Deleuze, Japanese Cinema, and the Atom Bomb

The Spectre of Impossibility

David Deamer

• Editore: Bloomsbury Academic
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781441145895
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Categoria: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

David Deamer establishes the first ever sustained encounter between Gilles Deleuze's Cinema books and post-war Japanese cinema, exploring how Japanese films responded to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From the early days of occupation political censorship to the social and cultural freedoms of the 1960s and beyond, the book examines how images of the nuclear event appear in post-war Japanese cinema. Each chapter begins by focusing upon one or more of three key Deleuzian themes – image, history and thought – before going on to look at a selection of films from 1945 to the present day. These include movies by well-known directors Kurosawa Akira, Shindo Kaneto, Oshima Nagisa and Imamura Shohei; popular and cult classics – Godzilla (1954), Akira (1988) and Tetsuo (1989); contemporary genre flicks – Ring (1998), Dead or Alive (1999) and Casshern (2004); the avant-garde and rarely seen documentaries. The author provides a series of tables to clarify the conceptual components deployed within the text, establishing a unique addition to Deleuze and cinema studies.

1

Special Images, Contingent Centres

The special image or contingent centre is nothing but an assemblage of three images, a consolidate of perception-images, action-images and affection-images.¹

Movement-images

Each atom bomb film overcomes the spectre of impossibility in its own way; each, in its own way, creates a singular encounter with the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This chapter explores this proposal by focusing upon some of the earliest films of Japan’s post-war and post-occupation nuclear cinema. Each film will be considered in relation to Deleuze’s movement-image, which describes a cinematic nexus of perception, affect and action. These three avatars of the movement-image dominate in different types of the earliest atom bomb films: documentary, contemporary drama and monster movies. Accordingly, each film creates its own contingent centre, its own special image of the pika and hibakusha.

Shot in 1945, the very first Japanese film of the nuclear holocaust was Ito Sueo’s documentary The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1946). Cameras capture, with scientific precision, scenes from the immediate aftermath of the pika, devastated city ruins devoid of life, hibakusha receiving treatment in makeshift hospitals. Shindo Kaneto’s Children of the Atom Bomb (1952) is an elegiac melodrama, creating an emotional response to the atomic attack. Produced soon after the end of the occupation, Shindo’s focus is a kindergarten teacher returning to Hiroshima to find out what happened to the young children once in her charge. Very different again is Honda Ishiro’s Godzilla (1954), the first Japanese atom bomb movie to snare the imagination of a mass audience. Godzilla signals, for the Japanese screen, the move from direct expressions of the nuclear event (as in Effects and Children) to indirect depictions. In this way, the atomic nightmare is not just experienced, not just survived, but resolved. Furthermore, the logic of the film permits the monster to return: rise (and fall) again and again; to enter into monster mêlées with other imaginary beasts sequel after sequel throughout the years that follow.

These very different early Japanese atom bomb films will each be explored through one of the three primary co-ordinates of Deleuze’s movement-image: perception-images, affection-images and action-images. Perception-images describe the creation of a special image, a contingent centre (usually, though not necessarily, a character) and its concomitant relation to all other images in the film. Affection-images channel emotion through and around this special image, on a face, across an object or within the mise-en-scène. Action-images describe the way in which this contingent centre defines or is derived from a determined situation and how that situation can be reconfigured by acts of individuals. In using these three co-ordinates of the movement-image, each film will be seen to create its own special image of the pika and the hibakusha – centres contingent upon the mode in which each film operates. Ito’s Effects is dominated by images of pure perception organized around the pika, science-images of the devastated cities and surviving hibakusha. Accordingly, the film will be explored from the perspective of the perception-image. Shindo’s Children of the Atom Bomb focuses upon the experiences and emotions of a central character and will be explored from the perspective of the affection-image. Honda’s Godzilla allows characters to act upon the indirectly determined situation of the nuclear event; in consequence, this film will be explored from the perspective of the action-image.

The aim of each of these engagements is primarily twofold. The first objective is to foreground, through perception-, affection- and action-images, the diversity of the films describing the nuclear event of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – the assertion being that the Japanese cinema has responded to the atomic bomb in any number of different ways, and that these films constitute a heterogeneous assemblage. The second aim, parallel to and generative of the first, is to explore the difference in-itself of each of the films. In other words, each film in-itself is also – before being dominated by a single type of image – an assemblage of types. Not only does this difference in-itself of a film account for variations in previous critical responses, but it also allows for the production of new perspectives. These new perspectives should not be considered the truth of the film, ultimately revealed, never to be surpassed. Rather, they could be seen as another variation: a twist here, a reversal there, the extension or reworking of an idea – a resolute seizing or desperate grab at something just within or beyond reach. In this way, this first chapter lays the groundwork for the rest of the book, where such cinematic encounters with the special images of the atom bomb will be explored through different philosophies of history and thought.

