Camera Movement, Reading, and Coloniality in Ichikawa Jun’s Film, Tony Takitani

The function of film grammar in the creation of narrative cinema is a central one when considering the realities of cinema as a global art. Since its birth from a confluence of European scientific and aesthetic principles, cinema has become a ubiquitous art form, but together with this growth has come the spread of those very principles from which cinema sprang. As an example, camera movement in Japanese film typically follows a grammatical pattern to privilege left-to-right, chronological movement as set by western cinema. That is, the camera will introduce information as a visual analogue to the process of reading a written, western text, with the lens operating very much as an eye in its trajectory across the ‘page’ of the screen. Building on work by Jean-Louis Baudry, Brian O’Leary and Jean Louis Comolli, this paper demonstrates this feature of Japanese cinema, using Ichikawa Jun’s 2004 film, Tony Takitani, as a case study. Through a close reading of the film and its pattern of movement, this paper proposes that we may discern a symptom of the persistent inscription of coloniality imposed in and through cinema—the movement of the camera parodies reading but also accepts as natural an ‘unnatural’, western pattern of movement. The act of adaptation, too, both anticipates and supports the conception of cinema as reading-parody, with Murakami Haruki’s short story “Tony Takitani” operating as a meaningful substratum to the process of vision-as-coloniality.