Naoki Yamamoto, Dialectics without Synthesis: Japanese Film Theory and Realism in a Global Frame

Has there ever been film theory in Japan? This question posed more than four decades ago by Satō Tadao, the doyen among Japanese film scholars, has more recently found new resonance and relevance. Naoki Yamamoto’s first monograph, Dialectics without Synthesis: Japanese Film Theory and Realism in a Global Frame, should be seen as a seminal contribution to this trend and an important step towards finding an affirmative answer to the nagging question. Previously, Decentering Theory: Reconsidering the History of Japanese Film Theory (2010), had first built up expectations about this new line of inquiry in Anglophone Japanese film studies. In Japan, the 2018 publication of the bulky (746 pages) Rediscovering Classical Japanese Film Theory — An Anthology, sought to present examples of critical engagement with cinema by dozens of pre-1945 writers, including Nakai Masakazu, Imamura Taihei, Sugiyama Heiichi and Nagae Michitarō, all discussed in detail by Yamamoto. Last but not least, Media Theory in Japan (2017), from where Yamamoto has found cues for his approach to Japanese film theory as a “local, medium-specific, and culture-inflected practice” (p. 5), displays a similar desire to bring about something of a paradigmatic shift, although it is mostly confined to material from the second half of the century.