, who drives her car at full speed with a
superficially calm facial expression. By her side, Robie cannot help clasping
his sweaty hands in a close-up and looking down at the cliff right next to
the car. On the other hand are two detectives desperately chasing the sports
car. They have to slam on the brakes as an elderly woman crosses the street
with her laundry. Then they try—and fail—to avoid a chicken wandering
into the street for no reason.When we hear the unmistakable sounds of a car
crash, we know that the chase has come to an end.
Crosscutting can also form parallels by showing a line of action that
happens in several different geographical locations at the same time. For
instance, That Darn Cat! (Robert Stevenson, 1965), a chase comedy featuring
a cat, uses crosscutting with different geographical locations in a hilarious
manner. DC, a cat belonging to a young woman, witnesses a kidnapping
 Editing in To Catch a Thief 59

Robie (Cary Grant) and Francie (Grace Kelly) in a

speeding sports car.

Thwarted, the police give up their chase of Robie and Francie.

during his evening walk. The FBI sets up headquarters in the young wom-
an’s bedroom, and the supervisor takes up his post there, relaying orders to
his agents by radio.
The agents, with their faces serious and intent, follow DC from a side
street to a backyard, a butcher shop to a garbage bin. The scene crosscuts
between the activity of the FBI supervisor and his agents, creating a dichot-
omy between the two actions: one group statically waiting in one room and
another actively chasing a cat. (The editing between the agents and DC is
also crosscutting, as it happens.)
After a long scene of parallel editing between the woman’s bedroom
and the nighttime streets, DC appears to go into the den of the kidnappers
at last. Eureka! The FBI agents break into a room from an emergency exit
and find themselves in . . . the young woman’s bedroom. Meanwhile, DC
60 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

has just finished his regular evening walk and returned home. The woman
and the FBI supervisor, who is still instructing his men by radio, are both
astonished when the separate geographical locations that have been shown
by crosscutting are connected all of a sudden. As such, the contrast created by
crosscutting formulates suspense and climactic emotional effects.

Editing of the Gaze: Point of View

The chases in Hitchcock films are particularly exciting because another
editing technique, known as “POV (point of view) editing,” is exquisitely
combined with crosscutting. In POV editing, a shot is taken from a camera
that is placed at the height of a character’s eyes. A close-up or a medium
shot of the character looking at something off-screen is placed before and/
or after the first shot. This creates the sense that we the viewers are seeing
what the character is looking at.
A good example of this occurs in The Private Life of a Cat, a 1944 short
film by experimental filmmakers Alexander Hammid and Maya Deren; in
it, we see the points of view of cats that live in an apartment in Greenwich
Village through the technique of POV editing. Without the use of human
actors, The Private Life of a Cat tells of a love story between an orange cat and a
white cat—their first meeting, mating, and the birth of their young. Through
POV editing, we see, for example, the father cat watching his children climb-
ing up to higher ground and playing around. We the viewers connect our
viewpoint to the father cat’s and warmly watch those kittens. I Am a Cat
(Wagahai wa neko dearu), the 1975 Japanese film based on a famous novel
by Natsume Sōseki and directed by Ichikawa Kon, is similarly full of POV
editing from a cat’s viewpoint. For instance, the visit of the wife of a nouveau
riche to the protagonist’s house is seen by a cat through a shoji window. The
cat’s viewpoint emphasizes that the woman is an uninvited guest.
A number of examples of POV editing can be found in To Catch a
Thief. As a result, we feel that someone is always looking at someone else, or
that somebody is always being looked at by somebody else. That is, To Catch
a Thief is a film that explores how the humans gaze follows (chases) other
humans, too.
For example, in one scene, Robie is standing in a hotel lobby. What
follows is a long shot of Francie posing like a fashion model. She wears an
elegant bathing suit that no one has ever seen before; the suit was designed
for this film by Edith Head, a leading Hollywood designer who received
eight Oscars. Grace Kelly was Edith Head’s favorite actress, and, according to
film historian James M. Vest, they did a fashion tour together in Paris right
 Editing in To Catch a Thief 61

before the production of the film began (Vest 2003, 61). Grace Kelly was in
fact a perfect fashion model for Edith Head. Her role in Rear Window (1954),
Hitchcock’s previous film, was that of a fashion model.
The shots of Robie looking and Francie posing appear by turn. As a
result, we the viewers feel that Robie is looking at Francie. This is how POV
editing works. In reality, however, these two shots might have been taken
at a different set at different times. However, we the viewers do not usually
think that way. Rather, we follow Robie’s gaze, connect our viewpoint to
his, see the woman in a beautiful bathing suit, and are enchanted. If Robie
looks a little agitated, then we cannot help sympathizing with his shock at
unexpectedly seeing a woman in such sexy clothes.
What we should also note here is that the POV editing is used to
enhance the gendered gaze. While the issues of gender and sexuality will be

Robie shifts his gaze in a hotel lobby.

Francie poses like a fashion model.

62 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

elaborated on in the following chapter, it is still noteworthy to briefly intro-

duce theories of the gendered gaze in cinema here. The term “gaze” was
first popularized in the 1960s by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to describe the
anxious state that occurs when one becomes aware that she or he is viewed
and feels that she or he loses autonomy and turns into an object (Lacan 1978,
73–75). Also in the 1960s, French philosopher Michel Foucault started using
the term “gaze” in his book The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical
Perception (1963) and then in the 1970s in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of
the Prison (1977) to point out power dynamics and disciplinary mechanisms
between doctors and patients, teachers and pupils, and prison guards and
prisoners (see, for instance, Foucault 1963, 114; Foucault 1977, 205).
With such psychoanalytic and historical contexts behind the term
“gaze” in mind, in the 1970s, along with the development in feminist move-
ments, film theorist Laura Mulvey introduced the concept of the “male gaze”
and pointed out that mainstream films, particularly Hollywood films, natu-
ralize conventional gender relations where the figure of woman functions as
the object of male desire. In her influential 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema,” Mulvey argued that the fascination of Hollywood films
was based on the desire to see (she uses the Freudian term “scopophilia” to
describe this desire). According to Mulvey, the POV editing, in particular,
subsumed the gaze of the camera into that of the (usually heterosexual male)
protagonist and then aligned the gaze with that of the spectator.
Three levels of the gaze (camera, male protagonist, and spectator) are
connected here. The first gaze (looking at another character, often female)
produces voyeuristic pleasure, whereas the second gaze (identification with
the character) creates narcissistic visual pleasure. Mulvey attacked main-
stream cinema by claiming that this system of gaze assumed the spectator’s
identification with the desiring (or powerful) protagonist who turned the
female character into a passive (or powerless) object.
In the bathing suit scene in To Catch a Thief, which I referred to above,
Francie is clearly displayed as a voyeuristic object of Robie’s male gaze. But at
the same time, Robie also becomes an object of the gaze. In such cases, Robie
is treated either as a visual pleasure for the “female gaze” or as an anxious and
rather vulnerable object, and the system of gendered gaze is maintained in a
little more complex manner. Following Mulvey, a number of critics including
Steve Neale have pointed out that there are numerous instances of the male
body functioning as the object of gaze in mainstream films (Neale 1983,
2–17). Those examples illustrate that the gendered gaze is also applicable to
male objectification, that the gaze is not essentially male, and that there can
be contradictions in apparently normative systems of gender relations.
 Editing in To Catch a Thief 63

More importantly, in this particular scene, Francie knows full well

that Robie is looking at her. Her over-the-top swimsuit and her hyper-
bolic sensual pose even make us the viewers aware of the objectifying male
gaze. That is probably why Robie looks embarrassed rather than delighted.
If that is the case, the apparent relationship between the viewer and the
viewed is reversed. Robie is not really the active owner of the gaze but
the actual object of the chase. Francie is not the passive object of the gaze,
but she may be the leader of the chase. Thus, we can say that the POV
editing in this scene is used not in a literary but in a critical or twisted
manner. We will discuss the issues of self-awareness in the gendered gaze
and performance of gender (feminine masquerade, etc.) in detail in the
following chapter.

The Cat and the Police

Now let’s look at how effectively POV editing is used in To Catch a Thief
to turn chases into gazes. First of all, there is a chase between The Cat and
the police. Here, Robie turns into a rather vulnerable-looking object at first.
However, in the end, it becomes clear that he is not simply an object of gaze.
Robie’s strategy is to confuse the officers by making use of the fact that he
is always watched by them. The key, for Robie, is to keep watching them
while knowing that he is being watched. As a result, it is always Robie who
wins the chase.
The first chase occurs when the police visit Robie’s house for the first
time. Robie is gardening and his black cat is taking a nap on a sofa. Both of
them hear screeching tires and turn their gazes in that direction. A police car
is climbing up the steep hill in an extreme long shot.

Robie turns his gaze.

64 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

Robie’s cat turns his gaze.

A police car is climbing up the hill.

Robie goes inside the house right away. Calling his maid, he runs up to
his bedroom on the second floor and looks out a window. Four plainclothes
detectives get out of the car and arrive at the gate. Robie turns his eyes to
a porch, but a detective already stands there. Every time Robie turns his
gaze, the shot that follows shows detectives. With POV editing, each officer
appears in turn as the one that is seen by Robie (and his black cat).
Robie can only go back down to the living room and welcome
the detectives. He asks them if he can change to formal attire before he
goes to the police station with them, then goes back into his bedroom
and closes the door. As soon as Robie vanishes from the screen, it seems
as though the one who watches and the one who is watched switch
places. Now it is the detectives who are looking at the closed door of
the bedroom. Suddenly, a gunshot is heard from behind the door. The
detectives rush over and break into the room. The following shot shows
 Editing in To Catch a Thief 65

a rifle, an upturned chair, and an empty room. The detectives look at

them, and we see an example here of POV editing. Then we hear, from
outside of a window, the sound of a car leaving. Rushing out and getting
back into the police car, the detectives follow a red sports car that has just
driven away.
A car chase begins in front of the graceful mountains of Provence. But
when the sports car is forced to stop by a group of sheep, the detectives find
that it is not Robie but his maid who has driven the car. Realizing they’ve
been tricked, the detectives make a U-turn and head back to Robie’s house.
In front of the house, Robie is calmly waiting for a bus. When the bus
arrives, he climbs aboard, looks out the window, and sees that the police
car has just come back. POV editing is used again. It is Robie who is now

The detectives break into Robie’s room.

A rifle and an upturned chair are left in Robie’s room.

66 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

the watcher. In fact, he has been in that position from the beginning of this
scene until the end. He is the first winner of this chase.
This is exactly what cats do in their chases: they pretend to switch sides
from being the watcher to the watched. In fact, they never stop watching
and are always conscious of being watched. My cat knows that she is being
watched and consciously treats me coldly and hides behind something in
order to attract my attention. When I start chasing her, she joyfully runs
away. When I think she has gone far away and stop chasing her, she is back
before I know it and waits for me to catch up. Then, the chase starts again.
I’m always the one who falls for her strategy. She always catches me.
With a feeling of victory, Robie smiles and takes a seat at the back
of the bus. But when he looks to one side, he finds two birds hysterically
chasing each other in a birdcage. On his other side sits Hitchcock himself

Robie looks out of a bus window.

The police car comes back. Note how Robie’s face is

reflected in the bus window.
 Editing in To Catch a Thief 67

Hitchcock—The real chase has not yet begun.

wearing a serious expression. It is as though he is warning Robie, and us, that

it is too early to feel secure, that the real chase has not yet begun.
In the scene at a masquerade ball, which is the climax of the film, Robie
adopts this strategy once more to confuse the watchful gaze of the police.
Guests arrive one after another wearing luxurious jewelry and costumes
from the period of Louis XV. POV editing emphasizes that they are objects
of the gaze of the watching police, who are awaiting the right time to arrest
The Cat. Francie, Mrs. Stevens, and Robie, in a costume with a black mask,
are all being watched by the police. But Robie skillfully switches his cos-
tume with someone else’s when he pretends to go back to a room to bring
Mrs. Stevens her medication. Failing to notice the switch, the police officers
do not move their gazes away from Francie and the man with the black
mask, who continue their dance until the very end of the party. POV editing
continues.The police are always the watchers. But nothing dramatic happens
on the dance floor. At this point a close-up of Robie appears. Standing in
the dark on the roof, he has been looking at everyone and everything at the
party. Pretending to be watched, Robie has in fact always been the watcher.
It is not only the police who are tricked by the chase of gazes. Without
knowing that the real Cat is watching, the false Cat finally emerges.

The Cat and “the New Kitten”

Yet, it gradually becomes clear that the chases with the police and with the
false Cat are not what is most important to Robie. There is another chase
happening simultaneously. Francie tempts him with sensual wordplay: “How
about a new kitten?” This chase will have a greater impact on Robie’s life as
a free man. POV editing in this chase engages with the notion of gendered
gaze in a more critical manner.
68 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

When he becomes a suspect in the robberies, Robie crafts a plan to

attract and capture a rich person and use him/her as bait for the false Cat.
Mrs. Stevens becomes Robie’s target. He uses the same tactics with her as he
used with the police: he pretends to be watched by her but in fact watches
her. Robie appears three times in front of Mrs. Stevens, who spends a grace-
ful evening at a luxury hotel. POV editing is used each time to make Robie
an object of Mrs. Stevens’ gaze. The first time is in the dining room, where
Robie is a young bachelor who dines alone. The second time is in the hotel
lobby, where he is a rich man discussing imitation jewels with a concierge.
The third time is at a roulette table in the casino, where he is a comical char-
acter who accidentally drops a chip down a lady’s dress. Mrs. Stevens looks
at him on each occasion. She cannot help laughing at him and eventually
invites him for a drink. Robie’s tactics, or his performance to become an
object of her gaze, have worked well.

Robie dines and leaves the restaurant alone.

Robie discusses imitation jewels.

 Editing in To Catch a Thief 69

Robie drops a chip down a lady’s dress.

Mrs. Stevens looks at Robie on each occasion.

But Robie has misjudged one thing. Mrs. Stevens has a clever “kitten,”
whose name is Francie. Robie keeps winning the chases with the police
and Mrs. Stevens by maintaining his position as the watcher while he pre-
tends to be watched. But he cannot easily have his own way when it comes
to Francie. This is because Francie adopts the same strategy as Robie. She
makes the one whom she chases chase her, without letting him know that
she is chasing him. She is the one who watches but pretends not to. This is
what is going on in the hotel lobby when she puts on the elegant bathing
suit in the scene that we examined earlier. Apparently, Francie is an object of
gendered gaze; the POV editing of the scene emphasizes that. However, in
reality, it is Robie who is targeted as the game of the chase. He is the object
of Francie’s gaze, a dynamic that is not explicitly displayed in the POV edit-
ing. The POV editing and the system of gendered gaze are deliberately used
in a deceptive manner.
70 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

Robie is unaware of being gazed at by Francie.

In fact, Robie has already lost the first chase of gazes with Francie
without even knowing it. Robie takes a brief rest at the beach in front of
a luxurious hotel after his first victory over the police. Being fully satisfied,
he is completely unaware of a gaze trained on him from behind. There is a
mysterious woman in a yellow bathing suit with big sunglasses. It is Francie.
POV editing is not used here, and in fact Hitchcock may have carefully
avoided using POV editing from Francie’s position in order to emphasize
this irony: without a doubt, there is a relationship between the watcher and
the watched. The former is Francie and the latter is Robie.

A Truth Born Out of a Lie: Intellectual Montage

Francie’s operation reaches a climax in a night of fireworks. The love scene
between Robie and Francie at a hotel room is over the top and even makes
us laugh. But the more hyperbolic the situation becomes, the more strongly
we can feel the true emotions that they are trying to hide from each other.
This coexistence of artificiality and truthfulness is craftily expressed by the
third editing technique that appears in this film: “intellectual montage.”
Intellectual montage is an editing technique that combines two shots
with different images that do not have any obvious connection. Their collision
brings about new meanings, complex concepts, or even subjective messages
that cannot be expressed by each individual image. Soviet filmmaker Sergei
Eisenstein came up with this idea of intellectual montage while examining
hieroglyphs and Chinese and Japanese languages and characters. For instance,
the collision of the characters “eye” and “water” produces the concept “cry-
ing” (Eisenstein 1998, 82–92). Three shots of lion statues (not domestic cats
 Editing in To Catch a Thief 71

but the same family) in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) are a typical
example of intellectual montage. The Cossack troops of the Russian Empire
massacre civilians on the Odessa Steps. The sailors of the Battleship Potemkin
revolt against the oppression and start to fire the cannons at the Cossack
troops on the Steps. Between a shot of the firing cannons and that of a col-
lapsing building, three shots are inserted: a statue of a sleeping lion, that of a
lion awake, and that of a lion standing up and roaring. There is no specific
connection between the sailors and the lion statues. However, when they are
shown one after another, a new meaning emerges. It is as if civilians, who are
strong by nature but have been silent, have finally awakened and stood up.
Intellectual montage is only one element of Soviet montage theory,
which explores cinema that relies upon editing to create complex ideological
and intellectual concepts and ideas from connected images. The editing meth-
ods of Soviet montage theory include metric (based purely on the specific

The lion is asleep

The lion is awake.

72 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

And the lion stands up roaring.

number of frames), rhythmic (based on a compositional relationship between

shots), tonal (based on the emotional reactions of viewers), vertical (focused
on non visual elements in shots), and more. Eisenstein considered intellectual
montage, in particular, to be an alternative method of editing to the so-called
“continuity editing” of the mainstream Hollywood cinema. Filmmaker D. W.
Griffith, “the father of Hollywood cinema,” developed continuity editing in
the 1910s with the goal of creating a universal language of cinema for audi-
ences of all classes all over the world. The editing techniques that we have
discussed so far—the 180-degree rule, crosscutting, and POV editing—are
representatives of continuity editing. The focus of continuity editing is to
formulate a smooth and seamless narrative development for viewers. This
can be achieved by consistency of time and physical location between shots.
As long as a logical progression of shots is established, the narrative is clearly
intelligible. The viewers do not even notice the cuts between shots as long
as the combination of images makes visual sense. In contrast, montage, as
formulated by Eisenstein, is “an idea that derives from the collision between
two shots that are independent of one another” (Eisenstein 1998, 95).
Let’s go back to the hotel room, where Robie and Francie stand by the
windows. Fireworks have begun outside. Turning off the light, Francie says
to Robie, “If you want to see the fireworks, it’s better with the lights out.
You’re going to see one of the Riviera’s most fascinating sights.” Robie is
taken aback at her enticing words. Even in the darkened room, Francie is
given three-point lighting. Her body in a strapless white dress, her breast with
diamond necklaces, and her platinum blonde hair are all shining. Here, a shot
of fireworks is inserted. Then, in the following shot, Francie says seductively
from a sofa where she lies, “Look, John. Hold them. Diamonds, the only
thing in the world you can’t resist.” This is followed by a shot of fireworks
that have become brighter. Simultaneously, the violin score becomes louder.
 Editing in To Catch a Thief 73

Francie kisses Robie’s fingers and places his hand on her diamond
necklace. She comes closer and says, “Ever had a better offer in your whole
life? One with everything?” Does she mean her diamonds or herself? These
explicitly sensual lines make us embarrassed and may even provoke laughter.
A shot of fireworks is inserted for the third time; they have suddenly become
very showy. In the following shot, the camera starts to move erratically and
shows a close-up of Robie’s face and then turns to that of Francie. Then
appears an extremely bright shot of fireworks. The duration of each shot
becomes shorter and shorter.
As if telling himself that both diamonds and Francie’s offer are false,
Robie says, “You know as well as I do this necklace is imitation.” But
Francie replies, “Well, I’m not.” Robie cannot help kissing her. The next
shot is filled with fireworks. The screen is almost all white. The violin score
is at a climax, too. The camera comes closer and closer to the couple kissing
on the sofa. Then comes an explosive shot of fireworks.

“Look, John. Hold them.”

Fireworks begin.
74 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

“I’m not imitation.”

Fireworks explode.

While Robie and Francie are kissing in the hotel room, the fireworks
are reaching their climax outside of the room. In that sense, this editing
is a variation of crosscutting. Unlike the chase scenes, however, even if all
the shots of the fireworks are omitted, viewers will never lose track of the
smooth progression of the storyline. There is something else behind the edit-
ing here, and that is intellectual montage. When the shots of fireworks, which
become brighter and fiercer, are combined with those of Robie and Francie,
who come closer and closer, the collision of images creates a new idea. In
other words, we the viewers, who have been paying attention to the screen,
try to read new meanings and emotions into the combination of shots. For
instance, we may think that even though Robie and Francie pretend to be
cool, they have fierce romantic feelings inside and their passions for each
other are heightening in this scene, or something of the sort. We think that
 Editing in To Catch a Thief 75

the fireworks are a metaphor for their emotional states. The images of the
couple and the fireworks collide and thus are forcefully connected. Film
scholar Lesley Brill makes the following argument about the scene:

This foolishness charms us partly because its self-conscious

excesses are impossible to take seriously. The most familiar aural
and visual clichés of cinematic courtship—violins, fireworks,
divinely glamorous protagonists—are sent up together in an inflatio
ad absurdum. Behind the amorous folly, however, uninsistent but
unconcealed, Hitchcock makes his straightforward point: this is all
make-believe, as unreal as it is overstated. “You know as well as I
do they’re fake,” says John about Francie’s diamonds. The emotion
is fake, too, “weird excitement,” not love. (Brill 1988, 38)

However, such a forged connection of independent images by intel-

lectual montage comes to express the true emotions of the entangled couple,
no matter how strongly they try to make their emotions appear fake. It is a
truth born out of a lie, so to speak. Hitchcock once said that emotions could
be created by editing so that actors need not do anything but be there.What
he has resorted to here is intellectual montage.
According to the original screenplay of To Catch a Thief, in addition
to the fireworks, a shot of a cat walking toward the camera until it fully cov-
ers the entire screen was supposed to be inserted into this love scene. Again,
there is no innate connection between a cat and the couple. But if this shot
of a cat had been connected to the shots of the couple, we the viewers
would most likely have started to think of new meanings—perhaps the cat
is about to attack someone or catch some person or valuable jewel, or some
such thing. But who catches whom? The cat is a metaphor for whom? Is it
Robie, or Francie?

Uh-oh—The Cat Is Caught

In the end, Robie catches the false Cat and proves his innocence. He appears
to regain his freedom. But it looks as though he has lost the chase with a
young woman. When he is about to relax at his house on the hill, he is
surprised by an intruder. Previously, when the police came, he immediately
placed himself in the position of a viewer. He was prepared for the chase
with them. But he fails this time. Francie appears on the veranda out of the
blue. She clings to his shoulder and murmurs sweetly, “So this is where you
live. Mother will love it up here!” Robie is flabbergasted, but it is too late.
76 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA

The chapel bells ring in benediction as though celebrating a marriage. The

film comes to an end.
Hitchcock called this an almost tragic ending. It is Francie who wins
the chase. Just like that, the Cat is caught.

Author’s note:
Jessie Royce Landis, who plays Mrs. Stevens, Francie’s mother, played the
role of Cary Grant’s mother in North by Northwest (1959), the next Hitch-
cock film in which Grant would appear. Could this be a joke? Hitchcock’s
way of carrying the story beyond one film?
 CHAPTER 4

Cats Are Prima Donnas

Feminist Film Theory and Auteurism in Dishonored

Josef von Sternberg, USA, 1931

Dietrich Is a Cat, Too

Like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Simone Simon in Cat People,
and Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, Marlene Dietrich in Dishonored is a
cat-like character. Dishonored is a tragic love story set in Vienna during
World War I. The Austrian spy X27, played by Dietrich, is cat-like from
beginning to end. A nameless cat is always with X27: on her bed, on the
piano with which X27 plays “Waves of the Danube (Valurile Dunarii),”
on her lap when she rides in a biplane to steal into enemy territory, and in
jail after she is sentenced to death for treason. At times, it seems as if X27
is a black Persian cat and the real body in a human shape next to it is only
its imitator.
The film opens with a close-up of a street lamp illuminating a rainy
night. Under the lamp, a woman wearing a coat with a black fur collar and
cuffs raises her skirt a little and fixes her stockings and garter belt. Her legs,
slightly peeping out from the skirt, are shown in a close-up and shine white
under the streetlight. This is ostensibly an erotic image. But the owner of
these legs seems to be aware that somebody is watching her and is con-
sciously showing off her beautiful legs. We sense this because the way she
fixes her stockings is somewhat pretentious, perhaps even unnecessary. We
the viewers sense that she is a prostitute performing an erotic move. Her
action also reminds us of a cat cleaning its wet legs. Cats do not like to get
wet. Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief also tends to his wet sleeve so much
when he escapes by boat that he is teased by Danielle, a young French
woman: “Cats don’t like water.”

79
80 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

A woman fixes her stockings under a street lamp:

Close-up of her legs.

Medium shot of the woman’s face (Marlene Dietrich).

In the shot that follows, the woman turns her face halfway to the camera
as if she were seducing someone. Her face is covered by a black veil, but her
eyes shine from the reflected streetlight, just as the eyes of a cat often glow
in the dark. What she looks at with her radiant eyes is a building across the
street. A crowd has gathered there while policemen and emergency rescue
team members go in and out of the building. She holds her stare and slowly
comes closer to the camera while placing one of her hands on her hip. Here
 Feminist Film Theory and Auteurism in Dishonored 81

it becomes clear to us, the viewers, that this woman is played by Dietrich.
Of course, many viewers might have recognized this with the first close-up
of Dietrich adjusting her garter belt because she was already famous for her
beautiful legs.
Someone is carried into an emergency vehicle on a stretcher. It seems
that a young prostitute has committed suicide. Among the people on the
side street, there are apparently other women of the same occupation as
well as a gentleman with a fine mustache, possibly a customer of one of the
women.The woman played by Dietrich looks at the situation and says to no
one in particular, “I’m not afraid of life. Although I am not afraid of death,
either.” The gentleman with the mustache hears this and speaks to her.
There are two things that we should pay particular attention to in this
opening scene. First, the prostitute played by Dietrich is clearly depicted as
an erotic object. It looks as though she is consciously performing in an erotic
way. Second, POV editing (see the previous chapter) emphasizes her gaze.
In other words, this opening scene indicates that the prostitute that Dietrich
plays is an object of male desire yet she is simultaneously a subject who
firmly looks back at a society controlled by men.
When the prostitute invites the gentleman into her room as the night’s
guest, her body is placed under a big dark shadow that the man and his
umbrella create. Visually, it looks as though she is captured under his big
wing. Yet, at the same time, she keeps staring at him. The man, by contrast,
does not turn his eyes to her, as if she were too vulgar for him. He only spits
out, “I need a woman who knows how to deal with men.”
As soon as she hears this, the prostitute starts to take conspicuously
sensual poses. His comment sounds like a sexual innuendo, but his facial
expression indicates that this gentleman is not very interested in the pros-
titute sexually; rather, he appears to be recruiting her, to turn her into a
terrorist or something similar. With wine glasses in her hand, she responds,
“It’s against Austria, of course.”
“Of course,” says the man.
“I’d like to get some wine,” she replies. When she comes back after
a few seconds, what she brings back with her is not a bottle of wine but a
policeman who has been patrolling nearby. She accuses the gentleman of
being an anti-Austrian spy. Thus, it is the prostitute who captures the man
using her gaze while she performs as an erotic object.
Even though the prostitute has made a nihilistic remark in the opening
scene (“I’m not afraid of life. Although I am not afraid of death, either”), she
is not antisocial or rebellious toward her own country. In fact, the prostitute
obediently responds to a police summons on the following morning. It is the
82 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

gentleman with the mustache who awaits her at the police station. He was
not arrested the night before. He is the head of the Austrian Secret Service
and was testing her patriotism. Respecting her model action the previous
evening, he asks her to work as a spy for Austria. Without any hesitation,
she agrees.
But both the secret service head and we the viewers cannot help but
feel a little uneasy. Isn’t she a little too obedient? Isn’t she too pretentious?
When she arrives at the police station, when she is guided through a corridor
by a young officer, when she listens to the head’s story in front of a blind that
makes numerous lines of shadow, and when she leans into a chair and agrees
to become a spy, the prostitute in the black coat keeps playing with the fur
of her coat or casting meaningful glances. Her behaviors look like those of a
cat posing and playing a prima donna. She is not rebellious. She does not take
any antisocial actions. She apparently has an attitude that makes her customers
happy. Still, her attitude seems ostentatious. It looks like a performance. Her
real intention is hidden from the head as well as the viewers.
Similarly, on the previous evening, after she hands over the mustachioed
gentleman to the patrolman she approaches the camera and vigorously starts
to play the piano that sits in her apartment. Her Persian cat sits next to the
piano. The prostitute is so close to the camera that her face protrudes from
the frame (an extreme close-up). Yet, even from such a close distance, her
expression is inscrutable.We cannot really figure out what she thinks or how
she feels.

The woman plays the piano in an extreme close-up.

