脚本至上主義と日本映画の停滞The Screenplay Doctrine and the Stagnation of Japanese Cinema

As I wrote in the previous article, we live in a world where the Average Shot Length (ASL) of films has been shrinking year after year, settling around two seconds as the mainstream. If cinema is the finest mirror of its era, then the modern world is one in which life is condensed into an accumulation of two-second fragments. But there is no real coherence in those two seconds. There is no meaning at all. What we are witnessing is modern human beings voluntarily discarding decades of precious life through the aggregation of meaningless time.

There was, however, an era when ASL was very long. In the 1930s the average is said to have been roughly ten to twelve seconds. For those of us who did not live through that period, this suggests the existence of a world that at first glance appears to be the inverse of our own, which makes it an important point of reference. Without knowledge of cinema's technical history one might assume that the early years, before the medium had reached maturity, would have favored shorter ASL due to technical limitations. The reality was the opposite.

ASL is used as a metric specific to cinema, but if we set that formal boundary aside, the entire world today seems to be operating on a baseline of roughly two seconds. As the number of people incapable of sustained attention explodes and the mechanisms engineered to trigger dopamine secretion grow more sophisticated beyond human scale, it feels increasingly important to turn our eyes back to the masterworks of classical cinema. When we discover how brilliantly the technique of the long take was used to construct scenes in those films, we gain the ability to see our discomfort with the present from an objective distance.

The preeminent figure who composed his cuts through the long take was Mizoguchi Kenji. Mizoguchi employed a distinctive production technique in which he kept the camera rolling without cutting, and through this method he succeeded in rendering the natural movements of his characters and the expansiveness of space on the screen. The long take became synonymous with his work and continues to be discussed to this day. By filming a scene in a single unbroken take, Mizoguchi created what I believe was a new cinematic grammar of "weaving a story." But alongside Mizoguchi and the other celebrated directors of this era, including Kurosawa Akira and Ozu Yasujiro, there existed a certain custom that Japanese cinema of this period bequeathed to the present. That custom is the screenplay doctrine.

The term is still commonly used in Japanese film criticism today. The screenplay doctrine means more than simply treating the screenplay as sacrosanct. In Japan it refers to the belief itself that a film director cannot become a director unless he can write a screenplay.

The figure who most embodied this belief was Kurosawa Akira. Kurosawa repeatedly insisted on the importance of the screenplay and to the very end placed great weight on writing his own. This was because in the prewar Japanese film industry, you could not become a director unless you could write screenplays. How this custom originated is unclear, but because a director could not emerge without producing a good screenplay, aspiring directors of that era wrote screenplays day after day without cease. The custom of being recognized and given the opportunity to direct on the basis of a strong screenplay created the conditions for a broader practice of thoroughly refining the screenplay before proceeding to production. The important point is that this was already established before the Second World War.

Japanese cinema entered the postwar period alongside defeat. From 1945 until roughly 1950, when the Korean War began, the industry was subject to censorship under GHQ's information control. Films that did not conform to the democratic ideals promoted by the victors were forbidden from production and exhibition. Many filmmakers entered a bleak period. But after the outbreak of the Korean War, when American surveillance of Japan loosened, Japanese cinema began to thrive again. What emerged, however, was not so much new talent as the veteran directors who had already been active in the 1930s. Kurosawa Akira and Kinoshita Keisuke made their directorial debuts in 1943, in the middle of the war, but by the 1930s they had already been writing numerous screenplays within the film industry.

Both rode the new wave of cinematic vitality that began in the early 1950s to become world-famous directors. But the directors drawing acclaim around them at the time formed a formidable roster that included Mizoguchi Kenji, Ozu Yasujiro, Naruse Mikio, Imai Tadashi, Kinugasa Teinosuke, Shimizu Hiroshi, Gosho Heinosuke, and Yoshimura Kozaburo. The Japanese film world of this era was governed by a rigid exclusive-contract system known as the studio system. Directors, actors, and crew operated as employees or exclusive contractors affiliated with specific production companies. The Five Company Agreement concluded in 1953 was particularly decisive. It prohibited the poaching of talent that each studio had been practicing and established a monopolistic system in which each company produced films with its own stars and directors.

