Kinema Club VIII
at Nippon Connection
April 19-22 in Frankfurt
Special Guests: Yomota Inuhiko
The eighth edition of the Kinema Club conference for the study of film and moving images from Japan will be held in conjunction with the Nippon Connection Japanese film festival in Frankfurt, Germany, from April 19 – 22, 2007. Nippon Connection is the largest event for Japanese film in the world. It is swiftly becoming one of the premiere sites for seeing the latest Japanese works in every genre and media, so it is the perfect place to hold the first Kinema Club in Europe.
Nippon Connection screenings begin at 2 o’clock and run until midnight. A large amount of additional events and lectures are planned that cannot all be listed here. For a full program see www.nipponconnection.com (online approximately from the end of March). This year’s retrospective will focus on the history of experimental film in Japan.
Registration fee for the conference will be 35 Euro regular, 30 Euro for students and hijokin. Discussions with directors are open to the public, but admission to screenings requires separate tickets. Conference attendees have the opportunity to purchase purchase a ten-screening ticket for the reduced price of 30 Euro.
Conference language will be English, and virtually all films are screened with English subtitles.
Kinema Club VIII will aim to create synergies between Nippon Connection (held April 18-22, 2007) and the conference. The keynote address will be given by Yomota Inuhiko, professor at Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo. Presentations of papers will take place in the morning and noon, leaving afternoons and evenings free to visit festival screenings. The KC VIII presentations will be complimented by panel discussions related to films and trends visible in the immediate festival program. Around 150 films will be screened, and a large number of Japanese filmmakers are present at the festival (42 artists attended in 2006). The conference will take this opportunity to engage directors in discussions of their work and working conditions.
Supported by a grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Supported by a grant from the Japanese Culture Institute, Cologne (JKI)
In cooperation with the Department of Theater, Film and Media Studies, J.W. Goethe University, Frankfurt
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Schedule: (press here for abstracts; press here for official poster)
Thursday, 19.04.2007:
Panel Japanese Film & Europe
10:00- 10:20 Paul Berry (Kansai Gaidai University): “Empire of the Censors (Comparing Various Censored Versions of Empire of the Senses)”
10:20- 10:40 Andreas Becker (Goethe Universitaet, Frankfurt): “Cliché and Projection—Images of Europeanness in Japanese Cinema”
10:40- 11:00 Oliver Dew (University of London): “‘Asia Extreme’—Japanese Cinema and British Hype”
11:00- 11:20 Roland Domenig (Universitaet Wien): “What did Western Moviegoers See if Not Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Ozu? Some Remarks on the Distribution of Japanese Movies in the German Speaking Countries"
11:20- 12:00 Discussion
Tamatebako
10:00- 10:20 Sybil Thornton (Arizona State University): “Does Traditional Narrative Have a Place in Modern Japanese Cinema? Yamada Yoji and the Bakamatsu Mono”
10:20- 10:40 Lorenzo Torres Hortelano (Universidad Del Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid): “Kikujiro, the Jester Hero”
10:40- 11:00 Mark Schilling (Japan Times/Variety): “Kido Shiro”
11:00- 11:20 Nancy Stalker (University of Texas at Austin): “Deciphering Matthew Barney’s Japan in Drawing Restraint No. 9”
11:20- 11:40 Luk Van Haute (J-Com.be): “A Plea For a History of Failure”
11:40- 12:20 Discussion
Additional Events
18:00 Reception of Brecht and Mueller in Japanese Theater, a talk by Thies Lehmann (University of Frankfurt)
22:00- 23:30 Podium discussion with a filmmaker
Friday, 20.04.2007
Panel Apocalypse
10:00- 10:20 Akiko Sugawa-Shimada (Univ. of Warwick): “Gender and ‘The End of the World’ Narrative: Monstrous Girls and Feminized Boys in Japanese ‘Sekai-kei’ Animations after 1995”
10:20- 10:40 Kotaro Nakagaki (Tokiwa University): "The End of the World" Revisited: Beyond the Nostalgic Apocalypse”
10:40- 11:00 Makiko Yamanashi (Univ. of Edinburgh): “Super Girls and Shôjo Saviours in Manga-Based Films: Transcendent Visions of the End of the World”
11:00- 11:40 Discussion
Panel Reality Blurs
10:00- 10:20 Matthieu Capel (Université Paris 3, Sorbonne Nouvelle): Yoshida Kiju's Erotics
10:20- 10:40 Livia Monnet (University of Montreal): “Becoming-Animal, the Perversion of Affect, and Holognosis in Mamoru Oshii’s Cyberpunk Anime Ghost in the Shell 2 : Innocence”
10:40- 11:00 Kayo Adachi-Rabe (Humboldt Universitaet, Berlin): “On the Fragility of Reality in Japanese Film”
11:00- 11:20 Reinhard Zôllner (University of Erfurt): “Studio Ghibli, Time and Memory”
11:20- 12:00 Discussion
Additional Events
15:00- 18:00 “The Big J! Young Researchers Present a Pop-cultural Trend Report“ (Japan Studies Frankfurt, German language)
18:30- 19:30 Keynote Speech: Inuhiko Yomota (Meiji Gakuin Daigaku, Tokyo): “How the Japanese Cinema Represented China in the Military Invasion period of the 1930s and 1940s”
19:30- 20:15 Discussion Round with Inuhiko Yomota
22:30- 23:30 Podium Discussion with Filmmaker
Saturday, 21.04.2007
Bodies in Time
10:00- 10:20 Bill Miholopoulos (University of Northern Michigan): “A Time Out of Joint: The Postwar as Told by Imamura Shohei”
10:20- 10:40 Chika Kinoshita (University of Western Ontario): “On the Pregnancy Film”
10:40- 11:00 Dick Stegewerns (Osaka Sangyo University): “War Lilies—The Depiction of Himeyuri Butai in Japanese Cinema”
11:00- 11:20 Randi Gunzenhäuser (Universitaet Dortmund): “‘I Can't Stop Loving You’: Men, Women and Dream Machines in Rintaro’s Metropolis”
11:20- 12:00 Discussion
Panel “Left”
10:00- 10:20 Jonathan Hall (University of California, Irvine): “Popped Critique: Empire, Experimental Animation and the Surfeit of Images”
10:20- 10:40 Go Hirasawa (Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo): “Jônouchi Motoharu and the History of Underground Film””
10:40- 11:00 András Vàvôlgyi (Univ. Budapest): “On the Extreme Left Fringe of the ‘Nuberu Bagu’”
11:00- 11:20 Steven Clark Ridgely (University of Wisconsin, Madison): “Terayama Shûji and Visual Counterculture”
11:20- 12:00 Discussion
Additional Events
16:00 Grand Round Podium Discussion: Discussion with filmmakers, led by Roland Domenig (Universitaet Wien)
20:00 8mm Retrospective Screening: Discussion led by critic Ken'ichi Okubo and director Shinya Tsukamoto
Sunday, 22.04.2007
Panel 70/80/90/00
10:00- 10:20 Anne McKnight (University of Southern California): “Modernist Narratives of the 1970 Exhibition, or: Eyes vs. Ears”
10:20- 10:40 Ryoko Misono (University of Tokyo): “Somai Shinji and 1980's Japanese Film”
10:40- 11:00 Sharon Hayashi (York University, Toronto): “Terror and Trauma in Post-Aum Cinema”
11:00- 11:20 Aaron Gerow (Yale University): “A ‘New’ Industry Behind a ‘New’ Japanese Cinema?”