 Feminist Film Theory and Auteurism in Dishonored 83

Dietrich and Feminist Film Theory

As we have seen in the previous chapter, film theorist Laura Mulvey claimed
in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” that Hollywood films cater to
the desiring male gaze, which turns female characters into passive objects of
voyeuristic pleasure. For Mulvey, Josef von Sternberg’s films were “fetishistic
scopophilia” and Hitchcock’s were “sadistic” voyeurism that supported the
patriarchal gender hierarchy (Mulvey 1999, 840). Dietrich was, according to
Mulvey, “a perfect product, whose body, stylized and fragmented by close-
ups, is the content of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator’s
look” (Mulvey 1999, 841).
However, Dietrich’s character seems to go beyond being a passive object
of male gaze. Film theorist E. Ann Kaplan argues that Dietrich deliberately
uses her body as spectacle (Kaplan 1983, 51). Gaylyn Studlar, another film the-
orist, suggests that in Sternberg’s films Dietrich is also empowered and entraps
male characters with her charms while she offers voyeuristic pleasure to the
male gaze (Studlar 1988, 243). Dietrich’s own gaze undermines the sense that
the male gaze is always active and powerful. Studlar thus regards Dietrich as a
dialectic figure who is both the passive object and the gaze’s perpetrator.
I want to build on the views of Kaplan and Studlar and more recent
feminist theory with my own feminist reading of Dishonored, which emphasizes
the notion of performance. In her influential book Gender Trouble: Feminism
and the Subversion of Identity, feminist philosopher Judith Butler proposes the
idea of gender performance. According to Butler, our gender is constructed
through our own repetitive performance of gender (Butler 1990, 95). Such
repetition is forced by “oppressive and painful gender norms,” argues Butler
(Butler and Kotz 1992, 84). What Dietrich’s character does in this film is to
perform her femininity by using men as the ones who force her into what
she is. X27 does not passively accept her position as an object for erotic
male gazes; rather, she is aware that her body is a commodity, or a pet, and
consciously performs the role of a sexually and socially weak figure. She
does so in such an overtly erotic manner that even pleasure-seeking male
viewers often feel uncomfortable. By doing so, her performance highlights
the unequal and oppressive social structure that has deprived her of her
husband and turned her into a prostitute for society men and governmental
officials. She does not publicly oppose her country. She does not become
an antisocial terrorist.Were she to do so, she would most likely be oppressed
again. A more effective strategy is to appear to maintain the sexual and
social power structure on the surface but cast doubt on it by her exagger-
ated mannerisms.
84 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

As a result of X27’s performance, uneasy feelings stir among govern-

mental officials. The power structure has not been reversed but is shaken up.
It becomes unclear who really controls the situation. Film scholar Andrea
Weiss even argues that Dietrich’s sexual ambiguity, the result of a “masculin-
ization” of her characters, was embraced by gay and lesbian audiences (Weiss
1992, 42). Entertainment Weekly chose Taylor Swift as the 2010 Entertainer of
the Year and put her on the cover of its December issue. In the photo, Swift
wears a tuxedo, a white bow tie, and a silk hat. This costume is exactly what
Dietrich wore in Morocco (Sternberg, 1930) and proves that Dietrich’s image
still appeals to a broad audience.
The historical context behind such overt eroticization of Dietrich in
her films was the financial situation of the production company where she
worked. Dietrich played a mysterious cabaret singer in Morocco, charming
prostitutes in Dishonored and Shanghai Express (Sternberg 1932), and a chaste
wife/mother who becomes a cabaret dancer in Blonde Venus (Sternberg
1932). All of these films were produced and released by Paramount, which
was facing bankruptcy, before the enforcement of the Production Code
in 1934. The Hollywood film industry was increasingly sensitive about sex,
and it was a high-risk gamble to let a star play the explicitly sexy roles of
a dancer or a prostitute. In fact, during the production of Blonde Venus, the
screenplay and the prints were checked several times. Yet, Paramount was
gambling on exactly these types of sexy star vehicles in addition to trying to
reduce production costs (Baxter 1993, 39–84). It was helpful that Dietrich
was an exotic star who had just arrived from Germany and already had an
image as a sex symbol. Even if she was depicted as bold and sexy, it was
excusable because she was not an American.

Feigning a Harmless Kitten: Performance and Masquerade

Dishonored is indeed a film about performance. X27 changes her costumes
one after another and gives numerous performances in different disguises.
With her performances, she succeeds in a number of important missions.
First Act: X27’s first mission is to steal into a masquerade ball, seduce
Colonel von Hindau (Warner Orlando, who was famous for playing Charlie
Chan, a Chinese detective), a suspected betrayer, and seize evidence of his
betrayal. X27 puts on a mask that looks like a vulture or a cat, a shiny
black mini-dress that hugs her body, and a cape that reminds us of a gladi-
ator’s. She finds Hindau, who wears the costume of a hangman, right away
(POV editing) and openly begins a performance of temptation. She sends a
sensual gaze to him from behind her mask, exhibits some sort of courtship
 Feminist Film Theory and Auteurism in Dishonored 85

X27 seduces Hindau (Warner Orlando).

behavior with a party toy, allows her leg to show from under the hem of
her mini-dress, and smokes a cigarette in a seductive manner. But when he
is not watching her, she looks around carefully with a serious expression,
extends her arm like a cat to the back of a painting on the wall, and looks
for evidence.
Second Act: Her next mission is to infiltrate a hotel in Russia, seduce
a Russian officer, and steal military secrets. This time, X27 wears the far-
from-fancy dress of a maid. When I watched this film for the first time as
an undergraduate, I didn’t recognize the maid as Dietrich in disguise for
some time. She has her eye on one officer as she begins her performance as
a naïve innocent. When he looks at her legs, she opens her eyes wide and
bashfully hides her face with her skirt. She then climbs up to the top of a
cupboard and innocently imitates a cat’s meow in order to draw his atten-
tion. When he drinks too much and passes out, she starts to copy the secret
military documents he keeps. On her way out, however, she is captured by
Colonel Kranau (Victor McLaglen), an enemy spy. She does not give up
easily. When he turns his back on her, she opens her eyes wide like a cat in
the dark and glances right and left to look for an escape route. As she does
this, she holds her Persian cat right next to her face. Her cat also glances
around exactly as X27 does.
Kranau triumphantly says, “Everybody makes mistakes. And you carry
a cat.” When X27 replies, “It has brought me good luck, so far,” he asks her,
“Do you call this good luck?” X27 answers, “I don’t know yet.” In front
86 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

X27 and her cat glance around.

of a mirror, she arranges her maid’s dress to look a little bit sexy. Then, she
slowly clings to Kranau. Thus she resets her disguise and performance. It
will not take long for Kranau to relax his guard and drink wine containing a
sleeping drug. In the end, X27 escapes from Russia, returns safely to Vienna,
and delivers the military information to her boss.
Third and Final Act: Even facing her own execution, she keeps up her
performance. She asks, “Could you possibly help me to die in a uniform
of my own choosing?” What she puts on for her final act is the black fur-
trimmed coat of a prostitute that she wore when the film began: “[A] dress
I wore when I served my countrymen instead of my country,” according to
her. Using the young officer’s saber as a mirror, she puts on lipstick. Then
she sticks her left hand in a pocket, straightens herself up in the exaggerated
manner of a prostitute, and starts to walk. It looks as though she has started
her final performance.
The young officer is moved by her attitude and loses sight of his duty.
The moment the shooting corps point their guns at X27 and X27 makes an
exaggerated sign of the cross with her right hand, he cries out. “I will not kill
a woman. I will not kill any more men, either. Do you call this war? I call it
butchery! You call this serving your country? You call this patriotism? I call
it murder!” The young officer is held down and taken out by other soldiers.
In the meantime, X27 fixes her lips again. Unlike the young officer, she does
not overtly revolt against her country. Instead, she chooses to improve her
performance and disguise with her lipstick. As she did at the beginning of
 Feminist Film Theory and Auteurism in Dishonored 87

X27 fixes her lips before being executed.

the film, she raises her skirt, shows off her beautiful legs, and fixes her stock-
ings. When she is shot, she swings up her arms and falls down on her back.
This is a typical performance of death by a stage actor. Thus, she never stops
acting up to the moment of her death.
X27 does not have the power to change her fate. She knows that her
life is predetermined by the patriarchal system of power and desire and is
conscious of how such a system wants her to behave. She chooses to contin-
uously perform the ideal role of a woman that the system requires. She puts
on a mask of femininity as a masquerade. By doing so in an overt manner,
she makes those empowered by it realize how the system is working. They
end up feeling discomfort and guilt because of such exposure. This is her
method of resistance. Here, it is worthwhile to refer to the notion of mas-
querade that feminist film theorist Mary Ann Doane explores, drawing on
the work of British psychoanalyst Joan Rivière. Rivière claimed in her 1929
essay “Womanliness as a Masquerade” that women who found themselves in
a male position of authority put on a mask of femininity that would function
as compensation for their masculine position. They would overemphasize
their feminine characteristics and appearances. Doane resorts to this notion
of masquerade when she argues that female spectators who must identify
with the male gaze when they watch Hollywood cinema can wear a mask
of femininity for compensation (Doane 1982, 81–84). Doane claims, “The
masquerade doubles representation; it is constituted by a hyperbolisation of
the accountrements of femininity” (Doane 1982, 82). Consciously wearing
88 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

X27 plays the “Moonlight Sonata” with a tender expression

on her face, which is reflected in the cover of the piano.

the mask of femininity, or an excess of femininity, as a masquerade, X27

reveals the apparent normative system of gendered gaze.
There are at least two scenes in the film in which X27 displays a tender
expression and looks off into the distance. It is noteworthy that in both
scenes she is alone. What she thinks and feels remains ambiguous, but her
facial expression is clearly different from that she has worn in other scenes.
Framing and lighting enhance this difference.
X27 exhibits this expression for the first time when she plays the
“Moonlight Sonata” by Beethoven on the grand piano in her room right
after she has met Kranau for the first time. Her tender expression is reflected
on the cover of the piano on which she plays the passionate but yearning
tune, making it seem as if she were torn in two. Is this a metaphor for her
feelings towards Kranau that she tries so hard to hide?
The second time is when she looks outside, where a number of search-
lights brighten the evening sky to search for Kranau. Right before this shot,
X27 has volunteered to question Kranau, who has been arrested by the
border police. During the investigation, whether intentionally or not, she
drops her gun and lets him escape. This is why she is sentenced to death for
treason. Even though X27 stands in a dark room with all the lamps turned
off, her face is lit from the front top in a close-up. Her eyes and hair shine
beautifully in the light, enhancing her expression of contentment.
 Feminist Film Theory and Auteurism in Dishonored 89

Dietrich in the “north light.”

According to Lee Garmes, who was the cinematographer for many of

Dietrich’s early Hollywood films including Dishonored, this is the so-called
“north light,” the light from the top, or north, that he invented to beautifully
display Dietrich’s facial features. Garmes once said,

Unfortunately I didn’t have sufficient time to make tests of

Marlene Dietrich; I had seen The Blue Angel [Der blau Engel, 1930,
Sternberg’s German film with Dietrich], and, based on that, I lit
her with a sidelight, a half-tone, so that one half of her face was
bright and the other half was in shadow. I looked at the first day’s
work and I thought, ‘My God, I can’t do this, it’s exactly what Bill
Daniels is doing with Garbo.’ We couldn’t, of course, have two
Garbos! So, without saying anything to Jo, I changed to the north-
light effect. He had no suggestions for changes, he went ahead
and let me do what I wanted. The Dietrich face was my creation.
(Quoted in Higham 1970, 40–41)

In addition, white eyeliner makes her shining eyes look bigger. The
special lighting technique and makeup appear to emphasize X27’s affection
for Kranau and her satisfaction that she could save him.These two occasions
of tenderness make X27’s ostentatious disguises and erotic performances
even more striking.
90 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

Sternberg and Auteurism

The director and the star of Dishonored were just as conscious about per-
formance as the fictional character X27. The director, Josef von Sternberg,
was born in Vienna in 1894 and moved to Brooklyn, NY, when he was
a child. He entered the film business in the 1910s and became a director
in Hollywood during the silent era of the 1920s. When he was invited to
Germany to direct The Blue Angel at Ufa, the largest studio in Germany,
he discovered Dietrich. Returning to Hollywood, he directed a number of
Dietrich star vehicles at Paramount. Those films, including Dishonored, paid
particular attention to lighting and costume and emphasized stylistically the
thematic motifs of performance and masquerade.
The Blue Angel, the first Sternberg–Dietrich film, is the story of a ser-
ious high school teacher falling in love with Lola-Lola, a cabaret dancer, and
ruining his life. The audition for the role of Lola-Lola faced heavy going.
Sternberg wanted a woman who could captivate the world. He happened to
attend a theatrical play, Zwei Krawatten, because many supporting actors for
The Blue Angel were in it, including Maria Magdalena Dietrich von Losch.
According to Sternberg’s autobiography, entitled Fun in a Chinese Laundry,
she had heard that Sternberg was in the audience and was still looking for his
Lola-Lola, but she appeared indifferent to his presence—just like a cat! Even
when she came to the audition the following afternoon, she never tried to
sell herself. She was no one, even after appearing in twenty-five plays and
seventeen films, yet she boldly told the famous director that she doubted that
he could direct women. According to Sternberg in his autobiography, “She
was seated in a corner of a sofa facing my desk, her eyes downcast, a study in
apathy” (Sternberg 1965, 233). Her ostentatious indifference and her “deep
look of contempt” captured Sternberg’s attention (Sternberg 1965, 234).
He learned later that her behavior was actually a performance. According
to Lee Garmes, Dietrich was conscious of the techniques of cinematogra-
phy and lighting. She understood how she would be lit and photographed
and thus always played roles even during auditions and interviews. Garmes
claimed, “She [Dietrich] had a great mechanical mind, and knew the cam-
era. She would always stop in the exact position that was right for her”
(quoted in Higham 1970, 42).
From the very beginning, Sternberg may have known that Dietrich
had been acting. He was a son of an immigrant and his family had been
poor both in Vienna and in Brooklyn. Having experienced discrimina-
tion, Sternberg was extremely conscious of how he was seen by others.
He himself was always acting (Baxter 1993, 87–91), and he often studied
 Feminist Film Theory and Auteurism in Dishonored 91

his facial expressions in front of mirrors. He was fond of having his portrait
painted, his statue sculpted. He liked to display them at the parties he
threw. This did not necessarily come from narcissism, for the portraits did
not always depict him as handsome. He was also obsessed with costumes in
his films as well as in his real life. But he was not really interested in mak-
ing himself look chic, and he never followed trends. For instance, his daily
clothes included a secondhand costume from a Shakespeare play. Moreover,
his middle name, “von,” was not his real name. He chose it when he was
an assistant director because it sounded aristocratic. Also, it recalled Erich
von Stroheim, an acclaimed Hollywood director who was also from Vienna,
even though Stroheim was notorious for how much money he spent mak-
ing his films. As such, both Sternberg’s costumes and his name were a part
of his performance. (“Marlene” was also a fabrication by Sternberg, by the
way—the combination of Maria and Magdalena, her real name.)
Sternberg wrote, “[N]o matter how concealed the purpose of a story,
it is at all times indicative of its author” (Sternberg 1965, 3). His words
perfectly fit the mode of auteurism that was prevalent in film criticism when
his autobiography was published in 1965.
The term auteur dates back to the 1920s, when French film critics and
directors debated on the work of the auteur (i.e., screenplay author and film-
maker as one and the same) versus the scenario-led film (Hayward 1996, 12).
In the 1950s, this debate was revived. Critics for the film journal Cahiers
du Cinéma, including François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol,
and Eric Rohmer, who would all become directors, watched a number of
films at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and started a critical movement
called auteurism (politique des auteurs). Auteurism was the result of a French
response to a sudden influx of Hollywood films that had been held up dur-
ing the German Occupation in World War II. A great number of popular and
genre-based Hollywood films were examined in Cahiers du Cinéma.
There are four assumptions in auteurism. First, cinema is equivalent to
literature, or any other art of “profundity and meaning” (Astruc 1968, 20).
Second, cinema constitutes a new and unique language. Third, this situation
affords directors of cinema a means of personal expression, that is, a form
within which a genuine artist may “translate his obsessions” or personality
(Astruc 1968, 18). Fourth, these “obsessions” can be traced through thematic
and/or stylistic consistency over almost all films by the director.
In his influential 1954 essay, “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema,”
Truffaut made auteurism’s most fundamental point: films should not be
valorized by their subject matter but by paying particular attention to their
use of mise-en-scène, or all the visual aspects that are happening on the screen
92 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

(Truffaut 1976, 234). His logic was that subject matter and screenplays were
most likely under the control of studios but visual styles were likely under
the control of directors. Similarly, another influential critic, André Bazin,
claimed that auteurs included a “personal factor” that connected all their
films together and made their work identifiable (Bazin 1985, 255). As such,
in auteurism, directors who were able to impart their own styles to their
films, regardless of type or narrative or the conditions under which they were
made, were considered to be auteurs. Auteurism reevaluated such Holly-
wood filmmakers as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, who worked
in crime films, westerns, and horror films, which had been considered mass
entertainment, or B-films.
Auteurism was introduced to America in 1962 largely by one person:
Andrew Sarris, a film critic for the New York Times. While auteurism played
a part in the emergence of analysis that focused on cinematic techniques
instead of the stories and themes that had occupied the major areas of criti-
cism before, Sarris admitted that auteurism was “not so much a theory as an
attitude” (Caughie 1981, 65). His argument suggested that auteurism had a
tendency to put too much emphasis on the director’s worldview and exclude
the social reality and the historical context of filmmaking as a collaborative
process with the efforts of cinematographers, screenwriters, actors, etc.
In an auteurist analysis that takes Sternberg’s words seriously into con-
sideration, Sternberg’s films can be read as an expression of his obsession
with his star, Marlene Dietrich. For instance, in The Devil Is a Woman (1935),
the final collaboration between Sternberg and Dietrich, declining aristocrat
Don Pasquale (Lionel Atwill) tells his young rival how much he has loved
Concha Pérez, the femme fatale played by Dietrich, how bitterly he has
been betrayed, and how tragically he has followed the road to ruin. But at
the same time, he insists that his life was happy. This apparently confident
man in a spotless army uniform finds happiness in his fate even after he has
suffered from humiliation and lost both his health and social status. “Were
I to live my life over again I’d probably do the same foolish things once
more,” says Don Pasquale.
The story of Don Pasquale was an aestheticized version of Sternberg’s
life; he had been obsessed by Dietrich from the time he met her during
the preproduction of The Blue Angel. Sternberg wrote in his autobiography,
“She [Dietrich] has never ceased to proclaim that I taught her everything”
(Sternberg 1965, 224–225). But he insisted, “Her constant praise is rated as
one of her admirable virtues—by others, not by me” (Sternberg 1965, 224).
He claimed that Dietrich was hiding her claws, pretending to be humble in
order to be judged favorably, just as X27 consciously projected the desired
 Feminist Film Theory and Auteurism in Dishonored 93

image of a woman. Still, Sternberg could not help praising Dietrich as sophis-
ticated yet innocent, and says that he cannot believe such a beautiful woman
did not receive any attention for a long time.

Beyond Auteurism: Collaborative Performance Between the Director

and the Actor
But if both Sternberg and Dietrich were conscious of performance and mas-
querade, should we then consider Sternberg’s overt claim about his obses-
sion in his autobiography as well as in his films to be his performance? Or, to
be more exact, were they the products of the collaborative performance by
the director and the actor (and cinematographer Lee Garmes, and costume
designer Travis Banton, etc.)? Throughout the production of The Blue Angel,
Dietrich and Sternberg always watched the rush prints that they filmed and
then went to the editing room together. Historian Christian Esquevin argues
that Travis Banton knew that Dietrich was “no prima donna” but rather a
collaborator in the creation of her screen image. Esquevin writes,

With Sternberg’s late filming habits, Banton was forced to take

costume fittings late in the evenings. Nevertheless, Dietrich would
come into wardrobe late after her shooting schedule, and she
would stand stiffly upright while Banton, the seamstresses and fit-
ters would work, exhausted, until the early hours of the morning.
(Esquevin 2014, n.p.)

It was even publicized from the very beginning that the ostentatiously
erotic image of Dietrich was a fabricated one. The February 1932 issue of
Photoplay magazine published an article on Dietrich by Kay Evans, who
wrote, “She is two different women. With von Sternberg she is what he
has made her be, the woman who wandered through ‘Morocco’ on a pair
of ridiculously high heels, the woman who rouged her lips before facing a
firing squad in ‘Dishonored.’ When she is away from him [Sternberg] she is
a gay, happy, laughing child. The mask is tossed away, the pose is gone. She is
the Marlene Dietrich of Germany and not the creation of von Sternberg of
some mystic Graustarkian country” (Evans 1932, 104).
Other magazines constantly reported that Dietrich’s face when she
looked at her daughter Maria did not have the iconic cool and indiffer-
ent expression but rather the affectionate gaze of a mother. Since Dietrich
had a dual image of bold actor and reliable mother, Paramount was able to
release films that emphasized her eroticism.Yet, even this image of Dietrich’s
94 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

real life might have been a performance. We cannot naively believe stars’
“confessions” in fan magazines. We know that they are also part publicity
and, as such, this is one area that is lacking in auteurism: it does not fully pay
attention to the role of the spectator’s reading process. For the advocates
of auteurism, a film is not a place for active dialogues between the screen
and the spectator. As French philosopher Roland Barthes pointed out in his
essay “The Death of the Author,” the making of meaning lies in the rela-
tionship between the text and its reader (Barthes 1977, 62). Another French
philosopher, Michel Foucault, also suggests that the author ceases to be a real
person and instead “performs” a classificatory function that evokes spectators’
recognition and expectation (Foucault 1984, 101–120). If we follow the ideas
of Barthes and Foucault that rearticulate auteurism as a theory of the social
and historical subject, the auteur becomes both a person who expresses his/
her “obsessions” and a performative existence with which we the viewers,
whether living in the 1930s, 1950s, or today, can actively interact.

Masquerade Forever
After all, X27’s true character was not revealed until the very end. She showed
tender expressions in some scenes, but only we the viewers could witness
them and we could not understand what she was really thinking. X27 con-
tinued her performance until the very last moment and then departed to
the other world.
The same was true of Dietrich. Together with Sternberg, Garmes, and
Banton, among others, she created her image and continued her masquerade.
Like X27, did she hope to reveal the power structure of the patriarchal
society? The titles of Dietrich studies are filled with “images”: The Idea of
the Image: Josef Von Sternberg’s Dietrich Films (1988), Thinking in Images: Film
Theory, Feminist Philosophy and Marlene Dietrich (2006), Dietrich Icon (2007),
and Dressing the Part: Sternberg, Dietrich, and Costume (1993). This fact alone
is indicative of Dietrich’s (and Sternberg’s) life of performance.
In 1961, she published a book, Marlene Dietrich’s ABC. In it, she
explains a number of words in alphabetical order. The book is a strange mix
of encyclopedia, manual, and autobiography. In the “D” section, there is an
entry for “Dietrich.” It reads, “In the German language: the name for a key
that opens all locks. Not a magic key. A very real object, necessitating great
skills in the making.”
Dietrich died in 1992, so the key is lost now. The mystery behind her
performance remains.
 CHAPTER 5

Cats, Mixed and Hybrid

Genre and Stardom in Shozo, a Cat and Two Women

Toyoda Shiroˉ, Japan, 1956

A Film about Cats

Shozo, a Cat and Two Women is a little-known but fascinating film that
deserves more attention. The film is based on the novel by renowned author
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, which was originally published in 1936. The story
revolves around a triangular relationship between Shōzō (Morishige Hisaya),
the prodigal son of a kitchenware store owner in Ashiya, Japan, who plays
around with his beloved cat, Lily, every day despite the financial trouble of
his store; his wife Shinako (Yamada Isuzu), who has just decided to move
out; and Fukuko (Kagawa Kyōko), the delinquent daughter of a rich relative,
whom Shōzō’s mother wants as his new partner.
The film was directed by Toyoda Shirō, acclaimed for turning famous
literary works into cinema, including The Wild Geese (Gan, 1953), based
on Mori Ōgai’s novel; Snow Country (Yukiguni, 1957), based on Kawabata
Yasunari’s novel; A Dark Night’s Passing (An’ya kōro, 1959), based on Shiga
Naoya’s novel; and The Strange Tale of Oyuki (Bokutō kidan, 1960), based on
Nagai Kafū’s novel. Shozo, a Cat and Two Women had legitimate success as a
literary film. It was not only ranked number four in the annual “Best Ten”
of Kinema Junpō, the most influential film journal in Japan, but also received
other notable film awards in 1956. Both Miura Mitsuo, the cinematographer,
and Yamada Isuzu, the leading actress, received the Blue Ribbon Award and
the Mainichi Eiga Concours Award, prestigious film awards in Japan.
In this chapter, we will examine Shozo, a Cat and Two Women from an
auteurist standpoint and discuss how the acclaimed director, Toyoda, expressed
his worldview based on a famous literary work in collaboration with his crew
and cast. For instance, while Tanizaki does not make any explicit connection

95
96 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

between “a cat” and “two women” but clearly delineates them as the title of
the novel indicates, the film version in numerous scenes depicts both Shinako
and Fukuko as if they were cats. In Fukuko’s first appearance, she is depicted
exactly like a cat. Shōzō visits her room and looks for her by calling her
name, as if he were playing hide and seek with a pet. Suddenly, she jumps out
of a Western-style drawer and then scratches Shōzō like a cat. After spending
a night with Shōzō, she stays on his futon with Lily, his cat.
Shōzō also treats Fukuko like a cat. When they go out to the beach
together, he caresses her legs and arms affectionately and rubs her nose with
his, exactly the same behavior that he shows to Lily at the very beginning
of the film on the same beach. We can analyze Toyoda’s obsession with such
feline-like characters by comparing this film with others by the director, if
we like. But it is more fascinating to think about Shozo, a Cat and Two Women
from two different contexts: genre and stardom

What Is Film Genre?

It is not really farfetched to turn to genre here in this chapter, because auteur-
ism developed hand-in-hand with the study of film genre. Like auteurism,
genre is also a French term meaning kind or class. Film critic André Bazin,
one of the founders of auteurism, was particularly interested in the contexts
of genre in Hollywood filmmaking. In the early 1970s, under the strong
influence of auteurism, such film critics as Jim Kitses and Colin McArthur
started to examine the relationship between auteurs and genres (westerns
for Kitses, gangster/crime films for McArthur). That was the beginning of
genre theory in cinema. Since then, various theorists have discussed the
definitions of film genres, mainly based on content (themes, settings, etc.)
and form (structure, style, etc.) and the usability of genres for both audiences
(finding meanings and pleasures) and producers (minimizing economic risk,
marketing, etc.).
Traditionally, these theorists regarded genres as fixed forms, but as
film critic Daniel Chandler points out, contemporary theorists emphasize
that both forms and functions of genres are dynamic (Chandler 2017, 3).
A genre is not rigid or pure but fluid and hybrid—much in the same way
that cats are, by the way: most cats with us today are either mixed or hybrid.
One source states that about 98 percent of cats fall outside the purebred
population (www.familyeducation.com/life/cats/purebred-vs-domestic-cats).
Similarly, the most recent US Pet (Dog and Cat) Population Fact Sheet
published by the American Humane Association, estimates that 95 percent
of all US cats are “domestic shorthair,” cats of mixed ancestry. Such popular
 Genre and Stardom in Shozo, a Cat and Two Women 97

breeds of cats as Savannah (with African serval) and Bengal (with Asian
leopard) are hybrids with wild cats. In other words, genres (as well as cats)
are constantly changing because of various factors—economic, techno-
logical, etc. Therefore, it is significant to discuss genres “as historical phe-
nomena” (Chandler 2017, 4).
For example, everybody seems to know what “film noir” is as a genre.
Neon lights. Headlights. Naked light bulbs. Streets wet with rain. Window
blinds. Mirrors. Critics have tried to define it based on its content and form:
themes such as memory of war, threat of communism, corruption of cities,
and anxiety towards women’s social participation; nightmarish visual styles
such as contrasty lighting and diagonal composition; puzzling narrational styles
such as flashback and voiceovers of protagonists who live in nightmarish
worlds; obsessive characters such as femmes fatale and hard-boiled private
eyes or police officers. The expressive lighting was influenced by German
and Austrian filmmakers and technicians who fled to Hollywood from Nazi-
controlled Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.Those filmmakers and technicians
had experience making the so-called German Expressionist films that often
depicted the anxiety and paranoia of people who lived in big cities, includ-
ing criminals, detectives, and police officers, by using extremely contrasty
lighting and intentionally distorted sets and the techniques of flashback and
psychological point-of-view editing.
In film noir, when a character is sitting in a diner, or being ques-
tioned by the police, or is recording his confession, he may start to stare
into space. After a close-up, the scene shifts to some past event in his
life, and viewers realize that a flashback has begun. Thus, we the viewers
start to relive a character’s past from his or her viewpoint. Moreover, the
flashback scenes are often accompanied by narration by the character as
he or she remembers the past. This technique is called voiceover. The
important thing about flashback and voiceover is that the past only exists
in a character’s memory: the past that they remember may not be the one
that really occurred. It may only be their fantasy. Film historian Robert
Sklar makes the following point about post-WWII American society:
“The hallmark of film noir is its sense of people trapped—trapped in webs
of paranoia and fear, unable to tell guilt from innocence, true identity
from false” (Sklar 1994, 253).
It is clear, though, that none of those images is enough to define film
noir, and it is very difficult to find films that satisfyingly include all of them.
Images of film noir float around like a mirage, but never provide anything
concrete enough to grasp. That’s because it is a hybrid entity. The 1982
sci-fi film Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott, is one such example that
98 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

explored new stylistic possibilities by combining different genres. (Philip K.