In order to begin this exploration of the heterogeneous assemblage of films that compose the Japanese cinema of the atom bomb, it will first be necessary to enunciate in detail the fundamental co-ordinates of the movement-image. Accordingly, this chapter will commence with an account of the sensory-motor process of Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory (1896) from which arise the concepts of perception, affect and action.

Bergson, sensory-motor process

Images are matter. ‘The word’, writes Bergson ‘is of no importance.’² Yet in reconceptualizing matter as image, Bergson reconceives the relationship between the forces external to an organic body and the forces internal to that body as being of one and the same kind: ‘we consider matter before the dissociation which idealism and realism have brought about between its existence and appearance.’³ The image, then, is both the thing and the representation, the extension of the thing into representation and representation into the thing: ‘by “image” we mean a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing – an existence placed halfway between the “thing” and the “representation”.’⁴ Everything that is matter is an image, this atom, this cell, this organ, this body, this environment. Bergson is describing a universe of scale, a fractal universe of recursive images: ‘every image is within certain images and without others.’⁵ A universe where at and between every level all images are a centre that act upon each other and have a force between one another to a varying degree. All images are forces operating at scale and distance. At different scales, some images aggregate, construct centripetal consistency: a molecule here, a body there, here a planet, there a solar system: contingent centres, special images. In this way every image is always a multiplicity, is always composite and, at one and the same time, has integrity – and again, is a component in a vaster image.

The human body, for instance, is an assemblage of component images at a number of levels, atoms, molecules, cells, organs. It has a globalizing integrity, a whole body defined by its wrap of skin – yet it is also in an environment, fed by light, oxygen, water, food; and expelling waste. Zoom in, it is all just forces of molecules continuous with the molecules that surround it, distant moments in empty spaces. Zoom out, the body is but one of millions upon millions; ants on an anthill, swarming over the face of the Earth. For Bergson, the logic which proceeds from these observations means that from every perspective, everything is an assemblage of images interacting with other assemblages of images.

Images, then, capture both inorganic and organic life, which at the molecular level is composed of forces. Some images pass through other images; some images are reflected by other images, giving a certain consistency, that is, creating ‘outlines’.⁶ It is here that the relationship between images and perception is announced.

Perceptions are images acting upon other images. At the simplest level, these perceptions are collisions. If we introduce sensory receptors in organic life we find that in visual perception light waves collide with, say, a light-receiving device: the retina. The concept of perception as a collision impacts upon hastily formed notions of the difference between the senses. A visual perception is not different in kind from that of, say, tactile, olfactory or sound perception: all are collisions. ‘If we follow, step by step, the progress of external perception from the monera to the higher vertebrates,’ writes Bergson, ‘we find that living matter, even as simple as a protoplasm … is open to the influence of external stimulation, and answers to it by mechanical, physical and chemical reactions.’⁷ These influences are reactions, at the most basic simple reflections and an exchange of forces. However ‘as we rise in the organic series, we find a division of physiological labour. Nerve cells appear, are diversified, tend to group themselves into a system’; there is thus only a ‘difference of complication’ between the monadic cellular animals and the multifaceted life forms.⁸ In other words, actions are only possible because of the sensory input of a perception, but these actions can become more diverse in more complex life due to the intensive forces at play within the organism, which form ‘centres of indetermination’ where ‘the degree of this indetermination is measured by the number and rank of their functions’.⁹ These intensive forces are affects and are, in effect, engendered by perception. The crux being this: that the interval between a perception and an affect and an action can be of a variable length of time: instantaneous or emerging after a prolonged period. For Bergson, ‘I find that [affects] always interpose themselves between the excitations that I receive from without and the movements which I am about to execute’.¹⁰ Variable affect hands back perception to the world as action.

The body, then, is an image mapping a dynamic of extensive and intensive forces. The body is an image that distributes outside (extensive) disturbances through the body (as intensive turbulence) to component parts of the body to bring forth an (extensive) reaction. The body is situated in the world, and the world image is a component of the universe which in turn contains a multitude of images, of which one is the human-qua-itself, and so on. This is the sensory-motor schema. In its finitude, the sensory-motor schema is movement. Extensive movement received → intensive movement of sensory data, dissipated or directed → the emission of extensive movement.¹¹ A movement of images as perception → affect → action: an organic process.

Cineosis and cinema

One of the most memorable moments in Japanese – and world – cinema is the first appearance of Godzilla. Aging palaeontologist Dr Yamane (Takashi Shimura) is leading a scientific search party from Tokyo through the interior of Odo Island in the wake of the (yet unseen) monster’s devastating attack. Three images describe the power of the encounter: framed in a long shot, standing in for the collective sight of the...