11:20- 12:30 Discussion
Panel Inter-change
10:00- 10:20 Eriko Ogihara (University of Dortmund): “Anime as a Medium of Inter-religious Dialogue: German and Japanese Receptions of Japanese Animism through Miyazaki Hayao’s Spirited Away”
10:20- 10:40 Melek Ortabasi (Hamilton College): “Indexing the Past: Visual Language and Translatability in Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress”
10:40- 11:00 Hideaki Fujiki (Nagoya University/Harvard-Yenching Institute): “Advertising in Figural Aesthetics: Ephemerality, Ubiquity, Distraction in Interwar Japanese Cinema”
11:00- 11:20 Catherine Russell (Concordia University, Montreal): “Japanese Cinema as Classical Cinema”
11:20- 12:30 Discussion
Additional Events
14:00- 15:30 Grand Round Podium Discussion with Filmmakers
Schedule With Abstracts:
Thursday, 19.04.2007:
Panel Japanese Film & Europe
10:00- 10:20 Paul Berry (Kansai Gaidai University): “Empire of the Censors (Comparing Various Censored Versions of Empire of the Senses)”
- Since its emergence in 1976 Oshima Nagisa's Ai no koriida (Empire of the Senses) has met with a variety of forms of censorship. This paper compares the three versions released in Japan (a 30 min., a 104 min., and a 109 min. version, 18 yrs. and above), the two versions in the US (one "complete" on 35 mm film, and the VHS/DVD version missing a scene at 104 min., NC-17), a Dutch version (16 yrs. and above, 98 min.), a British version (18 yrs. and above, 98 min.) that is "optically edited," and two French versions (16 yrs. and over, 105 min. and a newly extended 111 min. 2003 edition). Although it is often considered that the multiple cases of censorship that have surrounded the history of this film reveals the controversial content of Oshima's film, a focus on the variety of censorship techiniques applied to the film better illustrates the structure of the censorship process than the content of the film. This presentation will give an analysis of the structure of censorship as revealed in these nine versions of Ai no koriida. It will be shown that underlying the considerable differences found in these versions is a similar structure of evaluating and controlling sexual content.
10:20- 10:40 Andreas Becker (Goethe Universitaet, Frankfurt): “Cliché and Projection—Images of Europeanness in Japanese Cinema”
- In a culture which is based on technical media clichés fulfil an important aesthetic function: they serve to establish a common frame of reference. Looking at the interrelation between European and Japanese cinema this becomes especially noteworthy since there are many directors from both of these cultural domains who have repeatedly made use of clichés by reworking, citing and transforming them. Clichés thus helped to bring two cultures closer together which, for a long time, had developed separately. One of the most famous examples which to some extent certainly fostered this kind of cultural exchange is Takahata Isaos animated cartoon Arupusu no shôjo haiji (Heidi: Girl of the Alps, 1974), in which he adopted the Spyri-material for the cinema. In Heidi (but also in the films of the Ghibli-studios) the figures pictured in anime-aesthetics, pop- and cuteness-culture often merge with pictures from the 19 th century (such as illustrations by Wilhelm Pfeiffer and Wilhelm Claudius), thus forming a newly styled mixture framed by clichés of Europeaness. Surprisingly, though, despite faithfully reproducing all the dominant Japanese clichés about the West (stereotypic figures, a very sensual atmosphere, the hyperreal optical perspektive) the film became fairly popular with its European audience as well. Clichés allowed to perceive the film from different perspectives and opened a field for different ‘readings’. In my presentation I shall demonstrate how clichés work to mediate between different kinds of representational devices in order to shed some light on what it means for Japanese filmmakers to cultivate a particular view of Europe. Along with the analysis of concrete examples (Takahata Isao, films from the Ghibli-studios, Teshigahara Hiroshi's Tanin no kao, Kinugasa Teinosuke's Kurutta ippêji), considerable attention will be paid to the various strategies different filmmakers have developed in making use of clichés – without getting used by them! (this will probably include a reference to Gilles Deleuze and Murakami Takashi's theory of superflatness). Finally, I shall also focus on the role of the projection, both in its literal and in a metaphorical sense, i.e. as cultural projection.
10:40- 11:00 Oliver Dew (University of London): “‘Asia Extreme’—Japanese Cinema and British Hype”
- Can “hype”, used by Thomas Austin, Mark Jancovich, Barbara Klinger and others to describe the marketing strategies of the vertically-integrated Hollywood conglomerates, also help us understand the promotional activities of independent British film distributors who have been promoting mainly Japanese and South Korean genre films under a variety of “Asia Extreme” brands since 2001? This paper will examine how these distributors and the print/broadcast media discursively construct a variety of presumed audience taste formations, and then recruit these niche demographics to build an aggregate audience by generating multiple promises and invitations-to-view, or hype, around a film text. I will examine the various discourses used to constitute these niches, including those of “cult” subcultural identity, auteurism, and other notions of authorship. This approach aims to resituate “Asia Extreme” brands away from Japanese supply and the assumption in the popular British media of a transgressive Japanese pop culture, and towards British demand. I will focus on those exceptional texts in which this multiplying process has been particularly successful, in particular Miike Takashi’s Audition.
11:00- 11:20 Roland Domenig (Universitaet Wien): “What did Western Moviegoers See if Not Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Ozu? Some Remarks on the Distribution of Japanese Movies in the German Speaking Countries"
- In his Midnighteye review of the Nippon Connection Festival 2006 Mark Nornes discusses several developments that have helped change the view of Japanese cinema in the West: the emergence of new technologies (video, dvd, satellite TV, internet) that facilitated the availability of films and information; the proliferation and specialization of film festivals; and the weakening position of gate-keepers, who decide which films to send abroad. Although only few films can be watched on the silver screen, Japanese movies are today better accessible than ever before. On DVD one can simultaneously watch the classical films of the past and the most recent releases, and at festivals like Nippon Connection one can fill in the gaps and also watch marginal works. Up until the 1980s, when no such choices existed, one usually had to go to the movie theatre to watch films from Japan or other “distant” countries. But what films got released outside of Japan? The canonical works that build the basis of most film histories and academic writings? The classics of masters like Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and Ozu? Or films that sank into oblivion? I will take a look at the Japanese films that got released in the German speaking countries in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Some findings are to be expected – for instance that moviegoers in East Germany saw other films than moviegoers in West Germany or that in Austria and Switzerland fewer films were released than in West Germany – others may come as a surprise – for instance that more films of Ishii Teruo got released in “real time” than of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and Ozu together. I will also explore why certain genres were more popular than others and try to identify specific reception patterns.
11:20- 12:00 Discussion
Tamatebako
10:00- 10:20 Sybil Thornton (Arizona State University): “Does Traditional Narrative Have a Place in Modern Japanese Cinema? Yamada Yoji and the Bakamatsu Mono”
- Does traditional narrative have a place in modern Japanese cinema? The popularity with audiences and critics of Yamada Yoji’s Tasogare Seibei (2002) and Kakushiken: oni no tsume (2004) indicate that this may very well be so. This paper will review the rhetoric of the period film in offering critiques of the present and Yamada’s function as critic of modernity. The paper is a condensation of the last chapter of my book The Japanese Period Film and Other Essays (tentative title), to be published by MacFarland and Co., Publishers.
10:20- 10:40 Lorenzo Torres Hortelano (Universidad Del Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid): “Kikujiro, the Jester Hero”
- This paper looks closely at Kitano’s Kikujiro no natsu. I analyze the figure or concept of the “jester” related to the hero position that Kikujiro/Kitano builds through the story. I make an analysis of how Kikujiro’s character becomes a hero for the boy, precisely, starting from transforming himself into a jester. I analyze how Kitano recaptures this classic figure starting from his own biography. Surprisingly, far from transforming himself into a postmodern antihero, that deep change approaches him to the classic hero; if one wants, sifted by their farcical personality and the visual Japanese culture in general. To argue it, I base myself on three pillars: my interpretation of what is a classic hero, a review to the biography of Kitano―a media character in Japan, one who has transformed his biography into an intertext―and the cultural Japanese antecedents about comedy.
