PROBLEMS OF POETICS A Commercial Industry For a poetics of the cinema, filmmaking is a practice - operating within institutions, regulated by tacit assumptions about the nature of the work process and about the decisions that are allotted to people in different roles. What we think of as the 'Ozu' film is strongly affected by the mode of film practice in which he worked. Ozu entered a vigorous film industry. Japan's two major studios of the 1920s, Nikkatsu and Shochiku, were surrounded by a host of lesser companies, some flourishing, others marginal. During the 1920s, the industry turned out between six and eight hundred features per year. Although this pace slowed to four to six hundred per year during the 1930s, Japan remained the most prolific filmmaking country in the world. Studios maintained this productivity by lengthening and intensifying the working day, using minimal crews, shooting on location, and making the director responsible for overseeing scriptwriting and editing. The major firms had directors, writers, technicians, and stars under contract; they published fan magazines and publicity brochures; they owned theatres and distribution outlets. In certain ways, the Japanese film industry of 1930 was as rationalized as the American film industry of a decade earlier. Like Hollywood, the industry relied upon tested genres. Jidai-geki, or historical films, were typically shot around Kyoto, while gendai-geki, films set in contemporary surroundings, were made in and around Tokyo. Smaller studios tended to specialize and were located in one city or another, but the major firms ran a facility in each city. The most popular jidai-geki were the chambara, or swordfight films, aimed chiefly at urban working-class men, rural audiences, and children. Chapter 1 has already mentioned some popular gendai-geki subgenres of the 1920s and 1930s: the nansensu comedy (modeled in part on the popular Harold Lloyd films), the female melodrama, the shoshimin-geki films about the lower middle class, and the home drama. There were still other varieties of gendai-geki, such as the 'salaryman' film, the student film, the haha-mono or mother film, the 'hooligan' or street-crook film, and the 'tendency' film (heiko eiga) of liberal social protest. Ozu's leanings toward the gendai-geki were confirmed by the critical praise which his early comedies and home dramas won. Indeed, critics were well-disposed to the gendai-geki film generally, since it was obviously much more 'modern' than the 'feudal' swordfight movie. It is still very difficult to be precise about Japanese film exhibition of this time. Throughout the period Japan had remarkably few theatres (never more than 2,000), yet film attendance grew from about 120 million in 1926 to almost 230 million in 1937. Audiences were overwhelmingly urban dwellers, familiar with many sorts of films, traditional entertainments like variety shows, and the growing medium of radio. Exhibition practices were inflected by native customs. In the silent era, patrons checked their shoes upon entering the cinema, sat on the floor or on low benches, and favored programs of a length competitive with the extensive running time of live traditional drama. The most striking aspect of the screening situation was the katsuben, or benshi, the performer who accompanied the film by playing all the vocal parts 18