Kinema Club Workshop Abstract: Aaron Gerow

[Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto]

Here is another abstract for the Kinema Club workshop.

M.Y.


______________________________________________________________________
Japanese Cinema Studies Here and There: The Academic Subject in Global 
Culture
by Aaron Gerow

	Film studies in Japan and the United States used to be worlds apart.  
Due half to ignorance and half to imperial contempt, scholars in America 
largely ignored what was being written in Japan except for the occasional 
translations of a Sato Tadao or some film director.  Japanese showed more 
interest in their counterparts, but what they brought into Japan was 
always regulated by the domestic politics of film discourse and the 
economics of publishing and academia.  Conditions have not changed that 
much in recent years, but it is clear we are entering an age in which we 
can no longer assume a clear separation between these cinematic 
discursive fields.  Not only has the exchange of ideas through 
translation accelerated, but increasingly scholars from one nation are 
living and working in the sphere of the other, disturbing any clear 
boundaries that used to exist between the two film studies worlds.  
Speaking from a personal point of view, I must confess I often am 
confused about my position when my colleagues here in Japan or there in 
the US use such pronouns as "us" and "them."  Writing both in English and 
Japanese, I recognize I have different audiences but feel unsure whether 
I can ever delimit my intended readership.  The subject of film studies 
is changing and scholars cannot discuss the future of Japanese film 
studies without confronting that transformation.
	In this paper, I want to discuss the issue of the globalization of film 
academia, but without resorting to utopian visions of an international 
community of scholars.  Focusing on two case examples, first the 
development of early cinema studies in Japan (the rejection of Burch's 
Japan and the problem of a classical Japanese cinema), and second, the 
reception of the work of American film scholars like David Bordwell and 
Peter B. High (the rejection of both by a dominant, Hasumiesque film 
studies), I want to stress how this increasingly globalized study of 
Japanese cinema is criss-crossed by local concerns which should force all 
of us to be more careful about our discursive projects.  Dominant 
paradigms in one country are ignored in the other at the same time that 
discourses from the other nation are strategically used to combat 
hierarchies within the home nation.  Discussions of Japanese film studies 
in the United States no longer have an affect only "there" in the US, but 
also "here" in Japan.  Our discourse must become increasingly split and 
complex, for that is the condition of the new subject of film studies, 
which cannot always be sure to what field "here" is referring to.