The cinema was the most effective medium for anti-Japanese propaganda in the United States during World War II and was the site of music's most important wartime role. From shortly after Pearl Harbor to the end of the U.S. occupation of Japan in 1952, Hollywood produced a large number of films offering negative depictions of the Japanese. Music assumed multiple roles in these anti-Japanese feature films and U.S. government documentaries. Never had Orientalist and racial politics been more clearly evident in music heard by so many as in these productions. These films marshaled preexistent European music, stereotypical Orientalist signs, and traditional Japanese music against the exotic enemy. This essay analyzes some sophisticated examples of musical propaganda that offer new perspectives for the study of cross-cultural musical encounters. For many in the United States, Hollywood film music continues to shape their impressions of Japan and their perceptions of Japanese music.
Tan Dun's 2006 opera The First Emperor dramatically transgresses stylistic, cultural, genre, and aesthetic boundaries and prompts investigation of critical methods and categories. This opera's multiplicity and engagement with the operatic past brings into focus relationships between Chinese, European, and experimental American operatic traditions and Romantic, modernist, and postmodernist modes of Orientalist representation. Powers's study of Puccini's manipulation of multiple styles in Turandot is a model for tracing Tan's stylistic sources and exploring their interaction in The First Emperor. Tan's use of conventions from the Orientalist operatic tradition and treatment of thematic material indicates an attempt to accommodate audience expectations. Other recent operas influenced by Chinese operatic traditions and the recent reception of Chinese opera in the West likely shaped Tan's composition and offer useful contextual and comparative perspectives. The critical reception and revision of this high-profile opera raise issues central to the creation of contemporary opera.
This article focuses on two cinematic versions of the ‘Madame Butterfly’ tale. Produced near the beginning of the sound era, the 1932 Madame Butterfly struggles to co-opt Puccini's opera and thereby create a fully cinematic Butterfly. My Geisha, created three decades later, aspires to subvert Orientalist representation by reflecting back upon Puccini's and Hollywood's Butterflies with hip sophistication. Both films work simultaneously with and against the Butterfly canon in intriguing ways and both are shaped by prevailing American perceptions of race and gender. In investigating the relationship between these films and Puccini's opera, I raise broader issues of comparative genre analysis, focusing particularly on exotic representation on stage and screen. Does film, in its bid to project exotic realism in both sound and image, succeed in surpassing the experience of staged Orientalist opera?
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