10:40- 11:00 Mark Schilling (Japan Times/Variety): “Kido Shiro”
- In an autobiographical essay Donald Richie characterized Kido as a Japanese combination of Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer. That is, a creative producer and hands-on studio boss who had huge impact on not only Shochiku's studio style and box office fortunes, but the production of individual films and the direction of individual careers. But he went even further than his American contemporaries in imposing his own vision on studio product. He saw himself as, not only a showman with a keen nose for the box office main chance, but an artist with a mission to entertain and inspire, according to a carefully worked-out aesthetic. I would like to examine the gap between Kido's own claims and the realities of production at Shochiku during his long reign from the early 1920s through the mid-1970s. Kido fathered the studio's director system, which had such a large impact on the Japanese industry as a whole, but how much freedom did his directors really have? What exactly was his impact on the films of Ozu, Kinoshita and others? Many writers and scholars have dealt with this question of authorship from the point of view of Kido's directors—I propose to examine it from Kido's perspective, using both autobiographical and biographical sources.
11:00- 11:20 Nancy Stalker (University of Texas at Austin): “Deciphering Matthew Barney’s Japan in Drawing Restraint No. 9”
- Visual and film artist Matthew Barney has been hailed by many as the most important American artist of his generation. His epic, the Cremaster Cycle (1994 – 2002), consists of five visually stunning and extravagant films that explore the processes of creation. Barney plays multiple roles within the films including a tap-dancing satyr, a magician, and even Gary Gilmore, the first man executed after the death penalty was reinstated in the US in 1976. The geographic setting of each film is important, generally linking to Barney’s personal history in significant ways. Following a sponsored period of residence in Japan, his latest film, Drawing Restraint 9, is set there, largely onboard the whaling ship, the Nisshin Maru. This film opened in selected cities and film festivals and was the centerpiece of a major exhibition held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from June to September 2006, where daily showings of the film, unavailable on the commercial theatre circuit, were accompanied by sculpture, drawings and videos related to the film. In the nearly dialogue-less, two and a half hour film, there are two primary narratives, both addressing the relationship between resistance and creativity. In one, workers aboard the whaling ship struggle to create a giant petroleum jelly sculpture of a motif that often recurs in Barney’s work, the “field emblem” symbol. This symbol is a pill shaped form with the body bisected by a bar that symbolizes “restraint.” In the other narrative, Barney and his wife, the singer Bjork, play the “Occidental Guests,” two shy strangers aboard the Nisshin Maru who are primped and dressed and by their Japanese hosts in the roles of Japanese bride and groom. The Guests then attend a traditional tea ceremony. After the ceremony, the tearoom floods and the Guests use whale flensing knives to carve away each others’ flesh, eventually revealing themselves as whale-like creatures, in keeping with Barney’s theme of transformation. Framing these narratives, both as a preface to the film and as pieces within the accompanying exhibition, are references to the U.S. – Japan relationship, especially the role of General Douglas MacArthur in helping reestablish the postwar whaling industry. Sprinkled throughout the film are scenes that reflect on the Japanese whaling and pearl fishing industries. The film’s lack of dialogue focuses the viewer’s attention on the colors, costumes and enigmatic images that Barney has created to present his interpretation of Japanese tradition and ritual. It thus often sidesteps the geo-political implications of these meticulously crafted images. The ritualistic forms and cadences of Japanese cultural practices have similarly seduced other artists and writers, from Vincent Van Gogh to Ezra Pound. This paper will examine Barney’s vision of Japan in Drawing Restraint 9 and reflect on whether Barney’s film differs substantively in content, intent, and form from earlier artistic re-interpretations of Japanese culture. Does Barney merely echo Orientalist visions of exotic Japan? Does he reinforce a simple dichotomy of pristine Japanese tradition against ugly industrialization or is there a new dynamic at work as a result of increased transnational cultural flows? How can we interpret his opaque commentary on Japanese modern history and on contemporary international whaling politics? This paper attempts to provide interdisciplinary perspectives to an abstruse, if ravishing, film representation of modern Japan.
11:20- 11:40 Luk Van Haute (J-Com.be): “A Plea For a History of Failure”
- Lost in La Mancha is a film about the making of a film that never got made: The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Since it never got made, it does not officially exist and does not appear on director Terry Gilliam's filmography, nor that of anyone else on the cast or crew, in spite of plenty of time and effort spent (wasted?). A film project can fail on many levels: during development or pre-production (mostly), during production (like Don Quixote), even in post-production. And a finished film still needs a distributor and a site for exhibition. For scholars who only study the ‘text’ of a film, i.e. what appears on the screen, failures like this are disregarded. But is there not a lot to be learned from failure? Could failures not be more revealing than successes for certain aspects of scholarly study? This paper looks at a few failed Japanese (co-)productions, with suggestions for a more systematic and methodological approach towards a history of failure. One of the productions mentioned deals with Japan's wartime past and the well known story of Harimao. It was developed around the same time as Wada Ben's film Harimao (1989). Why did one project make it to the screen, while the other didn't? And what does that tell us about the relations between the Japanese film industry, politics and other powers that be?
11:40- 12:20 Discussion
Additional Events
18:00 Reception of Brecht and Mueller in Japanese Theater, a talk by Thies Lehmann (University of Frankfurt)
22:00- 23:30 Podium discussion with a filmmaker
Friday, 20.04.2007
Panel Apocalypse
10:00- 10:20 Kotaro Nakagaki (Tokiwa University): "The End of the World" Revisited: Beyond the Nostalgic Apocalypse”
- At the turn of the 20th century Japan, the imageries and visions of "the End of the World" repetitively appeared in a variety of artistic and popular works such as novels, comics, films, music, anime and video games. In particular, the popular "light novels" (raito noberuz, short novels with illustrations targeting teens and young adults in Japan) and/or the recent video games preferably take up an apocalyptic situation where the world "ends" both in literal and figurative ways; even the popular films use the apocalyptic and post- apocalyptic settings as a space for cultivating and transforming the genre fiction. Some of the recent example films are A Variety Store Named the End of the World (Sekai-no-Owari-to-iu-nano-Zakkaten, 2001), World's End Girl Friends (Sekai-no-Owari, 2006) and Project Blue: Earth SOS (Project Blue: Chikyu SOS, 2006) which is, in fact, a remake of Japanese classic science fiction story Earth SOS (1948-51). Among them, Dragon Head, a series of manga (1994-2000) and its film version (2003), is one of the representative works inspired by the recent tendency of apocalyptic visions. This manga reflects the aspects of depression and decadence of Japanese society at the fin de siecle. The characters are high school students in the school trip who experience the catastrophic natural disaster and eventually have to survive the world where their unfamiliar and comfortable "world order" is completely destroyed and changed. From the current perspective, Dragon Head seems to have predicted the two "end-of-the- real-world" incidents in our reality: the Hanshin Awaji Earthquake and the subway attack by the members of the religious cult called "Aum Shinrikyo." Both incidents affected and changed the order of the society and, therefore, they inevitably transform the nature of fictional apocalyptic visions as well. In fact, these "real" events are regarded the moments when one thinks of "reality over imagination." The ending of Dragon Head shows struggles to re-invent a new or another apocalypse after the real event surpasses imaginary events in fiction. With these concern of historical transitions in the Japanese society, this presentation attempts to analyze the current tendency and transformation of the apocalyptic imagination by revisiting and tracing the "the end of the world" in fictional works.
