StarD_Bean_1910s_final

by Ellen Dawson

  The uniqueness of Hayakawa’s body, especially his face, transcended the existing vocabulary in film acting, such as restrained facial expressions suited for close-ups and pantomimic gestures, and redefined them with inscrutable facial expressions and an economy of gesture (Miyao 195–201).

  An article in Current Opinion in 1918 quotes Cecil B. DeMille’s comment on Hayakawa’s performance in The Cheat and enhances the novelty of Hayakawa’s acting styles. DeMille quips: “I don’t understand it [Hayakawa’s acting style]; it is new and strange, but it is the greatest thing I ever saw” (“Is the Higher Art of the Movies to Come from Japan?” January 1918, 30).1

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  Hayakawa recalled in an interview in 1963, “My facial expression was highly valued as expressionless expression” (Yoshiyuki 48). Yet Hayakawa’s face, such as the one framed in the mirror in The Man Beneath, is not simply expressionless, in spite of his own comment. Here, the close-up of his face in the mirror freezes an action in intense ambiguity, or in ambiguous intensity. The moment of restraint, or repression of emotions or motivations, is simultaneously that of being exaggerated. Hayakawa’s face certainly registers his intense emotions—anguish, suffering, irritation, desperation, and so on—no matter how “expressionless” it looks. This is clearly an emotional intensity that the prop of the mirror exploits. Caught in the mirror in close-ups—especially in those shots that hold as his eyes stare wide, often without blinking—Hayakawa’s physical/physiological motility may appear subtly understated but is surely exaggerated cinematically. In The Hidden Pearls, for instance, the action is noticeably restrained: Tom/Hayakawa stands perfectly still. But the enhanced luminosity of his body, reflected in the mirror in the dark room, achieves ambiguous intensity in meanings.

  Jean Epstein called the close-ups of Hayakawa’s face on the screen

  “photogénie, cadenced movement” (“Senses” 243). Louis Delluc argued that

  “photogénie” changes “real” into something else without eliminating the

  “realness,” and makes people, through the camera/screen, “see ordinary things as they had never been before” (Abel, “Photogénie” 110). Five decades after Delluc called Hayakawa “a phenomenon” and connected his

  “beauty” to “a natural force,” André Bazin revived the notion of “photogénie”

  by repeating the same words that Delluc used: “Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty” (Bazin 13). Via viewing Hayakawa’s body, French film theorists developed the “utopian vision of an originary, phenomenological plentitude of perception, preserved and extended by the cinematic apparatus” (Shaviro 18).

  With the intense ambiguity or ambiguous intensity in the action of violence displayed onscreen, Hayakawa’s image had “radical potential to subvert social hierarchies” of race and sex and “decompose relations of power”

  (Shaviro 65). It is true that the close-up of Hayakawa’s face in the mirror in The Man Beneath and the luminous body of Hayakawa in the mirror in The Hidden Pearls change the “real” body of the actor into something else: a racialized object. But at the same time, even if the view of the two identical bodies within the frame provides the viewer a pseudo-objective perspective, the spectator of The Man Beneath and The Hidden Pearls is “caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen” (Williams, “Film Bodies” 704). Viewed in this light, we

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  might understand Hayakawa’s immense appeal as a type of mimetic relationship, the likes of which Jennifer Bean elaborates in the context of early fandom by elaborating Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “mimetic faculty.”

  As she writes, “Mimesis stresses the reflexive, rather than reflection; it brings the subject into intimate contact with the object, or other, in a tac-tile, performative, and sensuous form of perception, the result of which is an experience that transcends the traditional subject-object dichotomy”

  (Bean, “Technologies” 46).

  To speak of a mimetic response to Hayakawa’s screen body means to speak of a carnal or sensuous experience that is neither joyous, nor thrilling, but rather measured by a reflexive relationship to the utter desolation and intensified agony of what it means to be human. “The beauty of Sessue Hayakawa is painful,” wrote Louis Delluc. “Few things in the cinema reveal to us, as the lights and silence of this mask do, that there really are alone beings. I well believe that all lonely people, and they are numerous, will discover their own recourseless despair in the intimate melancholy of this savage Hayakawa” (Delluc 138–39). In The Man Beneath, the left hand of Ashuter/Hayakawa grips his own facial skin as well as ours. In The Hidden Pearls, when the right hand of Tom/Hayakawa cuts open his flesh, the blood is simply, “universally,” red. Like Delluc, we gaze at Hayakawa’s cinematic body and feel the “pain.”

