Five Kurosawas and a (de)construction of the Orient

DOI10.1177/0263395719883759
Date01 August 2020
Published date01 August 2020
Subject MatterArticles
/tmp/tmp-18SUzALIOuRstN/input 883759POL0010.1177/0263395719883759PoliticsHuttunen
research-article2019
Article
Politics
2020, Vol. 40(3) 281 –294
Five Kurosawas and a (de)
© The Author(s) 2019
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construction of the Orient
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395719883759
DOI: 10.1177/0263395719883759
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Miia Huttunen
University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Abstract
In 1959, UNESCO published a catalogue of Eastern films suitable for Western audiences, titled
‘Orient. A Survey of Films Produced in Countries of Arab and Asian Culture’. The aim of the
catalogue was to familiarise Western audiences with Eastern cultures through cinema. The
catalogue lists seven general characteristics of Eastern cinema to distinguish it from its Western
counterpart and to provide ready-made interpretations of the essential characteristics of the
Eastern world. Of the 139 feature films listed in the catalogue, five were directed by Kurosawa
Akira – the biggest number of films by a single director. This article provides an analysis of the five
Kurosawa films within the frame provided by the characterisations in the catalogue in the political
framework of World War II and its aftermath. Reading the cultural differences listed in the
catalogue as a means of constructing the East in Western eyes, the article suggests UNESCO’s
world was defined neither in terms of the contemporaneous geopolitical polarisation of the
Cold War nor the ongoing decolonisation process. Instead, the catalogue served the purpose
of proposing a cultural intervention in geopolitics, providing a reimagining of political realities
constructed on a cultural basis and given a concrete form through cinema.
Keywords
cinema, Cold War, Kurosawa Akira, the East, UNESCO
Received: 13 March 2019; Revised version received: 16 September 2019; Accepted: 30 September 2019
Introduction
As Paul Virilio (1999) has taught us, the history of cinema is intimately wrapped up with
the history of war. Indeed, from propaganda to surveillance technologies, and from repre-
sentation to perception, the history of the two runs in parallel. Or, as Roger Stahl (2010: 4)
phrases it, ‘the line between war and entertainment has always been permeable and nego-
tiable’. The conduct of war and peace itself is becoming dependent on visual media’s aid
in comprehending and representing our world, resulting in a co-constitutive relationship
between geopolitics and visual culture. Film, however, also holds a critical promise for a
Corresponding author:
Miia Huttunen, Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, P.O. Box 35, FI-40014
Jyväskylä, Finland.
Email: miia.j.huttunen@student.jyu.fi

