Quar. Rn\ of Film & Video, Vol.

12(3), p p 9-19 Reprints available directly from Ihe publisher Photocopying permitted by license only

1990 Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Printed in the United States of America

The Phenomenology of Japanese Cinema: A Husserlian Intervention in the Theory of Cinematic Representation
Allan Casebier

Given Edmund Husserl's enormous influence on the development of phenomenology, any discussion of a productive relationship between phenomenology and film theory ought to involve a consideration of how his phenomenoiogical system could be utilized to model the film experience. In what follows, an explication will be given of Husserl's account of representation in general, together with an indication of how his theory would, mutatis mutandis, be applied to the phenomenon of cinematic representation. As will become apparent, many of the essential elements of the Husserlian system come into play in accounting for the specificity of cinematic representation. Currently another paradigm, that of post-structuralism, dominates thinking within the field of film theory about the nature of cinematic representation. The post-structuralist modeling of filmic representation differs markedly from the modeling which results from applying a Husserlian conceptual framework to the task of conceptualizing the experience wherein spectators grasp what a motion picture depicts and portrays. In order to focus the issue between post-structuralism and phenomenology, it will be useful to juxtapose the views of a leading post-structuralist author, Noel Burch, with the Husseriian approach to representation. Burch's writing about the Japanese cinema has a central place in current thinking about a most important
filmic tradition. In his To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in tlie Japanese

Cinema,' Burch utilizes a post-structuraiist framework for analyzing the film work of Akira Kurosawa, among others. In the following pages, this Burchean analysis of Kurosawa will be juxtaposed with Husserlian analysis of representation in the same body of work. Out of this juxtaposition should arise the basic elements involved in any adequate theory of cinematic representation. A Husserlian analysis of cinematic representation wil! constitute a significant intervention in film theory because the post-structuralist account of cinematic depiction and portrayal has thus far gone largely unchallenged. Husserl's notions about artistic representation are contained in section 111 of Ideas.^ For Husserl, the perceptual act in which spectators grasp what a picture
ALLAN CASCBIKR possesses a PhD in Philosophy ami is Associate Professor at The School of Ciitetria-felei'ision at use. He is completing a book entitled Film and Phenomenology, to be published by Cambridge University Press in Winter, 1991.

10 A. Casebier

Figure 1.

Edmund Husserl.

depicts or portrays involves intentionality.^ The Latin root term for intentionality is intentio, meaning a stretching out to or extending toward something. Husserl contends that consciousness is always intentional; by this claim he means that consciousness is always consciousness 0/something. The implication is that perceivers transcend their perceptual act in grasping the objects of their perception; the object of perception is, therefore, not contained within the act of perception but has an existence wholly independent of the act. For Burch, the absence of intentionality is at the heart of his post-structuralist analysis. In Burch's schema, perceivers have ideas (i.e., perception is consciousness of ideas which exist only in the mind); perception does not consist in grasping objects which exist independent of the mental act. According to this view, when we experience a film such as Kurosawa's The Seven Satnurai, we are perceiving only a series of images (and sounds). Out of this set of images, spectators construct the objects depicted and portrayed in the filmSamurai warriors, bandits, villagers.

Phenomenology of Japanese Cinema 11

Kikuchiyo the warrior, village, countryside, etc. This construction is ostensibly accomplished via codes deriving from cultural and cinematic sources. As Burch puts it, "The spatio-temporal audio-visual continuum which we call a motion picture . . . may be regarded as a flux/field of signs."'' He continues by delineating the nature of these signs:
. . . the sign has two aspects, significr and signified . . . The signifier is the sign in its materiality; it may be a pictorial clement . . . or a set of sounds . . . we may say that all substances of expression are ultimately visual or auditory, they may be transposed to film in either pictorial or auditory representation (i.e., codes of clothing).^

He then enunciates the relativity of representation: "A referent is 'that which refers a linguistic sign to extra-linguistic reality as it has been articulated by a human group.'"'' Burch has already explained that; "The signified is the concept . . . which, denotatively or connotatively is signified. The signified is not the referent."^ Burch distinguishes the material with which the perceiver deals in literature versus film: "In the cinema, of course, the sign/referent relationship is clearly very different from what it is in a written text, since we are dealing with an audio-visual facsimile of the referent."" In the section on Ozu, Burch then describes how the spectator constructs the space from the images, in short, how an act of "reading" is required.*^ He contrasts the way in which the Western mode of filmic construction fosters an audience's sense that they are an invisible relay'" in a conversation among characters portrayed across cuts; by contrast, Ozu arranges his images so as to undermine this deeply entrenched habit of organizing the images.

figure 2.