10:20- 10:40 Akiko Sugawa-Shimada (Univ. of Warwick): “Gender and ‘The End of the World’ Narrative: Monstrous Girls and Feminized Boys in Japanese ‘Sekai-kei’ Animations after 1995”
- The apocalyptic theme, ‘The End of the World’, is often seen in Japanese films, animations, novels, and manga comics. Our potential fear and phobia about the end of the world caused by possible wars and natural disasters seem to stem from the traumatic sense of ‘loss’ after WWII, and increasingly after the rapid economic growth in the 1960s and 70s. In TV animations and animation films, in particular, many male protagonists fight against the enemies, which destroy ‘the world’, as to protect innocent people or their love. To overcome or control the apocalyptic situation represents the triumph over our fear and phobia as well as the reconstruction of our identity. In addition, the characterizations in the apocalyptic situation could serve to enhance or reproduce ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’. However, after the big hit TV animation series, Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995-96, films (1997), new films (2007, 2008 (planned)), the apocalyptic theme can be no longer represented as a real issue to be dealt with or controlled on stage; therefore, it can be only used as a background which effectively represents the inner conflicts of the protagonists. The so-called ‘Sekai-kei’ (‘World Type) or ‘“the End of the World” narrative’ emphasizes the relationships between “you” and “me” in the exclusively closed inner world of the protagonists. The characters’ detachment from ‘the world’ is often metaphorically depicted in the unrequited relationship of the protagonist with his/her committed partner. Hence, the end of the world itself cannot convey any meaning in Sekai-kei animations since the late 1990s. A reflexive narrative is often conducted in such Sekai-kei works, in which fighting monstrous girls are masculinized, and cooped-up boys in cul-de-sac are feminised. Yet, it is not simply the reversed gender representations. The gender representations in those works can posit the alternative way of gender identities. I would like to argue on the way in which the apocalyptic theme and the use of narrative in Japanese films and animations after 1995 serve to construct an alternative of gender representations and how they are displayed and circulated by analyzing Saishu-heiki Kanojo, or She: The Ultimate Weapon (TV 2002, film 2005), Hoshino Koe, or Voices of the Shooting Stars (2002), Hauru no ugoku shiro, or Howl’s Moving Castle (2004).
10:40- 11:00 Makiko Yamanashi (Univ. of Edinburgh): “Super Girls and Shôjo Saviours in Manga-Based Films: Transcendent Visions of the End of the World”
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Though the end of world is usually portrayed in a negative and pessimistic manner, Japanese popular culture also offers alternate visions. In manga, and more effectively through its influence in Japanese films and anime as well, there are a number of significant works which attempt to confront apocalyptic oppositions – science vs. nature, body vs. soul, finite vs. infinite, life vs. death – with optimism and hope. This intriguing tendency is most visible in the domain of so-called shôjo bunka – girls’ culture. In a common scenario, shojo heroines gain super-human qualities in their attempt to protect the things they cherish. In some cases, a heroine even sacrifices herself for humanity and the natural world. By showing self-sacrifice or compassionate devotion, she inspires others to live, struggle on, and even overcome the obstacles, suggesting a hope for future peace and coexistence. Therefore, these heroines are sometimes represented in spiritual terms, elevating their female identities almost to the level of the sacred. This presentation will critically examine both the category and the consumer of ‘shôjo bunka ‘ from historical as well as socio-cultural view points. The aim is to analyse the visual construction of these heroic shôjo in an eschatological context and to reveal a common genealogy that links their identities. Shôjo images from several films will be examined and compared in terms of both their common fantasy narratives and shared visual elements. By evaluating universal themes embodied in the visual metaphors and the narrative messages they represent, this talk will consider how their transcendent visions offer a utopian alternative to the standard dystopian one.
11:00- 11:40 Discussion
Panel Reality Blurs
10:00- 10:20 Matthieu Capel (Université Paris 3, Sorbonne Nouvelle): Kiju Yoshida's Erotics
- Taking part in the renewal of the representations of sex and eroticism in the 60's, Yoshida nonetheless develops an original theory, which I would like to expose here. For those familiar with Yoshida's films in the second part of the 60's, they know how often he himself uses the pattern of "saga" to define his films starting with the seminal Mizu de kakareta monogatari of 1965, focusing from here on women and their essence through the figure of Mariko Okada. Nevertheless, underlying this question of the nature of women, one can recognize, in the depiction of sex and love, the traces of a wider theory involving the issues of space, images, and communication. From 1967's Hono to onna, I shall draw first how the eventuality of having sex or not, that is, being able to, depends on how the character deals with space. We shall also find this pattern in 1969's Eros +Massacre in a slightly different way, calling up to the question of the body and its representation. Body and space, as cinematographic main ingredient, are closely linked, needless to say. But the particularity of Yoshida is to question, by the mean of sex and its representation, the so-called evidence of this intricate relationship. Thus, to draw a new theory of communication, echoing or paralleling Godard's and Daney's "discommunication to be communicated" approach to cinema. From a more concrete point of view, this paper shall rely on analysis of shots and scenes from 1967's Hono to onna and Joen (showing how the issue of mirror provides the core of the matter), 1969's Eros +Massacre (or how blurred area of the body can help building a new representation of it), and 1968's Saraba natsu no hikari (for the rivalry of image and memory).
10:20- 10:40 Livia Monnet (University of Montreal): “Becoming-Animal, the Perversion of Affect, and Holognosis in Mamoru Oshii’s Cyberpunk Anime Ghost in the Shell 2 : Innocence”
- Mamoru Oshii’s celebrated cyberpunk anime, Ghost in the Shell’s recent sequel, Ghost in the Shell 2 : Innocence (2004) extends its predecessor’s critical probing of the notion of the technologized spiritual automaton (Deleuze) into unexpected, intriguing territories. In this essay I argue that Innocence’s vision is dystopian not so much because it replicates in many ways the classic cyberpunk fare – decaying industrial landscapes ; crowded cities overrun by pollution, crime, and corruption ; mind-controlling computers and governments ; and disenfranchised cyborgs – but rather because it emphasizes three interrelated aspects. The first aspect is becoming-animal : while the film posits an ominous blurring of boundaries, or near-indiscernibility between « naturally born » humans and artificial or non-human humanoids (cyborgs, ensouled doll gynoids, bodiless artificial intelligences), and between material-noumenal reality and computer-generated, illusory virtual worlds, it also substitutes becoming-animal for becoming-imperceptible as matter’s most desirable, most ideal state of thinking-becoming (Deleuze). Envisioned mostly as a crystal-image of animal affect, Innocence’s seemingly blissful becoming-animal, however, is constantly jeopardized by the film’s inherent, reflexive-generative, looping language-machine. Another dystopian aspect in Innocence I shall highlight is that of asexual, substitute or objectless affect. In a world where the body is a serial industrial product, or an indefinitely manipulable hybrid of organic and non-organic parts, love, connectivity, and desire seem either absent, or abstract and hollow. The objects of the characters’affection – Batô’s basset hound Gabriel, Togusa’s little daughter – may not be real at all. Even if they are more than computer-generated illusions, they seem to be stand-ins for something, or someone else (e.g.the dog Gabriel is a substitute for Batô’s love for the runaway Kusanagi). Evoking Deleuze’s description of non-sexual perversion in The Logic of Sense, Innocence’s world of objectless or displaced affect is doubly perverse in that it seems to have a stake in the denial of female embodiment and sexuality, indeed in the disappearance of the woman altogether : women are replaced with artificially ensouled gynoids which are used as sex toys. Innocence’s beautifully crafted, animated dystopian world also displays what might be called a holognostic citational discourse. Addressing the film’s Neoplatonic, gnostic rhetoric as well as its holographic register – holographic diagrams and reconstitutions of crime scenes, 3D photo-holograms of various characters – this concept aims to call attention to the politics of citation in Oshii’s anime. I will show that the film’s recourse to a plethora of citations from various novels, thinkers, films, and manga comic books (Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s The Future Eve, Nietzsche, Donna Haraway, the Old Testament, Blade Runner, the Matrix trilogy, Confucius and so forth ) seems bent on recapturing a lost dimensionality, the metaphysical or ontological thickness of a vanished world that is no longer extant except perhaps as strangely alluring, spectral phantoms. Like Borges’s Tower of Babel or the universal encyclopaedia of the now vanished city of Tlon, the holognostic universe, or ether-filled cosmos of Radiant Matter produced by Innocence’s repeated citational performances calls attention to the deceptive (im)material « life » of information.
