In an interview, Mizoguchi Kenji stated that he began experimenting with the long take, his signature style, in Tôjin Okichi (The Foreigner’s Okichi, 1930). This essay locates the lost film within an intermedial network of mass culture at the time of the Great Depression, on the eve of a revolution that never came. Tôjin Okichi, set in the Shimoda port in the mid 1850s, tells a story of Okichi, a geisha the Tokugawa Shogunate government offered to Townsend Harris, the first US consul general to Japan, as a mistress. My archival research into contemporary media discourse and production memos suggests that the film participated in the “Okichi boom,” a web of tie-ins and adaptations comprised of modernist literature, theater, radio, the phonograph, and, most notably, tourism. Produced and consumed at the time of crisis in modem Japanese history, the Okichi boom played out a number of polarities and tensions, such as Americanism and the Leftist politics, and center and periphery, superimposing the contemporary moga onto Okichi. Furthermore, the film Tôjin Okichi, originally planned to be a talkie and eventually released as a silent film accompanied by popular songs, enables us to reexamine the “talkie” at its mass cultural and intermedial genesis in which its identity as a medium had not yet been settled. Through historicizing both the “talkie” and Mizoguchi’s style within the contemporary media culture, this essay proposes to see continuity between Mizoguchi’s avant-garde montage and his long take, as both styles demand a “distracted” ― intensified, tactile, and bodily ― mode of perception specific to modernity.
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