On a cold morning in November 2012, I was standing in front of a grave at the Cimetière parisien de Pantin in Paris, where Jean-Pierre Melville was buried with his family. At that time, I had no idea that I would write a book on Le Samouraï, even when it is the film that I adore most to this day. In retrospect, though, this project started in that year in Lyon, France, one of the birthplaces of cinema (the Lumière brothers) and the center of the French Resistance during World War II. I was on sabbatical and had an incredible opportunity to spend a year at the Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 as a visiting researcher. Jean Moulin was a prominent figure in the French Resistance, and Melville drew heavily from Moulin's experiences when he directed his 1969 film, L'Armée des ombres/Army of Shadows. As a film historian and a Melville fan, one of the first places I visited in Lyon was Vieux Lyon (Old Lyon, or the Renaissance district of Lyon), where Melville shot some of the important scenes of Army of Shadows.

In retrospect, I have always been interested in people who keep crossing borders. National border, cultural border, and so on. Melville was one of those people. He dreamt of America. He was called an American in Paris. At the same time, he was heavily influenced by Japonisme. Cinema was his way to cross cultural borders.

My Ph.D. dissertation (2003) and the first book (2007) were on the Japanese actor and Hollywood star Sessue Hayakawa, who was in France during WWII. Some even say he participated in the Resistance. I argued that Hayakawa's stardom was in fact constructed through a cross-cultural negotiation about race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality among the filmmakers, the audience, and Hayakawa himself, who moved between the US, Japan, and France. I comparatively analyze the close-ups of Hayakawa and Alain Delon in this book on Le Samouraï.

In my second monograph, The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema (2013), there are 3 protagonists, if I say, who again crossed multiple borders. This time, they are cinematographers: Henry Kotani, an issei Japanese immigrant to the US who started his career as a cinematographer under Cecil B. DeMille. Harry Mimura, a co-worker of Gregg Toland, the acclaimed cinematographer of Citizen Kane. Miyagawa Kazuo, the cinematographer of Rashomon, as I have mentioned. In my cinematography book, I challenged the common misunderstanding on Japanese aesthetics: the darkness that Tanizaki Jun'ichirō famously discussed in In Praise of Shadows as the essence of Japanese traditional aesthetics. I discuss this issue of darkness further in Le Samouraï in its connection to Japonisme in France.

Finally, I must add that this book on Le Samouraï has a strong connection to my cat book, Cinema Is a Cat: A Cat Lover's Introduction to Film Studies (2019). Melville was a cat person. So am I. Melville loved cinema. So do I. This book on Le Samouraï is another book of love. To be more professional, Cinema Is a Cat is a non-traditional, rather pedagogical book. I introduce film theory and history by analyzing cat films, such as Breakfast at Tiffany's, Cat People, To Catch a Thief, and so on. I think the question of the animal, or the thought of the nonhuman to decenter the human, is a crucial area for film theory in the twenty-first century. I would say Melville, as a cat person, tried to cross a border between the human and the nonhuman. Also, Cinema Is a Cat was my attempt to communicate with non-academics, cinephiles, and my fellow researchers and students. I hope this book on Le Samouraï will make that connection, too.

Ongoing thread. More from Daisuke Miyao to follow.