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At some point along the way I realised that I have always found talking and reading about films much more compelling than actually watching them. It seems inevitable, then, that my doctoral project initially devised as close readings of selected screen works has ended up being about discursive practices rather than artistic ones, not texts but their contexts.
I also feel that I need to come clear by confessing that I never write at libraries, or for that matter in whatever office space I have. One thing I will certainly take with me from the experience of working on this dissertation is that materiality matters and space links people from different eras. Therefore I am tempted to state my own working conditions. It was not always easy to keep going but it would have been much worse if the following places did not exist: Afternoon Tease, Arts Picturehouse Cafe, Grads Cafe and Massaro’s at Cambridge ambient cafe Mole, Banda no hana, Cafe Bibliotic Hello, Cafe Kocsi, Cafe Loop, Cafe Zanpano, Coffee House Maki, efish, Elephant Factory Coffee, 58 Diner, Kamogawa Cafe,Kissa Inon, Kyoto Soh-an Cafe, Ōgaki Bookstore Cafe, Rebun Cafe,Sentido,Shinshindō, TRACTION book cafe and Tsuki to rokupensu in Kyoto; Boheem Kamahouse Lyon Cafe.
Hashimoto recalls that Itami “pinpointed weaknesses in [his] work and even offered specific guidance for what and how to revise” (Hashimoto 2015: 18). The correspondence between Hashimoto and Itami continued through the war years until the latter’s death in 1946. Possibly thanks to this accidentally discovered enthusiasm for writing, Hashimoto made a full recovery from tuberculosis and at 97 this year is one of the last surviving players from what is commonly called the Golden Age of Japanese cinema.
When Hashimoto eventually debuted with Rashōmon (1950, directed and co-written by Kurosawa Akira) it coincided with the period when scriptwriters were well known and held in high regard by film critics and audiences alike. Although a number of notable writers had appeared earlier, it was the immediate postwar condition that granted the profession new visibility, with the best of them being designated as shinario sakka (scenario author). Such writers were noted for producing original scripts that often revealed willingness to engage with serious social issues but also an aptitude for reworking the more traditional material. Indeed,Rashōmon, Hashimoto’s adaptation of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s short stories set in the Middle Ages, garnered considerable international acclaim and proved to be a turning point for both its director and the entire Japanese cinema. Not coincidentally, it seems, are the watersheds in the careers of Mizoguchi and Ozu commonly 1 located at the start of exclusive collaboration with these writers: two 1936 films, Naniwa erejii (Ōsaka Elegy) and Gion kyōdai (Sisters of Gion), for the former and Banshun (Late Spring, 1949) for the latter.
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE WRITING A HISTORY
Film histories and scriptwriting
Exclusion from histories
Inclusion in histories
Scriptwriting in Japanese film histories
Contribution to film history
History in fragments
Iida and Kobayashi
Tanaka and Satō
A complete history of Japanese scriptwriting
Framing history
Structuring principles
Time frames personalised
CHAPTER TWO FORGING A FORMAT
Early script froms and their influences
Influenced by Hollywood
Transcriptions and translations
The formats of silent scenario
CHAPTER THREE SITUATING THE SCRIPTWRITER
The status of the scriptwriter
Geniuses and craftsmen
Scenario writer and scenario author
The canon of scriptwriters
The working conditions of the scriptwriter
The script department
The master-disciple system
Writing alone and together
The writing inn
Gender in scriptwriting
Writer as wif
CHAPTER FOUR LOOKING FOR LITERATURE
Semi-independence of the scenario
The Scenario Literature Movement
Analogies in drama and music
Independence and intermediality
Critics and writers
Critic as catalyst
CHAPTER FIVE READING SCENARIOS
Scenario publishing and canon
Standard and contesting formats
Journalistic resources and anthologies
Static and dynamic canon
Strategies of scenario publishing
Scenario and its readers
Between accuracy and evocativeness
From reader to writer
Examples of readers
Itami Mansaku’s scenario reviews
Reviews and their context
Examples of reviews
Itami’s achievement and influence
CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
