Yamagata: Cinema Verite

[Abe' Mark Nornes]

At 12:04 PM +0900 10/28/99, Aaron Gerow wrote:
> >Not to contest your main point, but Hani's films were a little later than
> >this weren't they? '55 and '56 I think.
>
> The Japanese Movie Database gives the release date of Children Who Draw
> (which got a commercial release from Nikkatsu) as Feb 18, 1956.  The Doc
> Box interview with Kudo Mitsuru gives 1954 as the date for Children in
> the Classroom.

Yes, it was actually something I was going to look into, but when I finished
I couldn't remember what it was. But as Michael suggests, the point remains
standing. Ultimately, it is not interesting to get into an argument about
who came first. What is important is that 1) Japan has been structured out
of the discussion, and 2) no one has yet sorted out this history: something
was happening---_on a global scale_---that led to a crisis in the
conventional modes of representing the world. Peter's film is one of the
best renderings of the criss-crossing forces, at least the ones crossing the
Atlantic, but there are deeper issues that lay unresolved. It's amazing no
one has written a book on this yet. Any doctoral students out there looking
for topics?

Markus