Powers of the Real: Cinema, Gender, and Emotion in Interwar Japan by Diane Wei Lewis (review)

作者：J. Coates · 发表于：Technology and Culture · 年份：2022 · DOI：10.1353/tech.2022.0142 · 被引用次数：24 · 研究领域：Medicine

Diane Wei Lewis’s beautifully written book on interwar cinema in Japan argues that the years following the Great Kanto Earthquake (1923) were charged with a particular emotive mood that characterized certain modes of presentation, representation, and communication as feminine. As Lewis notes, some scholars have approached the topic of cinema in Japan’s interwar period to assess the dissemination of images of Westernized modernity. The innovative contribution of this book is connecting cinema culture of the era to other arts and culture production and reception, tracking “how the rise of the commercial media culture in a time of national crisis drew intensive scrutiny to the affects and emotions” (p. 4) associated with the rapid changes in everyday life occasioned by, or occurring alongside, the Great Kanto Earthquake. In this sense, the framing of the study around the earthquake and its aftermath is very effective, focusing the manuscript on how the disaster impacted media and public communications, and in turn how those same media forms shaped discourses of disaster and recovery. Lewis argues that the earthquake “imbued emotion with new importance in the public sphere” (p. 5) and subsequently boosted sales, readership, and viewership of those media that conveyed this heightened emotion. Newspapers covering the crisis are analyzed alongside documentary film footage (or “actualities”) and fictionalized representations of the earthquake and its aftermath in cinema and cinema-re...