JPEX screenings / workshop in Montreal, Jan 7-9

[anne mcknight]

Here's some info on events taking place in MTL in the new year.


POSTWAR JAPANESE EXPERIMENTS IN SOUND AND IMAGES
 
Thanks to support from the Faculty of Arts and the Department of East Asian
Studies at McGill University and Concordia University?s Mel Hoppenheim
School of Cinema, three screenings from the series, JPEX: Japanese
Experimental Film and Video, 1955- now, are now scheduled for Montr?al for
the weekend of January 7-9. Further generous support from the Japan
Foundation has enabled two unique events to complement the screenings. Anne
McKnight will moderate a roundtable discussion following the first screening
on Friday January 7th with Montr?al film writer/scholar Tom Waugh and the
JPEX co-curators, Jonathan M. Hall and Michelle Puetz. Meanwhile, Saturday
afternoon is dedicated to an open conference-workshop sponsored by the
Japan-Foundation on experiments in Japanese postwar music and image. The
full program of the weekend?s events is as follows:


 
FRIDAY JANUARY 7:  JPEX SCREENING ?SEX UNDERGROUND?
 
7:00 pm de S?ve Cinema, Concordia University $5
 
The films, videos, and animation in Sex Underground rebel against workaday
conventions of gender, sexuality, and the body.  Utilizing theatrical
traditions and a powerful performative agency, film and video makers such as
Ito Takashi, Nakajima Takashi, Terayama Shuji and Imaizumi Koichi subvert
and then reconfigure sexual difference, queer subjectivity, and gendered
norms. When viewed together, the works suggest that the sexed body was never
far from the center of postwar image experimentation; as individual pieces,
they open up complex worlds of transposed desire, indissoluble fetish, and
deadly seduction. From Idemitsu Mako?s lighthearted invocation of
traditional gender roles and Tamano Shin?ichi?s perversely magical realism
to Saito Yukie?s terrifying and oppressive exploration of male-female power
dynamics, the films and videos in Sex Underground collectively suggest
unexpected, yet open pathways for desire and subjectivity. JPEX: Japanese
Experimental Film and Video, 1955-Now has been made possible with the
support of the Image Forum Archive Tokyo, the University of Chicago, and the
University of California Irvine.  Program notes and curation by Jonathan M.
Hall & Michelle Puetz. Total Running Time: 101m The event is followed by a
public roundtable on ?cinematic and sexual undergrounds.?
 
ITO Takashi   Apparatus M, 1996, 6m, color, 16mm, silent
KAWANAKA Nobuhiro   Feedback, 1973, 8m, b&w, 16mm, silent
IDEMITSU Mako   Inner-Man, 1972, 4m, color, 16mm on video, sound
RICHIE Donald   Dead Youth, 1967, 13m, b&w, 16mm on video, sound
UEHARA Miho   Awanono, 2003, 3m, color, 8mm on video, sound*
IIMURA Takahiko   Ai (Love), 1962, 10m, b&w, 8mm on 16mm, sound
IDEMITSU Mako   Baby Variations, 1974, 9m, color, 16mm on video, sound
IMAIZUMI Koichi   I Want You to Kiss Me,  2004, 5m, color, video, sound
KIMURA Takashi   Utsu-musume Sayuri, 2003, 4m, color, video, sound
NAKAJIMA Takashi   Investigation, 1984, 3m, color, 8mm on video, sound
TAMANO Shin?ichi   Kosoku Bozu, 2002, 11m, color, 8mm on video, sound
SAITO Yukie   Benighted But Not Begun, 1994, 22m, b&w, 16mm, sound
TERAYAMA Shuji   An Introduction to Cinema for Boys and Young Men, 1974, 3m,
color, 16mm triple projection, sound
 
FRIDAY JANUARY 7

Public Roundtable with Tom Waugh: Cinematic and Sexual Undergrounds
9:00 pm de S?ve Theatre, Concordia University
 
The screening is followed by a public roundtable on cinematic and sexual
undergrounds with Tom Waugh (film studies, Concordia University), Michelle
Puetz (cinema and media studies, University of Chicago), and Jonathan Hall
(Japanese film studies, University of California Irvine).  The roundtable is
hosted and moderated by Anne McKnight (Japanese film and literature, McGill
University). 
 