There was movement across the board, but roughly speaking, in the early 1950s Shochiku had Ozu Yasujiro and Kinoshita Keisuke, Daiei had Mizoguchi Kenji, and Toho had Naruse Mikio, Kurosawa Akira, and Imai Tadashi. The film companies of the time exercised unitary control over production, distribution, and exhibition. Because each company needed to produce films continuously for screening in its own theaters, a stable annual output was required. What mattered to this system was the capacity for volume production, and it was for this reason that the screenplay was so highly valued.

At the same time, becoming a director required joining the production unit of a specific veteran director as an assistant and training for years. This was called the apprentice system. Within this master-and-disciple relationship, the principle that you could not become a director unless you could write a screenplay was drilled in thoroughly. As these conditions of the era solidified into a robust system, the screenplay doctrine was already fully entrenched.

Of course directors did not write their screenplays alone. Each found an ideal collaborator and together they produced one high-quality work after another. The system of the Japanese film world, already established to a significant degree before the war, intensified further when the golden age began in the early 1950s. The reason was that the great directors of this era, Ozu Yasujiro, Mizoguchi Kenji, Kurosawa Akira, Naruse Mikio, had all been raised within the screenplay doctrine.

This meant that the directors of that era possessed exacting standards when it came to screenplays. One anecdote survives that conveys the severity of those standards. Shindo Kaneto, who from his 1951 debut went on to release forty-nine films in his lifetime, was a director who achieved international recognition in the 1960s with The Naked Island (1960) and Onibaba (1964). But he was equally if not more renowned as a screenwriter, providing 250 film scripts over the course of his career. Shindo entered the film industry in 1934 at the age of twenty-two, which means he spent roughly seventeen years in the lower ranks before becoming a director. The master he revered above all others throughout his life was Mizoguchi Kenji. In 1941 Shindo worked on a Mizoguchi production for the first time. Shaken by the power of the completed film, he wrote a screenplay to present as his ticket to becoming Mizoguchi's disciple.

From this anecdote we can see that the custom of the era required aspiring directors to bring a strong screenplay as a gift when seeking recognition from a master. Mizoguchi's response was devastating. He dismissed what Shindo had written as not a screenplay but a story. Shindo was so shocked that he contemplated suicide. Having been crushed by the judgment of the man he most respected, Shindo threw himself into reading collections of dramatic writing to rebuild his foundation. Without that defeat, his talent might never have flowered.

In this sense it may be fair to say that within Japanese cinema, Shindo Kaneto was the director who confronted the question of what a film screenplay truly is with the greatest seriousness and persistence. He was conscripted during the Second World War and lost years to the blank of military service. But after the war, when the direction of Japanese cinema shifted under GHQ leadership, Shindo was among those who benefited most. The directors he began collaborating with from 1947, Yoshimura Kozaburo and Kinoshita Keisuke among them, happened to excel at the style of filmmaking GHQ was seeking. As a screenwriter Shindo produced one hit after another. But in 1949 he clashed with Shochiku, left the company of his own accord, and the following year established the Association of Modern Cinema. This organization became a pioneer of the independent production movement that would operate outside the Five Company Agreement from the 1950s onward.

Yet the screenplay doctrine itself did not change no matter how many independent productions emerged or how vibrant Japanese cinema became. From around the 1960s a new generation of directors led by Oshima Nagisa appeared in rapid succession, but even so the residual image of the screenplay doctrine was not dispelled. Japanese cinema thus found itself carrying a distorted problem. The screenplay doctrine works when the director personally possesses the ability to write an excellent screenplay. At that level a good screenplay naturally leads to a good film. But as the caliber of filmmakers gradually declined, the over-absolutization of the screenplay trapped them in a stagnation from which they could not deviate from what had been written on the page, from the signified.

The result was that Japanese cinema entered a period of total stagnation. Various attempts at breaking through were made, but no filmmaker emerged who questioned the screenplay doctrine at the heart of the problem. Or rather, even those who could identify the problem with the screenplay doctrine were unable to break free of it so long as they remained inside the film industry. Japan has a broader custom, not limited to cinema, of drifting into indefinite life support once this kind of stagnation sets in. When that happens the only possibility is for a new filmmaker to arrive from outside the industry.

Signs of such a break had appeared on an experimental basis in the 1960s, but not a single director possessed the power to accomplish a genuine rupture. When it became clear that the screenplay doctrine was one of the forces driving the decline of Japanese cinema and that no one inside the industry could break its hold, a new creator suddenly appeared from the outside like a comet. That creator was Obayashi Nobuhiko, a filmmaker I personally hold in the deepest admiration.