282
Politics 40(3)
disruptive intervention in our traditional models of political thinking, ones rooted in
nationalist geopolitics and the antagonist policy making that follows (Shapiro, 2009).
This article looks at an instance when cinema’s disruptive powers were summoned to
serve as an instrument for a radical reimagining of world affairs in the post–World War
II world. In the aftermath of the World War II, the number of international organisations
grew exponentially. This was due to a shared belief that it was finally time to move past
the antagonistic nationalism that had led to the world scale conflicts defining the first
half of the 20th century. UNESCO, especially, stood out as a vanguard of the idealistic
post-war endeavours to stretch the realm of state-centred multilateral diplomacy to the
spheres of science, education and culture. Indeed, as Akira Iriye (2002: 44) notes, ‘In
those days, no international organization better exemplified the renewed faith in world-
wide cooperation than the United Nations, Educational, Scientific, and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO)’.
The standard narrative of what followed describes the short period from 1945 to the
beginning of the Cold War as the height of the optimism held for the role of these organi-
sations, only to fall flat as the fall out between the United States and the USSR forced the
hopes of multilateral diplomacy to give way to the realpolitik of the bipolar Cold War
conflict (Sluga, 2013). However, as Akira Iriye (2002: 65) has argued, far from power-
lessly observing the conflict from the sidelines, international organisations became ‘actors
in the Cold War drama’. Thus, I look at UNESCO as an active contributor to the construc-
tion of the international system, suggesting that initiatives taken to improve international
relations outside the Cold War geopolitical framework assured the liberal internationalist
hopes for peaceful cooperation remained alive and well.
In 1959, during the ideologically heated stage of the Cold War and at the peak of the
decolonisation process, 139 feature films produced in UNESCO’s Eastern Member States
were chosen to represent the Eastern world to the West in a film catalogue titled Orient.
A Survey of Films Produced in Countries of Arab and Asian Culture
, published by
UNESCO in cooperation with the British Film Institute. As the project was aiming to
promote intercultural understanding, films ‘dealing with sources of international misun-
derstanding’ were omitted (Holmes, 1959). This meant avoiding any references to the
recent war and, one would assume, the geopolitical turmoil that followed. The catalogue
does, however, contain films where such references are not difficult to detect – most nota-
bly five films directed by Kurosawa Akira. These included Walkers on Tigers’ Tails (Tora
no O o Fumu Otokotachi
, 虎の尾を踏む男達, 1945); Rashomon (Rashōmon, 羅生門,
1950); Living (Ikiru, 生きる, 1952); Seven Samurai (Shichinin no Samurai, 七人の侍,
1954); and Throne of Blood (Kumonosu-Jō, 蜘蛛巣城, 1957).
Despite the ‘underlying similarity’ of Eastern and Western cinema, the catalogue
points out that, to Western viewers, some of the film content will seem incomprehensible
due to cultural differences, such as manners, customs and social behaviour (Holmes,
1959). These differences are represented as an obstacle for achieving intercultural under-
standing between the East and the West. During the times of the catalogue, both the Cold
War and the ongoing decolonisation process ensured that the East–West paradigm
remained central to UNESCO’s understanding of world affairs. Following Michael J
Shapiro (2009), this article turns to film as a cultural medium perhaps most exemplary of
the ways popular culture can generate alternative geopolitical worldviews, proposing an
alternative to the traditional black and white conception of world politics in the 1950s.
Just as understandings of the realities of the Cold War world were partially constructed
upon cultural products (see, for example, Sharp, 2000), so were its alternatives. This

Huttunen
283
article thus explores the promise cinema holds in its capability to shape the conditions for
the perceiving of alternative political realities.
The catalogue provides a seven-point list of general characteristics of Eastern cinema,
ranging from the way love is depicted to the representations of violence, derived from the
films in the catalogue. Thus, meaning for Western audiences is created not only through
the films themselves, but also by the ready-made, culture-specific interpretations of the
East. Following Paul Ricoeur, the categorisations provide one possible way of interpret-
ing the films and so, the messages the films communicate are created in an interplay of
alternative readings piled one on top of the other. While every text must be read at least
partially in the context in which it was produced, the mediation of texts decontextualises
them, and every interpretation is another recontextualisation. This allows for new levels
of meaning to be added, which then act in a conflict of interpretations. Meaning is not to
be found hidden behind the films, but in front of them: Meaning lies with the interpreter,
constructed through interaction between the interpreter, the object of interpretation and
the context within which the interpretation takes place (Ricoeur, 1976).
Kurosawa’s Orient
The Orient catalogue introduces 139 feature films from 13 countries: Hong Kong, India,
Indonesia, Iraq, Japan, Korea, Malaya, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, Tunisia, the
United Arab Republic and the USSR. The catalogue was distributed in 3000 copies to
organisations such as the National Commissions for UNESCO, film distributors and tel-
evision stations with the aim to stimulate ‘the presentation of films which might give
audiences in the West a fuller and more informed idea of the ways of life of Eastern peo-
ples’ (Holmes, 1959). This provides an intriguing starting point for analysis. First, the
world is divided into two along a line separating the East from the West. Considering the
geopolitical realities of the time, one might be inclined to interpret this as a reference to
the Cold War East–West division. The catalogue’s world, however, was not structured
along those lines. Among the countries with the biggest number of films are countries
from the opposite sides of the Cold War polarisation: Japan and the USSR. For its first
decade, UNESCO had remained a primarily Western European organisation and, perhaps
to do with the absence of the Soviet Union, the geopolitical division of the Cold War was
hardly visible.
The Soviet Union finally joined UNESCO in 1954. By that time, another form of the
East–West division had started to emerge in the UNESCO context. The...

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