10:40- 11:00 Kayo Adachi-Rabe (Humboldt Universitaet, Berlin): “On the Fragility of Reality in Japanese Film”
- A poem from the 10th century, which is well known as the old Japanese alphabet (iroha-uta) says: „As flowers are brilliant but [inevitably] fall, who could remain constant in our world? [No one could] Today let us transcend the high mountain of transience, and there will be no more shallow dreaming, no more drunkenness.“ These phrases with a touch of Buddhist thinking tell us about the vanity of dreaming. But essentially they also express an indispensable temptation into sensual experiences and the dreamlike fragility of reality. We can see a continuity of this idea in the representation of dreams in Japanese silent films, for example in Kenji Mizoguchis “Taki no shiraito” (“White Threads of the Waterfall”, 1933). Reality and dream are less differentiated from each other through camera-technique in comparison to western equivalences. Friedrich Willhelm Murnau, who was certainly influenced by Sigmund Freud’s investigation of the subconciousness, presented the vision made by “rapid-eye-movement” in “Der letzte Mann” (“The Last Laugh”, 1924) analytically and symbolically, whereas Japanese films show dreams like a simple extension of daily routine, even though these include a subtly abstract quality. According to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, cinematography is a “substitute of dream”. Film sometimes indicates the presence of its own apparatus to make aware of its own fictional being and creates the so-called “Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect)”. In contrast, Japanese avant-garde filmmakers like Shôhei Imamura, Shuji Terayama and Seijun Suzuki use the illusion of the media (theatre and film) to reveal the illusion of reality. They try to show our tendency to believe in the fiction and the dreamlike uncertainness of our emotional reality. Kaizô Hayashi’s film “Sleep like in a dream” (Yume miru yô ni nemuritai, 1984) and others display the transparency of celluloid and substancelessness of our memory. In the age of virtual reality the “shallow dream” turns into an analogy for our daily perception. From time to time real life seems like an endless strange nightmare without charm. Medial experiences sometimes give us a real fulfilment of our dream, or more intensive emotions than the reality. This phenomenon connects our discourse with a famous ancient idea: The Chinese philosopher Thuangzi (around the 4th Century BCE) dreamed he was a butterfly. After he woke up, he wondered whether he dreamed of the butterfly or it dreamed of him. In the same way, in Takashi Miike’s and Takeshi Kitano’s films the spatial and temporal dimensions are hard to define in a logical order. In Audition (2001) nightmare becomes true, because we miss the signal to come back to our ordinary world. In Takeshi’s (2005) we more and more lose any possibility to know in whose “dream” we are. Lars von Trier and David Lynch also operate with related “hypnotic” techniques to open the fourth dimension of cinematic imagination. They thereby stress the distance between two parallel worlds and evoke an image of the “depth” of the gap between these worlds. The protagonist either loses more and more contact to its primary position (The Element of Crime, 1984) or falls into a deep hole like Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (Mulholland Drive, 2001). Japanese versions differ from these cases through the closeness of the two different narrative levels and also through an unexpected interrelation between them in the shape of the Möbius strip. This new concept of “shallow dream of a butterfly” tests our imagination to develop an innovative way to realize the world as an unsolvable mystery.
11:00- 11:20 Reinhard Zôllner (University of Erfurt): “Studio Ghibli, Time and Memory”
- Virtually all of the Studio Ghibli productions by Miyazaki Hayao and Takahata Isao deal with aspects of time, history, and memory. This is most evident in their movies with explicit, real historical settings (Grave of the Fireflies, Ponpoko, Porco Rosso, Princess Mononoke), but also in those which rely on fictitious, quasi-mythological plots (Nausicaa, Laputa, Howl's Moving Castle) where the fates of their protagonists are inextricably linked to the overall political or societal circumstances. In movies focussing on episodes of individual crisis and development (Totoro, Spirited Away, Whisper of the Heart, Yamada, etc.), individual memories and lifetime consciousness are highlighted. Ghibli's time and life agenda is best reflected in Miyazaki's own words, "As so often in the past, tragedies are also bound to happen in the future. How are we to live in this situation?" The presentation concentrates on the questions and answers provided in the Ghibli animation concerning this key issue.
11:20- 12:00 Discussion
Additional Events
15:00- 18:00 “The Big J! Young Researchers Present a Pop-cultural Trend Report“ (Japan Studies Frankfurt, German language)
18:30- 19:30 Keynote Speech: Inuhiko Yomota (Meiji Gakuin Daigaku, Tokyo): “How the Japanese Cinema Represented China in the Military Invasion period of the 1930s and 1940s”
Imperialist Japan invaded the northeast of China in 1931 and founded Manchukuo in the following year. Japan signed a military treaty with Germany and Italy in 1936 ( forming the Axis) and plunged into war with China after the Marco Polo Bridge affair in 1937. She occupied Shanghai and the battle line expanded across the continent. In 1941 Japan declared war against the United States. My lecture is not kitschy nostalgia for the lost Manchuria, nor a reactionary view of WWII. Rather, I intend to talk about some aspects of the following problems: How does Japanese cinema from this period represent fascism and nationalism as dominant ideologies? How did films prepare and constructe stereotypes of the Chinese people in the context of colonialism? Why was the invading subject (the protagonist) always masculine and the invaded, the occupied, feminine? I’ll start with the subversive antiwar film Shanghai, directed by Kamei Fumio in 1938. Kamei had studied at Leningrad and was a leftist documentary director. The second film, Shanhai rikusentai (Shanghai Naval Brigades, 1938) was directed according to national policy. Its director, Kumagaya Hisatora, made Hara Setsuko, his sister-in-law, a Chinese girl with strong anti-Japan sentiments. Kumagaya was famous as the head of an esoteric semi-occult order of anti-Semitism. The third film, Shina no yoru (China Nights, 1939) is the most popular and notorious work from this period, and was directed by Fushimizu Osamu. Li Hsianglan (Ri Ko Ran) and Hasegawa Kazuo played protagonists and the Japanese audiences were intoxicated with the melodramatic relationship between this ‘cute little Chinese girl’ and a handsome Japanese onnagata actor. The film was produced in Japan in the hypocritical name of amicability between Japan, Manchukuo and China. Die Tochter des Samurai (1937) directed by Nazi director Arnold Fank was a great success not only in Japan but also in the Third Empire. Hara Setsuko played one of the leading roles. The film glorified the construction and the Japanese settlement in Manchukuo. It was in 1937 when Manchukuo started producing films (through Manchuria Film Association, otherwise known as Man’ei). Most of the Man’ei films were directed by Japanese directors and had a small Chinese audience. Iwasaki Akira, one of the leading leftist intellectuals in Japan, moved to the Manchuria Film Association after he was released from prison. He produced My Nightingale featuring Li Hsianglan in 1943. It was one of Man’ei’s twilight last glitterings. The film was an interesting melodrama musical, spoken in Russian, and suggests to us rather complicated cultural layers in Man’ei films. Hara Setsuko and Li Hsianglan, two of the most popular actresses of the period, will be compared in this lecture. After the defeat of WWII Hara concealed all of her cinematic career in the wartime and became a goddess of the postwar democracy. As for Li, she was sentenced to death by the KMT but was released. She moved to Hollywood and is now working with the Palestine liberation movement at age 87.
