Bunka Eiga/Culture Film has usually been regarded as a synonym for documentary film, and while the category was highly influential in Japanese cinema during 1935-1945, its accurate meaning has yet to be defined. My paper will clarify the functions of Bunka Eiga through analyzing its historical discourses. Bunka Eiga needs to be elaborated from its four aspects: First, many of the filmmakers and critics associated with Bunka Eiga aimed at improving their institutional status by asserting the importance of recording “facts” on film. Second, Bunka Eiga was always discussed in relation to “kagaku/science.” Bunka Eiga’s emphasis on science allowed for the covert use of Marxist principles, thus mitigating the lingering guilt of the Bunka Eiga filmmakers and critics, many of whom had been forced to renounce Marxism. Third, as a result of this connection with “kagaku/science,” Bunka Eiga could act as a means of mediating between individual objects and the universal laws underlying them. Fourth, the abstractness of Bunka Eiga helped the Japanese to disavow the overwhelming threat from the U.S. Even at the outbreak of the war, Bunka Eiga assuaged Japanese with a self-aggrandizing vision of their own “high” culture.

This paper is a study of the reception of Chinese cinema in Japan focusing on postwar Chinese cinema. In the post World War II period, the traditions of Chinese Cinema, which were built up in Shanghai, the center of Chinese cinema in the prewar days, were entirely broken in socialist China. With a new movie system, the so-called “People’s Cinema,” a political propaganda organization appeared in China. In this paper the writer uses materials in Japanese to research how the “People’s Cinema,” serving the political policies and socialist ideologies of the Communist Party, had been accepted by a Japan that was searching for her own ways to achieve postwar democratic cinema. Through this research, the actual ways Japan looked at Chinese cinema in the postwar period will be made clear. In addition, the unknown sides of the movie critical field in Japan will be brought into relief.

The first stage of the “People’s Cinema” is divided into two periods. The first period, from 1949 to 1953, is a time of stagnation in Chinese cinema that can be attributied to a political movement of the Chinese Communist Party. This political movement was created by criticiging The legends of Wu Xun. The second period, from 1953 to 1957, is an age of Chinese cinema developming due to the all viation of verify the responses to Chinese cinema in Japan by referring to the ups and downs of Chinese cinema.

In this article I will argue about what is the most important and basic characteristic of self-reflexivity (auto-réflexivité) in movies. My answer is that it is a direct evocation or presentation of a split or a dividing in two (dédoublement) of time into the present and the past. This dédoublement of time is the origin of any and every self-reflexivity, and therefore can be called archi-réflexion (this is my neologism).

According to Gilles Deleuze (and Henri Bergson), it is not that the present changes into the past as it passes away, but that they are both constituted at the same time in each moment. “The past does not follow the present that it is no longer, it coexists with the present it was.” (Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 79, translated by H. Tomlinson & R. Galeta.)

Movies can present directly and concretely this dédoublement of time, this archi-réflexion through a “crystal-image (image-cristal)”, which is an image with two sides, that is, a coalescence of an actual image and a virtual image.

I will furthermore discuss several reasons why movies in particular, among many genres of art, can evoke or present such dédoublement of time so directly and concretely.