<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px; ">Dear KineJapaners,</span><div><br></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px; "></span>Please join us at UTCP for a talk by Michael Raine (University of Chicago) on <b><u>Tuesday, December 14 at 16:30</u></b>.</div><div><br></div><div>Title: "Film as a 'Synthetic Art': Imitation, Copyright Infringement, and Masquerade in the Toho Film Musical"</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> 「"総合芸術"としての映画――東宝ミュージカル映画における模倣、コピーライト侵害と変装」</span><br><div><div><br></div><div>Place: University of Tokyo, Center for Philosophy, <a href="http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/campusmap/cam02_01_17_e.html">Collaboration Room 1, 4th Floor, Building 18</a>, Komaba Campus.</div></div><div><br></div><div>Access: <a href="http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/campusmap/map02_02_e.html">http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/campusmap/map02_02_e.html</a></div><div><br></div><div>Language: English | No registration required</div><div><br></div><div><div>Details: <a href="http://utcp.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/events/2010/12/talk_by_michael_raine/index_en.php">http://utcp.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/events/2010/12/talk_by_michael_raine/index_en.php</a></div></div><div><br></div><div>Abstract: </div><div><br></div><div>The project of "unthinking eurocentrism" in film studies asks us to incorporate non-western practices of filmmaking and film criticism into a global history of cinema. Earlier attempts to write Japanese film history often reinforced its exotic difference but recent work emphasizes the cultural permeability and global simultaneity of Japanese cinema, as well as the geopolitical incline between Japan and the West. This presentation argues that a reconsideration of "film study" [<i>eigagaku</i>] in 1950s Japan would "de-provincialize" western film studies of the auteurism and political modernism that came to define it. Japanese film around 1960 was a synthetic art [<i>sogo geijutsu</i>] in two senses: the aesthetic dialectic of avant-garde music and theatre in the "Japanese New Wave" was housed within a synthetic "transmedia exploitation" of musical and televisual celebrity in popular genre cinema. A close reading of Japanese films and film culture in the 1950s and 1960s shows the importance of social psychology to Abe Kobo and other critics' embrace of musicals as a form of anti-naturalist critique. This presentation expands on that reading formation to explore how practices of imitation, copyright infringement, and cultural masquerade in the Toho studio's color-coded musical-comedy celebrity vehicles, from <i>Janken Girls</i> (1955) to <i>You Too Can Succeed</i> (1964), could be understood as forms of "modernist mimesis" that modeled the experience of postwar modernity in Japan even as they furthered the growth of celebrity culture.</div><div><br></div><div><b>Michael Raine</b> is Assistant Professor in Japanese Cinema at the University of Chicago. His research explores the tension between a "culture of the copy" in postwar Japanese commercial cinema and a "culture of authenticity" in the Japanese New Wave around 1960. He is also developing a project on image culture in wartime Japan and its territories, with a particular focus on the rhetorical construction of documentary [<i>bunka eiga</i>] and propaganda features [<i>kokusaku eiga</i>]. His other interests in film studies include the history of film theory, particularly political modernism and the potential for a Peircian theory of film, and using digital media for teaching and research, including subtitling as both an historical practice and an aesthetic problem in the relation between text and image.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div>For more information, please contact <mroberts37 AT mail-central DOT com>. <br><br>Mark Roberts</div><div><div>Research Fellow, UTCP</div><div><a href="http://utcp.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/members/data/mark_roberts/index_en.php">http://utcp.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/members/data/mark_roberts/index_en.php</a></div><br></div></body></html>