The Seven Samurai.

12 A. Casebier

Husserl finds no such construction process occurring. In explaining the experience in which spectators perceive what a picture represents, Husserl uses an illustration, Durer's "Knight, Death, and the Devil" (Fig. 3). Husser! contends that perceivers transcend the mental acts involved in experiencing the engraving; in doing so they reach the depicted objects (e.g., the flesh and blood knight). He expresses it this way:
. . . we distinguish the perceptive consciousness in which, within the black, colorless lines, thereappear tous the figuresof the'knight on his horse,' 'death,' and the 'devil.' We do not advert to these In aesthetic contemplation as objects. We rather advert to the realities presented 'in the picture'more precisely stated, to the 'depictured' realities, to the flesh and blood knight, etc." In reaching the flesh and blood knight, spectators experience the little figures discernible within the picture space (Husserl calls them figurettes); experience of

Figure 3.

Durer, "Knight, Death, and the Devil."

Phenomenologi/ of Japanese Cinema 13

the figurettes guides perception to the knight, death, and the devil. For Husserl, consciousness of the small grey figurettes is consciousness of the picture; through experience of them and by means of what he calls "founded noesis"^^ something other, through similarity, "presents itself as depicted," namely, the knight. Central to this phenomenoiogical account of representation is Husserl's use of the traditional concept of apperception.'^ By apperceived, Husserl means that the images, the signs, that Burcb refers to (shapes, size relationships, color relations, directions, etc.), are "lived through," not made the objects of experience. They are "passed through" in grasping the flesh and blood knight; they are not focused upon as the objects of perception. It is, of course, possible to make a spatial relationship in a film the object of perception, but this has nothing to do with the experience wherein we realize what a motion picture depicts; in such latter cases, we pass through the sensa (subjective images, rather than objective objects) to grasp an independently existing entity, such as the flesh and blood knight. Grasping the representational content of the engraving is taken to be very much like normal perception. There is, however, a difference. Spectators engage in two acts at the same time while grasping what the picture represents: they eventually move through the sensa to the actual object of the perception, and their act of perception has neutrality-modification as a crucial feature. Normal perception has as its object, say in the case of the Durer engraving, the physical thing, tbe engraved print. Husserl wants to point out that consciousness of the picture as having a depiction involves an alteration of the perceptual act; "This depicting picture object stands before us, neither as being nor as non-being nor in any positional modality."'** Husserl's point is that in normal perception the perceiver posits the appearing physical thing as actually existing. However, in the case of the neutralitymodification of normal perception, this process is suspended. Husserl describes the differences as follows; The actuality of positing factual existence is . . . neutralized in perceptual picture consciousness. Adverted to the 'picture' (not to tbe de-pictured), we do not seize upon anything actual as object, but instead precisely a picture, a fictum, 'Seizing-upon' has the actuality pertaining to advertence, but it is not 'actual' seizing-upon . . A^ Husserl's theory may then be regarded as a critical realist one involving a complex set of acts of mediation. This mediation is very different from that assumed by a post-structuralist such as Burch. For Husser!, appreciators engage in multiple acts of apperception as part of the whole perceptual process which has as its object an independently existing object (e.g., the flesh and blood knight). First, they apperceive sensa and images, then they apperceive appearances (the figurettes in the Durer example). On the basis of these two mediations, which arise together with the perception of the flesh and blood knight as what is depicted by the picture, the act of intending what the picture depicts is accomplished. Husserl described the relationship between these apperceptions and tbe perceptual act as one involving "founding." When an act is founded, it is an act which essentially involves consciousness of another act.''' A basic difference between the Burchean approach to representation and the Husserlian alternative may be pinpointed with respect to the locus of apprehension. For Husserl, spectators who grasp what a picture represents do so using

