Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema by Daisuke Miyao (review)

Abstract

Early Japanese cinema is a notoriously challenging period for film historians, because so few prints and production documents survived the geological and geopolitical crises of the twentieth century. Daisuke Miyao has provided some valuable insights into this period by approaching it from the angle of the French connection, particularly the Lumière brothers and their well-travelled emissaries, as well as the vogue for all things Japanese that swept the West at the turn of the century. The term Japonisme may refer to the influence of Japanese aesthetics on European art from the 1860s through to the early twentieth century, but Miyao expands its scope to include the ways that Japanese culture was in turn affected by the French “Orientalist” view of Japan. Japonisme thus becomes “a nodal point in a transmedial network” (5). The key term that Miyao uses to explain the influence of Japanese aesthetics on the Lumière brothers’ films is à traverse cinema, which translates literally as “to cross” or perhaps “cinema that crosses.” A prime example is on the cover of the book: the steel bars of the Eiffel Tower framing and crossing a long view of the Palais du Trocadéro, a monumental building fronted by an equally monumental terrace. This foreground/background composition in which two different viewpoints, or focal distances of far and close, are effectively layered is offered as exemplary of Japonisme. As a frame enlargement, the image does not capture the movement of the elevator on which the camera was positioned, and the term à traverse is, for Miyao, a strictly compositional concept, although he will eventually link it to “phantom ride” cinema. Oddly, the term à traverse is not used for the cultural exchange between France and Japan; nor is the significance of the Trocadéro in French ethnography and orientalism considered in the analysis of this image. Using illustrations of woodblock prints by Hiroshige and Hokusai, compared to frame enlargements from a wide range of Lumière actualités, Miyao draws comparisons between the compositional principles of multi-planar perspective. He argues, via Japanese and Western art historians, that the technique entered Japan in the eighteenth century as a means of creating perspective. Influenced by Western arts of mimetic realism, Japanese artists created their own “physiological realism,” delivering heterogeneous spaces within a single frame. Impressionists such as Monet then adapted that technique back into Western