Dick, the author of the original 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep?, on which Blade Runner was based, was also a cat lover.)
The term film noir was initially used by pre–WWII French film critics,
who critiqued the films The Port of Shadows (Le Quai des brumes, 1938) and La
Bête humaine (1938) for their moral failings. Film historian Charles O’Brien
points out that the term film noir first appeared in French journalism as early
as 1938 or 1939 as a term of contempt. According to O’Brien, the term
originally suggested “an essentially affective response to a group of films that
seemed to transgress the morality of the national culture” (O’Brien 1996, 8).
In 1939, Georges Altman, a film critic at La Lumière, noted about film noir:
“THE PUBLIC is embarrassed. The ‘critics’ are outraged in a fit of morality.
Everyone who thinks the cinema is just a dubious form of entertainment or
an abject form of pleasure simply cannot understand” (Abel 1988, 266–267).
Film historian Nakamura Hideyuki points out that critics used the term
film noir appreciatively to evaluate the same films as “poetic realism” and/or
“avant-garde” that could shock and confuse the viewers for artistic purposes
(Nakamura 2009, 78). Thus film noir emerged as a discursive term to assess
certain types of films from the perspectives of morality or art.
Then, after WWII, the term film noir was applied by French film critics
to describe a certain type of Hollywood film—for example, The Maltese
Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), Laura (1944), Murder, My Sweet
(1944), and The Woman in the Window (1944). What the French critics rec-
ognized and highly valued was the same quality of “poetic realism” and/
or “avant-garde” that they appreciated in some prewar French films and
hoped postwar French films could achieve in order to defend the French
film industry from the Hollywood invasion (Nakamura 2009, 71). Thus,
film noir was never a rigid or pure genre. It appeared in postwar France as
a discursive term—like auteurism—and the categorization has since been
used in a fluid manner.

Shozo, a Cat and Two Women as a Ghost Cat Film

I propose to consider Shozo, a Cat and Two Women as the historical product of
genre fluidity. To be specific, despite its apparent status as a successful literary
adaptation, I regard this film as an expansion of the ghost cat genre (kaibyō
eiga, or bake-neko mono). The year 1956, when Shozo, a Cat and Two Women
was released, marked the midst of a boom in ghost cat films. A typical plot
of a ghost cat film goes like this: A samurai is killed by his despotic lord,
causing the end of the familial lineage. The samurai’s wife commits suicide
after she begs her cat to avenge the family. The cat that licks the blood of
 Genre and Stardom in Shozo, a Cat and Two Women 99

the samurai’s dead wife turns into a ghost cat that can freely possess any
woman. At the climax of ghost cat films, women possessed by ghost cats
always display monstrous actions. They usually jump repeatedly from the
tops of castle roofs to the ground and back, and fight against samurai. The
stop-trick editing that early filmmaker Georges Méliès often used in his
films was adopted. In this style of editing, filming is paused, an object (or a
person) is added to or removed from the frame, and the filming restarts. This
creates an abrupt teleportation of the monster from one place to another, as
in Black Cat Mansion (Bōrei kaibyō yashiki, Nakagawa Nobuo, 1958). All the
samurai can do is be astonished at their agility.
One scene at the seashore in Shozo, a Cat and Two Women looks like a
ghost cat film scene. Under the bright sunlight, Shinako asks Shōzō to hand
over Lily as a remembrance of her life with him. Shinako is in a kimono
and crouches on an embankment, showing her back to Shōzō, who stands
several feet away. In the close-up of her face that follows, Shinako opens her
eyes wide, even though the strong sunlight from above leaves nearly half of
her face in shadow. Contrary to her rather scary facial expression, she speaks
to Shōzō in a silky voice like a cat’s meow: “I can’t say I want to come back.
But I feel lonely. So give me Lily instead. Please understand a woman’s feel-
ing.” Then, suddenly, she jumps off the embankment, waving the sleeves of
her kimono. Is Shinako jumping into the ocean? Shōzō is as astonished as
the samurai in ghost cat films.
In the following shot, Shinako, cat-like, manages to land safely on a rock
right under a sign that says “Danger!” Of course, the sign warns that the area
is dangerous because of rocks and waves. But to Shōzō, Shinako is the force
of danger, asking him to hand over Lily, the cat he loves. In addition, Shinako
looks as if such a dangerous action were nothing to her. Then, in a high-angle
shot, Shinako comes closer and closer to Shōzō, who runs away in fear to his
bicycle, which is parked nearby. Shinako runs after him at full speed. How can
she run so fast in her kimono, we wonder? We see that a white handkerchief
that she drops clings to the tire of his bike as if it were a segment of a white
dress, the typical costume of a Japanese ghost. Shinako’s high-pitched, meow-
ing voice calls to Shōzō reproachfully and pursues him as he desperately turns
the pedals of his bike. Shinako’s monstrous actions—the jump, and the chase
in a kimono—look like those of a woman possessed by a ghost cat.

Shozo, a Cat and Two Women as a Star Film

In addition to the historical context of ghost cat films in Japan, I also want
to emphasize the role of the film’s two female stars, Yamada Isuzu, who
plays Shinako, and Kagawa Kyōko, who plays Fukuko. As we have seen in
100 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

the previous chapter, auteurism considers filmmaking to be a collaborative

effort. An actor, or star, like Marlene Dietrich could play a significant role in
creating films about performance and masquerade in 1930s Hollywood, for
instance. Here, I argue that the star images of Yamada and Kagawa in this
film embodied the changing representations of the female body in the visual
culture of postwar Japan.
The kind of socio-historical reading of the star image that I propose
has its roots in the recent development of film star studies, which has come
to consider the star to be a construction, the result of mediation between
producers and audiences/fans within the larger sociocultural dynamic, which
includes issues of gender and sexuality, politics, economy, race and ethnicity,
age, class, and fashion. Founded on the semiotic and philosophical works on
celebrity culture by French philosophers Roland Barthes and Edgar Morin in
the early 1970s, film scholar Richard Dyer published his influential book in
star studies, Stars, in 1979. Dyer argues that a star goes beyond being a real per-
son and becomes an image that is constructed by their performances in films,
fan magazine articles, advertising posters, personal biographies, and rumors,
among other things, to be consumed as a commodity and/or to represent
certain ideologies. Dyer defines a star as a “structured polysemy” and explains
the term as “the finite multiplicity of meanings and affects they [stars] embody
and the attempt to structure them so that some meanings and affects are fore-
grounded and others masked or displaced” (Dyer 1979, 30). Dyer believes that
a star, as a “real” individual “existence” in the world, succeeds in reconciling
the contradictions through “magical synthesis” (Dyer 1979, 95).
As a “real” individual, it was a challenge for Yamada Isuzu, who was
the most popular and loved star in late 1930s-1940s Japanese cinema, to
play the role of Shinako, an unlovable and monstrous character.Yet by 1956,
Yamada was at a difficult stage of her life and her career, undergoing a
midlife crisis as she moved into her forties and made the transition from a
young and beautiful star to a character actress. The star images of Yamada
and Kagawa in this film embodied the changing discourse on female bod-
ies that was valorized in the visual culture of post-WWII Japan. The film
is structured so that the historical significance of this changing discourse
becomes visible in an (over)emphasized manner, a clear example of Dyer’s
“magical synthesis.”

Two Ghost Cat Battles

It is noteworthy that Shozo, a Cat and Two Women adds scenes that are not in
Tanizaki’s novel: two battles between Shinako and Fukuko. These two fierce
 Genre and Stardom in Shozo, a Cat and Two Women 101

battle scenes must have reminded the audience in 1956 of ghost cat films,
both technically and thematically.
The first battle occurs at Shōzō’s kitchenware store. Shōzō has gone
fishing with Lily. Shinako visits the store, which is empty, and sneaks into it
without a sound. The camera enters the dimly lit interior from the bright
exterior and goes deeper and deeper into the private space of Shōzō’s house
behind the store. This is the only clear-cut POV shot used in this film.
Shinako invades her enemy’s territory, which used to be her own. She calls,
“Lily, Lily,” in a low voice. If she kidnaps Shōzō’s beloved cat, he will def-
initely beg her to come back. That is her plan. The handheld camera swings
a little: the camera operator most likely could not move smoothly with the
heavy weight of the 35mm camera on his shoulder. But the sway suitably
expresses Shinako’s nervous feeling. Curiously, this scene of invasion repli-
cates a scene in Black Cat Mansion, in which a female servant visits a room
that she thinks is empty. She opens a sliding door without a sound. In a POV
shot from the position of the nervous female servant, the camera captures
two contrastively lit spaces in a composition with depth: a dimly lit corridor
with a black sliding door and a brightly lit room where an elderly woman
possessed by a ghost cat licks a wound.
The psychological dynamics of the scene change when Fukuko comes
back to the store on her bike. Close-ups of Fukuko’s face wearing sunglasses
and of Shinako’s face backlit by the light coming from the back door appear
one after another as shot reverse shots. Because of the sunglasses and the
backlight, we cannot see their facial expressions clearly. Suddenly, Shinako,
who is in the dimly lit interior, starts laughing with a terrifying hissing sound.
It is as if Fukuko has taken over the position of the female servant and Shi-
nako the elderly woman in Black Cat Mansion. Trying to keep calm, Fukuko
sits at a table, opens the cap on a bottle of milk, and sips some milk, like a cat.
The technique of deep focus, a special cinematographic and compo-
sitional technique in which all parts within a frame, from the front to the
back, are in focus, is conspicuously adopted here. Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane
(1941) is famous for its extensive use of deep focus. In this scene, Fukuko
drinks milk in the forefront, while Shinako remains in shadow at the back of
the same shot. Shinako makes a sarcastic remark from the dark: “I sent you
three letters. Of course, you read them, didn’t you?” In the shot that follows,
Shinako’s face is placed right in front of the camera. She laughs again with a
hissing voice and says, “There is something that I want.” Fukuko, recoiling
in fear, is at the back in the same shot.
Shinako appears to be in a relatively predominant position, even
though it is Fukuko who currently lives in Shōzō’s house. Lighting causes
102 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

this sense of changing hierarchy. Whether Shinako is at the back or in the

front of the space, only half of her face is backlit and shines ominously. The
lighting, which emphasizes the contrast between light and shadow, especially
on Shinako’s face, enhances Fukuko’s fear and anxiety. In contrast, no con-
spicuous lighting is used for Fukuko. Agitated, Fukuko cries out hysterically,
“Go home, go home! This is my house!” and chases Shinako away.
Depth of field is often used in ghost cat films, with a signature device
of the genre called nekojarashi (pronounced “nay-koh-jah-la-she”).
According to film historian Shimura Miyoko, nekojarashi originated in
kabuki and imitates “a cat playing with a mouse” (Shimura 2006, 98). In
ghost cat films, humans replace the mouse and are toyed with by ghost
cats. In a scene from Ghost Cat of Otama Pond (Kaibyō Otamagaike, Ishikawa
Yoshirō, 1960), a young servant is controlled with the act of nekojarashi by an
elderly woman possessed by a ghost cat. Depth of field in the composition
within the frame is utilized in order to enhance the effect of the nekojarashi.
The young woman stands at the back and the elderly woman in the front.
There are slightly open sliding doors in the middle, which emphasizes the
power play between two planes in the composition within the frame. If we
bear this in mind, Shinako and Fukuko seemingly try to force the nekojarashi
against each other in deep space. When Shinako’s power is about to surpass
Fukuko’s, Fukuko invokes her territorial power—“This is my house!”
Round two of the battle between Shinako and Fukuko occurs at the
doorway of Shinako’s sister’s house, where Shinako is staying. The battle
centers on Shōzō’s visit to Shinako. He wants to see Lily, who has been taken
away by Shinako. But Fukuko also shows up. She believes that Shōzō is there
to secretly see Shinako. This time, the battle goes beyond words. It is raining
cats and dogs outside. In addition to the framing, lighting, and editing, the
acting of the two women is over the top. As the tone of the non-diegetic
sound (i.e., the source of the sound is not visible or implied in the scene)
rises dramatically, the two women draw closer and closer. A close-up of the
two faces. A long shot of the two closing in on each other. A close-up of
Shinako crouching and looking up, in which her face is lit from both sides.
The center of her face is in shadow, but her eyes glitter with excitement.
Declaring, “I won’t lose,” Shinako clenches her teeth. Fukuko responds
with a fierce facial expression in the close-up that follows. Then comes an
extreme close-up of the two, clenching their teeth. Light comes from the
paper screen (shōji) window on the wall behind and leaves their faces in
relative shade. Rain, sweat, makeup, and lipstick make their faces shine darkly.
Their teeth gleam with saliva. The two grapple, punch, and pull each other’s
hair. They do not look like human beings any longer but rather two animals,
 Genre and Stardom in Shozo, a Cat and Two Women 103

or two monster cats. Because of the compiling of extreme close-ups, we feel

that we are witnessing this grotesque battle right in front of us, even closer
than sitting next to a boxing ring. After several minutes of scuffling, Fukuko
falls down in the doorway as if she were dead. Then Shinako, in a torn
kimono, sobs and leans back against the door. The camera rises up, swaying,
as if it were following the souls of the two women leaving their bodies.
As the camera captures the two from above in a high-angle shot, the score
echoes dreadfully like that in a horror film.
As such, in the climactic battle in Shozo, a Cat and Two Women, the focus
is on grotesque female faces and bodies. In this sense, this film aligns more
closely with the ghost cat films of the 1950s.

Two Ghost Cats Battle

Even as the film Shozo, a Cat and Two Women was made, another battle,
influenced by the popularity of the ghost cat films, was taking place off
screen between two different women—Yamada Isuzu and Irie Takako, who
was the most popular actress in Japan in the 1930s. While Irie was experi-
encing a resuscitation of her career with the ghost cat genre in the 1950s,
Yamada was also trying to deviate from her image as a beautiful star and
resurrect herself as a character actress in the same period. A number of traits
connected these two actresses, and Yamada must have been aware of Irie’s
dramatic comeback.
Irie was the first actress in Japan to establish her own production com-
pany, Irie Productions, in 1932. Her performance in The Water Magician
(Taki no shiraito, 1933), a modern drama based on Izumi Kyōka’s novel and
directed by Mizoguchi Kenji, was received particularly well. She played a
selfless heroine who devotes her life to the career of the man she loves. After
the dissolution of Irie Productions in 1937, Irie contracted with Tōhō, a
new film company. She costarred in Tojuro’s Love (Tōjurō no koi, Yamamoto
Kajirō, 1937) with Hasegawa Kazuo, the most popular actor of the time.
After the war ended, Irie did not appear in many other films until
Ghost of Saga Mansion (Kaidan Saga yashiki, Arai Ryōhei, 1953), in which she
played a woman possessed by a ghost cat. The comeback of Irie Takako, a
superstar of silent films renowned for her beautiful face and her sensual body,
ignited the third boom of ghost cat films.
While the ghost cat story already existed in kabuki of the Edo period,
the first ghost cat film boom came in the Taishō era (1912–1926) when
twenty-six films were made. The focus was on the fight scenes between the
heroes and the monsters, enhanced by trick cinematography that depicted
104 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

the immediate transformation of a human being into a monster cat.

The second boom arrived in the late 1930s. Twenty-one ghost cat films had
been produced by 1940. Many of them starred Suzuki Sumiko, a “vamp”
actress of the period. While the second boom relied on Suzuki’s physical
strength and her sensuality (Shimura 2001, 43), the 1950s ghost cat films
focused more on the grotesque display of Irie’s face, which is aging, and
her body, which lacks sexuality (Shimura 2006, 100). Irie was suffering from
Graves’ disease, which caused her eyeballs to protrude.
Irie regained her stardom by appearing in Ghost of Saga Mansion and
four more ghost cat films in four years. The audience of the 1950s ghost cat
films not only found thrills in the transformation of a woman into a monster
cat but also enjoyed watching the spectacle of the transformed big star. Irie
herself was conscious of the connection between the images of monster cats
and those of elderly women, as well as the popularity of ghost cat films in
contrast to her own falling stardom. She wrote in her autobiography, “After
I started appearing in ghost cat films, the roles that came to me became more
and more horrible. No matter how terrible those roles were, I was ready to
accept any of them as a falling star. But the sad thing was that when they
brought those roles to me everyone at our studio stopped telling me, ‘I am
sorry for asking you to do this kind of a role.’ It is a natural thing to happen
in this harsh world, though” (Irie 1957, 226).
Like Irie, Yamada started her career during the silent period. Both
were stars known for their beauty. A few years after Irie starred in The Water
Magician, Yamada played leading characters in two modern dramas, Osaka
Elegy (Naniwa erej ī, 1936) and Sisters of the Gion (Gion no kyōdai, 1936),
both directed by Mizoguchi Kenji. With those two films, Yamada achieved
the status of a top actress. In 1938, when Irie’s Tojuro’s Love was released,
Yamada also decided to move to Tōhō and soon thereafter co-starred in
Naruse Mikio’s Tsuruhachi Tsurujirō (1938) with Hasagawa Kazuo. The duo
of Yamada and Hasegawa was enthusiastically supported by film fans in Japan
during the war. During the seven years between 1938 and 1944, as many as
seventeen films starring the two were produced, and most became mega hits.
The rivalry between Yamada and Irie was clearly noticeable, especially
after Yamada’s move to Tōhō. A critic noted, “The master actress [Irie] is
having a difficult time in talking pictures. Her status was in danger when
Tōhō welcomed Yamada Isuzu to its studio” (Irie 1957, 159). Irie her-
self “regretfully” admitted that her star status was threatened by Yamada
(Irie 1957, 163). Throughout her autobiography, she constantly mentions
Yamada and compares her with herself. For instance, she writes, “I noticed
that my star status started to collapse around 1946. I didn’t know the reason.
 Genre and Stardom in Shozo, a Cat and Two Women 105

I had been a star for seventeen years by then, but as I grew old, I started to
lose something like inspiration and self-confidence. I did not have the acting
skills of Ms.Yamada Isuzu” (Irie 1957, 174).
This is ironic, because at the time Irie published her autobiography in
1957, Yamada was also distressed by a fear that she, too, lacked acting skills.
In her 1953 autobiography, Yamada wrote about this unease:

I have fortunately received the Yomiuri International Film Festival

Special Actress Award, the Mainichi Concours Best Actress
Award, and the Blue Ribbon Actress Award [for her roles in Storm
Clouds over Hakone (Hakone fūun roku, 1952) and The Moderns
(Gendai-jin, 1952)], but to be honest I still don’t have a systematic
approach to acting even after more than twenty years of experi-
ences as a film actress. I stick to what I have learned based on my
experiences of appearing in numerous films, but it is still difficult
for me to analyze them and construct something methodological.
In fact, like anyone who started acting when I did, I was never
trained. I did not feel the need and did not practice at it. (Yamada
2000, 143)

Even though such claims could be regarded as mere modesty, it is true

that most of the twenty-eight films that she appeared in between 1954 and
1956 were unsuccessful.
Witnessing the sensational comeback of her long-time rival, Yamada
decided to play a cat, which she abhorred doing. In 1936,Yamada had said,
“I will do any roles, but please do not make me play a cat” (Yamada 2000, 73).
In the ghost cat films in which Irie starred, the focus of attraction was the
novelty of a superstar from the past playing a monster. It is understandable
that Yamada did not like the idea of appearing in a ghost cat film when
she was a nineteen-year-old aspiring actress. But in 1956, Yamada gave up
her star image of a beautiful modern girl and accepted that she had become
an elderly woman. In contrast to Irie’s case, the name of Tanizaki and the
ghost cat literary genre worked as a safety valve for Yamada. While Shozo,
a Cat and Two Women was produced during the ghost cat boom and obviously
referenced that genre, it was apparently difficult for anyone to categorize
the film as a ghost cat film thanks to the illustrious name of Tanizaki.
Even if Yamada’s image in it seemed similar to a monster cat, it was viewed
as a conscious playing-out of the well-known image of a ghost cat. It
was regarded as a respectful self-referential performance of vulgarity by an
aging actress.
106 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

Becoming Ghost Cats in Postwar Japan

Beyond Yamada’s personal ordeal as an aging star and her rivalry with Irie,
there existed yet another significant historical background that made it pos-
sible to represent women in Shozo, a Cat and Two Women as ghost cats. Female
representation in visual culture was changing in postwar Japan when the film
was released in 1956. In terms of the feline representation of women in the
film, there is an emphasis on the corporeality of women’s bodies, which look
grotesque. Even when women’s faces are displayed in close-ups, the focus is
not on their beauty but on their corporeality.
The cinematographer of Shozo, a Cat and Two Women was Miura Mitsuo,
who photographed both Yamada and Irie in their star vehicles in the 1930s
and 1940s. Miura’s ultimate goal at that time was to make those female stars’
faces as beautiful as possible no matter what artificial techniques he used.
During the silent film era, Miura had a contract at Irie Productions and pho-
tographed three Irie star vehicles.When Irie Productions was dismantled, he
moved to Photo Chemical Laboratory (PCL) and worked on Tojuro’s Love,
a star vehicle for Irie and Hasegawa Kazuo. Then, he photographed Female
Genealogy (Onna keizu, Makino Masahiro, 1942) and its sequel (Zoku onna
keizu, Makino Masahiro, 1942), directed by Makino Masahiro and starring
Yamada and Hasegawa. In both Tojuro’s Love and Female Genealogy, Miura
captured the facial expressions in close-ups and with special lighting of tragic
heroines who sacrificed their lives for the careers of men they loved.
At the climax of Tojuro’s Love, Tōjurō (Hasegawa), a young kabuki
actor, tells O-Kaji (Irie), a geisha, that he loves her. It is a lie. Tōjurō only
thinks about his art. A love affair is merely a tool for him to improve his
acting skill. He ruthlessly observes O-Kaji’s reaction—her facial expressions
and her behaviors. The couple is in a room at night. The room is lit only
by a paper lantern (andon) in the corner. While strong contrasty lighting is
placed on the face of Tōjurō, the close-up of O-Kaji, who is truly in love
with Tōjurō, is in soft lighting, which makes her look extremely sensual.
At the climax of Female Genealogy, Hayase (Hasegawa), a young chem-
ist, tells O-Tsuta (Yamada), a former geisha who loves him, that he cannot
see her any longer. Hayase must follow his mentor’s order to focus on his
studies. The couple is at Yushima Shrine at night. They are lit only by the
moonlight. There is no glamorous close-up of the kind typically used in star
vehicles. Instead, the couple is photographed in a long shot of long duration
(long take). Hayase is almost in silhouette. Because of the distance between
the camera and the couple, and because of the low lighting, the beauty of a
close-up of O-Tsuta’s face in the following scene at a noodle shop is striking.
 Genre and Stardom in Shozo, a Cat and Two Women 107

O-Tsuta’s expression of sadness (she must leave him when she does not want
to) is emphasized in brighter and softer lighting.The Hollywood-style three-
point lighting, which shows a star’s face glamorously, is not adopted, though.
Rather, Miura faithfully recreated the lighting of a cheap noodle shop, which
uses only an uncovered electric bulb above each table.
At the time he worked on these two films, Miura was publicly insist-
ing that he would pursue documentary-style cinematography in opposi-
tion to Hollywood style, in which stars were captured in heavenly beauty.
In Cinematography Reader (Eiga satsueigaku dokuhon, 1940), Miura wrote,
“Speaking of methods of lighting, I think it is dangerous to be absorbed
in blindly imitating foreign films and bringing glamorous brightness into
Japanese rooms . . . The beauty of simple and soft beams of light floating
into a Japanese room in the semi-dark evening: this is the light that we
find most intimate” (Miura 1940, 241–42). Miura thus emphasized the
spatial difference between Hollywood and Japan and insisted on adopting
different lighting schemes in order to represent them properly. Miura’s
idea was most likely based on Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows (Inei raisan,
1933–1934). Tanizaki’s appreciation of darkness and shadow as the essence
of Japanese aesthetics and culture was not exactly based on the actuality
of the Japanese landscape and architecture of the time. Curiously, this was
the time when Japan led the world in the vogue of neon signs. Tanizaki
fully understood the formidable attraction of such modern technology
as electric lighting. Simultaneously, he was aware of the material limita-
tions in Japan. Tanizaki’s conceptual dilemma was the reality of Japanese
cinematographers.
Even when pursuing a documentary style in the name of Japanese
aesthetics, however, Miura and other Japanese cinematographers highly val-
ued the works of Lee Garmes, who photographed Josef von Sternberg’s
films starring Marlene Dietrich. They particularly appreciated Garmes’s
technique, the so-called north light, which enhances the glamour of the star.
While the overall tone was dark, the shadows in Garmes’s cinematography
were not simply black but showed numerous levels of blackness in grada-
tion. In order to achieve that type of lighting, however, it was essential to
use large numbers of lamps and very sensitive film stocks. The shortage of
equipment and materials in Japan made meeting this requirement hopeless.
The appreciation of shadows and the notion of Japanese aesthetics, therefore,
appear to be a desperate measure by cinematographers to overcome such
limitations. Torn between their yearning for Hollywood and the reality of
their situation, Miura and others emphasized the pitch-blackness without
the gradations of documentary style.
108 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

While Miura publicly insisted on documentary style as the default for

Japanese filmmaking, he still wanted to imitate Garmes’s artificial glamorous
lighting for close-ups of his stars, especially for Irie, Yamada, and Hasegawa.
The result was that some criticized his cinematography, saying that the films
of Tōhō’s studio were “beautiful but without soul” and “lacked Japanese
characteristics” (Tsumura 1943, 38–39). The examples of Tojuro’s Love and
Female Genealogy were the results of Miura’s dilemma and his efforts towards
the Hollywood-style artificial beauty of star lighting.
Given Miura’s obsession with beauty in close-ups of the stars even
during the privations of wartime, how do we respond to the non-glamorous,
even grotesque appearance of Yamada in Shozo, a Cat and Two Women?
When Shinako appears in the film for the first time, she is taking in the
washing in a tiny, untidy backyard. She is captured backlit in a medium shot
under the strong sunlight. Her face is in the shade. She is looking down,
biting her lip, frowning, and wiping the sweat from her face with a worn-
out cloth in an irritated manner. After crudely finishing up her work, she
rushes upstairs to speak to her mother-in-law. Baring her teeth, she declares
that she is leaving: “I cannot stand it any longer.” In a medium shot, half
of her face is in the shade, but the other half looks greasy and sweaty. It is
incredible that the same cinematographer who always tried to photograph
the superstar as glamorously as possible now captures the same actress in such
a grotesque way. Miura’s cinematography in this film adopts more medium
and long shots than close-ups in order to capture the corporeal reality of
female bodies. Moreover, when close-ups are used, they emphasize such
extreme expressions as teeth-baring grimaces and battle-stained faces cov-
ered in sweat and saliva. Lighting is not used for glamour but rather enhances
the materiality of the body parts. In other words, Miura’s cinematography
could be understood less as documentary than as connected to representa-
tions of bodily excess. Thus, the emphasis of representations shifted from
Yamada’s face to her body in Shozo, a Cat and Two Women. Such a shift
of representations corresponded to the changing representations of female
bodies valorized in the postwar popular imagination.
During the American occupation that immediately followed Japan’s
defeat in the Pacific War, one of the reforms was to advance gender equality
and ensure women’s rights. The idea of women’s liberation changed the
conventions of gender representation in Japanese cinema under the occu-
pational media policy. Apparently strong-willed, liberated, and independent
women emerged on screen in such films as No Regrets for Our Youth (Waga
seishun ni kui nashi, Kurosawa Akira, 1946) and The Love of Actress Sumako
(  Joyū Sumako no koi, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1947).
 Genre and Stardom in Shozo, a Cat and Two Women 109

