An Uneasy Propaganda Alliance

And wow, starring Setsuko Hara

edit: I found this interesting review that explains how the Japanese title's release was adjusted for domestic audiences, so it is another version of the same film:

> Harun Farocki's juxtaposition of the way American and Nazi propaganda films represent hands in Der Ausdruck der Hände brings out that obsession of Fascist propaganda with the sexualisation of machinery, that is, through the act of touching and caressing—something essentially passive and supervisory where the machine is almost worshipped for its power (yes, as a phallus). Crucially, what we must recognise here is the automated process in which the human is a mere appendage. Compare this to the portrait of skilled labourers in Allied propaganda, hands that truly work, hands that actually appear to belong to a human—that creature who designs and builds, repairs and heals. So, why is this relevant to the German-Japanese co-production, Die Tochter des Samurai? First, what you will be struck by is the overwhelming emphasis on machinery—automated machinery. It is a cosmopolitan story* with a central Japanese character, Teruo, who returns to his home after many years abroad being educated by Germans. But then there is also Setsuko Hara's character—ah! the eternal virgin! Now we have the clash between quaint old Japan—obviously dealt with in some of the most painfully 'non-exoticising' exoticised terms (yes, there is even a sequence in which Hara plays with deer in front of the Itsukushima Shrine; gag) where the camera acts like a brush dripping (and I mean fucking dripping) with the paint of romanticist slop—and the ideals of 'the modern world', symbolised by the lack of free will, militarism, and the subjugation of Manchukuo (for the greater good, of course). Contemporary Japanese viewers must have found it really quite hilarious when they weren't furious about being condescended to; it's as if the makers just wanted to cram as many identifiably Japanese things into the movie without any mind as to how horribly they were distorting them. Ultimately, the film gets even worse once it edges into blood and soil territory, but we've all already given up hope by this point so it's hardly much of a let-down. The fact of the matter is contemporary Japanese people thought it abysmal, and that was even after Mansaku Itami had managed to get the film changed from Fanck's version for domestic release. I believe this was the version I saw, and I can hardly imagine how terrible the 'properly Nazi' one was. Perhaps my half-star rating is somewhat of an overstatement, but considering how much I respect and adore Japanese filmmaking during this troubled yet incredibly creative decade, I can't help but despise this film.

> I say this without a single ounce of hyperbole: you will not find a Japanese propaganda film from the 40s which is even SLIGHTLY as vile as this.

> In truth, the story is certainly not a work of cosmopolitanism (how could it be?), but insofar as Japan does have virtuous qualities (in the eyes of Fascists), cosmopolitanism must be presented first as the kind of initial stage in the overcoming of those unwanted traditions (already very much nonsense in every way).

> Another note: it is important to remember that the notion of “progress” always played a significant role in the authoritarian ideologies as a “reduction of historical time to an automatic and unthinking mechanism”. Thus, this film focuses on automated machinery not only to load its idea of modernity with this image of the powerful machine working for the greater (read: Nazi) good but to also inextricably tie the automatic machine with history itself, i.e. to assert the absolute necessity of ‘progress’ and everything that it involves (the rape of China, the cultivation of land in Manchukuo, etc.)

> One more thing on this note: it is essential to recognise the dangerous conflation of power and authority in authoritarian ideologies. A clear example in this film is the scene in which Sessue Hayakawa’s character goes to the Kamakura Daibutsu to seemingly draw strength from it, described by one contemporary Japanese critic as treating great Buddhist statues “as if they wielded an absolute power.” There is nothing religious to this sequence; it is the perfect expression of the secular world and bourgeois man “whose life is completely determined by the category of usefulness, so that he desecrates everything he thinks about.” (Del Noce) Hayakawa’s character visits the statue in order to draw power from it, just as his son talks of Manchukuo as nothing more than land ready for cultivation, i.e. use. Traditions only have value when there is some specific use to them—a belief as closely at home in Nazi Germany as it is the liberal technocratic world order.

(RIP Harun Farocki)

Today: Trumps America and Putin's Russia. Trump has gone way beyond just standing up for his own countries interests. He is literally echoing Kremlin talking points every chance he gets, probably to the detriment of his own country.