Even if one can say that every villain is the product of a serials author's imagination, it cannot be neglected that once he appears in a work of the moving pictures, the sense that one is touching the real thing is more prominent than one's feeling in watching theater. Accordingly, the degree to which film itself exerts a lasting influence on audiences is a problem that cannot be neglected.(*2)
The fact that cinema could make the fictional seem real was a major problem because "simply ingeniously flavoring the work with fantasy and fact is itself enough to strengthen and spread the film's lasting influence."(*2) In emphasizing cinema's unique capacity to turn the imaginary into reality, the Asahi was constructing a narrative of influence based on a difference represented by the cinema. Here was a quality to the motion pictures that distinguished it from other entertainments such as the theater; in the discourse on Zigomar, film was beginning to peek out from the shadows of the misemono. But ironically, in the Tôkyô Asahi's view, this uniqueness only existed to the degree that it was a social problem.
Not only the realism of the films themselves, but also the entire space surrounding cinema distinguished it as a dangerous medium and created a plethora of strong stimuli which left a lasting mark on spectators. In the eighth part of the Zigomar series, the Asahi offered a vivid account of the sensory experience of going to the movies in 1912:
Beyond the electric lights that dazzle the eyes and the noise from the bands that tend to stray off-key-both of which lead astray the minds of passersby—the first set of stimuli offered by the moving picture district are the placards painted in strong colors of red, blue, yellow, and purple which incite curious hearts. Men and women who set one foot in this area quickly become the prisoners of the moving pictures even before they watch a film, already losing their mental balance.
Audiences stimulated and led on in this way first taste an unpleasant feeling as they enter the darkness from the light. Their state of mind, having lost its balance, eventually falls into an uneasy mood. Here the air inside the theater, inadequately ventilated, assaults people with a kind of unclean humidity and attacks the sense of smell with tobacco smoke, the fragrance of face powder, and the odor of sweat.
In an insecure and unpleasant theater, what is projected into the eyes of people having lost mental tranquillity is Zigomar. . . . The conditions for extending an evil influence and for causing corruption have all been prepared in these points.(*2)
With these scenes and props, the film first leads the audience into a field of realistic impression and there puts into motion and shows various evil deeds. Even adult audiences with good sense and judgment seem impressed to the degree of calling it "An interesting novelty that works well." All the more, in the minds of the young who like both adventure and the strong and who idealize the winner in any situation, the film naturally offers strong excitement.
For instance, even if the end results in the death of the villain, just how much does the acquired moral point of view of the death of the villain transmit an authoritative impression in the minds of the young living in today's society? Most of them will only see the success of the elusive hero on screen, and think in the end how they would like to become a figure on the screen themselves, and act and appear like on screen."(*2)
On the one hand, children (as well as other lesser spectators, like women) were not seen as possessing the discernment necessary to both read the film's ending properly and ward off the pernicious stimulations of cinema, especially since the motion pictures offered them modes of identification that were heretofore unheard of. Given that it is debatable whether the audience was as dominated by children as the Asahi believed (Kubota Utsubo, for instance, in his account of going to the movies, registered surprise that his fellow spectators were mostly adult), the problem concerning the film audience was less one of age than of modes of understanding and knowledge.
On the other hand, contemporary discourse was describing a potentially ineluctable historical difference which posed a distinct threat. The Yomiuri Shinbun cited the motion pictures (along with the phonograph) in an editorial as one of the great modern inventions that had truly penetrated the everyday lives of normal people.(*2) But to the Tôkyô Asahi Shinbun, this modernity served as the background for a new breed of young Japanese who were increasingly expressing desires that were not accommodated in approved modes of moral discourse. The problem was not of a minority of children who were cruel and mischievous by nature, but of a majority who were born that way.(*2) The cinema then does not simply produce but "conforms to these instincts and tastes," representing a new age that threatens to overturn established orders.(*2) Film spectators were thus not simply seen as undereducated but also as fundamentally different in their way of perceiving the world and acting on their desires.