14 A. Casebier

intuition. When we intuit, we directly apprehend. We do not, for example, infer that an object is yellow; we directly apprehend that it is, utilizing intuition. In recognizing what the Durer engraving depicts, we apprehend intuitively the highly complex texture that mediates our experience, tbat guides our perception to the flesb and blood knightthe figurettes. For Burch, by contrast, all that we are directly aware of are images, what Husserl calls sensa. Where Husserl contends that we pass through the sensa in perceiving what the picture depicts, Burch makes the sensa the objects of our perception; the object represented becomes then a construction made by the spectator out of the sensa according to conventions, codes, and other culturally conditioned categories. Crucial also for assessing a cinematic practice such as that of the Japanese in general and Kurosawa in particular is provided by the concept of diegesis. The diegesis is conceptualized as the fictional world of the film. As Burch describes it, "the diegesis is for instance the 'world of Balzac' which his readers 'enter': those imagined drawing rooms . . . those imagined characters."'^ It has been the tendency of Western cinema, according to Burch, to create a cinematic practice that aims to absorb spectators in the diegesis. Accordingly, Kurosawa is praised by Burch for those aspects of his film style that remove spectators from their customary absorption in the diegesis and is criticized for those instances where his cinema maximizes the diegetic effect. Kurosawa's "rough-hewn" geometry"* in some of his well-known films such as Rashortion (1950) comes in for special praise by Burch. In earlier films Kurosawa had aimed to have the organic form characteristic of the dominant Western cinema accompanied by the usual absorption in the diegesis and cultivation of a story sense of diegetic illusion. Elements in the rough-hewn geometry are: use of the hardedged wipe for transitions, the 180 degree reverse-angle cut, and sharply contrasting (and frequent) juxtapositions (e.g., close-up and long shot, moving and stationary shots). The effect of this approach is to expose the process of articulation and reveal the making of the diegetic illusion, while correspondingly inhibiting the sense of strong diegetic illusion. On the other hand, Kurosawa is criticized for such stylistics as the way in which he "never in any way disrupts the unambiguous definition of spatial relations."''' Occasionally, as in Ikiru, there will be a mismatch that could, if coordinated with following shots, disclose the illusion-making character of the filmic practice. Kurosawa, however, instantly resolves the mismatch in Ikiru by placing both characters on the screen together, clarifying the spatial geography for the spectators before they have time to "see through" the illusion of the cinematic making of space. Kurosawa also adheres always in an underlying way to Western linearity. As Burch puts it, "Ambiguity in Kurosawa . . . is an element of tension to be answered by one of resolution . . . never is it a categorical indifference to univalence or linearity as it is in Ozu."^' Kurosawa's manner involves combining signifying elements: in Ikiru, in a content of "wholly unambiguous narrative claim," for instance, Watanabe progresses from foreknowledge of death to the "petty bourgeois" realization that he can do something meaningful himself.^-^ Burch notes that even the most modest picture from japan often displays a more or less systematically decentered composition.^^ When Kurosawa does use decentering, as in Tlie Lower Depths, he is praised, but when he does not, he is criticized

Phenomenology of Japanese Cinema 15

Figure 4.

Ikiru,

for his participation in and furtherance of diegetic illusionism. Burch concludes with a chilling assessment of Kurosawa; "It would seem that (the Japanese film industry's) stiflingly repressive structures have ultimately broken the one true master which the post-war Japanese cinema has known."^* Burch is led to look back on the silent period in Japanese dnema as a "Golden Age. "^^ In this period, the cinematic apparatus was foregrounded, and the effect of this cinematic practice was that of inhibiting diegetic illusionism and sensitizing the audience to the constructed ness of all filmic articulation. The period in which Kurosawa gained international fame, the post-World War II era, is regarded by Burch as one in which Kurosawa (and others) compromised with Western-inspired diegetic illusionism. In that earlier silent Golden Age of Japanese cinema, films bore the marks of their own inscription. For example, Ozu consistently mismatched conversations across cuts;^*^ Kinugasa utilized presentational forms of exposition wherein the manner of presentation obtrudes upon spectator experience, rendering the image opaque rather than transparent.^^ Burch praises Kurosawa for those stylistics that make a film bare the marks of its own inscription, such as the rough-hewn geometry of Rashomon. Where Kurosawa is criticized, it is for adherence to Western forms that "hide" the filmwork while correspondingly cultivating spectator absorption in the diegesis. With an understanding of (1) the distinction between perception and apperception and (2) recognition of the intentionality of representational consciousness.

