Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Thirteen: Chapter Twenty-One: Emergent Positions
In the previous lecture, in the context of Saitô Tamaki and Laura Mulvey, we talked about how discussions of gender and sexuality in films studies have gravitated toward visual techniques and optical technologies that create a sense of perceptual positioning, that is, subjective and objective shots. We also talked about how the psychoanalytic approach tended either to ignore materiality in favor of subjectivity, or to make technologies feel deterministic in the formation of subjectivity. Finally, we looked at how the negotiation of technologies — camera, VCR, PC, cell phone — within manga can affect sensory-motor orientations. Particularly with the shift toward ‘touch’ interfaces, the question of ‘who touches whom, and how’ became more important than ‘who looks at whom’ in matters of gender and sexuality. Sensation became more important than perception, affection more important than vision, and disposition more important than position. Drawing on Deleuze’s Cinema, I introduced a distinction between the perception-image and the affection-image.
In his film books, Deleuze initially looks at cinema in terms of how different films present an overall coordination of three kinds of image: action-image, perception-image, and affection-image. Later he introduces a number of other image types, but for our purposes these three are a good point of departure.
We can approach manga and anime in terms of an overall coordination of these three kinds of image. The goal of differentiating three kinds of images is not to look at things in terms of a combinatory system of simple elements, but to give you a way of talking about the technics of the image and its overall tendencies (overall coordination).
The action-image is one that highlights the direction of action. As a point of departure, you might associate the action-image with the long shot in cinema, that is, a shot in which you see a body at a longer distance, usually showing the body head-to-toe or at a greater distance. Taking this distance from the body emphasizes its direction of movement.
The perception-image can be loosely associated the medium shot, that is, a shot in which you tend to see about half of the body, which tends to place the emphasis on direction of perception, on the direction in which the body, face, and eyes are turned.
The affection-image brings you very close to the object or human body, usually the face, and the close-up is one paradigmatic form of affection-image. You no longer see much background, so there is less sense of the direction of action, and even though you may see a person’s eyes, you’re too close to worry about the direction in which they’re looking, or you might not be able to tell. What is more, the impact of the affection-image isn’t based primarily on one body perceiving another. If the eyes are looking directly out at you from the screen, the feeling is as much one of the eyes being too close, close to touching you, or being ‘in your face,’ as it is a feeling of being seen.
The way in which these three modalities are coordinated results in a specific set of embodied orientations and expectations. Let’s look at some manga examples.
