This research paper investigates how and by what the discourse of film directors was formed in the Japanese modem era 1910s and how this discourse had prepared the Japanese director system which was allegedly instituted in 1920s. In my concept of this essay, I would like to think this “Director System” not only as a mode of the film production but also as a cultural imaginative mode about “film director/auteur” like Star System in the present studies. According to this view, we could find that Director System would be configured by the discourse of the film director as well as a process of the division of labor.

I will designate following things here. The image of film director was somewhat obscure to Japanese people in the beginning of Taisho era. But this circumstance was drastically changed by infiltration of the information about American film directors. Above all the figure of D.W.Griffith as a great director of INTOLERANCE forcefully effected to the Japanese discourse even before releasing the film in Japan. Examining carefully those articles’ information, we find every image of the director was almost always depicted with the relevance of the movie stars. In the Japanese discourse of that time, film directors were imagined less as a narrative creator of film image than as a manager of movie stars. Emergence of those directors’ discourse reflected some colonial problems in modem Japan.

This paper analyzes how Buster Keaton’s automobile gags function and considers it a kind of mechanism. In fact, among his numerous machine gags, some of his automobile gags are quite unique. For example, when Keaton is racing with his rival, his old car suddenly collapses without any logical reason. This phenomenon can be explained by Keaton’s original portrayal of an automobile. In his films, an automobile is represented on two levels. On one level, it is described as an ordinary machine that carries people but on the other, when an automobile is introduced into a chase sequence, they are transformed into a cog of a big abstract machine. The latter interpretation is based on an idea that, as Gilles Delueze argues, Keaton’s chase can be interpreted as a mechanism. Therefore, when Keaton chases (is chased) in an automobile, it is represented simultaneously on both levels. In other words, the automobile is simultaneously a machine and the cog of machine. This is a contradiction and the resolution of this contradiction is reflected in his automobile gags. In the case of the example cited above, this contradiction is resolved when his car collapses because after that, it is neither a machine nor a cog anymore. In Keaton’s most unique automobile gags, these two levels of automobile representations interact with each other.

This paper examines a genre of army comedy, called Heitai Kigeki and its transition from the postwar period to 1960’s. Historically based on Heitai Rakugo by Kingoro Yanagiya, Heitai Kigeki emerged out during the war. Ore Wa Suihei (1935) starring Kingoro and supported by the Department of the Navy aimed at whipping up public sentiment and succeeded to get critical reputations also. Soon after the WW II, Japanese films mainly depicted the last war from the victim’s point of view or cried against the military. Nitouhei Monogatari (1951), the first postwar Heitai Kigeki, had, like other films, a antimilitary position and made Japanese audience weep itself.

In Heitai Kigeki like Gunkanki series (1957~1958) which were made under the influence of Nitouhei Monogatari, tears and antiwar feeling faded away. When the war combined with the actions, the comical elements came out at first. Dokuritsu Gurentai (1959), clearly affected with Hollywood Western films, was criticized for its losing a perpetrator feeling. The criticism against the Emperor system started with another Heitai Kigeki, Haikei Tennou Heika Dono (1963).

In most of Heitai Kigeki the main character is not an officer but a soldier, which has a personality of marginality like a clown in a comic film. Heitai Kigeki was a genre derived from the resistance to the way in which other Japanese films represented the memory of the war.

In the late 1950s and 1960s a debate was raised up in film journals among leading film critics, directors, art critics and authors of the time. It eventually came to be known as the “Image Debate” or “Image and Language Debate.” This paper traces the course of the debate and considers the issues which it raised, focusing on the enthusiastic years of it between 1958 and 1960. In this paper I will concentrate in particular on the point where the issues under debate shifted from the problem of montages to the functions of language and image: the area on fire with the need to traverse the boundary line between film and literature and find the keys to the synthesis of the arts. I will organize the arguments of the principal participants in the debate—Okada Susumu, Hani Susumu, Masaki Kyosuke, Abe Kobo, Nakahara Yusuke et al. —including the uses they made of the theories of Sergei Eisenstein, Alexandre Astruc and Ivan Pavlov to search out the possibilities of image and language.

Nowadays we talk a lot about “convergence of media” which integrates different mediums like television, film, web, phone etc. But before convergence or integration, we had a long period of preparation, when mediums, keeping theirs own specificity, tried to develop a mutual exchange experience both in the fields of expression and technology. An example is High Definition Television (HDTV). Before HDTV, two dominant moving image mediums, Television (electronic image) and Film (optical image), were separated. Their making processes were different and the collaboration between them was limited. With HDTV, because of its high visual capacity, electronic image production of Television and optical image production of Film become able to collaborate. Our study aims to overview different experiences of collaboration between HDTV and Film during 1980s and 1990s, to show problems encountered and resolved through the collaboration, and to consider what happens when two distinct mediums meet and integrate each other (that is what we call “media mix”).