Kawamoto Masao was one of the key players in the formative years of Japanese amateur film culture during the 1920s and 1930s. Soon after 9.5mm and 16mm technologies arrived in Japan, Kawamoto became involved in amateur film communities in various ways, from editing amateur cine journals to networking with film societies outside Japan, including the Amateur Cinema League in the United States.1 These activities not only contributed to the development of amateur cine culture in Japan, but also helped introduce Japanese amateur cinema to the West at a time when Japanese cinema, and Japanese culture more broadly, were unfamiliar commodities regarded as objects of exoticism.
Up until the early 1930s, the 9.5mm film stock and equipment was more prevalent than 16mm in Japan. Iconoclastically, Kawamoto was primarily associated with 16mm film culture even before it became the dominant amateur format. In 1927, Kawamoto, together with another important figure in Japanese film named Nishimura Masami, established the Nippon Amateur Cinema League. This organization was the Japanese branch of the Amateur Cinema League (ACL) founded in New York in July 1926.2 Kawamoto and Nishimura launched multiple amateur film magazines together, such as Amachua mūbīsu (Amateur Movies, 1928), Firumu amachua (Film Amateur, 1929), and Amachua shinema (Amateur Cinema, 1931). In addition to serving as the editor of these magazines, Kawamoto wrote articles on various subjects related to amateur film practice and theory, including “The Application of Kodacolor Film” (Kogata eiga, October 1930), “Film Editing for Beginners” (Kogata eiga, April 1931), and “A New Market for Kodak 8” (Amachua eiga, September 1932).
What distinguishes Kawamoto from other Japanese amateur filmmakers and critics of this period was his publication of articles in English, which helped introduce Japanese amateur cinema to international communities. As scholar Tomita Mika details in her study of Japanese amateur cinema, in the late 1920s, Kawamoto, along with Nishimura, began sending articles to Movie Makers, the monthly magazine that the ACL had published in New York since December 1926.3 Although interaction with international communities accelerated in the mid- to late 1930s, when there was a boom in international amateur festivals in the West as well as in Japan, articles by Kawamoto and Nishimura predated this trend by several years. In addition, Kawamoto published a book in Japanese in collaboration with Arthur Gale, one of the editors of Movie Makers. Titled Amachua eiga no seisaku: Riron to jissai (Production of Amateur Film: Theory and Practice, 1933), the book listed Kawamoto and Gale as co-authors and included four of Gale’s essays translated into Japanese.4 Kawamoto wrote in its introduction that the publication of this volume would mark the first international project for Japanese cine amateurs and play an important role in developing cross-cultural exchanges.5
Kawamoto’s essay, “Amateur Cinema, Avant-Garde Film, and Tendency Film,” was published in Nihon shashinkai nenkan (Yearbook of the Japanese Photographic World) in 1932, and a near-exact copy of the piece (with only minor revisions) appeared in Amachua eiga no seisaku: Riron to jissai the following year.6 While the essay does not explicitly detail Kawamoto’s international engagements, it still demonstrates how his understanding of Western film theories and practices shaped his vision for Japanese amateur cinema. Moreover, Kawamoto’s piece reflects contemporaneous amateur practices and discourses, which in Japan were shifting from trends inclined to stylistic experimentation and aestheticized pleasure-seeking in the late 1920s to practices which employed small-gauge technologies for practical social ends in the 1930s. Over the course of these two decades, then, the discursive tendencies of Japanese amateur filmmaking reflected an increased social demand for practical filmmaking endeavors. This imperative was informed by various socio-cultural and socio-political factors, such as the arrival of Western and Soviet film theories in Japan, the rise of proletarian filmmaking, and the Manchurian Incident in 1931, which marked the beginning of fifteen years of continual war in East Asia. Kawamoto’s argument is by no means radical in this context; rather, it was representative of Japanese amateur cinema of this period. His essay demonstrates the discursive reality of the historical moment, which was beginning to depart from a view of amateur cinema as solely a vehicle of modernist artmaking, increasingly treating it as a civic activity with broad social and political utility to imperial Japan.
1. Both the 9.5mm and 16mm systems arrived in Japan around 1923, although some other small-gauge formats were already available by then. According to contemporary essays by figures such as Kaeriyama Norimasa and amateur filmmaker Shimazaki Kiyohiko, 17.5mm was the first small-gauge system in Japan when Sone Shunsuidō, a camera store in Kanda, Tokyo, imported the 17.5mm Ernemann Kinox from Germany around 1908 or 1909. Sone Shunsuidō soon began manufacturing its own product named “Kineo,” which emulated the technological functions of the 17.5mm Ernemann Kinox camera. Shimazaki Kiyohiko, “17 miri han,” Kogata eiga 3, no.6 (June 1931), 21-23; Kaeriyama Norimasa, “Kogata eiga no jōshiki,” Nihon shashinkai nenkan Shōwa 7 nendo (Tokyo: Shōrindō Shoten, 1932), E63- E70.↩
2. Nishimura Masami is another key figure in the formation of amateur film culture in interwar and wartime Japan. Born in 1908, Nishimura worked as a banker at Dai Hyaku Ginkō before becoming involved in film. According to Nishimura’s own account, he began learning small-gauge film in 1927 and developed interest especially in 16mm. His book, Kogata eiga: Rekishi to gijutsu (Tokyo: Shikai Shobō, 1941), has been one of the most important resources to grasp the history of amateur cinema in the pre-1945 period.↩
3. Tomita Mika, “Senzen kogata eigashi Movie Makers ni miru Amerika no Nihon imēji” (Images of Japan in Small-Gauge Film Magazine Movie Makers before World War II), Āto risāchi [Art Research] 13 (March 2013), 37-48.↩
4. According to a description in Amachua eiga no seisaku, the four essays by Gale were originally published in the A.C.L. Bulletin. In addition to these four pieces, an introduction to this volume was included as Gale’s contribution to the collaborative project.↩
5. Kawamoto Masao and Arthur L. Gale, Amachua eiga no seisaku: Riron to jissai [Production of Amateur Film: Theory and Practice] (Tokyo: Nippon Amachua Eiga Kyōkai, 1933), 7.↩
6. Kawamoto Masao, “Amachua eiga to zen’ei eiga narabi ni keikō eiga to no kanren ni tsuite,” in Amachua eiga no seisaku: Riron to jissai (Tokyo: Nippon Amachua Eiga Kyōkai, 1933), 13-16.↩