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Ahen sensô (The Opium War, 1943) was produced as one of the wartime propaganda films justifying Japan’s war for the purpose of “liberating asia,” simultaneously agitating the audience’s hostility toward Western colonial powers by telling a story about Britain’s brutal invasion of China. More intriguing, however, is the fact that cinematically Ahen sensô is heavily influenced by Hollywood, particularly in its consisted adaptations from several Hollywood films. In my essay I will focus on how Ahen sensô adapted the Hollywood historical disaster films in order to create its anti-Western propaganda. In the last sequence of Ahen sensô, for instance, British warships burn Canton city to ashes. The sequence offered an unprecedented scale of Hollywood-style spectacle in Japanese cinema, one that relied heavily on cribbed footage from In Old Chicago (1937).

While Ahen sensô tried to represent “universal” entertainment for “the Greater East Asian” audience by combining a spectacle of catastrophe with melodrama, Hollywood disaster films were adopted as the proper model. But Ahen sensô’s climactic catastrophe sequence differs significantly from Hollywood’s historical disaster films in that it lacks a cathartic moment where the catastrophe turns into a happy ending and the evil old metropolis is replaced by the new utopia. This does not mean, however, that Ahen sensô lacks a utopian vision. Under the wartime Japanese propaganda code, the plight of Asia under Western colonialism could only be rescured by the Japanese imperial military. In the film Ahen sensô, the Chinese people could not be saved from catastrophe because this film lacks a Japanese protagonist, and the cathartic moment is transformed to the real world where the Japanese military would “liberate” these victims by defeating the Western colonial powers and constructing “the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” in the future.

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Cette étude a pour objet la redéfinition du suspense au cinéma du point de vue de l’expérience du spectateur. Tout d’abord, nous avons analysé la scénographie utilisée par Alfred Hitchcock en nous référant à la théorie écologique de la perception, ce qui nous amène à la remarque que le suspense hitchcockien ne renforce pas le processus de l’identification supposée, mais le rend momentanément impossible. Parce que cette scénographie déchire la continuité entre la perception et l’action.

Nous prenons le suspense ainsi compris pour ce que Jean-Louis Schefer appelle “le suspense du monde” où les images en mouvement apparaissent dans leur irréversibilité et leur impassibilité absolue. Nous somme conscients dans ce régime que nous ne pourrons jamais intervenir ou participer à ce qui se passe sur l’écran, bien que nous connaissions à l’avance le destin du protagoniste. La composition du suspense révèle al ors l’aspect fondamental du cinématographe. C’est l’étemel retour de l’image. Nous voyons les protagonistes comme des écureuils courant dans une cage cylindrique. Il ne s’agit pas d’identification dans le cinéma de suspense, mais de la pitié de Sisyphe.

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