16 A. Casebier

however, one can see that reflexivity is only one of many ways in which the cinematic experience can be meaningfully obtained. With representational consdousness transcending the mental acts involved in perception and founded on sensations, representation per se does not become a feature of a film to be demeaned, as it does for a post-structuralist such as Burch. If representation involves the intentional grasping of independently existing objects while images are only apperceived, judgments of value about a film should have their locus in the qualities of the objects grasped, not in an alleged spectator participation in or inhibition from an alleged illusion-making activity. Where Kurosawa represents events developing according to cause and effect in linear fashion, as in Watanabe's growth under the influence of an extreme situation (foreknowledge of his own death) in Ikiru, it is not per se a deficiency of the film that this part of the film involves linearity. Rather than being properly described as diegetic illusionism, as Burch wants, this part of the film involves, according to the Husserlian perspective, a transcendence to objects, events, and persons founded on an apperceptive mass. Thus, it is not the case, according to a Husserlian analysis, that there are just images there which because of their proffered relations invite spectator construction of an illusion of reality.^** On the contrary, objects of reality are there to be grasped in a way involving intentional transcendence, i.e., feelings and emotions coincident with having foreknowledge of death. In this light, the emphasis that Burch, in To the Distant Obseri'er, places upon the formal characteristics of Kurosawa's films is misguided for the Husserlian. The rough-hewn geometry serves the end of intentional transcendence, not the aim of disrupting spectatorial absorption in the diegesis. Measuring the nature of cinematic representation in terms of bow it affects spectators involves conflating two different relationships, in recognizing what a film represents, spectators engage in mental acts which are the proper locus for analyzing representation; it is quite another matter to isolate the affective relationships that occur coincident with an instance of representation. Indeed, a recognition of what a film depicts and/or portrays can occur in a context where there is no appreciable affective relation obtaining at all. The way Burch asks us to conceptualize the basic film experience biases the issue against Kurosawa. We are asked to accept the assumption that in the experience of a film such as The Seven Samurai there is only a set of images. These images may be presented to us in a way which will make us sensitive to facture,^^ the (supposed) constructedness of all filmic articulation, or they can be presented so as to cultivate absorption in the diegesis by hiding the constructedness and fostering our tendency to posit them as constituting a linear exemplification of events. The Husserlian notion of apperception, however, directly counters this picture of the film experience. Before us, in our experience of a Kurosawa film, are not just a set of images. There are images in our experience to be sure, but tbey are apperceived; there are also objects to which we have transcendent access through intentionality. Moreover, it is not the case, according to Husserl's model, that facture marks all filmic expression and that various manners of presentation foster spectator construction of illusions of reality while others inhibit this tendency. Some films provide experiences in which objects of reality may be intentionally grasped by prepared observers (documentaries); other films offer fictional events as their

Plienomenology of Japanese Cinema 17

representational content (a fiction film like The Seven Samurai); still others offer experiences that involve representations of a mixed character (e.g., Chris Marker's Sans Soleil). If there is such an entity as the diegesis and some films foster an absorption in it while others inhibit such absorption, it does not carry any implications for the nature of cinematic representation, at least according to the Husserlian paradigm. Moreover, the hard-edged wipes in The Seven Samurai lend a quality of simplidty to the film that would appeal to the sensitivities of the Japanese audience.^ In the Japanese aesthetic, simplidty is accorded paramount significance owing to its status as a crucial element in siiihui, the Japanese concept of beauty. For the Japanese audience, this simplicity in editing practice does not disrupt the diegesis, whereas a dissolve or fade would conceal film practice and tend to absorb the audience in the diegesis. On the contrary, for the Japanese audience, attuned to this S/I/^H/-making feature, the hard-edged wipe could well be expected to seem quite natural and absorb the audience in the action of the film. The same may be said for the 180 degree reverse-field editing practice used by Kurosawa. It certainly has a different psychological effect upon spectators than socalled "invisible editing" wherein spectators may more easily form a sense of the geography of the action. It is, however, a non-sequitur to conclude that the reversefield editing will make the audience confront facture. The audience may simply have to deal with more complex sensations in being guided to their intentional grasp of the events and objects being portrayed. If, as in some avant-garde films, the reverse-field editing practice is sustained over a lengthy portion of the film's time, then articulation itself may well become the object of perception. But in the case of Kurosawa's use of this device, it seems more likely that the intentional grasp of transcendent objects remains the content of perception, not a shift to images and their relationships. As Burch notes, Kurosawa moves rather quickly, in instances of reverse-field editing, to reinstate a coherent spatial geography. It seems likely that Kurosawa is aiming to foster audience transcendence to fictional events rather than to cultivate a vivid sense of facture. Burch and other post-structuralists also tend to utilize the ccmcept of transparency, so central to realist film theory, in an inconsistent fashion. As we have seen above, the Husserlian epistemology may be utilized to expose the insufficiency of transparency in analyzing representation. Post-structuralists like Burch have a different way of criticizing any realist view. They believe that the inadequacy of any realist view is entailed by the truth of the doctrine of facture. That is, if the film experience ultimately resolves into the sensations of images which are then fashioned by the spectator into objects via codes and other "transactional" categories of tbe mind, then a realist notion of spectators seeing through transparent pictures to the things themselves is false to our actual experience of film. It is, however, a curiosity of post-structuralist theory that there has been a "paradox of transparency" within the theory.^' On the one hand, realist theory is wrong because it fails to grasp the constructedness of all filmic articulation. But then, on the other hand, when discussion centers on the dominant cinema (the standard Hollywood product being paradigmatic), the concept of transparency suddenly has application. The so-called "bourgeois realist film"^^ is denigrated for its transparency, in contrast to valued films (such as Oshima's) which engage the