As a problem of knowledge, cinema was interpreted as an educational issue by many officials from the 1910s on.(*2) Film viewers both young and adult required instruction, a mental preparedness that would protect them from the disorienting assault of the cinematic experience and enable them to produce approved meanings from specific film works. Logically, the issue revolved around the application of discourse, the administration of proper interpretative categories to the film to receive the correct lesson. In this regard, the commentary of the benshi, the lecturer who stood next to the screen and explained the film during projection, became of central concern to film reformers and censorship authorities throughout the Taishô era.(*2) But what surfaced in the Zigomar incident, and what presented an obstacle heretofore unencountered, was again the problem of alterity, this time as represented by the question of the image. The Tôkyô Asahi noted:
As expected, the style of explanation of the benshi charged with lecturing did not neglect the lesson that good is rewarded and evil punished, . . . but in the minds of audiences who were watching the changes appear before their eyes on screen, no sense arose of good being rewarded and evil being punished.(*2)
For some reason, spoken language was unable to direct the interpretive processes of cinema audiences; there was something in the image which exceeded or even worked against the word. An official from the Tôkyô Metropolitan Police, in explaining their difficulties with the film, also noted the difference between the film summary submitted as part of the censorship procedure and the film itself:
At police headquarters, it was thought that, looking at the original story of the French Zigomar, there was nothing much to it. Even among works of this kind, if you inspect the moving picture license, you would think it is only a kind of child's play. That's why we approved it up until today thinking it had no effect on public morals. However, looking at the actual film, there is a world of difference from the explanation in both the scenery and the characters.(*2)
Since the written account of the film was different from the meaning acquired by actually viewing the cinematic text, there was increasing concern that the motion pictures were a medium fundamentally different from existing linguistic arts, one which posed unique problems. As the Tôkyô Asahi defined this difference,
More than from jôruri and Naniwa-bushi(*2) which specialize in the aural, and more than from theater which attacks with both the visual and the aural, the impression received from the moving pictures is stronger and the influence caused greater.(*2)
Working on a register dominated by the visual, cinema was then seen as exerting an influence greater than that of the other arts. Resistant to the restrictions of the spoken or written word, the image was posing a problem wherein desired meanings were not guaranteed to be produced in the minds of audiences. It was the alterity of the image, coupled with spectator desires associated with it, that helped define the cinema and mass cultural modernity as a threat to a Meiji order that had just seen its leader pass away.
It is important to underline that the problem of the image was not one exclusive to Zigomar, in the end, cinema itself was more the issue than this one individual text. Zigomar was merely seen as leading a dangerous trend in motion picture culture that necessitated banning not just this French production, but all others similar to it. Zigomar had become a problem in other nations as well (it was eventually banned in France, for instance), often for its supposed elevation of criminality through the figure of an upper class criminal. While class would become a central problem in later film censorship discussions in Japan, Zigomar's social portrayals were barely mentioned in the discourse surrounding the film. Many did voice concern that the film was teaching minors the methods of crime, but it is significant that, despite the recommendation of several newspapers,(*2) police never pulled any of the Zigomar influenced novels from the bookstore shelves. It was Zigomar's new and unique depiction of crime through the image that was the issue.
The Asahi in particular was already citing a driving force behind this evolution in the image: "When people get used to the moving pictures and will not be satisfied with most products, it is necessary to provide something unprecedented and strongly stimulating in order to shock the visual senses."(*2) This, the Asahi Shinbun felt, was what Zigomar and its ilk were doing, offering a thrilling and singular mode of visual sensation which the paper would name with the adjective "motion picture-like" (katsudô shashinteki).(*2) This emerging uniqueness to cinematic narration was itself cited as a problem. Earlier, the newspaper had complained in general about the "unnaturalness" and incomprehensibility of such new film techniques as ellipses and cutting within the scene, arguing that jumping from scene to scene or cutting out (what, in the classical narrative economy, are determined unimportant) actions confused and fatigued spectators, especially younger ones.(*2) In Zigomar, this was coupled with the villain's ability to appear and disappear, to change costumes in an instant and mysteriously jump from one place to another in eluding his pursuers, but in a way that, the Asahi acknowledged, proved absolutely fascinating to new Japanese youth.
This fluidity of space and identity, analogous of the circulatory anonymity of the modern crowd, was, according to Tom Gunning, a central concern of not only early trick films, but also of 19th century phenomena like photography (which both undermined established forms of identity through mechanical reproduction and reinstituted new ones by documenting the individual body) and detective fiction (which tried to reassert the certainty of an individual's guilt against an ever changing urban environment).(*2) We can speculate that it was this transcendence of space and time, Zigomar's ability to disguise himself and change identities, aided by Jasset's skillful use of trick photography—not dissimilar to the "motionless voyage" Noël Burch cites as central to the classical film experience-that both fascinated and disturbed contemporary observers. That is perhaps why so much of the discourse on these films worried about the audience's ability to recognize and identify who was the villain and who was the hero. If, as Gunning says, Zigomar "envisioned a new cinema of narrative integration, moving towards the paradigm of classical filmmaking,"(*2) the discourse on film in Japan marked it as the point at which the moving pictures broke with previous paradigms and stepped into the unknown-the simultaneously alluring and threatening realm of the new and different—and thereby posed the problem of what cinema is. (Here we can say that cinema became foreign after it was familiar.) Just as Gunning emphasizes the important role of regimes of knowledge in processing photographic information so as to refix and re-establish identity within a modern social context, so we can investigate how discourses after the Zigomar incident attempted to name and classify this particular visual experience. On the one hand, such discourses, represented at this time by the efforts of educational authorities and newspapers to describe and categorize cinema and its individual texts, laid the foundations for film study in Japan. On the other, in the hands of film reformers like those in the 1910s Jun'eigageki Undô (Pure Film Movement), these discussions would work to merge the cinema with the culture of the new Japanese middle class and transform the status of Japanese film and its audiences.
