Cheshire Cat

Abstract

This essay by the Communist avant-garde critic Hanada Kiyoteru, written in 1954, uses the Disney interpretation of Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat as a means to discuss how documentary film might deal with “folk” phenomenon such as “goblin cats.” The piece also works hard to present a form of critical writing that is self-reflexive and open and places practice before knowledge, in line with Maoist tenets.

KEYWORDS:

• Hanada Kiyoteru
• Paul Rotha
• Walt Disney
• Sugiura Minpei
• Roberto Rossellini
• Tsumura Hideo
• Sasaki Kiichi
• Imamura Taihei
• Alice in Wonderland
• documentary film
• animation
• Mao Zedong’s “On Practice”

Notes

1. The Disney Alice in Wonderland was directed by Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson and Hamilton Luske, and released in 1951.

2. Mao Zedong, “On Practice: On the Relation Between Knowledge and Practice, Between Knowing and Doing,” in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. 1 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press), 295–309.

3. See: Yuriko Furuhata, “Rethinking Plasticity: The Politics and Production of the Animated Image,” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6, no. 1 (2011), 25–38; idem, Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Ken Yoshida, “The Undulating Contours of sōgō geijutsu (Total Work of Art), or Hanada Kiyoteru’s Thoughts on Transmedia in Postwar Japan,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (2012), 36–54; Ken Yoshida, “Interstitial Movements in the Works of Hanada Kiyoteru: A Preliminary Study,” Positions 22, no. 4 (Fall 2014), 781–808; and Aaron Gerow (ed.), Review of Japanese Culture and Society 22 (special issue, December 2010: “Decentering Theory: Reconsidering the History of Japanese Film Theory”).

1. Kaibyō Arima Goten (Ghost-Cat of Arima Palace) was directed by Arai Ryohei, and Jūdai no yūwaku (Teenage Seduction) by Hisamatsu Seiji. Both were released in Japan at the end of 1953.

2. Turksib was directed by Viktor Turin and originally released in 1929; Louisiana Story was directed by Robert J. Flaherty and released in 1948.

3. Bosustow was primarily a film producer, perhaps most famous for the American series Mr Magoo.

4. It should be noted that Rotha’s use of “actuality” in his definition of documentary is indebted to the terminology of John Grierson.