calls the “cinema of facts” (jijitsu no eiga) – must be placed higher than geki eiga – or the “cinema of fiction” (kakū no eiga) – in the historical development of film practice (Imamura 1957: 137). As expected, Rotha's documentary theory is evaluated only in this light; although Rotha clearly differentiated his conception of documentary from the descriptive and objective treatment of the facts found in newsreels or educational films, Imamura tactically interprets him as someone who “paid attention to the film's recording ability and came to believe that the real beauty lies only in the documentation of the fact” (Imamura 1952: 154).
Another, and perhaps most telling, characteristic of Imamura's documentary theory is his tireless effort to make generic distinctions between fiction and nonfiction films, and, ultimately, to defend the latter as a superior form of film practice. Like Tsumura's argument on the philosophical distinction between reality/fiction and actuality/documentary, Imamura's formula appears to be somewhat schematic, but with a different emphasis. In fiction film, Imamura argues, all aesthetic efforts are made “to exhibit the necessity [hitsuzen] as the contingent [gūzen],” whereas documentary film aspires “to reveal the necessity among the contingent” (Imamura 1955: 107). Imamura tries to prove the legitimacy of his formula by connecting it to recent trends in postwar film culture. After its long, indulgent tenure in the dream‐like world of fiction, he says, cinema is now consciously beginning to recuperate its social function through different uses of the medium, as represented by the recent upsurge of the so‐called “semi‐documentary” films such as Roberto Rossellini's Paisan (Paisà, 1946), René Clément's The Damned (Les maudits, 1947), and Jules Dassin's The Naked City (1948). One the one hand, this ongoing move toward a more concrete and down‐to‐earth filmic representation/documentation of the actual world outside the studio is a necessary result of the catastrophic destruction of reality as such brought about by the world war, for contemporary audiences “are eager to see in the movies not melodramas but vivid reflections of their own life due to radical changes in their living conditions” (Imamura 1955: 113). One the other hand, the continuous development and increasing availability of recording devices (e.g. small‐gauge cameras and cheaper film stocks) through mass production promises progress toward the perfect realization of what Béla Balázs once called the period of “visual culture.” In this period, he argues, individuals would no longer remain in the position of mere passive receivers segregated by language barriers but would begin to directly communicate with each other by becoming witnesses, reporters, and even protagonists of ongoing historical events. According to Imamura, a new and promising form of film art should arise from this “vernacularization of cinema” (eiga no nichijōka) as a personal mobile tool for the documentation of the everyday (Imamura 1955: 114).
Aside from its prophetic tones, Imamura's documentary theory is problematic for its uncritical determinism. He argues that documentary must differ from fiction in its exclusive focus on the facts, and that the filmic documentation of those factual events (both historical and mechanical) would almost automatically attain both perceptual and epistemological credibility due to its “photographic objectivity” (shashinteki kyakkansei). But this statement immediately raises a question: What if either governmental powers or individual filmmakers appropriate such a strong “reality‐effect” generated by the cinematic apparatus to cover up their malicious will to manipulate the viewer's world‐view? To be more precise, hasn't the term fact in its philosophical sense been always relative and not absolute, radically changing its value and meaning according to the particular set of each receiver's empirical perception, preexisting knowledge, and sociocultural background? Similarly, one could take issue with Imamura's argument on contingency and necessity. As a sympathizer of socialism, Imamura may well have said that every necessary step to be taken in modern history had always been indicated in the success and progress of the Soviet Union. And in fact, he writes, “it is socialist society that has unraveled more significance in documentary than in fiction film. Having started with documentary film, Soviet/Russian film created a method of fiction film based on the documentary method” (Imamura 1955: 115). Nevertheless, we should also be aware that this sort of political posture is always relative and changeable over time; in a series of essays he published during the war, Imamura repeatedly expressed his view that the liberation of film practice from the hands of capitalists could only be possible under total state control of the film industry, a model that, in his view, had been most completely accomplished in Nazi Germany. When asked in the postwar years about his past appraisal of Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia (1938), Imamura had little choice but to depoliticize his standpoint:
It is, as it cannot be denied, the Nazis Government that produced this film, but what it expressed to us was not the government's will; it was rather the international, humanistic, and peaceful sprit of the Olympics. This was a film that foiled Nazis' trap. And it was possible only because it was a documentary.
(Imamura 1957: 135)
If the revelation of such a “respectful” or even “universal” mission in the modern Olympics speaks to Imamura's belief in documentary's power to present what he considered to be a “fact,” this “fact” tells us nothing about the reality of the world system around 1938, in which so many countries and peoples were ruthlessly exploited and suppressed by colonial powers, including Japan itself. In this sense, Imamura's theorization of documentary as the “cinema of fact” is useful, at best, to technological determinists, and, at worst, to political conformists, given its lack of concern about the role of the viewer, or about the actual condition under which we see and admit the factuality of given film texts.
In its own context, Imamura's adamant promotion of documentary as a superior form of film practice also led to a famous debate called kiroku eiga ronsō in 1956–1957. The debate originated in Imamura's aggressive – indeed, offensive – review of another Marxist film critic Iwasaki Akira's 1956 book Film Theory (Eiga no riron). Imamura reproached this book for Iwasaki's complete ignorance of documentary as a legitimate genre within film theory, and for his alleged plagiarism from Imamura's own previous book Introduction to Film Theory. In response Iwasaki wrote a lengthy refutation which can be summarized as follows: (1) Imamura is a “dogmatic documentarist” (kiroku eiga shijō shugisha) who never admits the value of fiction film; (2) Imamura's focus on the photographic nature of the film medium leads only to an animism of the camera‐eye, or to the formalistic equalization of realism and mechanical recordings of the events; and (3) there is no substantial difference between fiction and documentary because in both instances what really matters should always be the filmmaker's creative and conscious treatment of the subject matter as such (Iwasaki 1957: 32–49).
Twenty years after its publication, one cannot not help but see Tsumura's initial counter‐argument against Rotha make a full circle here. Of course, Imamura tried to dispel Iwasaki's polemical criticism by clarifying his standpoint further, but the result was far from fruitful (Imamura 1957: 199–226). The reason for Imamura's failure, I contend, rested not so much in his promotion of documentary's own legitimacy as in his inability to overcome the conventional dichotomy between fiction and nonfiction. Despite his Marxist leanings, Imamura's documentary theory, as one critic points out, is modeled not after dialectical meterialism but after August Comte's positivist theory of evolution that, when applied to film theory, delineates a highly teleological course of progress from the mechanical reproduction of the theater to the development of fiction story‐telling, and finally to the dominance of nonfiction or documentary film (Nakamura cited in Sugiyama 1990: 184). In this irreversible line of thought, it is technically impossible to address the mutual transformation of fiction and nonfiction genres which was in effect taking place in postwar cinema, because with it Imamura tended solely to pin down and compare the static modes of being – and not of becoming – they had already developed in the 1920s and 1930s. In retrospect, the déjà vu‐like appearance of the Iwasaki‐Imamura debate in the late 1950s clearly marked the impasse of the traditional Japanese discourse on documentary, and, as is must be clear by now, it is against this particular discursive backdrop that Hanada Kiyoteru made his theoretical intervention.
Sur‐documentary:
