A Companion to Documentary Film History. Группа авторов
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Haniya Yutaka, Abe Kōbō, Yoshimoto Takaaki, and Matsumoto Toshio. As a result, some scholars have seen him as marking a significant rupture not only between wartime and postwar critical discourse, but also between traditional, studio‐based commercial filmmaking and the more independent‐leaning Japanese New Wave of the 1960s (Sakamoto 2011: 57–68). It is true that Hanada remained relatively unknown as a critic until the end of the war, but we should remember that he also belonged to the same generation as the two critics discussed above, and that his intellectual formation dates to the 1930s and the early 40s. During this period of obscurity, Hanada was diligently writing a series of essays on what he called “the spirit of the transformative period” (tenkeiki no seishin), pieces that interpreted how the major European figures in art and science – Dante, Leonardo, Copernicus, Swift, Villon, and so on – articulated their experience of the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, or to the modern period of the Enlightenment (Hanada 1977 [1946]). When these essays were published in book form in 1946, many contemporary readers welcomed them as an opportune guide to their own survival of the crisis of (Japanese) modernity. And yet especially remarkable from today's perspective are the rigor and boldness of Hanada's method of creative interpretation, which he elaborated through his wide range of knowledge of Marxism, the Kyoto School of philosophy (Kyoto gakuha), Continental philosophy (from Plato to Hegel to existentialism), and many other contemporary literary and art movements that, perhaps surprisingly, he was able to access and contemplate on during the war. If Hanada's reconceptualization of documentary appears radically new and different, it was not because of his generational gap from the other two critics, but due rather to the critical distance he had from the relatively small world of Japanese film criticism, as well as to his wide reading in modern and contemporary thought.
This is, however, not to say that Hanada lacked interest in film in his early career. Although his first essay on film did not appear until October 1951, he had been paying constant attention to both domestic and international currents in critical discourse on this medium. In fact, it was Hanada who took the lead in reassessing the enduring relevance of Imamura's film theory in the postwar era. Not only did he help republish Imamura's Theory of Animated Film in 1948 from his own publishing house Shinzenbisha, he also contributed a favorable preface to the 1950 reprint of Imamura's first book The Form of Film Art: “Although there are so many film critics around us, only a few can think things cinematically. If [the poet] Nishiwaki Junzaburō's so‐called ‘kaigateki shikō’ [pictorial thinking] was peculiar to Surrealists of the past, one could say that Imamura Taihei's ‘eigateki shikō’ [cinematic thinking] stands at the forefront of our times” (Hanada 1950: 1). There is no doubt that Imamura's influence on Hanada was profound at the beginning – for instance, Hanada's first book on cinema was precisely titled Cinematic Thinking (Eigateki shikō) (Hanada 1978 [1958c]) – but Hanada's assessment of Imamura gradually went sour as he developed his own documentary theory. Indeed, after reading the aforementioned debate between Imamura and Iwasaki, Hanada dismissed both critics as “the typical prewar figures who had finished forming their thoughts in the 1930s” (Hanada 1978 [1956]: 208). In his view, while Iwasaki fell completely behind the times due to his old‐fashioned humanism, Imamura was also problematic in his naïve treatment of the fact as a self‐evident truth.
Hanada's criticism of Imamura and other fellow Japanese critics became more apparent in his meta‐commentaries on the hitherto local interpretation of Rotha's documentary theory. According to Hanada, the problem with Imamura's reading of Rotha is that he was never seriously concerned with the conceptual distinction between reality and actuality. Given his treatment of these opposing terms with the same single Japanese word genjitsu, the reader is likely to get confused because it is not clear at all whether what he meant by it was the idealist “essence” of a universal truth or the materialist “existence” of an external being. Moreover, Imamura's overemphasis on the fact as a transcendent category would likely diminish the possibility of our active and conscious commitment to the self‐transformation of the world in motion. On this point, Tsumura was more careful with his argument on the categorical difference between reality/Realität and actuality/Wirklichkeit. Yet again, Hanada argues, Tsumura was no less problematic for his dualistic thinking that reality and actuality are completely separable from each other, and that one could even achieve the general truth of reality without stepping into the hustle and bustle of actuality. And precisely because this schematic dyad between reality and actuality, between fiction and nonfiction, and between essence and phenomenon was a common feature of previous Japanese debates on documentary, Hanada asks his readers to revisit Rotha once again:
I don't need to restate here the self‐evident axiom that the “truth” is nothing more than a relative and historically determined concept. As Paul Rotha tells us, I think we must start our work by addressing the raw and vivid problems our external reality [genjitsu] presents us, from the standpoint of what he called “the creative dramatization of actuality” [actuaritī].
(Hanada 1977 [1954a]: 244)
It goes without saying that Hanada, in writing this statement, did not intend to provide a more accurate reading of Rotha's original text. Rather, he only used Rotha as a foothold for the exhibition of his own documentary theory. Let us look first at how he considers the significance of the term actuality used in Rotha's call for “the creative dramatization of actuality.” Unlike Tsumura, Hanada does not underrate actuality but instead treats it as an indispensable means of reaching reality, which he thinks of as a mysterious, uncanny, and even unknowable entity, almost equivalent to “the thing‐in‐itself” in Kantian philosophy. To foreground the relevance of actuality as the main subject of film practice in his times, Hanada argues that this term can also be replaced with “contingency” (gūzensei) in part following Imamura's claim that “the aim of documentary film is to reveal the necessity among the contingent” (Hanada 1978 [1957]: 367). Here, however, it is also possible to presume that Hanada's equation of the actual and the contingent came from Hegel, who defined contingency as the immediate, external appearance of actuality, or “the shape in which actuality first presents itself to consciousness” (Hegel 1991 [1830]: 218). But if Hegel, as an Idealist philosopher, was rather critical of contingency for its indeterminate, transformative, and inessential nature, Hanada finds more values in exactly what Hegel has negated. In other words, his main motivation is to establish a documentary theory that hinges on those miscellaneous and ever‐changing phenomena that appear and exist for our experience alone. In this regard Hanada maintains that actuality/contingency can also be seen as equivalent to existence (jitsuzon), having some unmistakable resonance with Sartre's famous motto “existence precedes essence” (Hanada 1978 [1957]: 368). Consequently, what becomes important for Hanada's existentialist standpoint is “to pay more attention to individual ‘objects’ as such than to the ‘essence’ or ‘universal meaning’ ” (Hanada 1978 [1957]: 373).
Hanada further explicates the significance of actuality in his documentary theory by comparing it with two other modalities of empirical thinking discussed in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason – necessity (hitsuzensei) and possibility (kanōsei). According to Hanada, each of these modalities represents three different moments in temporality, namely, the past (necessity), the present (actuality), and the future (possibility). And it is on this formula that one could understand – or rather, “experience” – the ontological meaning of reality in temporary terms, because, he says, “‘reality’ is that which sublates in itself both the necessity of the ‘past’ and the possibility of the ‘future’ by taking a lead from the contingency of the ‘present’ ” (Hanada 1978 [1957]: 367). Hanada himself admits that this triadic formula itself is too Hegelian, but it still helps us know how he tries to give shape, in a purely dialectical manner, to the basic structure of the world surrounding us and the multiple roles film plays in it (Sasaki et al. 1956: 151). To provide a clear exposition of Hanada's rather complicated argument, I would like to explain it using the following interpretive diagram (Figure 3.2):