The Zigomar incident in this way helped define a central problem which would face authorities and social leaders with regard to the motion pictures for some time: how to control an alluring but elusive visual mode of cinematic signification that was resistant to the regulation of the written or spoken word. The recognition of this unique problem was reflected in the police's reaction to the incident. A few days after the order to ban the film, the Tôkyôpolice issued a set of internal procedural guidelines regarding what films to guard for when evaluating applications for film exhibition:
1. Works constructed from a framework that suggests adultery.
2. Works liable to invite or support the methods of crime.
3. Works bordering on cruelty.
4. Works constructed from a pattern that concerns love relations or which descend into obscenity, especially ones capable of exciting base emotions.
5. Works contrary to morality or which induce mischief by children or bring about corruption.(*2)
The sections covering adultery, cruelty, obscenity, and morality differed little from the theater regulations in force at the time. What had changed in confronting the problem of film was the perception that cinematic works could not merely offend established sensibilities or directly harm public morals, but also induce objectionable behavior in spectators, especially in certain sectors of the audience. Theater regulations at the time never posited in this way a narrative of behavioral influence, nor specified audiences that should be the object of regulative concern. This was a problem specific to cinema, which was posited as having an influence on a newly defined object of correction and control: thought and behavior.
Cinema was a unique problem that demanded particular modes of correction. As a Tôkyôpolice official himself said, there was "a necessity to more strictly watch [the moving pictures] than the theater."(*3) It was as cinema that Zigomar was banned, not as literature. The special attention-or fear, one could say-to which cinema was subject is evident in reports that authorities even tried to prevent producers from making films on the life of General Nogi Maresuke, the military leader who committed junshi (ritual suicide on the occasion of the death of one's lord) on the night of the Meiji emperor's funeral, only one month before Zigomar was banned.(*3) Despite the fact Nogi was already being praised by many as the epitome of bushidô, the perfect example of citizenship for Japanese children, cinema and its form of spectatorship was apparently too dangerous to trust to spread even this important message.
The procedures for censoring films started to change. The Tôkyô Metropolitan Police acknowledged that their mistake in approving Zigomar for exhibition was due in part to the fact that they had not seen the film before they approved it(*3) , given the misemono regulations that covered cinema at the time, all that was necessary for an application was a written summary of the film or of the benshi's narration.(*3) The police did often send out officers to investigate the films while they were being screened in the theaters, but this procedure was no different from foot patrols of the side-show tents.(*3) What the Zigomar incident made clear was that in order to censor the content of a film, it was inadequate merely to review a written representation of the cinematic text. The Tôkyô police acknowledged that they now needed to base their decision on whether to approve a film on a preview screening of the work.(*3) The definition of the filmic text itself began to change as censorship procedures started to place importance in the text as visual object, not just as a written story, as well as in the text as viewed, not just as read. New censorship technologies were deemed necessary (and later proposed, for instance, in the groundbreaking 1917 Tôkyô Moving Picture Regulations), ones that molded modern models of subjectivity centered on promoting the internal mental faculties capable of accommodating this visual "stimulation" and that created a homology between the structure of the individual subject and the social hierarchy, where the mental (the upper class and the state) would rule over the body (the lower class, the people).
In conclusion, it is clear that the history of discourse on cinema in Japan as a specific object began with the realization that discourse was completely adequate to define or accommodate its object, that cinema was other to existing modes of understanding. Such an interpretation itself was not sufficient to generate a discourse on the motion pictures, however, unless it was linked to a description of the medium as a social problem in need of solution. Only with such a perception did the fact that existing discourses, such as those on the misemono, did not treat the cinema as a differentiated sign itself become an issue. Discourse on cinema developed by first negating existing discourses, establishing the basis of a semiotics of difference within which the cinema would be defined. Such a semiotic negation was doubled in the social realm as the motion pictures had to be, in a sense, rejected or posited as objectionable in order to gain a definition. The question would remain, however, how to solve the problems posed by cinema. The very fact that the motion pictures posed a problem that sparked objections meant that film was durably establishing itself in discourse in a way that other misemono that soon faded away, like the panorama or the Western looking glass, never did. Cinema became distinguished in discourse precisely as a medium that exceeded current discourse (if not the word itself), one that utilized a mode of signification that could not be accommodated in existing forms of speech and writing. It was this contradictory task of delineating in discourse an object as elusive as Zigomar that could not be described, of making familiar again what had been posed as other, that became the central dynamic of 1910s discourse on cinema in Japan.
(*2) For a copy of the 1900 theater regulations, see Takazawa Hatsutarô Gendai engeki sôran, 2nd edition (Tôkyô Bunseisha, 1919): 211-229, especially Article 23, which regulated the content of theater plays.