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  ✩ Conclusion

  Walter Benn Michaels claims, “Nativism in the period just

  after World War I involved not only a reassertion of the distinction between American and un-American but a crucial redefinition of the terms in which it might be made. America would mean something different in 1925 from what it had meant at, say, the turn of the century; indeed, the very idea of national identity would be altered” (Michaels 2). According to Michaels, there was a distinctive nature to nativism in the 1920s. In what he calls

  “nativist modernism,” the possibility of Americanization for immigrants was denied, and the ultimate difference between “American” and “un-American” was emphasized. In “Progressive racism” before World War I, Michaels argues, “projects of ‘Americanization’” always existed behind the racist discourse. The “inferiority of ‘alien’ races” was emphasized, but eventually new immigrants were considered to be able to assimilate to American society as Americans. However, in “nativist modernism,” Michaels claims, immigrants’ ultimate “difference” was emphasized, and “ ‘American’ designates not a set of social and economic conditions but an identity that exists

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  prior to and independent of those conditions” (Michaels 8–9). In fact, Frances Kellor, who had been a central figure of the Americanization movement, claimed in 1921 that American people began to think it was wrong to consider that all foreigners were future American citizens and that political, economic, and educational opportunities should be equally provided (70, 72).

  In the 1922 Ozawa case at the U.S. Supreme Court, Japanese bodies were clearly distinguished from American. Ozawa Takao originally filed an application for U.S. citizenship on 14 October 1914, after twenty years of studying in an American university and working in an American company.

  After his application was denied, Ozawa challenged the rejection in the Federal District Court for the Territory of Hawaii in 1914, but the court ruled that Ozawa was not eligible for naturalized citizenship (Daniels 151). In 1922 Ozawa informed the Supreme Court that “at heart” he was “a true American.” Ozawa insisted that he did not have any connection with the Japanese government or with any Japanese churches, schools, or organizations. His family belonged to an American church and his children attended an American school. He spoke English at home so that his children could not speak Japanese. He even chose for a wife a woman educated in American schools instead of one educated in Japan. However, Ozawa lost his petition, because physically his body was “clearly” “not Caucasian” (Takaki 208).

  Under these conditions, the numbers of fiction films displaying Japanese bodies decreased by the early 1920s. In 1921, the Japanese film magazine Katsudô Shashin Zasshi reported, “There is no film about Japan this year [in the United States], even though there were many last year. There are films about China, instead” (Aoyama Yukio, “Beikoku katsudô shashin
no miyako yori (13) [From the capital of American motion picture],” February 1921, 79). Hayakawa’s stardom in the United States also came to a turning point by 1921. His popularity was clearly declining. According to a poll of film stars conducted by Motion Picture Magazine, Hayakawa was ranked number 44 in December 1918, but in December 1920 his rank dropped to number 124 (“The Motion Picture Hall of Fame,” December 1918, 12; “Popular Contest Closes,” December 1920, 94). Hayakawa left Hollywood in 1922.

  Across the Pacific, Hayakawa’s body played a key role in the Japanese reception of his stardom. While the Hollywood studios that created Hayakawa’s stardom tried to confine (but not eliminate) “the carnal sensuality of the film experience” (Sobchack 56) that his screen presence could provoke, Japanese media emphasized Hayakawa’s sheer physicality. In so doing, the Japanese media underscored, even liberated, the materiality of Hayakawa’s body that his film narratives sought to codify and control; they also laboriously reinscribed that body’s meanings in the racial politics of Japan.

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  The Japanese film journal

  Kinema Junpo highlights

  Hayakawa’s expressive capacities

  in its April 1920 issue.