19:30- 20:15 Discussion Round with Inuhiko Yomota
22:30- 23:30 Podium Discussion with Filmmaker
Saturday, 21.04.2007
Bodies in Time
10:00- 10:20 Bill Miholopoulos (University of Northern Michigan): “A Time Out of Joint: The Postwar as Told by Imamura Shohei”
- The topic of this paper is the film Postwar History as told by a Barmaid (1970) directed by Imamura Shohei. What I find interesting about this film is how Imamura aims to convey the whole experience of Japan’s encounter with modernity after the Pacific War through the juxtaposition of the protagonist’s psychological make and experiences with the major events chronicled in national history. As such, the film opens a gap between the sanctioned history of post-war Japan – centred on US occupation and subsequent economic recovery – and an alternative history of Japan lived by people on the margins of Japanese society due to the unevenness of post-war development. The brilliance of this film is the way Imamura discloses a gap between the lived experience of the barmaid narrating her story and the official history of the nation. The cultural whole of Japan is presented as constituted by two distinct, incompatible realms of Japanese life which coexist in the single space of the Japanese nation-state. Postwar History as told by a Barmaid opens Japan to the existence of multiple pasts, presents, and possible futures that are incompatible and outside the narratives of official history that form the conditions of shared memory. The lived experience of Emiko offers new spatial and perceptual situations that challenge the notion that the nation-state is the fixed and immutable point of reference of all things Japanese. This paper explores how in conception and praxis, Emiko’s life story offers form and expression to the multiplicity of experience that does not fit into categories of the one and many, and directly challenges the notion that subjectivity is some fixed and secure property found in the homogeneous space and time of the Japanese nation-state.
10:20- 10:40 Chika Kinoshita (University of Western Ontario): “On the Pregnancy Film”
- This paper investigates the ways in which contemporary Japanese films conveys the woman’s embodied subjectivity, centering on the trope of pregnancy and childbirth. I tentatively locate an origin of this contemporary trend in Hara Kazuo’s documentary Extreme Private Eros: Love Song, 1974, where the director films the labor and delivery of his former lover, the radical feminist Takeda Miyuki, seeking to forge a retroactive – and belated -- alliance with Women’s Liberation Movement. The figure of pregnancy and childbirth has emerged in recent independent films, such as the woman director Kawase Naomi’s Shara (2002), Nanasato Kei’s Nonkina nêsan (The Merry Sister, 2003), and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s homage to Ozu, Café Lumière (2004). In these films, I argue, the motif of pregnancy presents the woman’s phenomenological relationship with her own body, refusing to serve as a moral metaphor in patriarchy or a passage to motherhood. Following Saitô Minako’s Ninshin shôsetsu (The Pregnancy Novel, 1994), that critically traces the genealogy of literary representation of pregnancy, abortion, and childbirth in modern Japanese novels, this paper attempts to contextualize those contemporary films within a history of “pregnancy films” in Japan. My analysis draws on theories of cinematic body as well as historical and anthropological writings on technologies of reproduction in modern Japan.
10:40- 11:00 Dick Stegewerns (Osaka Sangyo University): “War Lilies—The Depiction of Himeyuri Butai in Japanese Cinema”
- Ever since the post-occupation box-office success of Imai Tadashi’s screen adaptation of the tragic story of the Himeyuri butai, the young Okinawan schoolgirls who volunteered to serve as nurses at the front of the only battle fought on Japanese territory have become a standard trope of postwar representations and memories of the Asia Pacific War. This paper will analyze the original of 1953 and the various film and television remakes in order to address how Japanese representations of the war, women, Okinawa, the enemy, and the roles of aggressor and victim developed from the immediate post-occupation period up until this very day. The analysis will include related postwar films on the battle of Okinawa and nurses on the frontline in China and wartime propaganda movies centred on the female contribution to the war effort.
11:00- 11:20 Randi Gunzenhäuser (Universitaet Dortmund): “‘I Can't Stop Loving You’: Men, Women and Dream Machines in Rintaro’s Metropolis”
The presentation focuses on Rintaro's anime Metropolis from 2001. At the time of its release criticized as too Western, Rintaro's film draws on Western and Japanese versions of Metropolis and on their fictional machine women, from Fritz Lang's 1927 German film classic to Tezuka's 1949 manga success. The presentation takes a close look at women and at machines in these texts: each work deals with the creation of a beautiful artificial female who has the power to attract not only the men within the movie, but also the viewers. At the same time, these texts create the most advanced science-fiction effects to immerse the viewers in their world. Both the women and the machines are retrofuturist visions, looking backward at archaic love relationships and forward to a science-fiction future full of humans attached to machines. But what makes a science-fiction world peopled by archaic women so attractive to both Western and Japanese viewers? And why should we care for these retrofuturist visions? The presentation includes film excerpts, film stills, and excerpts from manga.
11:20- 12:00 Discussion
Panel “Left”
10:00- 10:20 Jonathan Hall (University of California, Irvine): “Popped Critique: Empire, Experimental Animation and the Surfeit of Images”
- In this paper, I examine the how Japanese experimental animators and manga-ka in the late 1960s and1970s borrowed tropes of mass commodity to offer an oblique critique of state power (both Japanese and US) that at the same point formally “depoliticizes” their own work. While this gesture may have served as a strategic detour around intense , ideological battles of the period, it also had the counter-effect of allegorizing the political. By addressing the work of Tanaami Keiichi, Hayashi Seiichi, Furukawa Taku, and Aihara Nobuhiro, I trace the contours of what I label the “pop effect.” Looking to Fredric Jameson as well as to recent theories of the camera-machine as subject, I ask to what extent does the pop gesture express an effective critique of dominant culture . I choose Hayashi and Tanaami for especially detailed analyses. In my consideration of Hayashi, I look at the formal critique mounted in his print-manga work, Red-Colored Elegy (Aka-iro ereji, 1971) as well as his animated Shadow (Kage, 1969), while I am concerned with the structure of allegory in Tanaami’s war-series of the early 1970s and his Yoshikei (Juvenile Scenes, 1979). Does the paranoid, masculinist critique evident in these works typify a totalitarian economy of representations? Are they capable, in their attempt at a simultaneous critique of state apparati and the mass accumulation of objects, to offer a glimpse of the real state of empire?
10:20- 10:40 Go Hirasawa (Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo): “Jônouchi Motoharu and the History of Underground Film””
- Jônouchi Motoharu played a central role in the underground cinema of the 1960s. He participated in the formation of the Nihon University Film Research Group, documentaries on the on the Security Treaty protests and the Zenkyoto movement, and helped establish the key experimental collective VAN. This paper considers the history of the Japanese underground film by focussing on the figure of Jônouchi.