Film scholar Ayako Saito claims, however, “the female body that sus-
tained the new, postwar regime of democracy, at the same time epitomized
the contradiction of postwar democratization” (Saito 2014, 331). According
to Saito, women’s bodies soon became “highly sexualized” in the postwar
culture milieu (Saito 2014, 331). Even though Japanese cinema under the
occupation did not explicitly show female nudity, the visual presentation
of female bodies themselves had a stronger impact than representing them
in literary works. While direct visibility of female bodies on screen had a
symbolic function towards women’s liberation, it also caused objectify-
ing effects on those bodies, especially when they were sexualized. In other
words, female bodies were at the same time liberated and objectified during
the occupation.
Shozo, a Cat and Two Women was released in 1956, four years after the
postwar occupation ended, when a new body culture developed in the wake
of the Sun Tribe (Taiyōzoku) boom and new actors began to emerge. The
term Sun Tribe came from Ishihara Shintarō’s 1955 novel, Season of the Sun
(Taiyō no kisetsu), and was popularized by the weekly entertainment maga-
zines (shūkanshi). Ishihara’s novel, which won the prestigious Akutagawa
Prize in January 1956, depicted the youth culture of the first postwar gen-
eration as “cynical, violent, sexually permissive, and suspiciously foreign”
(Raine 2001, 202–203). Season of the Sun featured wealthy college students
who spend their time dancing, drinking in nightclubs, and sailing. What
the Sun Tribe boom made clearly visible was a generational clash. Weekly
entertainment magazines reported how troubled older audiences were by
the youth culture, which seemed to ignore conventional boundaries and
disregard Japanese identity. But no matter how immoral the Sun Tribe gen-
eration seemed to older audiences, the morality of the older generation was
equally questionable. It was seen as tarnished by its subjugation to ultra-
nationalism and fascism during wartime, as well as by its instant switch to
American-style democracy during the occupation period. In that light, the
immorality and cultural hyperbole of the younger generation could be read
as criticism of its elders.
This intergenerational conflict was expressed particularly through the
portrayal of bodies. The most visible representative of the Sun Tribe was a
new star called Ishihara Yujirō, Shintarō’s younger brother. As film historian
Michael Raine suggests, Yujirō’s image when he became a star was clearly
connected to his body: “They talked about his ‘un-Japanese’ strong phy-
sique, his long legs, his [Hawaiian-style] taiyōzoku clothes, and his [GI style]
Shintarō-gari hairstyle” (Raine 2001, 211). Critics in 1956 even thought that
Yujirō was “too big and too ugly to be a star” (Raine 2001, 216). He was
110 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

famous, or notorious, for his uneven teeth as well. A studio publicist even
compared him to a monster (kaibutsu).
Such a monstrous representation of the body was not limited to Yujirō.
In the film version of Season of the Sun (Taiyō no kisetsu, Furukawa Takumi,
1956), for example, female bodies in bathing suits fill the screen in low-level,
low-angle shots. Beyond the dichotomy between liberation and sexualiza-
tion, what is emphasized in these shots are representations of bodily excess.
They are commodified bodies in an Americanized manner, as seen on night-
club floors or on the stage of “Miss” contests, but these hyperbolic shots
parody and mock the notions of liberation and sexualization themselves.
In Shozo, a Cat and Two Women, female bodies are displayed in a man-
ner that goes along with the contradictory discourse on female bodies:
liberation and sexualization. In contrast to the representation of Shōzō as
a degraded and feminized man, which could be argued to be the iconic
image of defeated Japan, the feline representations of Fukuko and Shinako
are erotic, athletic, and triumphant. The body of Fukuko is young and
sexualized, while that of Shinako is aging but energetic. They are sexually
liberated and passionately engaging in resistance to the patriarchal system.
Yet, as was the case for the first ghost cat actress, Suzuki Sumiko, naked skin
under disordered kimonos made both Fukuko and Shinako erotic objects
for the male gaze.
At the same time, the grotesque and monstrous display of female bodies
in this film should be located within the intertext of the Sun Tribe boom.
In particular, the battle between Shinako and Fukuko could be read as the
intergenerational conflict in the form of female bodies. Shinako, played by
the biggest star during wartime, represents the morals of the older gen-
eration. She is the one who tries to restore the marital order that has been
disturbed by conspirators. Fukuko is played by Kagawa Kyōko, who made
her debut after the war. In this film, Kagawa clearly plays the new image of
the delinquent girl, drinking and dancing at nightclubs and spending her
days at the beach with a married man, that was being reported in the popular
press and weekly journals around 1956. Since her hyperbolic performance
goes against the graceful image that she had presented in such films as The
Crucified Lovers (Chikamatsu monogatari, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1954), a sense of
parody comes into her depiction of the Sun Tribe generation.
What characterizes the physical battle scene between Shinako and
Fukuko is the sarcastic viewpoint towards the clash between the aging body
and the hyper-sexualized young body. As in many ghost cat films of the
1950s, in which an elderly woman who is possessed by a ghost cat torments
a young resistant female servant with the technique of nekojarashi, Shinako
 Genre and Stardom in Shozo, a Cat and Two Women 111

and Fukuko battle over how to take control of their bodies. But the final
shot of the battle scene, which is from the ceiling, is illustrative. Both Shi-
nako and Fukuko eventually fall down on the ground in vain, expressing the
irreconcilable but not clearly delineated positions between the old and the
new in post-occupational Japan. This is ironic, because Yamada herself had
played a delinquent girl in Osaka Elegy exactly twenty years earlier and had
embodied then the anxieties towards the new generation in 1930s Japan.
CHAPTER 6

Drawing Pictures of Cats

National Cinema and Anime in Jungle Emperor Leo

Takeuchi Yoshio, Japan, 1997

The Lion King Controversy

When Disney’s animated musical film The Lion King (Roger Allers and Rob
Minkoff, 1994) was released, the San Francisco Chronicle reported “a roar of
protest from those who say the record-breaking animation feature is not as
original as Disney claims but borrows substantially from a Japanese story cre-
ated 40 years ago.” The “Japanese story” was Jungle Emperor (  Janguru taitei),
a manga by Tezuka Osamu (1928–1989) originally published between 1950
and 1966; an animated TV series (1965–1966) based on the manga was also
broadcast in the United States with the title Kimba, the White Lion (1966).
The San Francisco Chronicle report listed “similarities” between the two
works: “Both Disney and Mr.Tezuka’s animations center on lions in Africa”;
“In both, a father lion is the king and is killed early, leaving a young son. The
son returns after an exile and struggles with himself over his responsibility
to become king”; “The son overthrows an evil lion who has usurped the
throne”; and “The good lions are aided by a wise old baboon and a talkative
bird, while the evil lions are aided by henchmen hyenas.” The protest against
The Lion King was heightened because Disney did not credit Tezuka despite
such similarities.
Curiously, the response from Tezuka Productions in Tokyo was not
critical of Disney. Matsutani Takayuki, president of Tezuka Productions, said,
according to the report, “If Disney took hints from ‘The Jungle Emperor,’
our founder the late Osamu Tezuka, would be very pleased by it . . . Rather
than filing a claim, we would be very happy to know that Disney people saw
Tezuka’s work. On the whole, we think ‘Lion King’ is absolutely different
from ‘Jungle Emperor’ and is Disney’s original work.”

112
 National Cinema and Anime in Jungle Emperor Leo 113

It is certainly possible to read Matsutani’s remarks in the context of a

colonial subject pleased to be acknowledged by the more advanced colonial
power. Tezuka was a big fan of Disney animation. It is said that he watched
Bambi (David Hand et al., 1942) eighty times and Snow White and Seven
Dwarfs (David Hand et al., 1938) fifty times in theaters when these films
were released in Japan after World War II ended. He even published manga
versions of Bambi and Pinocchio in Japan in 1951 and 1952 respectively.
Matsutani’s statement, which fully respects Disney, can also be located
in the history of animation in Japan, and particularly in the context of how
Japanese animators adored Disney animations and tried to imitate their styles
for a long time. The most common technique of animation has been cel
animation, in which pictures are drawn directly onto celluloid “cels.” Cel
animation began in the United States in 1913. Walt Disney’s productions
quickly became the benchmark for quality in cel animation. The first talkie
animated film, Steamboat Willie (Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks), was shown in
Japan in 1928. Japanese animators strove to emulate Walt Disney, but they did
not know that such productions demanded the resources of a big studio, with
large collaborative groups. In Japan, animation was basically a household indus-
try. Typically, a small house was subdivided into smaller rooms for drawing,
photographing, and screening, with the bathroom reserved for development.
Photography had to be done during daylight hours, between nine and three,
to make use of the available light. The camera was set close to the window and
operated manually. Family members and relatives constituted the regular staff.
It was only in wartime that animation in Japan received sufficient
funding and found its market. Ironically, freed of financial constraints, anima-
tors were able to imitate Disney films, the animation style of the enemy. Seo
Mitsuyo was the first animator in Japan to work with the multiplane camera, a
technique developed some years earlier by Disney to impart a sense of three-
dimensional space to animation. In his film Ants (Ari-chan, 1941), commis-
sioned by the Ministry of Education, Seo could afford to experiment with
such costly techniques.
Technical advances and military advances went hand in hand. With the
start of the Pacific War in December 1941, the production of animation for
propaganda purposes increased. Committed to total war, the Japanese army
and government continued to rely on the power of animation to influence
audiences. The Ministry of the Navy asked Seo to produce a film to publicize
the successful attack on Pearl Harbor. The result was Japan’s first feature-length
animated film using Disney-style animation, Peachboy’s Sea-eagle (Momotarō no
umiwashi, 1943), which ran thirty-seven minutes. In the film, Momotarō, a
folklore hero, serves as captain of an aircraft carrier, and various animals (dogs,
114 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

monkeys, pheasants) pilot his planes. The planes attack Onigashima (the island
of Oahu) without sustaining any losses.The film met with resounding success,
earning some 650,000 yen (Yamaguchi and Watanabe 1977, 40). One film
magazine rated it the third-best film of the year, and there were reports of the
Emperor Hirohito’s satisfaction when he viewed it. In sum, the wartime gov-
ernment laid the basis for the postwar development of animation, encouraging
technical experimentation, training animators, and creating the conditions for
teams of animators in the Disney style.
Ōkawa Hiroshi, the first president of Tōei Studios, established Tōei
Dōga, the first large-scale animation studio in Japan. At that time, Tōei
Studios wished to attract new, larger audiences and thus branched out beyond
their characteristic period dramas. Ōkawa hired over one hundred young
animators (significantly, only two had received training in wartime animation
studios). The air-conditioned ferroconcrete structure itself cost some hun-
dred million yen and was fully equipped with multiplane cameras and other
devices developed at Disney Studios (particularly around the production
of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), for Ōkawa Hiroshi aspired to become
nothing less than the Walt Disney of the East. Ōkawa’s first large-scale work,
The Tale of the White Serpent (Hakujaden, Yabushita Taiji and Ōkawa Hiroshi,
1956), deployed a technique based on live action. It is a technique still used
today at Disney Studios in order to create realistic gestures and facial expres-
sions. First, actors are filmed, and after the film is developed, it is transformed
into stills that are used to draw the pictures for the animated film. The Tale
of the White Serpent went on to achieve international success, domestically
and internationally. The film was exported to the United States, Brazil, and
Taiwan. Not only did it earn 95,000 US dollars, but it also received a prize
at the Venice Film Festival. Financially and technically, with The Tale of the
White Serpent, Tōei Dōga achieved a level of success equal to Disney, at least
in the domestic market. As a consequence, many commentators see The
Tale of the White Serpent as the start of commercial Japanese animation and
thus of anime. Indeed, the animator most frequently associated with anime,
Miyazaki Hayao, began his career at Tōei Dōga.
Matsutani’s statement that The Lion King is “absolutely different” from
Jungle Emperor becomes more interesting when we look at Jungle Emperor
Leo (  Janguru taitei, 1997), an animated feature that Tezuka Productions
released three years after the controversy around The Lion King. Tezuka’s
manga Jungle Emperor has been made into animation several times—three
TV series (1965, 1966, and 1989), two theatrical versions (1966 and 1997),
one TV film (2009), and one direct-to-video version (1991). Curiously,
the 1997 version does not begin from the very beginning of the original
 National Cinema and Anime in Jungle Emperor Leo 115

manga but from the midst of its story, when Lune and Lukio, the babies of
Leo the lion and the respected king of the African jungle, are born. This
opening follows The Lion King, which starts when the king Mufasa’s son,
Simba, is born. While The Lion King is the coming-of-age story of Simba,
Jungle Emperor Leo turns into the coming-of-age story of Lune because of
narrative choices.

The Lion King vs. Jungle Emperor Leo: 3-D and 2-D Styles
While the beginnings of the stories are identical, the images that we see on
the screen look quite different. When Matsutani stated that The Lion King
was “absolutely different” from Jungle Emperor, he might have been refer-
ring to their styles rather than their stories. The openings of The Lion King
and Jungle Emperor Leo indicate “different” ways of drawing and painting
pictures of big cats. Such differences stem from different styles of animation
that Disney and Tezuka Productions take despite the long history of Disney
adoration among Japanese animators.
Cats have appeared in drawings or paintings since the time they first
started living alongside human beings about 4,000 years ago in ancient
Egypt. Since Egyptian religious belief viewed all kinds of animals as mani-
festations of deities, cats too were often depicted as divine beings. Cats are
ignored in the Bible, but because of their association with pagan practices,
they are treated ambivalently in Christian art, either as a benign presence or
a negative symbol of evil. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, cats
were often featured in paintings of domestic settings, depicting qualities of
femininity, vanity, and playfulness. In the nineteenth century, an increasing
number of artists began to portray companionship and affection toward cats,
including Édouard Manet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. These painters were
familiar with ukiyo-e, Japanese woodblock prints, in which cats were often
depicted with natural grace and sinuous contours.
To me, one of the most notable characteristics of cats in drawings and
paintings over the years is their speed or quickness. Art historian Caroline
Bugler writes, “It is no surprise that some of the most accurate and sensi-
tive portrayals of cats—those that come closest to penetrating their essential
nature—are informal pencil or watercolour studies not destined for the pub-
lic gaze. In these sketches, quickly jotted down on paper, the cat is not part of
a painting burdened with allegorical, religious or mythological meaning, or
shown as the plaything of women and children in a cozy interior. Shorn of
context and free from surroundings, its true character is allowed to emerge”
(Bugler 1981, 158). A sketch of a cat appeared as early as c. 1297–1185 BC in
116 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

Egypt on smooth white limestone. Since then, such acclaimed artists as Jan
Breughel the Elder, Leonardo da Vinci, Paul Gauguin, Manet, and Katsushika
Hokusai of Japan left a number of sketches of cats, capturing spontaneous
moments and movements. Even in complete paintings, cats often display the
essence of sketch—quickness in speed with particular emphasis on touches
and brush strokes. For instance, in Renoir’s A Boy with a Cat (Le garçon au
chat, 1868), the cat “is tenderly portrayed in broad fluid strokes of paint,
which present a contrast with the rather dry treatment of the boy’s figure”
(Bugler 1981, 146).
Jungle Emperor Leo and The Lion King adopt different styles in their
portrayal of cats and the landscape surrounding them. First of all, in The
Lion King, the movements of the characters (animals, including lions, in this
case) are smooth and flawless. This is a typical example of so-called “full
animation.” Animation artists take on the task of the movie camera’s shutter,
drawing a figure in various stages of motion, at relatively equal intervals
(LaMarre 2002, 331). They replicate the camera’s way of decomposing “live
action,” but with sketches rather than snapshots. The Disney standard of
full animation demanded that the artist draw approximately twelve frames
per second. It is common to film live-action sequences in order to produce
a series of images to be redrawn by animation artists. This was the practice
that Japanese animators at Tōei Dōga tried to imitate when they made The
Tale of the White Serpent.
Second, the major focus of the opening of The Lion King is the emphasis
on depth. After the first extreme long shot of the daybreak, there are a series
of medium shots of animals (a rhino, horned deer, meerkats, a cheetah, and
pelicans). Following a medium shot of a pelican starting to fly, there are a
series of extreme long shots. These extreme long shots are typical examples
of the multiplane camera, which preceded 3-D computer-generated anima-
tion and simulates the visual qualities of three-dimensional space as it is
photographed. A flock of pelicans fly in front of giant waterfalls. A herd of
elephants walks in the mist in front of a high mountain. A group of flamingos
fly over the river as more birds pass across the frame closer to the camera.
A herd of horned deer jumps across the frame at back and in front. A baby
giraffe appears from behind a hill, accompanied by its mother, approaches
the camera, makes a slight left turn, and looks over the hill. What we, the
viewers, see with the baby giraffe, which stays in the left front corner of the
frame, is a number of different animals walking in the vast field at a great
distance. In the same shot, the two giraffes start to run and join the other
animals at the far back. In the next shot, a line of bugs carries green leaves
on a tree branch in front while a herd of zebras run on the ground behind
 National Cinema and Anime in Jungle Emperor Leo 117

Opening of The Lion King.

Emphasis on depth.

the tree. A shot of blue birds and elephants running towards the camera
follows. Eventually, all these animals gather under a gigantic rock. Following
the movement of a flying bird, the camera swiftly approaches the rock where
Mufasa stands.
What is important in this scene is photographic realism within the
computer-generated illusion of reality. Visual verisimilitude is maintained
clearly by linear perspective, which has been an influential approach to real-
ism in Europe since the Renaissance era. Japanese Studies scholar Thomas
Looser argues,

In classic Western perspectival space, everything is unified

and hierarchized by the single vanishing point; space itself is
accordingly homogenous, and everything finds its proper place
within that space, including the spectator (drawn into the picture
118 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

plane via the vanishing point), in accordance with fixed

mathematical laws of relation. This yields stable positions of near
versus far, subject versus object, and, supposedly, the position and
identity of the viewing subject. Again, in a depth model, that now
seems almost three-dimensional (but qualitatively homogenous).
(Looser 2006, 97)

In contrast to the opening of The Lion King, that of Jungle Emperor Leo
does not look fully three-dimensional. First, while nearly all the movements
of animals in the opening scene of The Lion King were flawless and smooth,
we the viewers cannot help noticing Leo’s movements with “skippiness,
jerkiness, awkwardness” (LaMarre 2002, 338), or the gap between stillness
and movement in his actions in the opening scene of Jungle Emperor Leo.
After a very brief close-up of the moving legs of a white lion, we see Leo
running in a dimly-lit grass field in a long shot. Here, Leo’s body is not
depicted in a realistic manner at all. The shape of his body is drawn only by
simple lines, as if it were a caricature. Moreover, while Leo moves his four
legs, his tail, and his mane, he does not seem to be running appropriately.
The movement of his body parts is too consistent. His body does not move
from the center of the frame. Only the grass around him moves from left to
right. The situation is similar in the following close-up. Now we see Leo’s
upper body from the side. It constantly moves, but it seems to be shaking
from left to right and not running, especially because the movement of
the blue sky at the back is too slight. The shot that follows captures Leo
from the front.We see a constant movement of his two front legs only. Gradually,
the camera draws back and we start to see Leo’s face, but no movement is
added to his face at all. This is a typical example of “limited animation,”
which uses fewer drawings. The result is that we understand that Leo is on
the move. We know the big cat is running, but at the same time, we clearly
notice that his movements are not realistic in a photographic sense.
In addition to the sense of jerkiness, Leo’s movements look very flat.
Many of his movements are horizontal or vertical, but not between the front
and the back. Leo’s approach to his home, a ruin, is depicted as a POV shot,
and we do not see Leo physically come close to the place. In cel animation,
which uses meticulously painted outline drawings on thin, transparent sheets
of celluloid, images are logically displayed in two-dimensional space. Leo
himself appears rather flatly drawn because of black-ink character outlines.
It is true that Jungle Emperor Leo also uses deep composition. But when
cel animation integrates depth, it tends to be represented between layers
of composited images. Leo’s movements occur in front of the background,
 National Cinema and Anime in Jungle Emperor Leo 119

Opening of Jungle Emperor Leo.

Leo’s movements with “skippiness, jerkiness, awkwardness,”

even though it is difficult to notice them in still images.

including the waterfall and the sky, which is drawn in multiple layers. When
he jumps from the top of a waterfall to the bottom, Leo becomes small then
big then small again in an attempt to follow the rules of linear perspective,
yet the sizes of the clouds in the sky and the waterfall in the background do
not change proportionally. This makes Leo’s potentially three-dimensional
movement look awkward.
With 3-D computer-generated spaces, when the point of view changes,
proportions of objects change accordingly. In contrast, in cel animation,
because all the images are drawn and painted by hand, it is difficult to recreate
such proportional changes of objects. As a result, when we, the viewers, watch
characters movements between front and back, we cannot help noticing the
multiple layers in which the images are drawn. Such use of layers is clear in
the opening scene when Lune and Lukio watch the movement of a deer, a
120 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

close friend of Leo, in their POV shot. The deer moves from right to left in
front of a number of different animals, but the animals do not move at all.
There are two planes in this shot. The animals are painted as flatly as the
background in the second plane, and the deer moves in the foreground. This
makes his movement look unnatural. Then, in the following shot, an elephant
and a giraffe raise Lune and Lukio high in the air using their long trunk and
long neck, respectively. The same technique is used: all the other animals on
the ground are shown in a flat and static drawing in the background layer.
Only Lune, Lukio, the elephant, and the giraffe move in the front layer. Even
though the sizes of Lune and Lukio change as they are lifted from the ground,
the sizes of the other animals stay the same and do not change proportionally.

Lune and Lukio in the first layer and the other animals in
the second layer.

The animals in the second layer are completely static, and

their sizes do not change at all.
 National Cinema and Anime in Jungle Emperor Leo 121

This creates a strange mismatch in the supposedly three-dimensional move-

ment. In contrast to the photographically realistic image of the African land-
scape and the drawn-from-live-action movements of animals in The Lion
King, the landscape in Jungle Emperor Leo looks flat and the movements of Leo
appear strangely exaggerated.

“Cool Japan”?: National Cinema and Anime

Society, customs, art, culture: all are extremely two-dimensional.
It is particularly apparent in the arts that this sensibility has been
flowing steadily beneath the surface of Japanese history . . . This
book hopes to reconsider “super flatness,” the sensibility that has
contributed to and continues to contribute to the construction
of Japanese culture, as a worldview, and show that it is an original
concept that links the past with the present and the future. During
the modern period, as Japan has been Westernized, how has this
“super flat” sensibility metamorphosed? . . . “Super flatness” is
an original concept of Japanese who have been completely
Westernized. (Murakami 2000, 5)

In April 2000, the Japanese visual artist Murakami Takashi curated

an exhibition titled Superflat. By “super flatness,” Murakami refers to various
flattened forms in Japanese fine arts and pop culture, including anime.
In “The Super Flat Manifesto,” the introductory essay to the exhibition
catalog, Murakami tries to create a direct lineage between art from Japan’s
premodern period and contemporary art, including anime and manga. As a
first example of superflat, the catalog juxtaposes a series of stills of the explo-
sion of a planet from Galaxy Express 999 (Ginga tetsudō 999, Rintarō, 1979)
with a famous woodblock print from Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji
(Fugaku sanjūrokkei, c. 1831). As film theorist Thomas LaMarre describes,
“Both images flatten the relationship between different planes (foreground,
background, and middle grounds), with zigzagging, arching, sweeping lines
that encourage the eye to wander over the surface of the image, restlessly
scanning it” (LaMarre 2009, 112). As LaMarre points out, Murakami makes
the connection “entirely in terms of the structural composition of the
image,” which apparently lacks depth (LaMarre 2009, 112). By doing so,
Murakami’s “superflat” avoids looking at the history of modernization in
Japan, which has had a complicated relation to Western technology.
Similarly,Takahata Isao, a noted animator, producer, and director, claims
in his 1999 book Animation in the Twelfth Century:The Cinematic and Animetic
122 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

in National Treasure Scroll Paintings ( Jūni seiki no animēshon: Kokuhō emakimono

ni miru eiga-teki anime-teki narumono) that, technically speaking, we should
look for the origins of contemporary anime in twelfth-century illustrated
hand scrolls or sketchbooks, such as The Picture Book of Ban Dainagon (Ban
dainagon ekotoba) and Animal-Person Caricatures (Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga). (One cat
appears in Animal-Person Caricatures. Compared to other animals, the eyes of
the cat are drawn nice and big.) By referring to giga, Takahata tries to locate
the origins of manga and anime in twelfth-century art.
Tezuka adopted the drawing technique of limited animation in his
Tetsuwan Atomu, Japan’s first weekly thirty-minute-long television animation,
which started in 1963 and would also become popular in the United States
as Astro Boy. With its emphasis on exaggerations and omissions, limited ani-
mation often results in flat-looking characters and jerky movements, which
is entirely different from the drawn-from-live-action animation of Disney.
However, contrary to Murakami’s theory of superflat and Takahata’s
idea of twelfth-century-animation, it is not my intention here to insinuate
that the “absolute” difference between Jungle Emperor Leo and The Lion King,
or between limited animation and full animation, might be based on a sense
of cultural essentialism that uniquely distinguishes the flat aesthetics of Japan
from the depth aesthetics of the West. I do not mean to define anime as a
uniquely Japanese art form. I suggest, rather, that it is necessary to have a
more historically specific perspective when we discuss the connections and
differences between Disney animation, anime, manga, and giga.
For instance, woodblock prints by Hokusai flatten the hierarchal rela-
tionship of depth between the front and the back of a surface, as Murakami
insists in “The Super Flat Manifesto.” However, historically speaking, many
of the Edo artists knew and understood Western geometric perspective per-
fectly and used it “as one among many modes of spatial organization that
could be played with, and even layered over other kinds of space” (Looser
2006, 101). Some of Hokusai’s images play with two or more viewpoints
within the same image, inviting the viewers not so much to reject depth as
to layer viewpoints. Moreover, as we have already seen, the history of anime
in Japan has been full of admiration and understanding of the full animation
of Disney. These historical periods, when Hokusai worked and when anime
developed, certainly existed between the flatness of giga and the apparently
flat-looking limited anime.
My suggestion about historical awareness is a response to “Cool Japan,”
a concept coined in 2002 by journalist Douglas McGray and later adopted by
the Japanese government. “Cool Japan” expresses Japan’s growing cultural
superpower and the extremely competitive products of a global capitalist
 National Cinema and Anime in Jungle Emperor Leo 123

economy. In the Japanese government’s “Cool Japan” campaign, as Prime

Minister Abe Shinzō’s appearance in disguise as Super Mario at the closing
ceremony of the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro demonstrated,
anime has been regarded as uniquely representative of Japanese culture,
despite its complicated historical relationship with Disney.
The choice of anime and its emphasis on superflatness without histor-
ical specificity in the “Cool Japan” discourse reminds us of the post-WWII
attempt of the Japanese film industry to formulate a “national cinema” that
would represent Japan’s unique culture. In film studies, studies of “national
cinema” since the late 1970s have emphasized that cinema has the function
of realizing a nation. Film theorist Stephen Heath argues that nationhood
is not given but is rather something to be “gained,” and that cinema is
one of the means by which it is “gained” (Heath 1978, 10). Film scholars
Ella Shohat and Robert Stam also suggest the role of cinema in the pro-
cess of imaginary construction of national identity (Shohat and Stam 1996,
153–154). Clearly, Shohat and Stam follow historian Benedict Anderson and
his idea of national self-consciousness as the precondition for nationhood.
Anderson argued that collective consciousness about origins, status, loca-
tion, and aspirations became possible due to the use of common language
in the novel and the newspaper, the products of print capitalism (Anderson
1983, 41–46). Similarly, cinema can actively work to construct collective
consciousness, rather than simply reflecting or expressing an already fully-
formed and homogenous national culture and identity.
By the late 1950s, when Shozo, a Cat and Two Women, the film discussed
in the previous chapter, was released, Japanese cinema had recovered from
the devastation of World War II, largely thanks to the strong support of the
Allied Occupation (1945–1952), and was enjoying its golden period. According
to the report by the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan (Nihon
eiga seisakusha renmei), in 1958, motion pictures reached an unprecedented
1,127,452,000 viewers. The number of Japanese films released in 1960 rose
to an unprecedented 547. The number of film theaters increased to 7,457
in 1960. (In comparison, in 1996, the number of viewers was 119,575,000,
about one-tenth that of 1958.) The number of Japanese films released in
that year was 278; most of them were independent films, whereas most of
the 547 films of 1960 were produced by major film studios. The number
of theaters dropped to 1,828 (www.eiren.org/toukei/data.html). Audiences
were particularly attracted by genre films such as melodrama, comedy, and
horror (monster films).
Simultaneously, a number of Japanese films received critical acclaim
in international film festivals in the 1950s. Kurosawa Akira’s Rashomon
124 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

(Rashōmon, 1950) received the Golden Lion prize at the Venice International
Film Festival in 1951. Mizoguchi Kenji’s Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari, 1953)
received the Silver Lion prize in 1953 at Venice, and his Sansho the Bailiff
(Sanshō dayu, 1954) was awarded the same prize in 1954 along with Kurosawa’s
Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai, 1954). Kinugasa Teinosuke’s Gate of Hell
( Jigokumon, 1954) followed with the Grand Prize at the 1954 Cannes Film
Festival. As a result, the term “Japanese cinema” spread among international
critics and audiences for the first time.
This was followed by a conscious and strategic attempt to construct a
national cinema. The unexpected success of Rashomon at the Venice festival
had a certain influence upon Japanese state policy makers and impacted
the way Japan would publicize its new image in the post-WWII recon-
struction era (Davis 1996, 31–36). Nagata Masaichi, the president of Daiei
Studio, which produced the film, became aware of certain expectations
from international audiences towards Japanese cinema. He strategically initi-
ated producing and exporting films that paid little attention to the histor-
ical accuracy of their contents but emphasized hyperbolic Japaneseness, or
traditional-looking cultural objects such as scroll paintings (emaki), gorgeous
kimonos, sword-fighting samurai, etc. Gate of Hell was one such example.
So, two types of films existed in Japan in the 1950s: genre films and
exotic films. While the former were well received in Japan, it was the latter
that were formulated and recognized as the Japanese national cinema. Naga-
ta’s strategy, which mixes and matches traditional cultural elements while
paying little attention to historical accuracy and specificity, can be called the
self-exoticization of Japanese cinema and culture. The major justification
for these films was their appeal to foreign viewers. Thus, the expectations
of the international “gaze” at the Japanese culture initiated the formation of
a national cinema in Japan. Gate of Hell was not very successful in the Japan-
ese market, probably because it was regarded as too exotic. Yet, the self-
exoticization policy strategically adopted by the Japanese film industry in
the 1950s provided an opportunity for the Japanese spectator to consciously
think about what Japanese culture was and would be.