  Initially, Japanese media followed the politics of race in Hollywood cinema, but in a negative tone. They criticized Hayakawa for appearing in such films as The Cheat that would “insult” Japan and enhance anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States, and they regarded him as a “traitor” to the

  “Japanese race” ( Katsudô Gahô, January 1919, 14). Yet, after Hayakawa established his status as a U.S. matinee idol, the negative tone that regarded

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  Hayakawa as a national/racial shame almost completely disappeared.

  Instead, Japanese media started publicizing Hayakawa’s cinematic achievement. In fact, there were teleological discourses on cinema in the period that tried to distinguish and elevate cinema from other theatrical forms of entertainment and spectacle, including kabuki, which were often connected to lower class and juvenile spectators in Japan.

  In particular, Hayakawa’s body was regarded as “beyond the average Japanese people” and praised as more “cinematic” than those of other Japanese actors (Kaeriyama 2–5). Hayakawa was reportedly taller than most Japanese actors, much closer to American actors in stature. Other reports claimed that Hayakawa was not only practicing facial expressions, but also training his body with a rigorous daily schedule similar to other American film actors.2 As I have argued elsewhere, in early-twentieth-century Japan, a “Caucasian complex” was observable in the discourse of physical appearances. Japanese bodies were considered to be “shameful”

  compared with well-built and well-balanced western bodies (Deguchi 104–23). The terms nikutai-bi (the beauty of the body) and hyôjô-bi (the beauty of expressions) gained wide currency as vogue words at that time.

  Under such conditions, Hayakawa’s biological body was highly valued because it gave hope to Japanese people to become physically equal to the perceived beauty of western bodies. Hayakawa’s body was regarded as one that could even overcome Darwinism, or the presumption of naturally determined western racial and social hegemony. Conceived as the ideal physical embodiment of a western style of modernization, Hayakawa’s body was thus, finally and ironically, deprived of its materiality and confined in the discourse of race in Japan.

  N OT E S

  I would like to dedicate this chapter to the Nederlands Filmmuseum, the George East-man House, and the Museum of Modern Art for their magnificent efforts in film preservation. The prints of The Man Beneath (NF), Hidden Pearls (GEH), and The Devil’s Claim (GEH) were restored and became available for viewing only after I completed my book manuscript, Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom. The Museum of Modern Art included Hidden Pearls and The Devil’s Claim in its retrospective of Hayakawa films in September 2007. The Man Beneath was screened at the 27th Giornate del Cinema Muto in October 2008, together with His Birthright (1918) and The Courageous Coward (1919), two more Hayakawa films restored and preserved at NF. I would like to acknowledge Elif Rongen-Kaynakci (NF) and Charles Silver (MoMA) for their generous support. Lastly, I thank Jennifer M. Bean for inviting me to write about Hayakawa one more time.

  1. The subtitle of this entry is Current Opinion is particularly telling: “Japanese Actors, Obtaining Remarkable Emotional Effects Without Moving a Face Muscle, Astound Our Masters of the Craft.”

  2. See Mori, “Eiga Haiyû no hanashi” 72–73, and Mori, Hayakawa Sesshû 37–38.

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  Theda Bara

  Orientalism, Sexual Anarchy,

  and the Jewish Star

  GAYLYN STUDLAR

  In referring to unmarried females in the period of transition to twentieth-century modernity, Elaine Showalter says: “Sexual anarchy began with the odd woman” (Showalter 19). I would like to direct her statement to the exploration of Theda Bara, one of the earliest and, by some accounts, oddest manifestations of female stardom to emerge from American film culture in the 1910s. Bara, like her Victorian predecessors in odd femininity, undermined gender and sexual norms, but through more spectacular means—by being inextricably linked to film’s predatory “vampire”

  or “vamp,” an unmarried woman who became the screen embodiment of seductive feminine evil.

  Theda Bara, “The Queen of Vampires.” Undated photo.