10:40- 11:00 András Vàvôlgyi (Univ. Budapest): “On the Extreme Left Fringe of the ‘Nuberu Bagu’”
- I reject violence. I grew up in a country where until 1989 there was a communist system. I was able to experience the destruction wreaked by an extreme left-wing totalitarianism when allowed into power. Nevertheless, there were many intellectuals, within the generation before me, who believed in the world-changing principles and plans of the apocryphal left wing. They considered the “existing socialism” as a deviation and the politics based on Marxist philosophy as the path towards the freeing of humanity. Though I never sympathised with the political methods to realise them, I am nevertheless able to understand the one-time illusions of those intellectuals when I absorb myself and imagine the spirit of the times. This is because I remember well the faces and the atmosphere despite the fact that I was still very much a child in 1968. Similar radical attitudes and approaches were not unique to Adachi Masao among filmmakers. It’s enough to mention Jean-Luc Godard, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and my mentor, the dissident, anarchic film-maker Dusan Makavejev. I discovered many similarities in the film-making art of Makavejev and Adachi. However, the afore mentioned European intellectuals stopped in almost every case, at intellectual insurrection. They fought for their ideals with their creations and only very rarely did they get to direct political activities, much less anything like the extreme, radical version of the Nihon Sekigun terrorism. What was the excess, the drive, the socialisation, the fanaticism and blindness which took Adachi from what was not a revolutionary situation to what he thought to be revolutionary actions. Was it the established or the relatively closed Japanese society which brought about the desire for insurrection to such an excess as to join the Nihon Sekigun? This did not seem like very appropriate behaviour, the temptation and desire to change is a European thing, it demonstrates a Faust-like spirit.
11:00- 11:20 Steven Clark Ridgely (University of Wisconsin, Madison): “Terayama Shûji and Visual Counterculture”
- Terayama Shuji’s work in independent cinema during the early 1970s (Emperor Tomato Ketchup, Throw Out Your Books Let’s Hit the Streets, Cache-Cache Pastoral, various shorts) has come to represent both the Nippon Art Theater Guild’s co-productions and of the founding spirit of the Image Forum project—and therefore central to a 60s ethos manifested in the 70s which then has been remembered with nostalgia from the 80s until the present. But what, precisely, did Terayama bring to cinema? Was it an aesthetic from his debut genre of poetry? Was it the rambunctious spirit of underground theatre (his main interest since 1968)? In this paper I will consider the possibility that Terayama’s contribution involved documenting and visualizing counterculture itself (as with Matsumoto Toshio’s Funeral Parade of Roses or Oshima’s Diary of a Shinjuku Thief), and that the countercultural form of these documents of the countercultural lifestyle is what appeals. But what is that countercultural form? I will attempt to make sense of Terayama’s early 70s films as part of a broader visualized form of counterculture, historicizing them against the so-called “visual turn” of the 1960s.
11:20- 12:00 Discussion
Additional Events
16:00 Grand Round Podium Discussion: Discussion with filmmakers, led by Roland Domenig (Universitaet Wien)
20:00 8mm Retrospective Screening: Discussion led by critic Ken'ichi Okubo and director Shinya Tsukamoto
Sunday, 22.04.2007
Panel 70/80/90/00
10:00- 10:20 Anne McKnight (University of Southern California): “Modernist Narratives of the 1970 Exhibition, or: Eyes vs. Ears”
- It is estimated that some sixty percent of the population of Japan attended the 1970 World Exposition--the Osaka banpaku. Recent scholarship on the banpaku has taken two approaches. On one hand, one branch of writing heroises it as the "origins of the virtual” by both new-media visual artists and electronic musicians. In this account, the banpaku was the spectacle where many electronic musicians caught their first glimpse of the possibilities of musical based on forms of recording, mixing and playing derived from the synthesiser, first witnessed at the Osaka banpaku. This glimpse contributes to the way the acoustic virtual--a recording of sound sundered from its source and manipulated--was conceived. On the other hand, the visual virtual seems to provoke divided affiliations between "1960"-anti-AMPO and later versions of politics not based on opposition to the false consciousness of the image. For some reason, the betrayal of the potentially revolutionary image of this carefully planned and documented spectacle falls hard on potential narratives in which consciousness of the “mass image” (Yoshimoto) results in a mass effect. In this paper, looking at recent (2005-6) books by Yoshimi and Sawaragi, I contrast the two meta-narratives of visual and acoustic 1970, to ask how and why the successfully original acoustic 1970 (synthesiser) and the much more ambivalent (visual) 1970 banpaku underwrite and provide a strangely modernist origin for analysing the role and varieties of narrative in two settings: the split between 1960 and 1970 incarnations of mass politics; and subsequent subcultural productions (anime, manga, theory) which find a curiously full agenda based on the absent presence of the banpaku as a cauldron of virtual possibilities. The general scheme of these possibilities will be taken from expo catalogs, visitor testimonies, journalistic accounts, and the recent boom of writings by “subculture” scholars (e.g. Yoshimi, Sarawagi).
10:20- 10:40 Ryoko Misono (University of Tokyo): “Somai Shinji and 1980's Japanese Film”
- In most of the discourse on Japanese film history, the 1980s remains a blank period which draws little attention of scholars and critics. It is usually considered as a sterile era for innovative filmmaking, situated between the 1970s avant-garde and the 1990s resurgence of independent filmmakers such as Kitano, Kurosawa and Miike. After the ruin of studio system in the preceding decade, the 1980s is now remembered as the period of commercialization and capitalization of film production. Nevertheless, from the viewpoint of larger cultural and economic context, the 1980s films cannot be overlooked simply as indicative of degeneration of Japanese filmmaking. It has to be reconsidered as the transitional period when the mode of film production and its relationship with audience had radically changed in the midst of the flourishing of postmodern culture during the age of bubble economy. In this paper, I would like to investigate the multiple conditions which determined the 1980s Japanese film, especially focusing on the films of Somai Shinji. As one of the representatives of the 1980s Japanese film, Somai’s work embodies the difficulty and the possibility of making a film in the 1980s Japan, which is marked by the dilemma between film production as a capitalistic endeavor and filmmaking as an artistic achievement.
10:40- 11:00 Sharon Hayashi (York University, Toronto): “Terror and Trauma in Post-Aum Cinema”
- Attempts to cinematically narrate the trauma and terror of the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway on March 20, 1995 provided an unprecedented moment for filmmakers to re-examine postwar Japanese history. Billed as Japan's 9/11, this event was alternately juxtaposed to, or substituted for, WWII as the historical horizon of contemporary Japanese society. Attempts to come to terms with this event through the cinema revealed how each generation of directors is informed by distinct notions of truth, narrative, and memory. Coming out of Leftist the struggle to uncover discrimination in Japanese society, Kumai Kei uses the ruse of a high school documentary crew to uncover the mainstream media's irresponsible coverage and castigation of a victim rather than perpetrators of the attack. Mori Tatsuya's documentaries about Aum communities, influenced by the increasing blurring of boundaries between documentary and fiction film since the early 1990s, challenged mainstream stereotypes of the group and facile binaries of inside and outside, of perpetrator and victim. For Shinozaki Makoto the event reflected the decline of individual subjectivity and increased vulnerability to brainwashing by cults of contemporary youth since WWII. The need to offer alternative narratives to today's youth, whether it be the resurrection of familial structures suggested by Koreeda Hirokazu, or new forms of narrative and historical temporalities yet unexplored, remains a pressing question for Japanese cinema today.
11:00- 11:20 Aaron Gerow (Yale University): “A ‘New’ Industry Behind a ‘New’ Japanese Cinema?”