Impressionism and Its Expression of Movement

The construction of anime as representative of Japanese culture in the cur-
rent “Cool Japan” campaign is mostly market-dictated. Instead of simply
connecting Tezuka and giga in the name of superflatness and Cool Japan,
I propose that giga artists and Tezuka shared a major concern of how to
capture movements at different historical moments. Moreover, I suggest
 National Cinema and Anime in Jungle Emperor Leo 125

that there was a transnational and cross-cultural dialogue on how to capture

movements that went beyond the ahistorical, culturally essentialist connec-
tion between caricatures and anime in the name of superflatness.
In his book on the Hokusai Manga (1814–1878), a collection of giga on
various subjects by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), art
historian and manga scholar Shimizu Isao argues that for Hokusai the skill of
a graphic artist lies in his/her ability to precisely convey movements, such as
water and waves and human bodies (Shimizu 2014, 222). For that purpose,
Shimizu claims Hokusai included consecutive sketches of human and animal
bodies and analyzed their muscle movements.
According to Shimizu, cats appeared more than any other animal in
giga. Hokusai was particularly fond of big cats on the move. “Running
Tiger” (“Hashiru tora”) in Hokusai Manga captures the accelerating move-
ment of a tiger. A shower of blossoms that surrounds it enhances the sense of
the moment. Similarly, in “A Lion That Is About to Jump” (“Tobiagarantosuru
shishi”), the moment is conveyed by concentrating on the lion’s muscles,
depicted with rough touches of the brush. The positions and shapes of the
tiger’s legs and claws as well as the lion’s rigidly posed body and spinning
tail are not photographically real but exaggerated. Still, they clearly look as
though they are on the move.
The sketching skill of Japanese artists that was displayed in Hokusai
Manga drew particular attention in Europe as early as 1856 (Inaga 1997, 276).
“The attraction of sketching,” according to Maurice Letouzé, who reviewed
the Japanese paintings at the 1900 Exhibition in Paris, “comes from precise
and graceful techniques that nobody can deny. . . . The best example of how
Japanese painters display their masterful techniques with their hands is in
their representation of animals. See the two tigers by Ōhashi Suiseki. One
of them is resting half of its body and yawns with its mouth wide open. The
other tiger, which has just climbed upon a rock, turns around and shows its
grin, the grin that characterizes cats” (qtd. in Tano 1990, 445). Théodore
Duret, a critic and an advocate of Impressionism, noted, “Japanese artists,
who cannot withdraw once they place their brushes on their canvas, stabilize
images with their brushes in their raised arms without a break. Their bold-
ness, easiness, and sureness are out of reach for Western artists, who have
other capabilities and skills. Because of their tastes, it is worth noting that
Japanese people are the first and the most perfect Impressionists” (qtd. in
Inaga 2014, 103).
One of the goals of Impressionist painters was to capture a moment
in their work. The attempt included a strong awareness of the impossibility
of such an act, referred to as instantaneity. Instantaneity (l’instantanéité) was a
126 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

word that Claude Monet used to describe his project of capturing the land-
scape on site, under the exterior light (Mutobe 2007, 171). Instantaneity is not
equal to an instant. No matter how hard a painter may try, it is impossible
for him/her to complete a painting in an instant. It takes a certain amount of
time, and there are always delays. Impressionist and Postimpressionist paint-
ers were conscious of this temporal gap between a particular moment and
the time it took to create the painting. They understood that it was impos-
sible for any human eyes and hands to extract an instant from time or a
moment from moving objects. But they tried to represent with their hands
the movement that they sensed with their eyes.

Tezuka’s Limited Animation: A Project of Instantaneity

under Financial Restriction
Critic Ōtsuka Eiji claims that Tezuka was not really interested in “moving
pictures” in his animation; rather, he was obsessed with making his images
“look alive” by capturing movements. Tezuka wrote in 1980, “From the
cave drawings of the Primitive Era and through the Renaissance, Baroque,
and Modern eras, how hard the painters labored to make their pictures ‘look
alive.’ The word animation derives from anima, a living thing. A living thing
moves without fail. It is animation that draws this movement in pictures”
(qtd. in Ōtsuka 223). For instance, in Tezuka’s manga Film Is Alive (Firumu
wa ikiteiru, 1958–1959), two wannabe-animators, Musashi and Kojirō, com-
pete to draw a picture of a flying swallow with their pens as if it were
alive. Looking at Musashi’s sketch, done quickly in both hands, Kojirō is
excited and says, “It looks as if it were alive!” Still, Musashi is told by an
elderly manga artist, “Movement is dead in your drawings. Film is alive!” For
Tezuka, manga might have been about editing, but animation was about still
images that capture movement. Such images do not need to depict objects
in a photographic manner.
What is the value of animation if it redraws and repaints photographic
images, as Disney does? To me, this was the question that Tezuka asked.
Tezuka’s attitude towards sketches goes beyond photographic realism and
shares concerns with Impressionist painters and their projects of instantane-
ity. Even though he was a big fan of Disney animation, his sense of animation
was that it involved exaggeration and omission, rather than reproduction of
live footage. Such omission included three-dimensionality.
Tezuka’s obsession with capturing movements in limited numbers of
images with exaggeration and omission could also be regarded as a project
of instantaneity. With sketches, the artist’s physical presence—the movements
 National Cinema and Anime in Jungle Emperor Leo 127

of his/her brushes—is also captured in images. Art historian James H. Rubin

states, “Before Impressionism, and still at the official academies, such free-form,
sketch-like paint handling was discouraged in favor of objective-seeming and
smoothly crafted illusions of reality. Evidence of the artist’s touch should
be suppressed so that the artist’s ‘presence,’ manifest through such physical
evidence, would not interfere with convincing realism” (Rubin 2003, 118).
In particular, sketches of cats often exemplified such an attitude. For instance,
Rubin argues, “Manet often engaged playfully and ironically with forms and
conventions. And it is no accident that there is more lively brushwork for the
cat [in Young Woman Reclining, in a Spanish Costume, 1862, Yale University
Art Gallery] than elsewhere in the picture, or that the cat is above the artist’s
name in the dedication to Nadar. Both the brushwork and the cat on which
he used it were like a ‘signature’—aspects of Manet’s repertory and style as
distinctive as his handwriting” (Rubin 2003, 23).
Similarly, the aesthetician Paul Souriau argues that photographic
images are, in a sense, physiologically false; they fail to represent movement
as we really see it, since what is lacking is the real token of movement—
its luminous tracing or visible wake (Souriau 1983, 114–121). Thus, the
artistic mode that, for Souriau, is most conducive to the representation of
movement is the sketch. It is as if the speed, momentum, and necessary
imprecision of the sketch embodied all the attributes of our perception of
motion. In other words, in the animation of Tezuka Productions, there was
an attempt to reclaim the physicality of human eyes and human hands that
were attempting to capture and represent movements instantly. Leo’s jerky
movements look coded to express his joy and excitement about the birth of
his own children in the opening of Jungle Emperor Leo.
Contrary to recordings by a motion picture camera, the amount of
physical labor required of human beings is much larger in the production
of animation. But the result seems to evade issues of subjectivity, agency, and
intentionality in the case of Disney productions. Just as a motion picture
camera can bring viewers to a world in which no human emotion can
be detected, Disney-style animation can ultimately wipe out the traces of
human activities from the world.
In contrast, Tezuka’s animation is an attempt to reproduce an act of
physical, bodily actions that tries to capture movement instantaneously. The
maximum exaggeration and omission in limited animation is to have a single
static drawing/painting and to make it appear to move. This is also the idea
behind Japanese sketches and caricatures. However, it is necessary to note
that Tezuka’s choice was also a result of the financial conditions that he was
under when he started working on Tetsuwan Atomu in 1963. In the 1960s,
128 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

it was said that it would take nearly six months to make a thirty-minute
Disney-style animation. Constrained to work with drawings that could
be sustained for five or six frames, Tezuka adopted different strategies for
conveying movement with full animation. He would often emphasize the
most visually and emotionally important poses, which could last over many
frames, and suppress intermediate movements. This resulted in jerky actions,
or explosive and uncontained transitions. Another strategy was to move the
drawing, especially the background, rather than to draw the movements.
While the technologies of animation were developed along with
industrialization and mechanization, Tezuka’s work displays an intention to
maintain or restore the physicality of the artist. Moreover, with the jerky and
awkward movements of the characters, Tezuka’s animation inevitably created
awareness of how movements are created in animation. Like the work of
Impressionist painters by way of Japanese caricatures, Tezuka’s work chal-
lenged the supremacy of photographic realism, the idea based on the long
tradition of linear perspective in Western aesthetics, in which the spectator
is provided with only a single viewing position. With limited animation, we,
the viewers, cannot help noticing the techniques of moving images and, con-
sequently, having more attentive viewing positions. Such attentiveness to the
images as well as to the history of anime is what we need when we look at
anime, especially when they are publicized under the strong influence of the
national campaign of Cool Japan.
 CHAPTER 7

Moving Like a Cat

Realism in Take Care of My Cat

Jeong Jae-eun, South Korea, 2001

The Young Girls of Incheon

Writing about Take Care of My Cat (Goyangireul Butakhae), film critic
Hasumi Shigehiko says “The viewers are drawn back to severe reality every
moment. All they can do is to simply stare at the insecure behaviors of the
young women being hurt by the harsh reality” (Hasumi 2008, 226). The
film is surely about the “severe” and “harsh reality” of Incheon, a port city
located in northwestern South Korea, about 30 miles from Seoul. All the
scenes are photographed on location, either in the big city of Seoul or in the
industrial port city of Incheon, which is connected to Seoul with buses and
railways; this makes this film more susceptible to contingency, or accidents,
in many ways. The film depicts the lives of five twenty-year-old girls who
have graduated from the same high school. Tae-hee (Bae Doona) helps in
her father’s sauna and volunteers by taking dictation from a poet who lives
with cerebral palsy. Hae-joo (Lee Yo-won), the center of the group, works at
a brokerage firm in Seoul and dreams of becoming a career woman. Bi-ryu
(Lee Eun-shil) and Ohn-jo (Lee Eun-jo), twins from a family of Chinese
origin, cheerfully work at a street stall. Ji-young (Ok Ji-young) cares for her
grandparents, with whom she has grown up, in their dilapidated house while
she looks for a job. The five girls have been close friends but face heart-
breaking changes and difficulties as they enter the real world.

Three Types of Cinematic Realism

I should say a few words about “realism” in relation to the history of
cinema here. Roughly speaking, there have been three major lines of

129
130 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

thoughts on cinematic realism: Bazinian realism, psychological realism, and

Brechtian realism.
First, Bazinian realism. In the nineteenth century, before the birth
of cinema, there were novelists, including Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, and
George Elliot, who pursued literary naturalism.They told stories of working-
class lives and the phenomenal world in a detailed manner, depicting details
such as where people lived, what they ate, and how they spoke. One of their
goals was to advocate democracy and equality within society. At the birth of
cinema, as film scholar Laura Marcus claims, filmic “realism” was “identified
with literary naturalism” (Marcus 2007, 180). Film critic André Bazin further
emphasized the welter of details of the phenomenal world that the camera
can mechanically reproduce. In the late 1920s to early 1930s, during the
transition from silent to talkies, it was believed that cinema could represent
the daily lives of people as they were, because of the acquisition of sound.
Even though films were still in black and white, this belief was strongly
shared by filmmakers in post-WWII European countries. Italian Neorealist
films, for example, depicted the reality of devastated cities. Inspired by
these films, Bazin insisted that the motion picture camera’s capability of
mechanical reproduction was at the core of cinema’s realism. In his 1945
essay, which was later retitled “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,”
Bazin argued,

Originality in photography as distinct from originality in painting

lies in the essentially objective character of photography. For the
first time, between the originating object and its reproduction
there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent.
For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically,
without the creative intervention of man . . . All the arts are based
on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage
from his absence. (Bazin 1960, 7)

For Bazin, cinema records the space of objects and between objects
automatically and impartially. In that regard, he highly valued long takes,
for instance, in which one shot lasts for a long duration of time without
a cut, and deep focus as the notable techniques of cinematic realism that
faithfully represent the reality. In a long take, time flows continuously as in
the real world because there is no cut in the middle. In a shot with deep
focus, everything visible is in focus. For Bazin, both techniques help a film to
appear more realistic. In fact, however, cameras, lighting, and microphones,
etc., need to be carefully orchestrated in order to achieve successful long
 Realism in Take Care of My Cat 131

takes and deep focus. In that sense, the images with long takes and deep focus
are created so artificially that it is difficult to say they faithfully represent
the actuality. In any case, Bazinian realism thus connected a theory about
the cinematic medium’s material and technological nature (automatism or
mechanicality) to its technical devices and stylistic practices (long takes and
deep focus).
Second, psychological realism. Bazin claimed that the “personality of
the photographers” entered into the production by “automatic means” and
was limited only to their “selection of the object to be photographed and
by way of the purpose he has in mind” (Bazin 1960, 7). While Bazin did
not clearly address what he meant by “the purpose,” film scholar Dudley
Andrew claims that it was “clear” for Bazin:

[E]ither a filmmaker utilizes empirical reality for his personal

ends or else he explores empirical reality for its own sake. In the
former case the filmmaker is making of empirical reality a series
of signs which point to or create an aesthetics or rhetorical truth,
perhaps lofty and noble, perhaps prosaic and debased. In the latter
case, however, the filmmaker brings us closer to the events filmed
by seeking the significance of a scene somewhere within the
unadorned tracings it left on the celluloid. (Andrew 1976, 145)

According to Andrew, the dichotomy can be rephrased as “an opposi-

tion between narrative realism and perceptual realism” (Andrew 1976, 163).
“If perceptual space and time are rendered with honesty, a narrative will lie
obscured within the ambiguities of recalcitrant sense data,” explains Andrew,
and “If, on the other hand, narrative space and time are the object of a film,
perceptual space and time will have to be systematically fragmented and
manipulated” (Andrew 1976, 163).
If we follow Andrew’s view, then so-called classical Hollywood cinema,
the majority of films produced at Hollywood studios from the 1930s to
the 1960s, is a typical example of narrative realism. As film scholars David
Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Steiger argue, the verisimilitude of
Hollywood cinema is supported by the specific forms of filmmaking and
artificial techniques, including framing, lighting, and continuity editing,
which are used so seamlessly that the viewers do not notice. As a result, the
stories in those films look as if they are happening in real life, even when the
three-point-lighting, for instance, does not usually exist in the real world.
With these techniques, Hollywood cinema makes it easy for the viewers
to identify with, in many cases, a goal-oriented, good-looking, and idealized
132 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

protagonist. At the same time, as we discussed in the earlier chapter on fem-

inist film theory, Hollywood cinema often leads the viewers to share the
protagonist’s voyeuristic viewpoint, while prompting identification with
the gaze of the camera. Psychological realism is another term to describe this
type of cinema. Some critics, especially the Marxist ideological critics of the
1970s, often considered this type of realism to be illusionistic.
Third, Brechtian realism. In opposition to seamless and illusionist realism
that reduces the audience to passive spectators, the so-called modernist films,
which are directly or indirectly influenced by the ideas of poet and playwright
Bertolt Brecht and others, make the audience aware of the artificial techniques
of filmmaking. Moreover, in contrast to Bazinian realism, which takes only
theoretical (or phenomenological) account of the audience, Brechtian realism
requires active involvement from the actual viewers of the films. In the 1930s,
Brecht explored modernist alienation effects and theatrical distanciation in
his pursuit of realism in theater. He acknowledged the entertainment value
of realist literature, yet he thought it was necessary to let the audience realize
that those stories were artificial. In order to do that, he made his method and
process of storytelling visible to the audience. His actors spoke directly to the
audience. By doing so, he let the audience know that they were looking at
artificially created performance.

Realisms in Take Care of My Cat

One of the fascinating things of Take Care of My Cat is the smoothness or
lightness of the moves from one form of cinematic realism to another. As
Titi, the stray kitten that Ji-young has found, moves from one girl to another,
we witness seamless transitions from one realism to another. In addition
to Bazinian realism, this film utilizes classical Hollywood realism. Artificial
techniques are used so seamlessly that we notice them only with difficulty.
At the same time, the film incorporates Brechtian realism, which lets us know
how artificially the story is told. Even when it depicts the harsh reality that
Hasumi points out, Take Care of My Cat does not lose the sense of lightness,
which is reminiscent of a cat walking in the street. That cat-like lightness is
part of the beauty of this film.
The opening of the film is a good example of the smooth movement
from one type of cinematic realism to another. The first shot shows five high
school girls in school uniforms. Apparently, they have just come out of their
graduation ceremony. In a composition with deep focus, Tae-hee and the
twins are in front in an extreme close-up. When they laugh hysterically and
go out of the frame, we see Hae-joo and Ji-young walking arm in arm and
 Realism in Take Care of My Cat 133

Bazanian realism: Long take of five high-school girls.

intimately speaking to each other. Then, Tae-hee and the twins jump back
into the frame. Following their constant movements, the handheld camera
sways wildly and catches up with them at the pier of a dock. There is no cut
up to this point; it is one long take. Bazin would surely praise this opening
shot as an ideal example of realism in cinema. After the first long take, shots
change one after another for no specific reason. The five girls sing songs,
skip ropes, and make a fuss at the pier. Factory buildings of Incheon are
clearly visible behind them. The scene looks full of freedom, lightness, and
energy. Under the sunny sky, the lighting is very bright and the images are a
little too overexposed. It is like an amateur home movie. Even when Tae-hee
tries to take a photo in order to capture the moment, the other girls keep
moving around. It is difficult for her to place them within a frame. In this
sense, these girls are also as cat-like as Holly, Audrey Hepburn’s character, in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Following this prologue, the main story of this film begins. The first
shot is long and static, and shows the exterior of an apartment building.
It is not fancy. This time, relatively underexposed lighting emphasizes the
dark atmosphere. We hear a couple quarreling, and something is thrown
that breaks a glass window from inside. There is a staircase right next to the
apartment. Through a small open window on a landing, we see Hae-joo in
a red leather jacket walking down the stairs. For a moment she even looks
framed, captured like a prisoner. Then the camera smoothly follows her
coming out of the building and walking down a street where some snow
still remains. A crane is used for this shot, which craftily keeps Hae-joo at the
center of the frame. A sentimental score quietly begins as the camera moves to
follow her.The following shot captures her back as she walks up the stairs of
a train station. From the apartment building to the station, the locations have
134 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

Hollywood realism: Hae-joo (Lee Yo-won) is framed in a

small window.

Hollywood realism: The camera follows Hae-joo.

changed drastically. But because the camera keeps showing Hae-joo’s back,
we do not really think about the change of shots.
In addition, the words “Way Out” are clearly visible on a sign in front
of the station where Hae-joo is headed.The sign seems to express her feeling
of being captured and her hope of escaping from her parents, who are always
fighting with each other. Camera movements, lighting, editing, music, and
props—all these techniques are used so seamlessly that we are not aware of
them unless we pay close attention to those techniques. Yet, we think we start
to understand Hae-joo’s family circumstance and emotional condition as real.
This is also how psychological realism works in classical Hollywood cinema.
One of Hae-joo’s escape methods is her mobile phone. She thinks
that, via her phone, she can communicate with everyone in the world freely
 Realism in Take Care of My Cat 135

Hollywood realism: . . . to the station.

Brechtian realism: Hae-joo texts to her friends.

without being confined anywhere. As soon as she gets on a commuter train

to Seoul from the Incheon station, she takes out her cell phone and starts
emailing. In other words, she simultaneously starts her physical, geographi-
cal movement and her virtual, electronic movement. Suddenly, on the film
screen that we are watching, the screen of her cell phone appears beside
the image of Hae-joo, who stands right next to a window of the train. The
characters that she types now become visible to us. “I think you are still
sleeping. Tomorrow at seven. Club 369. Sent.” Here, a virtual space and a
real space are visible at the same time. It is impossible in real life for a cellular
image to appear next to a human, of course; we all know that. But here, an
artificial technique of double exposure or subtitling is presented as such and
clearly indicates to the viewers that this is a film and that this is an artificial
story. This is Brechtian realism.
136 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

Hae-joo arrives at her office earlier than anyone else. She opens the
blinds one after another.The room becomes brighter. Right next to Hae-joo’s
back, we see a glass partition on which a world map is designed with digital
dots. We have just seen Hae-joo’s cellular screen in almost exactly the same
position next to her in the previous shot on the train. It seems to symbolically
express that the virtual spaces of digital media are the only world where she
feels liberated. The title, Take Care of My Cat, appears on the glass.
Thus, within less than three minutes and thirty seconds and even before
the title is introduced, this film crosses times between the past and the present.
At the same time, it moves across three different types of cinematic realism.

Reality in Take Care of My Cat

In Take Care of My Cat, the harsh reality is represented as some kind of
prison that the five girls are locked inside. Just as Hae-joo appears to be
captured within a small window frame in the opening scene, a number of
frames within the motion picture frame confine these girls in little spaces.
Such “imprisonments” of the five girls are achieved by similar methods of
framing in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which are used to depict the “confinement”
of Holly.
The composition of a shot in which Ji-young looks out from a small
window of her room in the attic is almost exactly the same as the one in the
opening scene. Like Hae-joo, Ji-young is tightly framed in the small window.
Ji-young goes out onto the roof in search of a kitten, and a part of it suddenly
collapses. She is literally stuck in the hole, a prisoner of the dark, dilapidated
house. Ji-young is also chained, figuratively, to her old grandparents, who
need her constant care. She is confined in a claustrophobic space surrounded
by pillars and the handrails of staircases. Dust and sand constantly fall from
the broken ceiling, which has been patched up with old newspapers. Her
grandfather plays the television and radio at full volume. Her grandmother
cannot chew kimchi with her artificial teeth. Irritated, Ji-young picks up a
big kitchen knife. She means to use it for the kimchi, but the flash of the
knife scares a visitor who happens to enter the house at that moment.
The dilapidated house eventually collapses one day while Ji-young is
away, killing her grandparents. Ji-young is placed in a cell at a juvenile training
facility. She stops talking there. She locks her voice—and her emotions—
inside her body.
Tae-hee, who is forced to help at her father’s sauna for free, is also con-
fined in her house. On the living room wall is a thickly framed family photo
centering on the despotic father. She needs to lock herself into her room in
 Realism in Take Care of My Cat 137

order to secure a time and space of her own. Even when the family eats out,
her father is oppressive enough to decide where everyone sits and order what
everyone eats. The variety of dishes on the menu of the American-style BBQ
restaurant does not help at all. Completely disgusted, Tae-hee covers her face
with her hands and curses, “It is abusive to take away our freedom of choice!”
For Ji-young, who dreams of becoming a designer but cannot find a
job, Hae-joo, who works at a first-class brokerage firm in Seoul, is a star. Yet
even Hae-joo is clearly told by her female boss, a career woman whom she
adores, that it is impossible for her to be promoted without a higher edu-
cational background. Frustrated, Hae-joo becomes absorbed in a computer
game screen at an amusement park.
Elderly care, patriarchy, and “degree-ocracy.” These girls rebel against
these harsh realities. Tae-hee tries to liberate her emotions and thoughts
through her volunteer work with the disabled poet. On the film screen
that we see, Hangul characters appear as she types the poet’s reading voice
into her electric typewriter. Tae-hee’s typewriter offers the same release as
Hae-joo’s cell phone. That is, the digital screen of her typewriter is her
emancipated world. But in the end, she comes to know that all this poet
wants is to keep her in this small, dark room forever.
Both Ji-young and Hae-joo try to feel different and free by changing
their physical appearances. Ji-young dyes her hair. Hae-joo gives up contact
lenses, throws away her unfashionable glasses, and undergoes laser surgery.
Ji-young buys the latest, coolest-looking mobile phone, borrowing money
from her friend to do so. Hae-joo obsessively spends money on dresses that
she does not even wear.
Yet, Ji-young’s dyed hair is only laughed at by Hae-joo, whose physical
obsession intensifies; now she works on her eyes, nails, nose, and so on and
on. Her overconsumption endangers her friendship with the other girls.
The virtual network of mobile phones does not work as a tool that
connects them, either. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai insists on deterrito-
rialized connections between imagined selves and imagined worlds by way
of “electronic media” (Appadurai 1996, 4). But among the girls in Take Care
of My Cat, electronic media only works to frustrate them because it does not
connect them at the right moments. Ji-young’s phone never rings when she
is waiting for Hae-joo at a café for many hours. Ji-young never answers the
text messages that she constantly receives from Tae-hee. For whatever reason,
it is always Tae-hee who needs to pay a visit and talk with each of them. It
is symbolic that the screen we see splits into four when all five girls make
a conference call (the twins are in one split frame), discuss their friendship,
and try to decide on a place to meet. The technique of a split screen implies
138 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

Five girls split, despite being connected by their mobile

phones.

that though they seem to be connected, in fact, there are clear boundaries
between them. Only when Tae-hee and Ji-young exchange cigarettes and
smoke them at the same time and place, after their phone connection fails,
do they start to understand each other. In other words, their mobile phones
become useful for the first time when they do not work properly.

Moving like a Cat

Now a cat appears in the film. Ji-young finds a kitten on her way back home
from her job search. She names it Titi. Director Jeong Jae-eun says of Take
Care of My Cat, “I wanted my characters to be girls who possessed nothing
permanent and therefore were able to leave. Their relationships change and
the girls continue to walk. I believe that if something is not moving, the
energy weakens and it needs to be filled with things that are moving” (Shin
2005, 128). The kitten Titi is the one who keeps moving, who hates control,
and who cannot be easily confined. As if the director wanted her female
protagonists to find a way out of systematicity, she lets them keep walking in
the city of Incheon and beyond throughout the film.
No one can confine Titi. The kitten is constantly on the move.
Ji-young’s grandparents do not like to keep it in their confined space. They
tell Ji-young that a stray cat will bring bad luck to the house and force her
to get rid of it. Ji-young cannot object because it was her grandparents who
raised her in their dilapidated house after her parents died. She leaves Titi
with her best friend Hae-joo on her twentieth birthday.
At first, Hae-joo seems happy about receiving a special gift from her
best friend. However, the next morning Hae-joo returns Titi to Ji-young,
saying simply, “I cannot have her.” But it is also difficult for Hae-joo to keep
 Realism in Take Care of My Cat 139

a cat: her life is also tightly structured, at least financially. She is not as free
and independent as Ji-young thinks.
When Ji-young loses her house and her grandparents, she leaves Titi
with Tae-hee, the only friend whom she can trust. Tae-hee has visited her
house several times as well as come to her grandparents’ funeral. But it is also
difficult for Tae-hee to keep the kitten because her life is fully controlled by
her father, so she tries to hide Titi in a suitcase in the garage of her house.
Tae-hee is not as free and independent, either, as Ji-young hopes.
Every time the kitten is confined, however, it finds a way out. First,
Titi slips out through a window of Ji-young’s dilapidated attic. Ji-young
chases her and becomes stuck in the hole on the roof, in the scene I dis-
cussed earlier. We then lose sight of Titi. There is no explanation for how it
later returns to Ji-young. Similarly, Titi leaves the garage of Tae-hee’s house.
Again, there is no explanation of how the kitten later ends up back with
Tae-hee. The film has given up trying to follow the cat.
One night, both Ji-young and Tae-hee hear Titi’s meowing at the same
time even though they are in different places. In reality, the two girls may
not have heard the cat at all, but parallel editing connecting Ji-young, Titi,
and Tae-hee makes us feel that they have. Ji-young wakes up at a juvenile
training school and seemingly hears something. Titi meows near a window
somewhere. Tae-hee silently faces her typewriter, typing something that
we do not see. These three shots are placed right next to each other so that
we think both Ji-young and Tae-hee hear Titi at the same time. It looks as
though Ji-young thinks of something and Tae-hee has made up her mind
about something. We never know.
Throughout its history, the city of Incheon has been full of “wander-
ers,” according to director Jeong Jae-eun. Such wanderers include travelers,
foreign laborers, and homeless people of various racial, ethnic, and class
backgrounds. Incheon is a port city that opened to the outside world in
1883 and was the first city on the Korean Peninsula to encounter the
modern cultures of the West. Since then, Incheon has been the center of
Korea’s industrialization. The city is also known as the site of the Battle of
Incheon. In September 1950, during the Korean War, U.S. troops led by
General Douglas MacArthur landed at Incheon and conducted a large-
scale operation. The 1981 film Inchon (Terence Young), produced by the
Unification Church, depicted the battle. In this big production, Laurence
Olivier played Douglas MacArthur, and the international cast included such
big names as Mifune Toshirō and Jacqueline Bissett. In 2001, preceding the
2002 FIFA World Cup co-hosted by South Korea and Japan, Incheon Inter-
national Airport opened and became the largest airport in South Korea.
140 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

There are several scenes that point to Incheon as a cosmopolitan city,

where the girls interact with a number of wanderers. Tae-hee and Ji-young
distribute leaflets for the sauna at a busy disembarkation port. Most of the
people carry luggage and are in a hurry to move on to their next destina-
tion. In the chaos, most of the leaflets fall on the ground and are stepped on,
ripped, and torn. Even after escaping from the port, Tae-hee and Ji-young
are pursued by a scary-looking homeless woman.
Towards the end, the cinematic styles of Take Care of My Cat return to
different forms of cinematic realism. During the scene at Walmido Island,
long takes document the industrial and commercial areas of Incheon along
with every step the girls make and every breath they take under the chang-
ing light from the sky (Bazinian realism). Then, the girls walk to a bus stop
against the strong winds from the ocean, a shot in slow motion. This slow
movement is spontaneously connected to the flowing view of the beautiful
sunset from the windows of a bus to Seoul. Accompanied by a romantic
soundtrack of a male vocalist, dissolving shots keep changing from the
industrial scenery of Incheon to the big evening sky, a statue with flying
wings that commemorates the one hundredth anniversary of the opening of
the port, a highway tunnel, and the big city with its neon lights. This kind
of seamless transition of time and space typifies classical Hollywood realism.
In the end, Tae-hee makes up her mind to leave Incheon. She cuts her
image out of the gorgeously framed family photo in the living room. Then
she takes some money from her father’s savings—the supposed salary for her
work at the sauna.
The final scene of Take Care of My Cat is set in the brand-new Incheon
International Airport. Tae-hee heads there with Ji-young, who has just been
released from the juvenile training facility. A shot of the two girls walking
to the departure lobby suddenly turns into slow motion. The moving image
appears about to stop, as if to remind us that this is a story within a film
(Brechtian realism).
But in fact, the slow motion never stops. Tae-hee and Ji-young stare
forward, take deep breaths, and keep walking. Their movement smoothly dis-
solves to the movement of an airplane that slowly flies into the big sky. Subtitles
appear on the screen: “Good Bye.” We do not know where they go and what
they have decided. All we know is they are on the go. Remember the words
of the director: “I believe that if something is not moving, the energy weakens
and it needs to be filled with things that are moving” (Shin 2005, 128).
As a young female filmmaker, Jeong Jae-eun is also trying to keep walk-
ing, exploring new possibilities of realism in cinema and reality for young
women in South Korea. Good-bye for now, her characters seem to be saying,
and good luck.
 CHAPTER 8

Cats Old and New

Modernity in Samurai Cat

Yamaguchi Yoshitaka and Watanabe Takeshi, Japan, 2014

A Film of Shocks
Samurai Cat (Neko zamurai) is a film of shocks. It is a jidaigeki (period drama)
film, whose story is set in the premodern period of Japan, that is, before
1868, when the Tokugawa shogunate (feudalist military government) sur-
rendered its rule to the Emperor and the new Meiji government started its
modernization and Westernization policy. Most Japanese films have been
categorized into two mega-genres: either jidaigeki (pre-1868) or gendaigeki
(post-1868, contemporary drama). Jidaigeki as a genre has flourished because
samurai swordfights are flashier and more shocking than anything other
popular entertainments have to offer.
The protagonist of Samurai Cat is Madarame Kyūtarō (Kitamura
Kazuki), a rōnin, or a samurai who has lost his lord. In the district of Edo
where he lives, there are two crime lords, Yonezawa the dog lover and Aikawa
the cat lover, competing for supremacy. Because of his renowned sword skill,
Kyūtarō is hired by one gangster clan as their yōjimbō, or bodyguard. This
is a classic plot of jidaigeki that calls to mind Akira Kurosawa’s famous film
Yojimbo (Yōjimbō, 1961), whose violent but spectacular swordfights shocked
not only domestic but international viewers as well, and inspired both yakuza
( Japanese gangster) films and Spaghetti Westerns.
But the shock of Samurai Cat does not come from flashy swordfights.
What shocks viewers is that a climactic swordfight, which we anticipate at
the film’s climax, never happens and our expectation of a jidaigeki film is
betrayed in a surprising manner. The real shock of the film is a cat, whose
encounter with the protagonist persuades the latter to give up his sword.