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  Although she most famously came to represent the vampire on screen, Bara did not originate the type. William Selig’s film company released The Vampire in 1910, and Kalem followed with another female vampire film in 1913 (Staiger, Bad Women 151–52; Koszarski 274). However, the motion picture appeal of the vamp was not decisively established until Bara’s first major film appearance in Fox Film Corporation’s A Fool There Was (1915). Variously referred to in fan magazines, newspaper articles, and studio-originated publicity as “The Arch-Torpedo of Domesticity,” “The Queen of Vampires,” “The Wickedest Woman in the World,” “Purgatory’s Ivory Angel,” “The Ishmaelite of Domesticity,” “The Devil’s Handmaiden,” and the “Priestess of Sin,” the actress known to the public as “Theda Bara” enjoyed a brief reign—from 1915 to 1919—as one of the top box-office attractions of the early years of the star system, and her success inspired numerous imitators and rivals.1

  Fox shaped the script of A Fool There Was from the Porter Emerson Browne play (1906) and novel (1909), both sharing the same title as the film; all were loosely based on Rudyard Kipling’s well-known poem “The Vampire” (1897). The latter was written to accompany a Philip Burne-Jones’s painting of the same name that depicted a woman with long, dark hair poised menacingly over a young man who appears almost lifeless on the bed. A small mark on the man’s chest suggests that the female vampire hovering over him in her sleeveless negligee has used him to satisfy a supernatural lust for blood. The vampire’s face registers a slight smile, suggesting her sadistic enjoyment of an obviously sexualized triumph over masculinity.2

  The iconography of Burne-Jones’s 1897 painting would be reproduced in the selling of Porter Emerson Browne’s novel and would also become a foundation of the visual characterization of Theda Bara’s first vampire role.

  In spite of this shared iconography, Bara’s “vamp” was not a supernatural, bloodsucking creature of the kind who took hold of late nineteenth-century imaginations and was given expression in Burne-Jones’s painting as well as in other cultural texts such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Because this highly sensual and manipulative woman was often identified in her film representations as foreign (non-U.S.) and exhibited elements associated with the exotic Middle or Far East, this trend in movie seductresses of the late 1910s was widely referred to as the “Cobra and Incense” period.

  In Fox’s film adaptation of A F
ool There Was, directed by Frank Powell, Bara plays an unnamed adventuress of unknown origins; she victimizes a string of men who masochistically succumb to her sexual allure, an allure that transgresses the ideals of Anglo-Saxon white womanhood. The character is literally a dark seductress, haughty and imperious, inured to the suffering of her male victims—or their families. Boarding an ocean liner for

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  Europe, she appears as a spectacle designed to attract the male gaze. While other women are attired in conservative gabardine and sturdy tweed traveling attire meant to cover and protect, she is overdressed in satin and fur, vel-vet, and tight hobble skirts, the latter emphasizing her sensual walk and her shape. In a close-up of her looking out of a porthole at her sexual prey, the vamp’s kohl-ringed eyes are emphasized, suggesting the power of a gaze that exercises hypnotic power over men. In private, she lets down long black hair to recall both Burne-Jones’s vampire painting and the Victorian obsession with luxuriant hair as a register of female sexual power (see Gitter). While the vampire is pursuing a wealthy American envoy to Europe, one of her hapless lovers commits suicide in front of her. Unmoved by this tragedy, she proceeds to lure the married envoy into illicit sex and a life of alcoholic dis-sipation. The vampire alienates him from his wife and young child; he is stripped of his diplomatic post and shunned by respectable society. In the last scene of the film, he is on the verge of death. Remorseless, the vampire poses triumphantly, scattering rose petals on the prone body of “the fool.”

  Bara’s performance in A Fool There Was made her a star—a rather surprising occurrence considering the actress’s lack of previous film experience or theatrical success. In 1914, director Frank Powell recommended that Fox hire Bara, then an unknown New York–based stage actress who called herself “Theodosia De Coppet,” to play the vampire in his film. De Coppet, almost thirty years old, had never been able to advance her career beyond Yiddish theater and minor roles in legitimate New York City stage productions or in touring companies (Hamilton 18–20; Genini 7–8). Whether Powell first saw her when she was an extra on a Pathé film, The Stain (1914), or whether he discovered her at a casting call is uncertain. In any event, he saw something promising in the actress, and on his advice Fox committed De Coppet to a contract and the primary female role in Powell’s film (Genini 15; Hamilton 18).