Teresa de Lauretis proposes that “a film may address the spectator as female, rather than portray women positively or negatively” (1987, 135). Extending this proposition from film to screenplay, this paper uses Jun’ai monogatari (The Story of Pure Love, 1957) as a case study, comparing Mizuki Yōko’s screenplay with Imai Tadashi’s film. Here, “female” refers not to viewers’ empirical gender but to a spectatorial position constructed through the narrative.

Although framed by the male protagonist’s retrospective narration, Mizuki’s screenplay refuses him a monopoly on narrative action. It is the heroine who proposes their partnership, decides to abandon theft, and acts at decisive moments when the hero hesitates. The screenplay also develops a structure of intergenerational female support, in which a woman instructor guides and cares for the heroine. Most revealingly, a scripted parallel montage juxtaposes mealtimes in two gender-segregated juvenile institutions, making the gendered institutional order of 1950s Japan legible. The completed film largely preserves the heroine’s active role in the plot and this structure of intergenerational support, but omits the scene set in the hero’s juvenile training school, dissolving the montage and its comparative logic. Although this cut increases women’s relative share of screen time, it removes the contrast through which gendered difference is articulated, weakening the screenplay’s gender critique.

The paper argues that Mizuki’s screenplay constructs textual conditions for addressing the spectator as female. Script-to-screen comparison therefore reveals Mizuki’s creative contribution and shows how gendered address is reconfigured in the passage from screenplay to film.

Authors:
Shuaiwei Cheng, Independent Scholar, China

About the Presenter(s)
Shuaiwei Cheng is an independent researcher and screenwriter interested in film narratology, gender, and East Asian cinema. His current project traces the work of postwar Japanese women screenwriters from page to screen.

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