Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun'ichiro on Cinema and "Oriental" Aesthetics (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies)

Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, Number 53, Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan | "I can't escape the feeling that the you who lives here is an image, and what moves in the film is your true substance. If I may stretch the point, could it be that the entire universe and all the phenomena of this world are like film, from moment to moment everything continues to change, yet the past remains spooled up somewhere? And so we here are but images, soon to vanish without a trace, while our true substance lives properly within the film of the universe? The dreams and fantasies that we see are actually light cast in our heads from the film of these pasts, and not mere illusions at all. All in all, in images appears the true substances of things that were once seen somewhere, in previous lives or in childhood years." ... "The more he thought about it, the less sure he was about where the world inside the film ended and where the world outside the film began. But that's how it had to be with moving pictures, they should have such an intimate connection with actual life...." --Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, from Nikkai [A Lump of Flesh, 1923], TJZ 9: 40, 132-33