This paper will explore the historical context of the development of voice-over narration in wartime Japanese documentary, focusing on the introduction of existing vocal performers, mainly radio announcers and benshi, and their unique arts into nonfiction sound film production. At the beginning of the 1930s, after talkie technology arrived in the Japanese film world, filmmakers and critics began to search for a desirable acoustic accompaniment to the newly flourishing genre of bunka eiga (culture film). Interestingly, two previous techniques of narration contributed in this process, namely, radio announcing and the art of the benshi. In particular, the narrating practices of the latter had a qualitative and quantitative influence on the stylistic formation of voice-over narration in wartime “sensuous” documentaries, whereas the former, having been established as a modern and public vocal-medium, took a firm hold on newsreel soundtracks.

Through analyzing stylistic relationships between these vocal performers and nonfiction media, we will see that early documentary filmmaking built a close connection with radio broadcasting practice and such contemporary performing entertainments as mandan. Indeed, experimentation in documentary forms in the early era was surely an outcome of not just auteurist creativity but also a conflict between the techniques of existing performing arts, the enlarged modern soundscape, and the desire, on the part of those involved in the genre, for differentiation from other media and/or for surviving during the hard times of war.

Some contemporary photographers, of whom Duane Michals and Sophie Calle are the best known, have produced unique styles of story telling with a series of photographs and texts. Their new roman-photos could be easily compared with the traditional roman-photos, many of which were produced in the 1960s, but such a viewpoint will not necessarily enable us to understand their intentions clearly and place them in the history of twentieth century photography.

After the development of halftone printing, another photographic genre developed called the photo-essay. Life, undoubtedly the most famous American graphic magazine, established and developed this genre. Life’s photo-essays, which also combined a series of photographs and texts, offered reportage as “true” stories. They composed a narrative, and as time went on, began to “create” a narrative, representing a “normal” American life especially after World War II.

The obvious difference between photo-essays and roman-photos is that the former insists on their integrity or pretends to be honest, while the latter do not. Some Duane Michals’s sequences and Sophie Calle’s roman-photos pose a question about the “truth” of photography, when they maintain their ambivalent meanings regarding truth/fiction. In this respect, we can regard their works as the antithesis of photo-essays, and by the same token, of the photojournalism of our times.

This paper examines a particular relationship between the image and the mark in Sigmund Freud’s Wunderblock and Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad in order to better classify images in the information society.

In order to explore the relationship between the image and the mark, my paper first investigates N. Katherine Hayles’s notion of “Inscription technology,” Gilles Deleuze’s theory of painting centered on Francis Bacon, and William M. Ivins Jr.s’ research on the history of painting. From these theses, it becomes clear that the image, throughout its history, has been strongly tied to the mark. However, Sketchpad and Wunderblock imply new possibilities for an image-generating device because “no direct mark” on the surface is needed to generate the image. The user of a Wunderblock can draw any image and erase it over and over again because the image and the mark are separable although they appear as one. The Wunderblock generates images with marks via a process whereby the same mark occurs on each of the three surfaces, and is thus a traditional image-generating device. However, the Wunderblock also showed new possibilities for the separation of the image and the mark, a major element in inscription technologies. From Sutherland’s statements, we may say that his Sketchpad is a device which generates images via conversion. This occurs because of the inherent separation between the image and the mark found in inscription technologies, one made clear by Freud’s Wunderblock. Moreover, this principle of conversion annuls the relationship between the image and its mark.

Therefore, there are two types of images in our information society: one is the traditional image which has a strong relationship between the image and mark, the other is new type of representation which annuls the traditional relationship between the image and mark itself.