Scott Nygren's Time Frames: Japanese Cinema and the Unfolding of History takes the entire sweep of Japanese cinema as its subject. It should not be confused, however, with an orthodox history of Japanese cinema, such as those by Donald Richie or Joseph L. Anderson. It belongs to a turn of scholarship in film studies on time and history. The title lays out its concerns: Japan, cinema, and history, and in particular how history is constructed through film in Japan. In the introduction and periodically thereafter, these terms appear as [Japan], [film], and [history], bracketed as if under erasure, the terms themselves and all they signify subjected to intricate interrogation as constructed, unstable, and finally inadequate. The task that Nygren stakes for himself is a lofty one, which he declares to be simultaneously impossible and necessary: “Is it possible to imagine, construct, and participate in a nonauthoritarian network of discourses, one that does not base its operation on an appeal to unconscious or tacit absolutist assumptions, forcibly excluded from question? … Even if such a task seems impossible, the only ethical goal of knowledge work is to move in this direction, since alternates are untenable” (p. 7).

Lack of ambition is not among the faults of Time Frames. The book is expansive and intricate, and certainly provocative. However, it will not suit all tastes. The value that any reader finds in Nygren's book is likely to depend on his or her sympathy with poststructuralist French theory, especially Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Giles Deleuze, with a dash of Lacanian psychoanalysis as well. Those without a firm grounding in these thinkers may find the book obtuse and confusing, or even frustrating. A litmus test for many readers will be the opening chapter, which spends many pages destabilizing ideas of nation, history, and media, and even the idea of a book. Such a gesture may impress some readers as a welcome application of poststructuralist principles, asking all the questions that any scholar of Japan, history, or film should, whereas others may regard it as a lot of needless acrobatics in a book reluctant to acknowledge what it finally is: a book about Japanese cinema.

Nygren stresses that we should not look at Japan as autonomous and isolated from the modern global world, nor should we conclude that its own cultural specificity has been erased by it: “that Japan and Japanese people belong in the postnational world, and simultaneously that the idea of legacy of [Japan] can no longer be contained within the region of Japan. Japan is in the world in both senses: the world belongs to Japan, and Japan belongs to the world” (p. 21). A major break that Nygren explores at the length of a chapter is the victory of Kurosawa Akira's Rashomon (1950) at the 1951 Venice Film Festival, the point at which “previously isolated lines of development from Asia and the west first intersected” (p. 99). Rashomon was not a celebrated film in Japan but came to be one in the West; appreciated by Western scholars as the founding text of a Japanese film tradition, it also occludes what went before. Nygren analyzes its incommensurable alternative scenarios through its own status as a “hinge text” (p. 107) between Japan and its cinema as local and global, and between Japan's militaristic past and its humanistic presence, which is pointedly presented as a classical feature of Japanese culture and not an imposition of the MacArthur administration. Drawing on Deleuze's idea of the fold, Nygren reads Rashomon through “history as origami”: “a multiple refolding of discursive fields according to a design or figure that is not visible until the work of folding is completed and forgotten” (p. 114). The “unfolding” in the book's carefully chosen title takes on additional relevance in this light.

The chapter on Rashomon, “Kyoto/Venezia,” is a lean sixteen pages, the shortest, most controlled chapter in Time Frames. Though his discussion turns to many less discussed facets of Japanese cinema, including anime and Japanese video art, the bulk of Nygren's writing is on works by Kurosawa, Ozu Yasojuri, Mizoguchi Kenji, Oshima Nagisa, and other canonical Japanese filmmakers. This will increase the book's accessibility to the nonspecialist reader, even as it may limit its usefulness to Japanese cinema specialists.

Many readers are likely to take issue with Nygren's use of extensive amounts of French theory to discuss Japanese culture; often, models borrowed from Deleuze or Derrida seem to occupy an a priori position. In a book that is self-reflexive about everything, this is something I found myself wishing Nygren would be more self-reflexive about. A late discussion of Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) is helpful along these lines, stressing affinities between the French and Japanese New Waves and the place that Japan held in French thought at the moment poststructuralism was taking shape, though I wish Nygren had foregrounded the issue of his work's indebtedness to Continental thought.