Cinema Is A Cat A Cat Lovers Introduction To Film Studies 9780824881344 - Compress
Cinema Is A Cat A Cat Lovers Introduction To Film Studies 9780824881344 - Compress
Cinema Is a Cat
A Cat Lover’s Introduction
to Film Studies
Daisuke Miyao
Acknowledgments ix
vii
viii CONTENTS
Glossary 163
Filmography 167
References 171
Index 177
Acknowledgments
ix
PROLOGUE
Cinema Is a Cat
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
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
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
9
10 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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,
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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,
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
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
“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
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
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
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
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.
Irena spots Oliver and Alice, and her eye is fired by jealousy.
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.
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
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?”
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.
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
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
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
55
56 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA
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
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.
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.
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 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
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
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
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.
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
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.
Fireworks begin.
74 THE LANGUAGES OF CINEMA
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:
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
79
80 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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:
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
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
112
National Cinema and Anime in Jungle Emperor Leo 113
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
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 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
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.
(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.
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.
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
129
130 THEORIES AND HISTORIES OF CINEMA
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:
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
154
History in The Cats of Mirikitani 155
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.
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.
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.
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
167
168 Filmography
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
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Index
177
178 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
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
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