141
142 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

The Emergence of Jidaigeki in the Period of Modernity

The jidaigeki genre emerged in Japan in the 1920s at a time of cultural tur-
moil. The period that followed the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 witnessed
the drastic transformation of Japanese society. Tokyo’s rapid reconstruction
incorporated urban planning that furthered the modernization and industri-
alization begun by the Meiji Restoration. A mass market for films was open-
ing up. The number of movie theaters increased rapidly—from 703 in 1923
to 1,013 in 1924—and most were located in urban areas. A working-class
culture grew and flourished, and with it labor organization, unionization,
and socialist and communist ideas. Popular demand for political participation
and democracy resulted in the establishment of a parliamentary government
in 1924. Universal suffrage (for men) was promulgated in 1925. This flood
of new ideas, from left-wing radicalism to labor unionism, was countered
by growing state and military authority, effected by the authoritarian Peace
Preservation Law of 1925.
Jidaigeki films embraced the tension between democracy and authori-
tarianism in their narratives, themes, and styles. In jidaigeki films, cinematic
styles and techniques were used in a more radical fashion than in other
popular films before them. Even though the genre was set in premodern
Japan, jidaigeki was all about newness. Film critic Takizawa Hajime claims that
during the ten years between 1923 and 1932, “jidaigeki was more ‘modern’
than gendaigeki [contemporary drama]” (Takizawa 1986, 130).
It is noteworthy that Takizawa used the term “modern” to describe
jidaigeki. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “modern” as “characteristic
of the present time, or the time of writing; not old-fashioned, antiquated, or
obsolete; employing the most up-to-date ideas, techniques, or equipment.” Despite
its premodern setting, jidaigeki did not depend on premodern styles of enter-
tainment. Instead, it employed the “most up-to-date ideas, techniques, or
equipment” of the 1920s.
Jidaigeki used the techniques of Hollywood cinema extensively to cater
to rapidly changing audience tastes, influenced by Western art and popular
culture and the speed and spectacle of modern life. The swashbuckling film
star Douglas Fairbanks was then the most popular foreign actor in Japan, and
jidaigeki above all mimicked the athleticism and speed that Fairbanks’s films
displayed. The swordfights in jidaigeki, called chanbara to capture the acoustic
of swordfights, not only incorporated the continuity editing and crosscut-
ting of Hollywood cinema but even went beyond them. In scenes of violent
action, the editing became even faster and therefore more shocking than
the Hollywood standard, the camera (often handheld) moved swiftly and
 Modernity in Samurai Cat 143

violently, and fast-motion technique was added. By such methods, jidaigeki

overcame the slow and static theatricality of kyūgeki films (old drama), like
those produced earlier in the century by Makino Shōzō, “the father of
Japanese cinema.”
Even though kyūgeki included such cinematic polishes as Méliès-style
trick editing and deep space composition to display multiple actions within
a frame, it basically reproduced the staged performance of kabuki, a trad-
itional popular theatrical entertainment known for stylized singing, dancing,
and acting. Kyūgeki imitated kabuki mostly using long shots (a shot taken
from a certain distance), long takes (a shot with a long duration), and still
frames (no camera movement). Moreover, following kabuki, kyūgeki did not
use female actors. To viewers who were familiar only with Japanese-made
kyūgeki films, the styles and techniques of jidaigeki were shockingly new.
Jidaigeki was also heavily influenced by a brand-new Japanese theatrical
art: shinkokugeki (new national theater). Shinkokugeki was a new school of
popular theater founded in 1917 by Sawada Shōjirō and was best known
for its realistic, non-stylized, speedy, energetic, and violent swordfights.
Most of the shinkokugeki repertoires were based on the jidai shōsetsu (period
novel), the overwhelmingly well-liked taishū bungaku (mass literature) genre
of popular literature that mainly targeted working-class readers. Realistic
swordfights, rather than the dance-like stylized form in kabuki, had a shock
value for their audience and were considered to be more suitable to the
radical social changes and uncertainties characteristic of the first decades of
the twentieth century.
The modern techniques and equipment that enabled the realism of
sword-fighting in shinkokugeki revolved around lighting. It is unknown
whether Sawada was familiar with the work of David Belasco, but the theat-
rical lighting in shinkokugeki was similar to that of Belasco’s theater, which,
as we saw in Chapter 2 of this book, was heavily influenced by Lasky light-
ing. In contrast to flat and all-encompassing lighting of kabuki and kyūgeki,
jidaigeki fully incorporated the Belasco-type lighting of shinkokugeki,
especially with the flash of the sword, both to enhance visual shock and to
express complex psychological states of the sword fighters. In jidaigeki, char-
acters often wander in the dark. Under the dim moonlight or street lamps,
the swords of samurai warriors flash for a moment, as if they cannot wait
for bloodshed. Samurai resort to their swords, which embody their spirits, to
prove themselves. But they often suffer from the act of killing. The Japanese
filmmaker Uratani Toshirō claims, “Chanbara is the boiling point where the
‘psychological climax’ and the ‘visual climax’ of the drama meet” (Uratani
2004, 24). The Japanese cinematographer Morita Fujio elaborates:
144 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

It has been a regular practice for tateshi [the sword-fighting

choreographer] to come up with unique sword-fighting methods
that could be effectively photographed . . . Psychologically, a
bamboo sword transforms into a real sword. It is significant to
make the bamboo sword look heavy, edgy, and brutal. It is craft-
work to make the sword shine momentarily. The flash emphasizes
the fearful nature of the sword especially in close-ups. In this
sense, technicians of Daiei studio were extremely sensitive to the
environment of sword-fighting scenes. They preferred dawn,
dusk, and night to daytime. They liked to juxtapose such natural
phenomena as rain or mist with the sense of brutality in sword-
fighting. (Morita 2007, 79–80)

Even today, one of the major attractions at Tōei Kyoto Cinema Village,
a Universal Studios–style amusement park attached to a film and TV pro-
duction studio, is a live demonstration of jidaigeki filmmaking whose climax
is the production of a scene in which a sword flashes in the hands of an actor,
reflecting a spotlight. The presenter explains, jokingly, the difficulty and skill
required to flash the sword in perfect timing in front of a camera.
It is worth noting that the notion of the samurai’s sword embody-
ing his spirit was also one of the new “ideas” employed in Japan during
the period of modernization and Westernization. In Bushido: The Soul of
Japan (1900), Japanese economist and diplomat Nitobe Inazō, referred to
the romantic—not necessarily historically accurate—notion that Japanese
people had a particular philosophical and moral code called bushido, or the
code of samurai, handed down through generations. Nitobe wrote, “What
[the samurai] carries in his belt is a symbol of what he carries in his mind
and heart—loyalty and honour” (Nitobe 2002, 118). Confronting Western
imperialism and the rapid Westernization of Japan after the Meiji Restor-
ation, Nitobe strategically emphasized bushido—codes of loyalty and filial
piety—which he connected to modern Japanese nationalism for his foreign
readership. Nitobe claimed, “The samurai grew to be the beau ideal of the
whole race . . . Bushido was and still is the animating spirit, the motor force
of our country” (Nitobe 2002, 141). Nitobe’s tactics might be regarded as
an invented tradition that was the forerunner of the self-exoticization policy
of the 1950s Japanese film industry and the current governmental policy of
“Cool Japan” (see Chapter 6).
Nitobe’s tactics worked. By the 1940s, many people had come to
believe that the Japanese sword signified the embodiment of the Japanese
spirit. The American cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict juxtaposed the
 Modernity in Samurai Cat 145

Japanese sword and the Japanese soul in her classic work, The Chrysanthemum
and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (1946). Benedict wrote, “Though
every soul originally shines with virtue like a new sword, nevertheless, if it is
not kept polished, it gets tarnished. This ‘rust of my body,’ as they [Japanese
people] phrase it, is as bad as it is on a sword. A man must give his character
the same care that he would give a sword. But his bright and gleaming soul
is still there under the rust and all that is necessary is to polish it up again”
(Benedict 1989, 198).
At the end of World War II (see Chapter 5), Japan was under Allied
occupation. The occupation government led by General Douglas MacArthur
initiated control of the Japanese film industry as a part of its policy of recon-
structing Japan. On November 19, 1945, only three months after Japan’s
surrender to the allied nations, the occupation government made a list of
banned topics in films that included militarism, ultranationalism, feudalism,
and anything that might be perceived as anti-democratic. Many jidaigeki films
were banned because of their possible feudal elements (but kissing scenes
were recommended as a symbol of American-style liberalism and democ-
racy).The occupational film policy severely controlled jidaigeki ’s representa-
tion of the sword because the sword was regarded as the symbol of the
Japanese soul and a possible reference to the upholding of feudalistic loyalty.
This is ironic, because originally jidaigeki was not so much a “traditional”
genre as a “modern” one that was influenced by Hollywood films and by
the rebellious genre of shinkokugeki. That was why the ultranationalistic
militarist government of wartime Japan regulated jidaigeki as a Western-style
entertainment. Under the occupational film policy, the number of jidaigeki
released in Japan decreased sharply from 324 (1937) to only two (1945),
seven (1946), and eight (1947).

Vernacular Modernism
The term modern and the notion of modernity have been particularly pro-
lific topics of discussion in film studies, especially since film scholar Miriam
Bratu Hansen coined the term vernacular modernism to describe Hollywood
cinema in her influential 1999 essay, “The Mass Production of the Senses:
Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism.” Traditionally, the term modernism
was defined as an artistic movement prevalent from the late nineteenth cen-
tury to the first half of the twentieth century. It was an experiment in various
fields of cultural production to counter the conventional styles and values.
The most noteworthy element was consciousness about the specificity of
the medium—its materials and techniques. In the case of modernist cinema,
146 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

questions included the following: What is cinema? What makes cinema a

unique medium? What can cinema do? Avant-garde or experimental film-
makers, in particular, explored these questions.
In contrast, Hansen did not discuss modernism in cinema from this
type of art-historical context. Instead, she proposed to consider cinema to
be a part of the period of modernity. She wrote, “I take the study of mod-
ernist aesthetics to encompass cultural practices that both articulated and
mediated the experience of modernity, such as the mass-produced and mass-
consumed phenomena of fashion, design, advertising, architecture and urban
environment, of photography, radio and cinema” (Hansen 1999, 61). Here,
Hansen considered modernity to be a combination of changes in the society
that included “rapid industrialization, urbanization, and population growth;
the proliferation of new technologies and transportations; the saturation of
advanced capitalism; the explosion of a mass consumer culture; and so on,”
and changes of the experience “characterized by the physical and perceptual
shocks of the modern urban environment . . . that was markedly quicker,
more chaotic, fragmented, and disorienting than in previous phases of human
culture” (Singer 2001, 72–73). To Hansen, not just modernist experimental
cinema but cinema as a whole formulated and reflected modernity, the cul-
ture of shocks. Hollywood cinema, which such scholars as David Bordwell,
Kristin Thompson and Janet Steiger have called “classical,” had a huge impact
in the world film culture because it “produced and globalized” the aesthetics
of “vernacular” modernism (Hansen 1999, 72).
Jidaigeki of the 1920s certainly embodied the aesthetics of vernacular
modernism. The genre simultaneously reflected and formulated the cul-
ture of shocks. On the one hand, jidaigeki was a “globalized” version of
Hollywood swashbuckler films in its techniques and equipment, including
lighting technology. On the other hand, as the connection to shinkokugeki
illustrated, jidaigeki also forged its own idioms, such as those that went beyond
the Hollywood techniques of continuity editing, even though they were still
part of a larger vernacular-modernist culture. In that sense, the relation-
ship between Hollywood and jidaigeki was not simply a binary opposition
between the production-distribution center and periphery. The relationship
was “at once cosmopolitan and local” (italics in original, Hansen 2010, 291).

Zorro’s Sword, Chuˉtaroˉ’s Sword, Kyuˉtaroˉ’s Sword: To Flash or Not

Douglas Fairbanks’s films had a certain impact on the style of jidaigeki,
but the obsession with the flash of the sword and its symbolic implica-
tions distinguished jidaigeki from Hollywood swashbuckler films of the same
 Modernity in Samurai Cat 147

period. The significance of effects lighting was much more enhanced in the
swordfights in jidaigeki. For instance, in a climactic duel in Chutaro of Banba:
Mother of Memory (Banba no Chūtarō: Mabuta no haha, Inagaki Hiroshi, 1931),
the swords shine spectacularly. After defeating his enemies, Chūtarō, played
by the jidaigeki star Kataoka Chiezō, throws away his sword. It sticks into the
bottom of a tree and shines conspicuously white. Then the camera slowly
pans to the right until it captures Chūtarō and his mother, for whom he
has been searching a long time, embracing each other and sobbing. While
they were separated, Chūtarō was forced out of necessity to become a hired
swordsman.
This finale was surely inspired by the ending of The Mark of Zorro (Fred
Niblo, 1920), a Douglas Fairbanks star vehicle that was popularly received in
Japan.When Zorro, played by Fairbanks, throws away his sword after the cli-
mactic battle, it sticks into the wall. In the following long shot, Zorro jumps
up to the second floor. Then, in the following medium long shot, Zorro
and his sweetheart embrace each other. However, Zorro’s sword does not
conspicuously shine as it quivers, pinned to the wall. While both Chūtarō
and Zorro decide to give up their swords and most likely their professions
as swordsmen, lighting illustrates the different significance that act holds for
each of them. For Zorro, the sword does not have much of an impact on his
life, but for Chūtarō, the sword is his soul. Chūtarō is in tears not only of joy
in reuniting with his mother but also of dismay at his identity crisis.
In Samurai Cat, Kyūtarō, whose name reminds us of Chūtarō, similarly
gives up his sword when the climactic battle between the Yonezawa gang
and the Aikawa gang is about to begin. Unlike Chūtarō’s sword, however,
his does not flash or shine at all. When the enemy bodyguard challenges
Kyūtarō to a duel, Kyūtarō draws his sword in response. But his sword goes
out of the frame so quickly that we cannot even see it clearly. We the viewers
wonder for a little while where the sword has gone. Then, in the following
long shot, we see it stuck firmly into the ground. The publicity photo of
this scene displays Kyūtarō holding a cat, Tamanojō, in his left arm and
preparing for the enemy attack with a shining sword in his right hand.
This is an iconic image of a jidaigeki samurai (except for the cat). Yet the
film does not emphasize this fighting pose. Instead, the audience notices
how, under the dull daylight, Kyūtarō’s sword does not reflect any light
to make it conspicuously shine. Kyūtarō rejects the challenge and declares
that he will not use his sword. Impressed by his conviction, the enemy
bodyguard withdraws his challenge and sheathes his sword. The two gang
bosses witness the scene as well, and they make peace. Kyūtarō’s nonviolent
but disobedient tactic succeeds.
148 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

Chuˉtaroˉ’s sword shines.

Zorro’s sword pinned to the wall, not shining.

It is noteworthy that in Samurai Cat Kyūtarō never depends on his

sword to verify his identity. Yes, we are told that he has a masterful tech-
nique that made him a swordfight instructor in Kaga, his hometown. But
there is no scene in this jidaigeki film in which he kills a person with his
sword. We also never see his sword flash spectacularly. For him, the sword is
not his soul. Instead, we find that Kyūtarō was once fired from his position
in Kaga because he was not able to use his sword to assist his fellow samurai
in committing hara-kiri. He became rōnin and came to Edo to find a job
 Modernity in Samurai Cat 149

Kyuˉtaroˉ’s sword stuck into the ground, not shining.

as a samurai. In other words, he has tried to make his sword his soul, his
identity, especially to gain respectability and for his wife and daughter, but
he ultimately fails.
In this sense, Samurai Cat is an anti-jidaigeki. It rejects the shock of
swordfights. It forswears the spectacle of the shining weapon. It maintains
only the rebellious idea of rebellion against the dominant mode of expres-
sion that jidaigeki had in the 1920s against kabuki and kyūgeki. It is notable,
though, to see a samurai giving up his weapon if we consider the current
right-wing political trend in Japan, led by Prime Minister Abe Shinzō. In
July 2014, the Abe cabinet decided to reinterpret the national Constitution
of Japan, whose Article 9 outlaws war as a means to settle international
disputes involving the state, and to allow for the right of “Collective Self-
Defense.” This would allow the Japan Self-Defense Forces to aid allied
nations under attack. Despite public backlash, the “Peace and Security Pres-
ervation Legislation” bills that Abe’s cabinet introduced to the Diet were
approved in September 2015. The nonviolent tactics adopted by Kyūtarō,
which implicitly go against government policy regarding the Self-Defense
Forces, may have been possible because Samurai Cat was not produced by
one of the major broadcasting networks in Japan but by Tō-Mei-Han Net
6 and 5 Issho 3 Channel, which are members of the Japanese Association of
Independent Television Stations. First produced as a TV series in October
2013, its steady popularity led to the production and release of the film
version. As if to challenge Prime Minister Abe’s policy-making, season two
of the TV series appeared from April to June 2015 and a sequel, Samurai
Cat 2: A Tropical Adventure (Neko zamurai 2: Minami no shima e iku, Watanabe
Takeshi), was released in September 2015.
150 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

The Unpredictable Nature of the Cat

Even if Samurai Cat does not have any flashy swordfights, it is still a film
of shocks in a visual sense. Instead of the sword, various cinematic tech-
niques, including lighting, framing, and editing, are adopted to make the cat,
Tamanojō, stand out.
The cat’s eyes and fur shine in particular scenes. As the hired bodyguard
of Yonezawa’s dog-loving gang, Kyūtarō is asked to kill Tamanojō, the beloved
cat of the boss, Aikawa. Tamanojō is also wanted by a magistrate to mate with
his cat. The connection between Aikawa and the magistrate threatens to dam-
age Yonezawa. One dark night, Kyūtarō sneaks into the house of the cat-loving
Aikawa clan. Low-key lighting is adopted throughout this scene in order to
create a chiaroscuro effect and to heighten the suspenseful mood. The visible
sources of lighting are the moon for the exterior shots and candles and trad-
itional paper lanterns for the interior shots. Especially after Kyūtarō goes into
Tamanojō’s room, the candle flames and the paper lanterns are the only bright
spots around Kyūtarō. The camera zooms into a medium close-up of Kyūtarō,
who now makes a grimace and raises his sword. He is surrounded by darkness.
Then suddenly, the shot is reversed to a close-up of Tamanojō the
cat, who turns her face to the right. Her eyes hold the bright light and
her fur shines in an angelic manner. Despite the dark surroundings, three-
point-lighting is adopted to enhance her appeal, especially in Kyūtarō’s
eyes. (Remember our discussion of three-point lighting, which enhances
the attraction of the heroine in the shadowy room near the opening of Cat
People.) This is a visual shock to Kyūtarō; he is helpless before Tamanojō,
whose beauty is enhanced by lighting and framing. It is love at first sight,

Tamanojoˉ in three-point lighting.

 Modernity in Samurai Cat 151

and Kyūtarō surrenders unconditionally. Kyūtarō kidnaps Tamanojō after

making it appear that he has killed her.
A second technique in filming the cat is to make it appear and reap-
pear in unexpected places at unexpected moments. Even though Kyūtarō
has brought Tamanojō into his home, he is shocked by her behaviors again
and again. Framing is effectively used to depict Kyūtarō’s futile efforts to
keep her away from his side business of making paper umbrellas. Every time
Kyūtarō carries Tamanojō out of the frame, she comes back on screen to
disrupt his work. Exhausted, Kyūtarō decides to dump Tamanojō. He leaves
her in the woods but begins to worry about her when rain starts to fall.
When he wakes up in the middle of the night, he finds Tamanojō right next
to his bed, drenched. No explanation is given for her return. Tamanojō just
reappears. Kyūtarō begins to dry her with a cloth. The medium close-up
emphasizes the first direct kinship between the samurai and the cat.
The techniques of flashback and voiceover are also prominently used
in Samurai Cat. Flashback and voiceover are considered the signature tech-
niques of film noir (as seen in Chapter 5). In film noir, a paranoiac male
protagonist often remembers his past in a subjective manner with the help of
flashback and voiceover. In most cases, he regrets what has happened to him,
especially after meeting a femme fatale (literally, a woman of fate).
Kyūtarō keeps remembering his past: how he lost his position as
swordfight instructor in Kaga and how he left his wife and daughter. It
is a traumatic memory for him, and he habitually speaks to himself of his
feelings and thoughts. Despite its extensive use of flashback and voiceover
and the presence of the paranoiac protagonist, however, Samurai Cat is not
a film noir. Even though Kyūtarō meets a “woman” of fate, Tamanojō is
not a femme fatale. Yes, the encounter with her might have been the most

The kinship between the samurai and the cat.

152 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA

shocking thing in his life. His daily life has changed because of her, and
now it is difficult for him to maintain his side business; he needs to learn
how to feed a cat, etc. Yet, Tamanojō does not really transform Kyūtarō.
Even before he met her, Kyūtarō could not use his sword to kill people.
He tries to change his attitude to fit with the ideal image of a samurai, or
bushido, but is not successful. The shock of the cat only confirms his belief
in nonviolence. In the end, he simply goes home to his family, with the cat.
The sword as a weapon does not matter to Kyūtarō from the beginning
to the end.

Cats Are Modern

Even if Tamanojō does not change Kyūtarō’s identity, she shakes up his
world. As we have seen, the cinematic techniques in Samurai Cat are used to
enhance the shocking effect of the cat. In fact, like the swords in jidaigeki,
cats have represented the culture of modernity. Film scholar Rosalind Galt
writes, “[I]n the age of photography cats take on a new cultural role, their
bodies used to figure modernity’s themes of movement and the street. We
see the effects of this shift in the elegant cat silhouettes of Manet but its
direct appearance is in cinema, where the new figurability of unpredict-
able feline motion articulates the close affinity of cats to the discourses of
cinematic modernity” (Galt 2015, 43).
We discussed in Chapter 6 that cats played a significant role in nine-
teenth-century art as painters tried to capture their movements. Hokusai
Manga, a woodblock-printed collection of sketches of various subjects
including cats by the ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai, had a huge impact
on Impressionist painters in Europe. The work of Édouard Manet to which
Galt refers was produced under that influence. Beyond Hokusai Manga, the
images of cats were one of the forerunners of the culture of modernity,
fast-paced consumer culture in particular, in Japan.
It is said that another ukiyo-e artist, Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798–1861),
initiated the first boom of cats in popular culture in Japan. Being a cat lover,
Kuniyoshi illustrated famous kabuki actors in cat form.This was Kuniyoshi’s
playful strategy to avoid censorship during the early 1840s that banned
representations of kabuki actors, courtesans, and geisha as the symbols of
luxury and of subversive ideas (Kennedy, n.p.). Yet, Kuniyoshi’s ukiyo-e
prints with cats became hugely popular. Woodblock printing marked the
start of literary mass production in Japan in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, and its product, ukiyo-e, became mass-marketed, especially among
the merchant class, or the nouveaux riches. By the mid-nineteenth century,
total circulation of a print could run into the thousands (Ōkubo 2008,
 Modernity in Samurai Cat 153

153–154). In addition, Kuniyoshi’s prints of cats had another function in

the industrialization of Japan. During the Edo period, sericulture (silk pro-
duction) became an important Japanese industry. Cats were widely used
to protect the silkworms from mice. But many cats were imported from
China, and their number was limited. Merchants who could not obtain
actual cats used Kuniyoshi’s prints as amulets.
Thus, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cats’
“unpredictable” quick movements were suitable subjects of cinema. I referred
to Edison’s The Boxing Cat (1894) in the introduction of this book. I have
also mentioned that the Lumière brothers, Edison’s rivals, also produced at
least seven films with cats between 1896 and 1900. One of them is called The
Little Girl and Her Cat (La Petite fille et son chat, 1900). This less-than-one-
minute film captures a little girl (Madeline Koehler) and a black cat in one
shot, a medium close-up. Sitting on a chair with small table, she feeds the cat
ten times from her extended right arm. The cat suddenly gets distracted and
jumps off to the right after the third feeding. Then, the cat quickly jumps
back from outside of the frame and reaches its paw to the girl’s hand to grab
the food (the eighth and tenth times). Rosalind Galt makes this point about
the film:

As relatively untrainable animals, cats can’t be relied upon to do

what the film-maker wants. Even a pet cat being bribed with
copious amounts of food is just as likely to notice something
interesting elsewhere and leave, and so a cute actuality about a
little girl and her cat becomes a narrative about on- and off-screen
space, about desire, about the unpredictable; in short, about
unbiddable life. (Galt 2015, 43)

In reality, it is very difficult to make cats eat against their will, or to

make them perform during the actual shooting of films. Day for Night (La
Nuit américaine, François Truffaut, 1973) is a film about film production.
There is a scene in which the crew has a hard time getting a cat to drink
milk. A cat trainer remarks that this is strange because he has not fed the cat
for two days. I myself once tried to film my cat when I made a student film.
It did not work at all because my cat was so distracted by people and cars
on the street that it was nearly impossible to capture her image within the
camera frame. I tried to give her some food and treats to soothe her, but it
was no use. The unpredictable nature of cats was thus revealed during the
production of Samurai Cat as well as during the production of my own film.
Thus, Tamanojō is much more volatile than the sword in jidaigeki. She
is modern.
EPILOGUE

Cats Like Watching

History in The Cats of Mirikitani

Linda Hattendorf, USA/Japan, 2006

The Cats of Mirikitani and the Cat of Linda

The Cats of Mirikitani, a documentary, begins like a boy-meets-girl film.
Linda Hattendorf, the director of the film, lives in an apartment in Soho,
New York, with her cat. The tortoiseshell is a little overweight, but her fur is
beautiful and her eyes are sparkling. She must be well taken care of. There is
an elderly homeless man on the sidewalk in front of Linda’s neighborhood
deli. He often paints pictures of cats. If Linda were not a cat lover, she might
not have noticed him. Since she is a cat person, she becomes interested in
the elderly painter. That is, Linda and Jimmy Mirikitani meet thanks to cats.
Eight months later, 9/11 occurs. The World Trade Center collapses, and
Lower Manhattan is evacuated. Jimmy has no place to go, and Linda takes
him into her apartment. Cats usually do not like intruders—either other cats
or strangers—in their territories. But Linda’s cat accepts Jimmy rather nat-
urally. Sitting in front of a TV with Jimmy, the cat looks at the images of the
collapsing twin towers, of George W. Bush addressing the American people,
of air raids in Afghanistan, of attacks on Arab markets in New York, of people
questioning Islam within the United States. Jimmy murmurs, “It is the same
as old days.” In this scene, a close-up of Linda’s cat gazing at something is
inserted so that Jimmy and the images on the TV seem to be watched from
the cat’s perspective (POV editing).
Cats like watching, indeed. As film scholar Rosalind Galt writes, “cats
do watch moving images” with “avid engagement” (Galt 2015, 48). Every
evening, when I watch a film on TV, my cat is lying on a sofa right next to
me and quietly looking at the TV screen. Galt claims, “Cats certainly don’t

154
 History in The Cats of Mirikitani 155

Close-up of Linda’s cat.

