To the Distant Observer

The re-issuing of Noël Burch’s pioneering account of Japanese film, To The Distant Observer, first published in 1979, restores to us the best book written on Japanese cinema, despite its author’s modest claims that he didn’t know much Japanese, and brings us back to the scene of the postwar history and the film’s historical duty to recall and narrate its world for us. But Burch’s book is also an often forgotten reminder that at the heart of capitalist modernity pulsates the ceaseless process of interaction between past and present where the latter is constantly called upon to conjure the former. Among other things, Burch’s book was written during the most intense moment of the Cold War and the heyday of modernization theory and the countless studies it spawned to tell us how societies like Japan, especially, were able to negotiate the challenge of change by relying on the mediation of received practices and values that had miraculously managed to survive the tumultuous transformations of history. Where Burch departed from this Cold War paradigm, which held area studies in the United States in its thrall, lay in his recognition that the interaction between past and present was far more complex than a simple game of seesaw rocking the binary of tradition/modernity back and forth against a background noise of world-competing ideologies. What his book showed was how older cultural practices and artistic forms had to be radicalized to make Japan’s modernity something more than simple imitation, even though this message was often drowned out by the din of eagerness to present Japan as a modular exemplification of peaceable and smooth evolutionary modernization.