Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space by Bean Jennifer M. Horak Laura Kapse Anupama

Author:Bean, Jennifer M., Horak, Laura, Kapse, Anupama
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 6.2 Asakusa’s moving picture district in 1910, showing the garish banners and ornate facades of the Taishōkan and the Sekaikan. Photo courtesy of the National Diet Library website.

In the Tokyo asahi’s vision, conditions of reception were not completely to blame for undermining spectators’ processes of reason: moving picture audiences were somehow different from the start. Why, after all, would any normal human being tolerate time and time again the inherently “insecure and unpleasant,” the physically damaging conditions of the theater as movie fans did? Implied in the paper’s account was a cinema audience almost abnormal in character, made up of fans who possessed addictive personalities that forced them to become “prisoners” of the unpleasant as a perverse necessity. As a whole, the paper characterized movie audiences in less than complimentary terms, stating that those “sucked into this Zigomar” were “like ants swarming around a piece of sweet sugar.”61 With the Asahi claiming that “sensible-minded people would undoubtedly frown upon this fashion for crime films within the moving picture theaters,”62 the paper was distancing itself from regular filmgoers, placing them on a lower rung in a hierarchy of right-mindedness and siding itself (and its readers) with the “sensible,” who refrained from the mob-like behavior of the movie masses. Reflecting a fear of the modern crowd common in later Japanese intellectual descriptions of mass culture, the discourse established an “us” versus “them” division that defined the medium in class-based terms and placed cinema spectatorship outside the boundaries of right-minded behavior. It was cinema’s influence on this other set of people that was of central concern.

A description of the composition of the film audience served in part to justify this hierarchy. According to the Tokyo asahi, “the grand majority of the audience is young boys and girls of lower or middle school age,”63 and such future leaders of society were seemingly vulnerable to the motion pictures’ authority.

With these scenes and props, the film first leads the audience into a field of realistic impression and there shows, putting into motion, various evil deeds. Even adult audiences with good sense and judgment are so impressed they call it “an interesting novelty that works well.” The film naturally offers even more intense excitement in the minds of the young, who like both adventure and strong individuals, and who idealize the winner in any situation.

For instance, even if the conclusion results in the death of the villain, just how much does the moral point of view indicated by the death of the villain transmit an authoritative impression to the minds of the young living in today’s society? Most of them will only see the success of the elusive onscreen hero, and think in the end how they would like to become a figure onscreen themselves, to act and appear as if on film.64

On the one hand, it was believed that children (and other lesser spectators, such as women) did not possess the discernment necessary to both properly read the film’s ending and ward off the pernicious

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