SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This work is a historical study of the representation of the Ainu people through ethnographic documentaries made in Japan before the Pacific War. The corpus has been divided into three sections: first, the Ainu in the first Lumière actualités filmed in Japan. Second, in the actualités of Pathé productions and the reference to the lost documentary of Torii Ryozo. Third,in the travelogues, made in Japan by Frederick Starr and Benjamin Brodsky in the 1910s. When comparing the film analysis to the social reality of the Ainu, in section four, it becomes clear how documentaries tried to project a deceiving ethnicity belonging to a time prior to the moment they were filmed. Thus, filmmakers aimed at causing attraction of the Western audience through the exotic and ahistorical view of a cultural and geographically distant people. The approach to the productional circumstances of the images reveals the mise en scène, the premeditated construction of Ainu identity. All this could cast doubt on the validity of the ethnographic documentary as social testimony.