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active spectator in a transactional process at a site where the film itself is constructeda site where codes, industrial impact, and audience imaginatively and ideologically grounded activity obtain. Post-structuralist theory does not seem to realize that it cannot have it both ways; either transparency is unacceptable or it is not. It cannot be imported when needed to criticize the dominant cinema and then abandoned as naive when praising the transactional cinema of an Oshima. An appreciation for the full range of possible theoretical positions, including that of a critical realist like Husserl, helps in understanding how a theory of film may more fruitfully deal with transparency. The Husserlian notion of the neutralitymodification of perception as the locus of representation serves as the grounds for overturning the realist doctrine of representational transparency for all films, whether they be thought to be bourgeois-realist or paradigmatically transactional. From the above juxtaposition of Burchean analysis of Kurosawa and an Husserlian account, it should be apparent that the criticisms of Kurosawa made from the post-structuralist standpoint do not stand up. The Husserlian distinction between apperception and perception and the concepts of the neutrality-modification of normal perception and the intentionality of representational consciousness provide substantial theoretical grounds for overturning the chillingly negative assessment of Kurosawa's postwar film work.

NOTES
1. Noel Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meatiing in t}w lapatwsc Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), Chapter 24. 2. Edmund Husserf, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenonwnologyaiui to a Plu'nomcnological Phihsoptjy, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982), section 111. Consult also the translation by W. R. Boyce Gibson (London: G. George Allen & Unwin, 1931). 3. For an understanding of intentionality, see Dallas Willard, Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge: A Stud}f ill Husserl's Early Phiiosoph\f (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1984), 35. 4. Burch, Distant Observer, 18. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid, 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 19, 9. Ibid., 174. 10. Ibid.. 159. 11. Husserl, Ideas, sec. I l l , 262. 12. Founded noesis refers to the mental process arising from correlative acts, e.g., perception arising from apperception. The term noesis derives from the Greek term for intelligence or understanding. Noesis is that which confers intentionality on sensa. 13. Willard, Logic and Objectivity, 80, note #43. 14. Husserl, Ideas, sec. U l , 262. 15. Ibid. 16. See Husserl, la^^icai Investigations, trans. J. N. Finlay (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), 738-39. 17. Burch, Distant Observer, 19. 18. Ibid., 298. 19. Ibid., 299. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 301.

Phenomenology of Japanese Cinema 19 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. Ibid., 318. Ibid., 321. Ibid., 143. Ibid., 154-87. Ibid., 123-40. Elsewhere I have discussed the ways in which this "nominalist" assumption is ungrounded; see "Representation of Reality and Reality of Representation in Contemporary Film Theory," Persistence of Vision no. 5 (Spring I987):36-43. 29. On facture, see Michael Renov, "Re-Thinking Documentary: Toward a Taxonomy of Mediation," Wide Angle 8 il9lib):75. 30. On simplicity as appealing to the Japanese mind and tasle, see Charles Moore, "The Enigmatic
Japanese Mind," in The Japatiese Mitid: Essentials of Japanese Philosophy and Culture (Tokyo: Tutlle Co., 1967), 29()tf., and Masaharu Anesaki, Art, Life, and Nature in Japan (Tokyo: Tuttle Co., 1973), 32ff. 31. See Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), Chapter 5, especially 91ff. 32. Ibid.