The scene on the TV screen.

understand the concept of representation, but they can process representa-

tional images” (Galt 2015, 50). While Galt’s cat “only watches animal shows
on television and leaves in boredom if she sees too many shots of human
presenters” (Galt 2015, 50), my cat seems to keep watching the screen shim-
mering in black and white. Most of the time I watch black and white films,
so my cat may not “process representational images” but simply be gazing
at presented images. But in the film, because of POV editing, we feel that
Linda’s cat is actually processing the images represented on the TV screen
along with Jimmy.
156 EPILOGUE

When Linda was filming for The Cats of Mirikitani, she was also con-
tinuing her daily job and was not at home during the day. So the director
decided to leave the camera at home to capture Jimmy, who was absorbed by
his painting in the apartment. In the film, standing with his round shoulders
(neko-ze, or “cat’s shoulders,” in Japanese), Jimmy faces a big sheet of paper
on a table. He sings Japanese children’s songs and popular ballads as he paints.
It looks as if the cat, who also stays at the apartment, is recording Jimmy’s
activities. (In reality, though, the camera might have been operated by Masa
Yoshikawa, who is also credited as a cinematographer of this film.) The cat
records Jimmy’s paintings, including a picture of a cat comfortably sleeping
right next to ripe red persimmons from Hiroshima; a picture of red carp
(the baseball team in Hiroshima is the Carp); a picture of the World Trade
Center on fire; and a picture of the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima on
fire. Jimmy lost his family members and friends to the atomic bomb. The
color red connects persimmons, carp, and fire. The images of war give way
to those of cats mischievously looking at the carp or taking a nap right next
to the persimmons. “War is bad,” Jimmy mutters.
Jimmy keeps painting pictures of cats even after moving into Linda’s
apartment. But they are not sketches of Linda’s tortoiseshell. Are they cats
from his memories? Did he have cats in those “old days”?
Showing his paintings and his old photos to Linda, Jimmy starts to talk
about his past little by little. He was born in Sacramento, California, so he
has US citizenship. When he was three, his mother took him to Hiroshima,
where he became interested in ink painting. He returned to the United
States when he was eighteen and started working in Oakland, California.

Jimmy Mirikitani draws a picture of a cat.

 History in The Cats of Mirikitani 157

Shortly after he moved to Seattle, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and
the war between the US and Japan began.
In 1942, because of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, he
was relocated to an internment camp in Tule Lake at the border between
California and Oregon. He was forced to give up his US citizenship there.
Conditions in the camp were horrible, and many people died there. At Tule
Lake, Jimmy met a boy who was fond of cats. Pets were not allowed at
internment camps, and he was not able to bring his cat there. The boy asked
Jimmy, who was a good painter, “Brother, paint a picture of a Japanese cat.”
Ever since, Jimmy has painted pictures of cats. For the boy. In order not to
forget the history of the internment camp, and the boy who did not leave
the camp alive. The cats of Mirikitani—they are cats that remember.
“To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize ‘how it really
was,’” wrote philosopher Walter Benjamin in his 1940 essay “On the Con-
cept of History.” It means to hold fast “to a picture of the past, just as if it had
unexpectedly thrust itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject.”
On 9/11, “a moment of danger,” a memory of the internment camp “thrust
itself” onto Jimmy Mirikitani, and Jimmy could not help murmuring, “It is
the same as old days.” Benjamin imagined an “Angel of History,” its face
turned towards the past, pausing “to awaken the dead and to piece together
what has been smashed.” The cats of Mirikitani may represent that angel.

Cinema, History, and Viewing Positions

In his book Cinema and History, film scholar Mike Chopra-Gant suggests
that cinema can be a form of evidence of the social values and discourses
predominant during the historical moment in which it is produced (Chopra-
Gant 2008, 11–28). In other words, cinema is a historical document. This
does not simply mean that the content of cinema reflects society, but that it
exists in society and is produced and received within the complex network
of people who are living in that society.
This issue has become evident along with the development of recep-
tion studies in film studies. In addition to analyzing films as aesthetic and
symbolic audiovisual texts, which presupposes a theoretical and often
passive spectator, reception studies explores diverse ways of reading films
depending on the viewers’ positions. In previous chapters, I have often used
“we” or “viewers” when I describe people who watch films. I may have
been too general. For the convenience of my arguments, I may have taken
a certain viewing position—emotional, psychological, or interpretive—for
granted. I may have reduced multiple possible perspectives to only one. It is
158 EPILOGUE

convenient to regard viewers as a single entity, but we need to be careful

when we do so.
Thanks to the development of videos, DVDs, satellite TV, cable TV, and
the internet, the space for watching films has gone beyond movie theaters
and expanded to personal TVs, computer screens, tablets, and cell phones.
Under such conditions, it is difficult to assume a particular viewing position.
Moreover, I belong to a certain social group that is different from yours in
terms of race, ethnicity, nationality, class, gender, age, occupation, interests,
and so on. Given all this, we cannot simply say “we the viewers.”
The reception of The Cats of Mirikitani, as a historical document, has
been diverse, depending on the viewers’ positions. Here is how I viewed it,
from my position as a non-US citizen living in New York in 2001 at a time
when I was engrossed in my dissertation on a particular historical moment
in early twentieth-century cinema history.

The Cat of Miyao

On the morning of September 11, I sat facing my laptop in a small studio
apartment in Brooklyn. When I happened to glance up, I noticed my cat
sitting beside the window, looking outside and listening. A radio from the
street blared louder than usual, and I heard the words “hijack” and “state
of emergency.” Suddenly alert, I turned on the TV. Like so many others,
I could not believe what I saw. It looked like a Hollywood film (perhaps
the final scene of Fight Club [David Fincher, 1999] starring Brad Pitt). But
when I stepped out of my apartment and turned my eyes toward Manhattan,

The author’s cat poses for the camera.

 History in The Cats of Mirikitani 159

a huge plume of gray smoke was rising. As it slowly approached Brooklyn

like a cloud, I could no longer think that the scene before me looked like a
film. It was reality.
Like Jimmy, I experienced 9/11 as a “moment of danger.” I had never
been sent to an internment camp, but my dissertation research examined
anti-Japanese sentiment in the 1920s, a time when the term “Yellow Peril”
was prevalent and a recent act of the US Congress had targeted Japanese
immigrants by prohibiting the entry of “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” As
I gazed at the smoke, it was easy to envision that same kind of racism rising
up to cloud the lives of a different group of immigrants.
When 9/11 occurred, Jimmy shut himself up in Linda’s apartment
with her cat and grew more absorbed in his painting, as if he were trying to
capture the “picture of the past” of himself as a racial minority in the US.
So did I. I confined myself to my apartment and focused on writing my
dissertation as if I were trying to grasp the “picture of the past,” of Japanese
people in the US as a racial minority, by way of cinema, or pictures of the
past. Linda continued her research in order to record Jimmy’s memory as
history. I, too, continued my research so that I could understand the history
of racism that had existed before the internment camps. As such, I reacted to
the film The Cats of Mirikitani collectively as a member of a minority group
living in the US.

The Cats of Mirikitani Reborn

Mike Chopra-Gant suggests that cinema not only represents a historical
moment, but also creates narratives of the past (Chopra-Gant 51–69). In
other words, and especially in the case of historical dramas, such as The
Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915), cinema tells a (hi)story. Authenticity,
historical truth, and objectivity are always subjects of debate in such films.
The Birth of a Nation was perceived by many as an authentic depiction of the
history of the US Civil War when the film was initially released, despite the
film’s racist content and its glorification of the KKK. (The story of The Birth
of a Nation focuses on two families: one from the North and the other from
the South. Both families own cats, and the heroine, played by Lillian Gish,
first appears with a white cat.)
In addition to representing the historical moment of 2001, The Cats of
Mirikitani also creates a narrative. The film tells a personal history of Jimmy
Mirikitani from his perspective. In real life as well as within the storyline
of this documentary, director Linda Hattendorf conducts her own archival
research to support Jimmy’s story with empirical evidence. In that sense,
160 EPILOGUE

this film tells the story of Linda’s proactive attempt to restore the years that
Jimmy lost in the history of World War II and afterward.
In the film, Linda contacts the Social Security office because she wants
to help Jimmy. She does not want to leave him on the streets, which are now
filled with dust from the World Trade Center collapse, but she cannot have
him in her apartment forever. According to Jimmy, he came to New York
a few years after he was released from the internment camp. He worked at
restaurants, cooked for Jackson Pollock, and then was hired as a live-in chef
at a luxurious apartment on Park Avenue. If so, he had jobs until he became
homeless in the 1980s, and, Linda reasons, he must have paid Social Secur-
ity tax. But Jimmy stubbornly rejects the support that the people at Social
Security offer. He says he does not want any help from the United States.
Why does he decline their support so persistently?
Linda continues her online research in order to record a “picture of the
past” that “had unexpectedly thrust itself” onto Jimmy Mirikitani and secure
it as history. She finds out that Jimmy himself made efforts after the war to
recover his citizenship. He sent letters to the US government a number of
times and asked for his American citizenship back because he had a dream of
working as a painter and becoming a bridge between East and West. But he
never received any response from America. He feels that he can no longer trust
the Social Security office even if they now offer their support. It is too late.
In fact, the US government sent him a letter in 1959. Jimmy kept mov-
ing, however, so the letter was returned to the sender. Jimmy’s citizenship had
in fact been restored decades ago. He just didn’t know it. Linda’s research has
had an unexpected result. Jimmy’s closed heart starts to open. He is invited as
a guest instructor to a painting class for elderly people at the Social Security
office. He paints a picture of a cat. Participants are amazed at how Jimmy com-
pletes the picture of a cute cat in only a couple of minutes. Jimmy bashfully
reports to Linda, “They said to me, ‘Teacher, please teach to us [sic] again.’”
Led by cats, Linda met Jimmy and had a chance to see a “picture of
the past” in “a moment of danger” of 9/11 and documented the historical
moment. Led by cats, Jimmy met Linda and had a chance to face a “picture
of the past” in “a moment of danger” and recollect his history. Moreover,
Jimmy and Linda created their own narrative to (re)write the history of a
Japanese-American person with this film, The Cats of Mirikitani. The cat that
Jimmy painted with black ink looks as though it is smiling now.

The Cat of Miyatake

The Period that Toyo Miyatake Looked into (Tōyō Miyatake ga nozoita jidai, 2008)
is another documentary about the Japanese internment experience. Directed
 History in The Cats of Mirikitani 161

by Suzuki Junichi, it is a filmic attempt to re-document a historical moment

recorded by Toyo Miyatake (1896–1979), a professional photographer who,
like Jimmy Mirikitani, was interned in 1941 (but at Manzanar rather than
Tule Lake). Miyatake secretly brought along a lens, and once inside the camp
made a camera and started taking pictures. Then, the head of the camp offi-
cially asked Miyatake to photograph the camp. Suzuki’s documentary had
a goal similar to Linda Hattendorf’s: while Hattendorf rerecorded the past
that Jimmy Mirikitani had captured in his paintings of cats, Suzuki docu-
mented the historical moment that Miyatake captured in his photographs.
Before being sent to the camp, Miyatake’s photography was famous for
its aesthetic use of contrast between light and shadow as well as its abstract
composition of nature and human beings. It was art photography. However,
at the camp, Miyatake focused on recording history. Obsessed with details,
he captured buildings, furniture, and Japanese rituals. He treated Japanese
people collectively as a group with a unique culture. He bet on the camera’s
capability of mechanical reproduction, the realism that André Bazin valued
so highly. Miyatake said to his son, “It is a photographer’s duty to record the
facts that must not be repeated with his camera.”
Critic Andreas Hyussen wrote in Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a
Culture of Amnesia (1994), “The past is not simply there in memory, but it
must be articulated to become memory” (Hyussen 1994, 3). Both Jimmy’s
paintings of cats and Miyatake’s photos of the camp were methods of articu-
lation in order to document the past. Both films, The Cats of Mirikitani and
The Period that Toyo Miyatake Looked into, recapture such attempts to docu-
ment the historical moments of the 1940s and tell the stories in the 2000s.
Curiously, both works resort to cats to narrate their (hi)stories. When
his documentary film was released, Suzuki published a picture book with his
wife, actor Sakakibara Rumi. The book, Uncle Toyo’s Camera: Photographer
Toyo Miyatake and Japanese People in America during the War (Tōyō ojisan no
kamera: Shashinka Miyatake Tōyō to senjika no zaibei nikkeijin tachi) is about
Miyatake’s experiences at the internment camp in Manzanar seen from a
cat’s point of view. A stray cat becomes lost and ends up inside the camp in
Manzanar. Miyatake finds the cat and names it Miew. Miew looks at people’s
lives in the camp and is a witness to the results of the racist policies that
sent American citizens there. Miew also feels the suffering of the Nisei who
decide to fight against Japan, where their families came from.
There is no record that Miyatake ever had a cat in the camp. No one
was allowed to bring pets to the camps. Why, then, did Suzuki use a cat as
the narrator of his story? Perhaps his picture book required a cute, relatable
character for its young readers. Or perhaps the cat is a symbol of free will.
Despite the big sky and the land around them, Japanese internees are confined
162 EPILOGUE

in a camp surrounded by barbed wire. Miew says to herself, “I can go out if I

want . . .” The cat may represent both the hope and the despair of the people
in the camp as they yearn for freedom.
But the most important reason may be that cats are creatures who
watch. Just like Benjamin’s Angel of History, cats have always been watching
us, and they will continue to do so.
 Glossary

180-degree rule: The initial shot of a scene draws an imaginary line, called
the axis of action, which divides the action space in two halves.The first
is where the camera is located, while the second is on the other side of
that line. This setup allows the camera position to be varied between
shots, as long as the centerline is not crossed. Once a camera is placed,
it must stay on the same side and cannot cross the axis of action in the
scene.
Aspect ratio: The relationship between the width and height of the
frame. It includes 1.33: 1 (standard), 1.85: 1 (widescreen), or 2.66: 1
(CinemaScope).
Close-up: A shot in which the camera tightly frames an object or a human
face. When the camera moves even closer, the shot is called extreme
close-up.
Crosscutting: An editing technique that establishes actions occurring at the
same time. For instance, the camera captures two running people in two
separate shots. If the camera cuts away from one action to the other and
show these two shots by turns, one seems to be chasing the other even
though the two are never in the same shot together.
Continuity editing: An editing style that has been adopted by mainstream
Hollywood cinema. Filmmaker D. W. Griffith, “the father of Holly-
wood cinema,” developed continuity editing in the 1910s with the goal
of creating a universal language of cinema for audiences of all classes all
over the world. Such editing techniques as the 180-degree rule, cross-
cutting, and POV editing (see POV) are examples of continuity editing.
The focus of continuity editing is to formulate a smooth and seamless
narrative development for viewers.

163
164 Glossary

Deep focus: Also known as depth of field. Everything visible within a frame
is in focus.
Diegetic sound: The source of the sound is visible or implied in the scene.
See also Voiceover.
Flashback: A character recollects what happened to him or her in the past.
The plot moves back and shows events that took place before the current
one. The beginning of a flashback is often indicated by a close-up of the
character who recollects the past.
Gaze: The term “gaze” was first popularized in the 1960s by psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan to describe the anxious state when one becomes aware
that she or he is viewed and feels that she or he loses autonomy and
turns into an object. Film theorist Laura Mulvey introduced the concept
of the “male gaze” and pointed out that mainstream films, particularly
Hollywood films, naturalize conventional gender relations in which the
figure of woman functions as the object of male desire.
High-angle shot: A shot in which the camera looks down.
High-key lighting. The overall tone of a shot is bright, and the contrast
between bright and dark area is minimal.
Intellectual montage: An editing technique that combines two shots with
different images that do not have any obvious connection. Their colli-
sion brings about new meanings, complex concepts, or even subjective
messages that cannot be expressed by each individual image. Soviet film-
maker Sergei Eisenstein came up with this idea of intellectual montage
while examining hieroglyphs and Chinese and Japanese languages and
characters.
Lasky lighting: In this lighting scheme, as in a Rembrandt painting, a
spotlight is directed to a limited area within a frame, which not only
creates clear shadows but also indicates the source and direction of light.
Director Cecil B. DeMille and his cinematographer Alvin Wyckoff,
who developed this lighting style around 1915, had contracts with the
Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company at that time, hence the term Lasky
lighting.
Long shot: A shot size that typically shows the entire object or human body.
When the camera moves back further, the shot is called an extreme
long shot.
Long take: A shot with long duration. In a long take, time flows continuously
as in the real world because there is no cut in the middle.
Low-angle shot: A shot in which the camera looks up.
Low-key lighting: The overall tone of a shot is dark, and the contrast between
light and dark is strong.
 Glossary 165

Medium shot: A shot in which the camera frames a human figure from the
waist up. This is also called a waist shot.
Non-diegetic sound: The source of the sound is not visible or implied in
the scene.
POV (point of view) editing: A shot taken from a camera that is placed at
the height of a character’s eyes. A close-up or a medium shot of the
character looking at something off-screen is placed before and/or after
the first shot. This gives the viewer the impression that the first shot
is what the character is looking at. This combination of shots, which
creates the sense of a character’s view, is called POV editing. The initial
shot is called the POV shot.
Shot: An uninterrupted image taken by a camera.
Shot reverse shot: A technique in which one character is shown looking at
another character in one shot, and then in the following shot the other
character is shown looking back at the first character.
Three-point lighting: A lighting scheme that consists of three lights—key
light, fill light, and backlight. The key light brings the primary light to
the subject and highlights the form and dimension of it. The fill light,
usually a soft and indirect supplementary light that does not change the
character of the key light, is used to erase darkly shaded areas on the
subject. The backlight, which is placed behind the subject at a slightly
higher angle in order not to be seen by the camera, distinguishes the
subject from its background and provides a sense of three-dimensionality.
Voiceover: A narration, usually not accompanied by the image of the char-
acter himself or herself in the shot (see also non-diegetic sound and
diegetic sound).
 Filmography

American in Paris, An (Vincent Minnelli, 1951)

Ants (Ari-chan, Seo Mitsuyo, 1941)
Avatar ( James Cameron, 2009)
Ball at the Anjo House, The (Anjō ke no butōkai, Yoshimura Kōzaburō, 1947)
Bambi (David Hand, James Algar, Bill Roberts, Norman Wright, Samuel Armstrong,
Paul Satterfield, Graham Heid, 1942)
Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
Big Sleep, The (Howard Hawks, 1946)
Birth of a Nation, The (D. W. Griffith, 1915)
Black Cat Mansion (Bōrei kaibyō yashiki, Nakagawa Nobuo, 1958)
Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
Blonde Venus ( Josef von Sternberg, 1932)
Blue Angel, The (Der blau Engel, Josef von Sternberg, 1930)
Boxing Cats, The (Thomas Edison, 1894)
Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards, 1961)
Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938)
Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)
Cat People ( Jacques Tourneur, 1942)
Cats of Mirikitani, The (Linda Hattendorf, 2006)
Cheat, The (Cecil B. DeMille, 1915)
Children’s Hour, The (William Wyler, 1961)
Chutaro of Banba: Mother of Memory (Banba no Chūtarō: Mabuta no haha, Inagaki
Hiroshi, 1931)
Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1940)
Crucified Lovers,The (Chikamatsu monogatari, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1954)
Dark Night’s Passing, A (An’ya kōro, Toyoda Shirō, 1959)
Day for Night (La Nuit américaine, François Truffaut, 1973)
Devil Is a Woman, The ( Josef von Sternberg, 1935)
Dishonored ( Josef von Sternberg, 1931)

167
168 Filmography

Don’t Bother to Knock (Roy Ward Baker, 1952)

Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)
Female Genealogy (Onna keizu, Makino Masahiro, 1942)
Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)
Galaxy Express 999 (Ginga tetsudō 999, Rintarō, 1979)
Gate of Hell ( Jigokumon, Kinugasa Teinosuke, 1954)
Ghost Cat of Otama Pond (Kaibyō Otamagaike, Ishikawa Yoshirō, 1960)
Ghost of Saga Mansion (Kaidan Saga yashiki, Arai Ryōhei, 1953)
Godfather, The (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
Great Train Robbery, The (Edwin S. Porter, 1903)
I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko dearu, Ichikawa Kon, 1975)
Inchon (Terence Young, 1981)
Jungle Emperor Leo ( Janguru taitei, Takeuchi Yoshio, 1997)
La Bête humaine ( Jean Renoir, 1938)
Lady from Shanghai, The (Orson Welles, 1948)
Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1947)
Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944)
Lion King, The (Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, 1994)
Little Girl and Her Cat, The (La Petite fille et son chat, director unknown, 1900)
Love of Actress Sumako, The ( Joyū Sumako no koi, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1947)
Magnificent Ambersons, The (Orson Welles, 1942)
Maltese Falcon, The ( John Huston, 1941)
Mark of Zorro, The (Fred Niblo, 1920)
Morocco ( Josef von Sternberg, 1930)
No Regrets for Our Youth (Waga seishun ni kui nashi, Kurosawa Akira, 1946)
North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)
Osaka Elegy (Naniwa erejī, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1936)
Out of the Past ( Jacques Tourneur, 1947)
Pawnbroker, The (Sydney Lumet, 1964)
Peachboy’s Sea-eagle (Momotarō no umiwashi, Seo Mitsuyo, 1943)
Period that Toyo Miyatake Looked into, The (Tōyō Miyatake ga nozoita jidai, Suzuki
Junichi, 2008)
Pink Panther, The (Blake Edwards, 1963)
Port of Shadows, The (Le Quai des brumes, Marcel Carné, 1938)
Private Life of a Cat, The (Alexander Hammid and Maya Deren, 1944)
Rashomon (Rashōmon, Kurosawa Akira, 1950)
Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953)
Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948)
Sabrina (Billy Wilder, 1954)
Samurai Cat (Neko zamurai, Yamaguchi Yoshitaka and Watanabe Takeshi, 2014)
Samurai Cat 2: A Tropical Adventure (Neko zamurai 2: Minami no shima e iku,
Watanabe Takeshi, 2015)
Sansho the Bailiff (Sanshō dayu, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1954)
Season of the Sun (Taiyō no kisetsu, Furukawa Takumi, 1956)
 Filmography 169

Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai, Kurosawa Akira, 1954)

Shanghai Express ( Josef von Sternberg, 1932)
Shozo, a Cat and Two Women, A (Neko to Shōzō to futari no onna, Toyoda Shirō,
1956)
Sisters of the Gion (Gion no kyōdai, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1936)
Snow Country (Yukiguni, Toyoda Shirō, 1957)
Snow White and Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, Larry Morey, Wilfred Jackson, Ben
Sharpsteen, Perce Pearce, William Cottrell, 1938)
Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)
Steamboat Willie (Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, 1928)
Strange Tale of Oyuki, The (Bokutō kidan, Toyoda Shirō, 1960)
Take Care of My Cat (Goyangireul Butakhae, Jeong Jae-eun, South Korea, 2001)
Tale of the White Serpent, The (Hakujaden, Yabushita Taiji and Ōkawa Hiroshi,
1956)
Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956)
That Darn Cat! (Robert Stevenson, 1965)
Third Man, The (Carol Reed, 1949)
To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955)
Tojuro’s Love (Tōjurō no koi, Yamamoto Kajirō, 1937)
Tsuruhachi Tsurujirō (Naruse Mikio, 1938)
Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1953)
Water Magician, The (Taki no shiraito, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1933)
Wild Geese, The (Gan, Toyoda Shirō, 1953)
Wolf Man, The (George Wagner, 1941)
Woman in the Window, The (Fritz Lang, 1944)
World of Susie Wong, The (Richard Kwan, 1959)
Yojimbo (Yōjimbō, Kurosawa Akira, 1961)

An extensive list of films with cats can be found on such websites as “Cinema
Cats: From Feline Film Stars to Kitty Cameos.” http://www.cinemacats.com
 References

Abel, Richard, ed. 1988. French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology
1907–1939, vol. II 1929–1939. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and
Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Andrew, Dudley. 2009. “The Core and the Flow of Film Studies.” Critical Inquiry
35: 879–915.
———. 1976. The Major Film Theories: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Arnheim, Rudolph. 1974. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative
Eye. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Astruc, Alexandre. 1968. “The Birth of a New Avant-garde: La Caméra-Stylo.”
In The New Wave: Critical Landmarks, edited and translated by Peter Graham,
pp. 17–24. London: Secker.
Barthes, Roland. 1977. “The Death of the Author.” In Image/Music/Text,
translated and edited by Stephen Heath, pp. 142–148. London: Fontana.
Baxter, Peter. 1993. Just Watch!: Sternberg, Paramount and America. London: BFI.
Bazin, André. 1985. “On the politiques des auteurs.” In Cahiers du Cinéma: The
1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, edited by Jim Hillier, pp. 248–259.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 1960. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” Translated by Hugh
Gray. Film Quarterly 13(4): 4–9.
———. 2004. What Is Cinema? Volume 1 & 2. Translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Benedict, Ruth. 1989. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese
Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. 1985. The Classical Holly-
wood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia
University Press.

171
172 References

Brill, Lesley. 1988. The Hitchcock Romance: Love and Irony in Hitchcock’s Films.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Bugler, Caroline. 2011. The Cat: 3500 Years of the Cat in Art. London: Merrell.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London:
Routledge, 1990.
———, and Liz Kotz. 1992. “The Body You Want: Liz Kotz Interviews Judith
Butler.” Artforum International 31(3): 82–89.
Caughie, John, ed. 1981. Theories of Authorship. London: Routledge.
Chandler, Daniel. 2017. “An Introduction to Genre Theory.” http://www.aber.
ac.uk/media/Documents/intgenre/chandler_genre_theory.pdf. Accessed
18 July 2017.
Chopra-Gant, Mike. 2008. Cinema and History: The Telling of Stories. London:
Wallflower.
Chow, Rey. 2001. “A Phantom Discipline.” PMLA 116(5): 1386–1395.
“Core of the Movie: The Chase.” 1995. NewYork Times Magazine, 29 October 1950:
22–23. Reprinted in Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews,
edited by Sidney Gottlieb, pp. 44–46. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Davis, Darrell William. 1996. Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National
Identity, Japanese Film. New York: Columbia University Press.
Dick, Philip K. 1968. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Doubleday.
Dietrich, Marlene. 1961. Marlene Dietrich’s ABC. New York: Doubleday.
Doane, Mary Ann. 1982. “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female
Spectator.” Screen 23(3–4): 74–88.
Dyer, Richard. 1979. Stars. London: BFI.
Eisenstein, Sergei. 1998. The Eisenstein Reader, edited by Richard Taylor and
translated by Richard Taylor and William Powell. London: BFI.
Esquevin, Christian. 2014. “Marlene Dietrich & Travis Banton.” Silver Screen
Modes, 3 February 2014. http://silverscreenmodes.com/marlene-dietrich-
travis-banton/. Accessed 14 July 2017.
Evans, Kay. 1932. “Will Marlene Break the Spell?” Photoplay 41(3): 104.
Foucault, Michel. 1973. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception,
translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon.
———. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan
Sheridan. New York: Pantheon.
———. 1984. “What Is an Author?” Translated by Josue V. Harari. In The Fou-
cault Reader, edited by Paul Rainbow, pp. 101–120. New York: Pantheon.
Galt, Rosalind. 2015. “Cats and the Moving Image: Feline Cinematicity from
Lumière to Maru.” In Animal Life in the Moving Image, edited by Michael
Lawrence and Laura McMahon, pp. 42–57. London: BFI.
Hansen, Miriam. 1999. “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as
Vernacular Modernism.” Modernism/Modernity 6(2): 59–77.
———. 2010. “Vernacular Modernism: Tracking Cinema on a Global Scale.”
In World Cinemas,Transnational Perspectives, edited by Natasa Durovicova and
Kathleen Newman, pp. 287–314. New York: Routledge.
 References 173

Hasumi, Shigehiko. 2008. Eiga hōkai zenya [The night before the cinema col-
lapses]. Tokyo: Seido sha.
———. 1990. Eiga yūwaku no ekurichūru [Cinema: Writing of temptation].
Tokyo: Chikuma shobō.
Hayward, Susan. 1996. Key Concepts in Cinema Studies. London: Routledge.
Heath, Stephen. 1978. “Questions of Property: Film and Nationhood.” Cinetracts
1(4): 2–11.
Higham, Charles. 1970. Hollywood Cameraman: Sources of Light. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Gottlieb, Sidney, ed. 1995. Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hyussen, Andreas. 1994. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia.
London: Routledge.
Inaga, Shigemi. 2014. Kaiga no rinkai: Kindai higashi Ajia bijutsushi no shikkoku to
meiun [Images on the edge:A historical survey of east Asian trans-cultural modernities].
Nagoya: Nagoya daigaku shuppankai.
———. 1997. Kaiga no tasogare: Eduāru Mane botsugo no tōsō [The twilight of
images: Battles after the death of Édouard Manet]. Nagoya: Nagoya daigaku
shuppankai.
Irie, Takako. 1957. Eiga joyū [Motion picture actress]. Tokyo: Gakufū shoin.
Iwagō, Mitsuaki. 2007. Neko o toru [Photographing cats]. Tokyo: Asahi shinbun
sha.
Jacobs, Lea. 1993. “Belasco, DeMille, and the Development of Lasky Lighting.”
Film History 5(4): 405–418.
Kaplan, E. Ann. 1983. Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera. New York:
Methuen.
Kennedy, Philip. 2017. “Obsesses with Cats: The Ukiyo-e Prints of Utagawa
Kuniyoshi.” http://illustrationchronicles.com/Obsessed-with-Cats-The-
Ukiyo-e-Prints-of-Utagawa-Kuniyoshi. Accessed 10 August 2017.
Lacan, Jacques. 1978. Seminar XI:The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,
translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton.
LaMarre, Thomas. 2009. The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2002. “From Animation to Anime: Drawing Movements and Moving
Drawings.” Japan Forum 14(2): 329–367.
Lehman, Peter, and William Luhr. 1981. Blake Edwards. Athens: Ohio University
Press.
Letouzé, Maurice. 1990. “La Peinture Japonaise” [The Japanese painting] in
L’Exposition et ses attractions, Tome XVI (Paris, 1900), 49–52, quoted and
translated to Japanese in Tano Yasunori, “Pari bankokuhakurankai to Nihon
bijutsu” (Paris Exhibition and Japanese art). In Nippon Bijutsuin Hyaku-
nenshi, 2 kan Jō (Zuhan hen) (One Hundred Year History of Nippon
Bijutsuin, volume 2–1, graphics), edited by Nippon Bijutsuin Hyakunenshi
Henshūshitsu, p. 445. Tokyo: Nippon bijutsuin.
174 References