- Various appellations have been used to nominate a different cinema emerging in the last decade or so in Japan: "New Japanese Cinema," the "New New Wave," or other similar claims of a distinct entity corresponding to "Contemporary Japanese Film." One way to evaluate these claims is to focus on shifts in stylistic norms or in the general topography of stylistic politics in recent films, something I have worked on with my concept of the "detached style." Another is to note the shifts in the discursive context behind this cinema, especially the role of Hasumi Shigehiko and the theorizations of Aoyama Shinji. What I would like to focus on in this presentation is the industrial context: the transformations in the structures of production, distribution and exhibition that shape a new cinema not only after the 1970s and the fall of the studio system, but also after the 1980s and the development of the maeuri system. I will in particular focus on the changing relationships between production and distribution and distribution and exhibition, especially as new media outlets emerged with video and TV. I hope to see the emergence of directors like Kitano, Kurosawa, Aoyama, Kawase and others less as a resistance or alternative to changes in industrial structure, but as deeply tied to those transformations.
11:20- 12:30 Discussion
Panel Inter-change
10:00- 10:20 Eriko Ogihara (University of Dortmund): “Anime as a Medium of Inter-religious Dialogue: German and Japanese Receptions of Japanese Animism through Miyazaki Hayao’s Spirited Away”
- As a part of my dissertation project titled "Shinto in Christian Cultures: American and German Receptions of Japanese Animism," my presentation will discuss how Americans and Germans have received Shinto Animism through Miyazaki's U.S. Academy Award and Berlinale Goldbear winning animation film titled Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, translated into English as Spirited Away and into German as Chihiros Reise ins Zauberland. By employing translation, discourse and ethnographical analyses, I will examine a variety of American and German responses to Spirited Away, including dubbings and subtitles of the film, translations of its comic books, film critics' reviews in religious and non-religious publications to individuals' responses to the film in a classroom setting. My presentation will particularly focus on translation and discourse analyses of American and German responses, and compare how they have responded to the film's religious components that can apparently contradict their Christian faith and cultural traditions. As for the discourse analysis, I will classify the reviews of the film into the following four categories: (1) those which strongly attack the film's polytheistic elements; (2) those which are critical of such elements but try to make a compromise by relegating them to the film's background or by considering the film as a fantasy; (3) those which attempt to read Christian messages into the film; and (4) those which remain completely neutral in terms of their attitude toward religious elements in the film. In the meantime, I will shed light on the reviewers' attention to what many of them consider as two important aspects of the film, namely, its theme of work ethic and fantasy genre. I will analyze them in conjunction with the theory of religious work ethic which has evolved out of Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and the arguments about religious fantasy exchanged among literary scholars. Overall, my presentation will reveal that the inter-religious conversation promoted by Spirited Awa is a complex one which cannot be reduced to the patterns of mutual oppression that have often characterized the conversations between monotheism and polytheism. Such a complexity will consist of the difference between American and German responses as already suggested by the difference between the English and the German titles, and also by the difference between Catholics and Protestants who have traditionally approached visual and written texts in different ways.
10:20- 10:40 Melek Ortabasi (Hamilton College): “Indexing the Past: Visual Language and Translatability in Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress”
- The recent explosion in so-called “fan subbing” of Japanese animation has shown that translation is not as esoteric a skill as is sometimes thought. Similarly, it proves that cinematic materials can be accessible to international audiences even without professional mediation. As recent studies show, these fans use methods that are challenging not only how we think about interlingual subtitling, but even about the process of translation itself. At the moment, however, these techniques are rather limited in scope, since they tend to concentrate around a few anime genres. This paper will re-examine current cinematic translation practices through director Kon Satoshi’s full-length animated feature Millennium Actress (Sennen joyû, 2001). Given its nostalgic mid-20th century storyline, this film does not target the interests of most of the young international fan community. While there are English, French and German subtitled versions available, no fan-subbed versions exist, and there are no plans to dub the film professionally. Though the implied target audience – middle aged Japanese – no doubt has something to do with why the film has not been extensively localized, there is another, equally compelling reason: it applies, and expects, a fairly deep and broad knowledge of both Japanese history and the history of Japanese film. The notion that culturally specific knowledge is “required” to watch anime is nothing new: the plethora of guides and encyclopedias of anime in foreign languages attest to fans’ intense desire for authenticity. The reason this paper turns specifically to Millennium Actress, neglected by most of the foreign fan subculture, is because so much of the knowledge required to understand the film is culturally specific. In this film, where the protagonist recounts her life in movies in a realistic historical setting, imagery is the primary medium of communication. Narrative action and dialogue, considered the main components of cinema by many viewers, take a back seat to a visual iconography that indexes a real cinematic past. The real “story” is the history of one of Japan’s proudest cultural products: live action cinema, particularly that of the “golden age” of the 1950s and 60s. The aim of this paper is not simply to “translate” for the uninitiated viewer the many components of the film that cannot be efficiently communicated through subtitles, nor is its goal to suggest better methods for translating such material. Instead, because Millennium Actress arguably presents more difficulties to the conventional translator than does the average film, I plan to use it as a vehicle for demonstrating the shortcomings of our current text-based ideas of translation. Of course film is primarily a visual medium, one that uses a language perhaps more international than any other. But that fact has often been overlooked in efforts to bring local products abroad. By examining the subtitled versions of Millennium Actress through the lens of some of the innovative translation strategies employed by fan subbers, this paper will propose a cinematic definition of translation that more fully incorporates non-verbal methods of exchange and communication.
10:40- 11:00 Hideaki Fujiki (Nagoya University/Harvard-Yenching Institute): “Advertising in Figural Aesthetics: Ephemerality, Ubiquity, Distraction in Interwar Japanese Cinema”
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Since cinematic devices were imported into Japan in the late 19th century, the cinema has never separated from its advertising. In this paper I will explore how the newly forming visual environment epitomized by movie advertisements acted on people’s experiences in their historical context. I argue that movie ads pervaded their daily lives with remarkable characteristics on two interrelated levels. On an environmental level, they became increasingly institutionalized and served to form a visual milieu that habituated people to be both distracted from and sensitive to images, moving their eyes from one self-contained image to another. On the level of representation, movie ads, especially posters and magazine ads, developed what I call “figural aesthetics,” which were sustained by the arrangement of components rather than mimesis, so as to draw attention from the people with distracted sensitivity more than to require their intellectual understanding. This historical context conditioned people to comfortably and readily accept war-time national propagandas, many of which were designed in figural aesthetics.
11:00- 11:20 Catherine Russell (Concordia University, Montreal): “Japanese Cinema as Classical Cinema”
- Film studies scholars have long presumed Hollywood to be the only “classical cinema,” against which other national cinemas are measured as alternatives or “others.” Japanese cinema has accordingly been considered by Western scholars principally as an “art cinema,” rather than as an industrial practice. However, this nomenclature obscures the modernity of the American cinema as well as the everydayness of international film cultures. In this paper I will discuss the cultural significance of the studio period of Japanese cinema (1925 to 1960) in terms of both classicism and modernity. Regardless of the labels that are attached to it, the Japanese cinema of the mid-twentieth century—including the 15 years war and the American occupation—does exhibit a certain stylistic unity and coherence that is historically circumscribed. As a “classical” form as well as a modern cultural institution that has had significant influence within the history of East Asian film culture, Japanese cinema of the studio era needs to be recognized as an institutionalized form of mass culture. In this paper, I will explore the scope of the term “vernacular modernism” as Miriam Hansen has developed it, in the context of Japanese “classical cinema.” I will propose that it can be a valuable means of recognizing the aesthetic value of the films of this era, without resorting to a formalist model of aesthetic analysis. Vernacular modernism allows us to assess the significance of this cinema in terms of the experience of modernity and emergence of new subjectivities in modern Japan.
11:20- 12:30 Discussion
Additional Events
14:00- 15:30 Grand Round Podium Discussion with Filmmakers