Looser, Thomas. 2006. “Superflat and the Layers of Image and History in 1990s
Japan.” Mechadmia 1: 92–109.
Marcus, Laura. 2007. “Cinematic Realism: ‘A recreation of the world in its
own image.’” In Adventures in Realism, edited by Matthew Beaumont, pp.
177–192. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Miura, Mitsuo. 1940. “Haikō” [Lighting]. In Eiga satsueigaku dokuhon [Cinema-
tography reader], edited by Tane Shigeru, pp. 237–252. Tokyo: Dainihon
eiga kyōkai.
Miyao, Daisuke. 2013. The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema.
Durham: Duke University Press.
———. 2002. “Before Anime: Animation and the Pure Film Movement in Pre-
war Japan.” Japan Forum 14(2): 191–209.
———. 2007. Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom. Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press.
Morita Fujio. 2007. “Nihon eiga no jidaigeki saho dai 3 kai” [Methods of jidaigeki
in Japanese cinema 3]. Eiga Satsuei 172: 66–79.
Mosley, Rachel. 2002. Growing up with Audrey Hepburn:Text, Audience, Resonance.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Mulvey, Laura. 1999. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Film Theory
and Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall
Cohen, pp. 833–844. New York: Oxford University Press.
Murakami, Takashi. 2000. Super Flat. Tokyo: Madra Publishing.
Mutobe, Akinori. 2007. “Mone ‘Tsumiwara’ rensaku no saikō: Mochīfu,
shunkansei, koten” [Rethinking Monet’s series painting, Haystacks: Motifs,
instantaneity, private exhibition]. In Situation actuelle de l’histoire de l’art mod-
erne francaise: Du point de vue de l’après “New Art History” [Present situation
of the history of French modern art: From the point of view after “New
Art History”], edited by Nagai Takanori, pp. 163–192. Tokyo: Sangen sha.
Nakamura, Hideyuki. 2009. “In the Name of ‘Film Noir’?: Reconsidering the
Noir Discourse.” Iichiko: a journal for transdisciplinary studies of pratiques 102:
69–79.
Natsume, Sōseki. 2001. I Am a Cat, translated by Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson.
North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle.
Neale, Steve. 1983. “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Main-
stream Cinema.” Screen 24(6): 2–17.
Nitobe, Inazō. 2002. Bushido:The Soul of Japan. Tokyo: Kodansha International.
Newman, Kim. 1999. Cat People. London: BFI.
O’Brien, Charles. 1996. “Film Noir in France: Before the Liberation.” Iris 21:
7–20.
Ōkubo, Junichi. 2008. Karā-ban ukiyo-e [Ukiyo-e: Color edition]. Tokyo: Iwa-
nami shoten.
Ōtsuka, Eiji. 2003. Atomu no meidai: Tezuka Osamu to sengo manga no shudai
[Atomu’s proposition: The themes of Tezuka Osamu and postwar manga].
Tokyo: Tokuma shoten.
 References 175

Raine, Michael. 2001. “Ishihara Yūjirō: Youth, Celebrity, and the Male Body
in late 1950s Japan.” In Word and Image in Japanese Cinema, edited by Den-
nis Washburn and Carole Cavanaugh, pp. 202–25. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Rubin, James H. 2003. Impressionist Cats and Dogs: Pets in the Painting of Modern
Life. New Haves: Yale University Press.
Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage.
Saito, Ayako. 2014. “Occupation and Memory: The Representation of Woman’s
Body in Postwar Japanese Cinema.” In The Oxford Handbook of Japanese
Cinema, edited by Daisuke Miyao, 327–362. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Shimizu, Isao. 2014. Hokusai Manga: Nihon manga no genten [Hokusai Manga:
The origin of Japanese manga]. Tokyo: Heibon sha.
Shimura, Miyoko. 2001. “Onna ga neko ni naru toki: ‘Kaibyō’ eiga Hiroku kaibyō
den shiron” [When a woman becomes a cat: An essay on ‘Monster cat’ film
The Haunted Castle]. Iconics: Japanese Journal of Image Arts and Sciences 67:
41–56.
———. 2006. “Tenkanki no Tanaka Kinuyo to Irie Takako: Bakeneko to joyū
no gensetsu o megutte” [Tanaka Kinuyo and Irie Takako in transitional
periods: On the discourses on monster cats and actresses]. In Eiga to shin-
tai/sei (Cinema and body/sex), edited by Saito Ayako, pp. 79–110. Tokyo:
Shinwa sha.
Shin, Chi-Yun. 2005. “Two of a Kind: Gender and Friendship in Friend and Take
Care of My Cat.” In New Korean Cinema, edited by Chi-Yun Shin and Julian
Stringer, pp. 117–131. New York: New York University Press.
Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. 1996. “From the Imperial Family to the Trans-
national Imaginary: Media Spectatorship in the Age of Globalization.” In
Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, edited by
Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, pp. 145–170. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Singer, Ben. 2001. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its
Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sklar, Robert. 1994. Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies.
Revised and Updated. New York: Vintage.
Souriau, Paul. 1983. The Aesthetics of Movement, translated and edited by Manon
Souriau. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Sternberg, Josef von. 1965. Fun in a Chinese Laundry: An Autobiography. New York:
Collier.
Studlar, Gaylyn. 1988. In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the
Masochistic Aesthetic. New York: Columbia University Press.
Suzuki, Junichi, and Sakakibara Rumi. 2008. Tōyō ojisan no kamera: Shashinka
Miyatake Tōyō to senjika no zaibei nikkeijin tachi [Uncle Toyo’s camera: pho-
tographer Toyo Miyatake and Japanese people in America during the war].
Tokyo: Shōgakukan.
176 References

Takahata, Isao. 1999. Jūni seiki no animēshon: Kokuhō emakimono ni miru eiga-teki
anime-teki narumono [Animation in the twelfth century: The cinematic and
animetic in national treasure scroll paintings]. Tokyo: Tokuma shoten.
Takizawa, Hajime. 1986. “Jidaigeki towa nanika” [What is jidaigeki?]. In Kōza
Nihon eiga 2: Musei eiga no kansei [Lectures on Japanese cinema 2: Comple-
tion of silent cinema], edited by Imamura Shōhei, Satō Tadao, Shindō Kaneto,
Tsurumi Shunsuke, and Yamada Yōji, pp. 116–131. Tokyo: Iwanami
shoten.
Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō. 1982. “Neko to Shōzō to futarino onna” [Shozo, a Cat and
Two Women]. In Tanizaki Jun’ichirō zenshu dai 14 kan [Complete works of
Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, volume 14], pp. 263–368. Tokyo: Chūōkōron sha.
Tano,Yasunori. 1990. “Pari bankokuhakurankai to Nihon bijutsu” [Paris Expo-
sition Universelle and Japanese art]. In Nippon bijutsuin hyakunenshi, 2 kan
jō (zuhan hen) [One-hundred-year history of Nippon bijutsuin. Vol. 2-1
(graphics)], edited by Nippon bijutsuin hyakunenshi henshūshitsu, pp.
435–459. Tokyo: Nippon bijutsuin.
Theisen, Earl. 1934. “Part of the Story of Lighting.” International Photographer
6(3): 10–12, 26.
Truffaut, François. 1976. “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema.” In Mov-
ies and Methods,Vol. I, edited by Bill Nicols, pp. 224–237. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Tsumura, Hideo. 1943. “Nihon eiga wa shinpo shitaka: Shōwa 17 nendo sakuhin
kaiko” [Has Japanese cinema progressed?: Retrospective of 1942 films]. Eiga
Junpō 71: 38–39.
Uratani,Toshiro. 2004. “Chanbara sutā retsuden” [Biographies of chanbara stars].
In Kyōto kara sekai e: Chanbara eiga [From Kyoto to the words: Chanbara
films], edited by Yamane Sadao and Tanaka Noriko, pp. 24–27. Kyōto:
Kyōto Film Festival.
Vest, James M. 2003. Hitchcock and France:The Forging of an Auteur. Westport, CT:
Praeger.
Weiss, Andrea. 1992. Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in the Cinema. London: Jonathan
Cape.
Yamada, Isuzu. 2000. Eiga to tomoni [With cinema]. Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentā.
Yamaguchi, Katsunori, and Watanabe Yasushi. 1977. Nihon animēshon eiga shi [The
history of Japanese animation]. Osaka: Yūbun sha.
Yoshimura, Kōzaburō. 2001. Eiga wa furēmu da!: Yoshimura Kōzaburō hito to
sakuhin [Cinema is a frame!: Yoshimura Kozaburo the person and his
work]. Tokyo: Dōhō sha.
 Index

Abe, Shinzō, 149 Bae, Doona, 129

Academy Museum of Motion Ball at the Anjo House, The (Anjō ke
Pictures, The, 30 no butōkai), 4
Allers, Roger, 112 Bambi, 113
Altman, Georges, 98 Banton, Travis, 93, 94
Alton, John, 5 Barthes, Roland, 94, 100
American in Paris, An, 5 Battleship Potemkin, 71
Anderson, Benedict, 123 Bazin, André, 1, 92, 96, 130–133,
Andrew, Dudley, 131 140, 161
Animal-Person Caricatures Bazinian realism, 130–131, 132, 140
(Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga), 122 Belasco, David, 36, 143
Animation in the Twelfth Century: Benedict, Ruth, 144–145
The Cinematic and Animetic in Benjamin, Walter, 157, 162
National Treasure Scroll Paintings Birth of a Nation, The, 159
( Jūni seiki no animēshon: Kokuhō Bissett, Jacqueline, 139
emakimono ni miru eiga-teki Black Cat Mansion (Bōrei kaibyō
anime-teki narumono), 121–122 yashiki), 99, 101
anime, 114, 121–123, 124–125, 128 Blade Runner, 97
Ants, 113 Blonde Venus, 84
Arai, Ryōhei, 103 Blue Angel, The, 89, 90, 92, 93
Astro Boy, 122 Bordwell, David, 5, 131, 146
Auber, Brigitte, 55 Boxing Cat, The, 4, 153
Austria, 79, 81–82, 97 Boy with a Cat, A (Le garçon
auteurism, 5, 90–94, 95, 96, 98, 100 au chat), 116
avant-garde, 98 Breakfast at Tiffany’s: ending, 26–28;
Avatar, 3 framing, 13–14, 15–20, 21–25,

177
178 Index

26–27, 29; freedom of Holly Cheat, The, 36

and cats, 12–17; Holly behaves Children’s Hour, The, 28
like a cat, 11–12, 17, 18; open- Chopra-Gant, Mike, 157, 159
ing, 9–11; plot, 29 Chow, Rey, 1–2
Brechtian realism, 130, 131 Chrysanthemum and the Sword:
Breughel the Elder, Jan, 116 Patterns of Japanese Culture,
Bringing Up Baby, 55 The 145
Bugler, Caroline, 115 Chutaro of Banba: Mother of Memory
Bushido: The Soul of Japan, 144 (Banba no Chūtarō: Mabuta no
Butler, Judith, 83 haha), 147
Cinema and History, 157
Cahiers du cinéma, 5, 91 Cinema Is a Frame! (Eiga wa furēmu
Cameron, James, 3 da!), 4
Cannes Film Festival, 124 Cinémathèque Française, 91
Cat People: Alice becomes an enemy, Cinematography Reader (Eiga sat-
43–46, 48–51; Dr. Judd and sueigaku dokuhon), 107
Irena, 42–43, 44, 51–53; Irena Citizen Kane, 31, 101
becomes a cat person, 41–42, colonialism, 6
48; lighting, 29–31, 32–34, continuity editing, 72, 131, 142, 146
35–39, 40–43, 44–49, 50–54; “Cool Japan”, 122–123, 124, 128,
opening, 31–34; plot, 29, 30 144
cats: in art, 115–116; of author, 2, 3, Coppola, Francis Ford, 4, 5
50, 56, 66, 154–155; behaviors crosscutting, 58–60, 72, 74, 142
of, 6, 10–13, 17, 18, 20; breeds, Crucified Lovers, The (Chikamatsu
96–97; and cinema, 3–4; Dica, monogatari), 110
2; kittens, 31, 38, 60, 67, 69,
132, 136, 138–139; Maru, 4; Daiei Studio, 124
Miew, 161–162; nocturnal ani- Dark Night’s Passing, A (An’ya kōro),
mals, 35; passions of, 5; phan- 95
tomlike, 1, 2; Tamanojō, 147, da Vinci, Leonardo, 116
150–152, 153; Titi, 138–139 Day for Night (La Nuit américaine),
Cats of Mirikitani, The, 154, 156, 153
158, 159, 160, 161 “Death of the Author, The,” 94
celluloid, 3, 29, 113, 118, 131 décalage (time-lag), 2
“Certain Tendency in French DeMille, Cecil B., 35–36
Cinema, A,” 91 Der blau Engel (The Blue Angel ), 89,
Chabrol, Claude, 91 90, 92, 93
chanbara, 142, 143 Devil Is a Woman, The, 92
Chan, Charlie, 84 Dick, Philip K., 98
Chandler, Daniel, 96 Dietrich Icon, 94
 Index 179

Dietrich, Marlene: cinematographer montage theory, 71–72, To

Lee Garmes and, 89, 90, 93, 94, Catch a Thief , 57–65, 67–70,
107; director Josef von Stern- 71–72, 74–75, See also point-of-
berg and, 83–84, 89, 90, 92–93, view (POV) editing
94, 107; Dishonored, 79–81, Eiga wa neko dearu ( Japanese fore-
85; eroticization of, 79, 83–84; runner to Cinema Is a Cat), 2, 3
image, 79, 84, 93–94, 100; stud- Eisenstein, Sergei, 70–72
ies on, 94; understanding, 94 Entertainment Weekly, 84
digital filmmaking, 3 Esquevin, Christian, 93
digital media, 136 Evans, Kay, 93
Dishonored: auteurism, 91–92,
94, 95, 96, 98, 100; Dietrich, Fairbanks, Douglas, 146, 147
Marlene, 79–81, 85; director Female Genealogy (Onna keizu), 106,
Josef von Sternberg, 83–84, 108
89, 90–91, 92–93, 94; editing, feminist film theory, 5–6, 83–84, 132
81, 84, 93; feminist film theory, Film Is Alive (Firumu wa ikiteiru), 126
83–84; the gaze, 88; opening, film noir, 37, 38, 97–98, 151
79–82; performance and film studies, 3, 5, 6, 123, 145, 157
masquerade, 84–89, 94 Foucault, Michel, 62, 94
Disney, 112–114, 115, 116, framing: Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 13–14,
122–123, 126, 127–128 15–20, 21–25, 29, 136; the
Disney, Walt, 113, 114 chase, 57; concept of, 4, 131;
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Dishonored, 88; Samurai Cat,
98 150–151; Shozo, a Cat, and Two
Doane, Mary Ann, 87 Women, 102; Take Care of My
Don’t Bother to Knock, 28 Cat, 136
Double Indemnity, 98 Fun in a Chinese Laundry, 90
Dressing the Part: Sternberg, Dietrich, Furukawa, Takumi, 110
and Costume, 94
Duret, Théodore, 125 Galaxy Express 999 (Ginga tetsudō
Dyer, Richard, 100 999), 121
Galt, Rosalind, 152, 153, 154–155
Edison, Thomas, 4, 153 Garmes, Lee, 89, 90, 93, 94,
editing: 180-degree rule, 19–20, 72; 107–108
the chase, 45, 57–60, 63–67, Gate of Hell ( Jigokumon), 124
69–70; concept of, 4; continu- Gauguin, Paul, 116
ity, 72, 131, 142, 146; Coppola gendaigeki (contemporary drama),
on, 5; Dishonored, 81, 84, 93; 141, 142
intellectual montage, 70–75; Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Méliès-style, 143; methods of Subversion of Identity, 83
180 Index

genre: action, 57; based on, 91; cat Inagaki, Hiroshi, 147
videos, 4; comedy, 123; concept Incheon, 129, 133, 135, 138,
of cinema studies, 5; defined, 139–140
96–98; gangster, 37; ghost cat, Inchon, 139
98, 102, 103, 105; horror, 123; In Praise of Shadows (Inei raisan), 107
Japanese films, 124, 141; jid- instantaneity, 125–126
aigeki, 141, 142–143, 145, 146; intellectual montage, 70–75
melodrama, 123; taishū bungaku International Photographer, 30
(mass literature), 143 Irie Productions, 103, 106
Germany, 84, 90, 93 Irie, Takako, 103–105
ghost cat genre, 98–99, 103–104, 105 Ishihara, Shintarō, 109
Ghost Cat of Otama Pond (Kaibyō Ishihara,Yūjirō, 109–110
Otamagaike), 102 Ishikawa,Yoshirō, 102
Ghost of Saga Mansion (Kaidan Saga Iwagō, Mitsukai, 10–11
yashiki), 103, 104 Iwerks, Ub, 113
giga, 122, 124–125 Izumi, Kyōka, 103
Godard, Jean-Luc, 91
Godfather, The, 4, 5 jewels, 9–10, 27, 55, 56, 67, 68, 75
Goya, 37 jidaigeki (period drama), 141–145,
Grant, Cary, 55, 76, 79 146–149, 152, 153
Great Train Robbery, The, 57 Jungle Emperor ( Janguru taitei), 112,
Griffith, D.W., 72, 159 114, 115
Jungle Emperor Leo ( Janguru taitei),
Hasegawa, Kazuo, 103, 104, 106, 108 114–115, 116, 118–121, 122, 127
Hasumi, Shigehiko, 5, 129, 132
Hattendorf, Linda, 159, 161 kabuki, 102, 103, 106, 143, 149,
Hawks, Howard, 55, 92 152
Hayakawa, Sessue, 36 Kagawa, Kyōko, 95, 99–100, 110
Head, Edith, 60–61 Kaplan, E. Ann, 83
Heath, Stephen, 123 Kataoka, Chiezō, 147
Hepburn, Audrey, 9–10, 11, 28, Katsushika, Hokusai, 116, 121, 122,
79, 133 125, 152
Hitchcock, Alfred, 55, 57, 60, 61, 66, Kawabata,Yasunari, 95
70, 75, 76, 83, 92; chase scenes, Kelly, Grace, 56, 60–61
60; Rear Window, 61; To Catch a Kinema Junpō, 4, 95
Thief, 55, 57 Kinugasa, Teinosuke, 124
Hokusai Manga, 125, 152 Kitamura, Kazuki, 141
Hyussen, Andreas, 161 Kitses, Jim, 96
klieg lights, 35
Idea of the Image: Josef Von Sternberg’s Kurosawa, Akira, 108, 123–124, 141
Dietrich Films, The, 94 kyūgeki, 143, 149
 Index 181

La Bête humaine, 31, 98 Manet, Édouard, 115, 116, 152

Lacan, Jacques, 62 manga, 112, 113, 114–115, 121–122,
La Lumière, 98 125, 126
LaMarre, Thomas, 121 Marcus, Laura, 130
Landis, Jessie Royce, 57, 76 Mark of Zorro, The, 147
Laura, 98 Marlene Dietrich’s ABC, 94
Lee, Eun-jo, 129 Maru, 4
Lee, Eun-shil, 129 Matsutani, Takayuki, 112
Lee,Yo-won, 129 media studies, 3
Letouzé, Maurice, 125 Méliès-style editing, 143
Lewton,Val, 30, 39, 48 metric editing, 71
lighting: Cat People, 29, 30–31, Mifune, Toshirō, 139
32–34, 35–39, 40–43, 44–49, Minkoff, Rob, 112
50–54; cinematic evolution Mirikitani, Jimmy, 154, 155–157,
of, 29–30; concept of, 4, 57; 159–160
Dishonored, 88, 89, 90; Female Miura, Mitsuo, 95, 106–108
Genealogy, 106–107; “film noir,” Miyatake, Tōyō, 161
97; jidaigeki, 146, 147; Lasky, Mizoguchi, Kenji, 103, 104, 108,
35–38; in long takes, 130–131; 110, 124
Miura’s style, 107–108; Samurai modernity, 5, 6, 142, 143, 144,
Cat, 150; seamlessness of, 131; 145–146, 152, 153
shinkokugeki, 143; Shozo, a Cat Monroe, Marilyn, 9, 28
and Two Women, A, 101–102; Morin, Edgar, 100
Take Care of My Cat, 133–134; Mori, Ōgai, 95
Tojuro’s Love, 106, See also Morishige, Hisaya, 95
three-point lighting Morita, Fujio, 143
Lion King, The, 112, 114–118, 121, Morocco, 84
122 Mosley, Rachel, 9
Little Girl and Her Cat, The (La Motion Picture Produ-
Petite fille et son chat), 153 cers Association of Japan
Lloyd, Dorothy, 38 (Nihon eiga seisakusha renmei),
Love of Actress Sumako, The, ( Joyū 123
Sumako no koi), 108 Mulvey, Laura, 5, 62, 83
Lumière brothers, 4, 153 Murakami, Takashi, 121
Murder, My Sweet, 98
McArthur, Colin, 96 Musuraca, Nicholas, 30–31, 38
MacArthur, Douglas, 139, 145
McGray, Douglas, 122 Nagai, Kafū, 95
Makino, Masahiro, 106 Nagata, Masaichi, 124
Makino, Shōzō, 30, 143 Nakagawa, Nobuo, 99
Maltese Falcon, The, 98 Nakamura, Hideyuki, 98
182 Index

Naruse, Mikio, 104 Photo Chemical Laboratory

national cinema, 5, 123–124 (PCL), 106
nationalism, 6, 109, 144, 145 Photoplay, 93
Natsume, Sōseki, 1 Picture Book of Ban Dainagon,
nekojarashi, 102, 110 The (Ban dainagon ekotoba),
neorealism, 2, 130 122
Newman, Kim, 48, 51 Pinocchio, 113
New York: author’s time in, 2, 158; poetic realism, 98
Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 23–25, 27, point-of-view editing: Cats of
29; Cat People, 29, 40, 53; Cats Mirikitani,The, 154–155; con-
of Mirikitani, The, 154, 158, tinuity editing, 72; Dishonored,
160; Don’t Bother to Knock, 28; 81, 84; Jungle Emperor Leo,
Sternberg in, 90 118, 120; Shozo, a Cat and Two
New York Times, 92 Women, 101; To Catch a Thief,
9/11, 154, 157, 158–159, 160 60–65, 67–70;
Nitobe, Inazō, 144 politique des auteurs, 91
No Regrets for Our Youth (Waga Pollock, Jackson, 160
seishun ni kui nashi), 108 Port of Shadows, The (Le Quai des
brumes), 98
O’Brien, Charles, 98 psychological realism, 130, 131–132,
Ōhashi, Suiseki, 125 134
Ōkawa, Hiroshi, 114
Ok, Ji-young, 129 racism, 6, 159
Olivier, Laurence, 139 Radio City Music Hall, 28
180-degree rule, 19–20, 72 Rashomon (Rashōmon), 123, 124
“On the Concept of History,” 157 realism, 5, 98, 117, 126–128,
“Ontology of the Photographic 129–136, 140, 143, 161
Image, The” 130 Rear Window, 61
Orlando, Warner, 84 Reed, Carol, 4
Osaka Elegy (Naniwa erejī), 104, 111 Renoir, Jean, 31
Ōtsuka, Eiji, 126 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 115, 116
Out of the Past, 38 rhythmic editing, 72
Rivière, Joan, 87
Painting with Light, 4 Rohmer, Eric, 91
Paris, 55, 60, 91, 125 Rooney, Mickey, 11
Peachboy’s Sea-eagle (Momotarō no Rubin, James H., 127
umiwashi), 113 Russia, 39, 71, 85–86
Period that Toyo Miyatake Looked into,
The (Tōyō Miyatake ga nozoita Saito, Ayako, 109
jidai), 160, 161 Sakakibara, Rumi, 161
 Index 183

Samurai Cat 2: A Tropical Adventure social networking, 3

(Neko zamurai 2: Minami no Social Security, 160
shima e iku), 149 Souriau, Paul, 127
Samurai Cat (Neko zamurai), 141, Stam, Robert, 123
147–152, 153 stardom, 5, 96, 104
San Francisco Chronicle, 112 Stars, 100
Sansho the Bailiff (Sanshō dayū), 124 Star Wars, 57
Sarris, Andrew, 92 Steamboat Willie, 113
Sawada, Shōjirō, 143 Steiger, Janet, 131
scopophilia, 62, 83 Sternberg, Josef von, 83–84, 89,
Scorsese, Martin, 3 90–91, 92–93, 94, 107
Scott, Ridley, 3, 97 Strange Tale of Oyuki, The (Bokutō
Season of the Sun (Taiyō no kisetsu), kidan), 95
109 Stroheim, Erich von, 91
Season of the Sun (Taiyō no kisetsu Studlar, Gaylyn, 83
film version), 110 Sun Tribe (Taiyōzoku), 109
Seo, Mitsuyo, 113 Superflat, 121
Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai), Suzuki, Junichi, 161
124 Suzuki, Sumiko, 104
Shakespeare, 91 Swift, Taylor, 94
Shanghai Express, 84
Shiga, Naoya, 95 Takahata, Isao, 121
Shimizu, Isao, 125 Take Care of My Cat (Goyan-
Shimura, Miyoko, 102 gireul Butakhae): ending,
shinkokugeki (new national 140; framing, 136; mobile
theater), 143 phones, 134–136, 137–138;
Shohat, Ella, 123 opening, 132–133, 136; plot,
Shozo, a Cat and Two Women: as a star 129; realism, 132–136; Titi,
film, 99–100; awards, 95; battles, 138–139
100–103; cinematography, 106– Takizawa, Hajime, 142
108; female bodies, 110–111; Tale of the White Serpent, The
ghost cat genre, 98–99, 103– (Hakujaden), 114, 116
104, 105; opening, 96 Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō, 95, 100, 105,
Simon, Simone, 29, 31, 48, 79 107
Sisters of the Gion (Gion no kyōdai), television (TV), 3, 122, 136, 149,
104 155
Sklar, Robert, 97 Ten Commandments, The, 35
Snow Country (Yukiguni), 95 Tetsuwan Atomu, 122, 127
Snow White and Seven Dwarfs, 113, Tezuka, Osamu, 112–113, 114, 122,
114 124, 126, 127–128
184 Index

Tezuka Productions, 112, 114, 115, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a

127 Culture of Amnesia, 161
That Darn Cat!, 58
Theisen, Earl, 30 Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari), 124
Thinking in Images: Film Theory, Uncle Toyo’s Camera: Photographer
Feminist Philosophy and Marlene Toyo Miyatake and Japanese
Dietrich, 94 People in America during the War
Third Man, The, 4 (Tōyō ojisan no kamera: Shash-
Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji (Fugaku inka Miyatake Tōyō to senjika no
sanjūrokkei), 121 zaibei nikkeijin tachi), 161
Thompson, Kristin, 131 Uratani, Toshirō, 143
3-D, 116, 119 Utagawa, Kuniyoshi, 152–153
three-point lighting: Casablanca,
34–35; Catch a Thief, To, 72; Venice International Film Festival,
Cat People, 33–34, 35, 37–38, 114, 124
43, 51–52; Female Genealogy, vernacular modernism, 145–146
107; Hollywood trend, 36–37; vertical editing, 72
Samurai Cat, 150; seamlessness Vest, James M., 60
of, 131 VHS, 2
time-lag (décalage), 2 video games, 2
To Catch a Thief: backstory, 55–57; videos, 3, 4, 114, 158
the chase, 57–60, 63–67, 69–70; Vienna, 79, 86, 90, 91
editing, 57–65, 67–70, 71–72, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative
74–75; fireworks, 73–75; the Cinema”, 62
gaze, 61–63, 64, 67–70; intel- von Sternberg, See Sternberg,
lectual montage, 70–75; “the Josef von
Cat,” 55, 56, 75–76 von Stroheim, Erich, See Stroheim,
Tōei Kyoto Cinema Village, 144 Erich von
Tōei Studios, 114
Tōhō, 103, 104, 108 Water Magician, The (Taki no shiraito),
Tojuro’s Love (Tōjurō no koi), 103, 103, 104
104, 106, 108 Weiss, Andrea, 84
tonal editing, 72 What is cinema?, 1
Tourneur, Jacques, 30–31, 38, 49 Wild Geese, The (Gan), 95
Toyoda, Shirō, 95–96 Wolf Man, The, 30
Truffaut, François, 91–92, 153 Woman in the Window, The, 98
Tsuruhachi Tsurujirō, 104 “Womanliness as a Masquerade”,
TV (television), 3, 122, 136, 149, 87
155 World of Susie Wong, The, 28
 Index 185

World War, II, 97–98, 100, 123, 124, Yamamoto, Kajirō, 103
130, 145, 160 Yojimbo (Yōjimbō), 141
Wyckoff, Alvin, 35–36 Yoshimura, Kōzaburō, 4
YouTube, 3
Yabushita, Taiji, 114
Yamada, Isuzu, 95, 99–100, 103, Zoku onna keizu, 106
104–106, 108, 111 Zwei Krawatten, 90
 About the Author

Daisuke Miyao is professor and Hajime Mori Chair in Japanese Language

and Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Miyao is the author
of The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema and Sessue Hayakawa:
Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom. He also edited the Oxford Handbook
of Japanese Cinema and coedited Transnational Cinematography Studies with
Lindsay Coleman and Roberto Schaefer, ASC.