SATURDAY JANUARY 8 
 
Conference-Workshop at Cin?salon, Montreal
 
1:00-5:00 pm, Cin?salon, Studio 420

Belgo Building, 372 St-Catherine?s W, Montreal

Thanks to Japan Foundation funding, we will be able to provide participants
with a set of 2-3 books that will be common reference points on discussions
of avant-garde cinema, studio film, and experimental music. To RSVP and
request materials for the conference, mail Anne McKnight at
akmck at sympatico.ca.
 
Papers and presentations will be workshopped by:
 
JONATHAN HALL (Film, Japanese studies, UC Irvine, co-curator of the JPEX
program)
??Koreans, Fascists, and Perverts: Experimental Origins and Radical
Critique?
?Although discussions of Japanese experimental cinema have often
foregrounded a formal and structural cinema, I discuss the importance of
narrative, sexual strategies for a diverse series experimental and
independent filmmakers including Kanai Katsu, Togo Ken, and Yamatoya Atsushi
active in the Japanese late 1960s and early 1970s.  By looking at their
differing uses of sexual perversion, narrative disorder, and racial
alterity, I suggest the emergence of a skein of distinct yet interconnected
cinematic subjectivities constituted by a fragmented sexuality that is
explicitly political.
 
SHARON HAYASHI (Film/history, Rikkyo and McGill, independent video
production)
?Pink Films & Multiple Audiences.
?In the context of ?movement? cinema as it is currently being revived in
Tokyo, this paper is essentially an intro to pink cinema using clips of
Wakamatsu Koji?s and Adachi Masao's films, in an effort to decenter the
exclusively Shinjuku-oriented political modernism narratives by suggesting
the multiple audiences that viewed Wakamatsu?s work for different but
simultaneous reasons, much like movements themselves.
 
ANNE MCKNIGHT (East Asian Studies, McGill)
?Safety Last?Risk and Narrative in Straight-to-Video Subculture Features
?This paper look at different depictions of subcultural networks based on
genre film, documentary about disenchanted youth, and pink film about
disenchanted adults. I?m essentially interested in how experimentation in an
unabashedly globalized market of 2003+ feature exchanges and collaboration
whose linkages make a strangely social contrast to the preoccupations of
other subculture denizens, such as otaku, and a departure from both
modernist notions of realistic illusion, and the formal and sociological
principle of the autonomous fragment that dominates 60s modernist cinema.
 
DAVID NOVAK (musician & ethnomusicologist, NY/Columbia University)
?Sounding Electric Shadows: Film and Performance in Technological Genres of
Postwar Japanese Experimental Music
?This paper looks at two groups and production movements, Jikken Kobo/NHK
and Group Ongaku/Taj Mahal Travellers, in relation to changes in form during
the 1960s that were largely mediated by electronic music technologies,
comparing those formal moves to some structural elements in JPEX films.
 
MICHELLE PUETZ (Cinema studies, U of Chicago, filmmaker, co-curator of the
program)
?Japanese Experimental Film and the Avant-Garde Tradition
? This presentation reflects upon the curatorial project ?JPEX: Japanese
Experimental Film and Video 1955 ? Now,? which documents the radical medium
of postwar Japanese experimental film, video, and animation at its fiftieth
anniversary. In redressing the occlusion of Japanese experimental cinema
from our understanding of avant-garde film practice, JPEX explores the
significance of Japanese experimental media for our understanding of the
history of avant-garde film practice within a global context of interaction
and exchange.  The curatorial project demonstrates a unique attempt to
expand our understanding of experimental film and video practice and to
reveal a rich international dialogue between Japanese and European/American
traditions of filmic experimentation and media-works.
 
SATURDAY JANUARY 8: JPEX SCREENING ?EXPLODED STATES: WAR, POLITICS, AND
NATIONAL IDENTITY?
 
7:00 pm de S?ve Cinema, Concordia University $5
 
In Exploded States: War Politics, and National Identity, the importance of
political and social critique for postwar Japanese experimentation is made
apparent.  Here, Japanese experimental film and video comes to its closest
intersection with experimental theater and avant-garde performance. The
films draw from and contribute to ?happenings? staged by avant-gardists in
the Hi Red Center group, an intercontinental Fluxus movement, and Hijikata
Tatsumi?s butoh dance.  Viewed together, works by Hosoe Eiko, Kawanaka
Nobuhiro, and Terayama Shuji, among others, exhibit a delightful irony and
playful insubordination to state, collective, and perspectival authority.
 
TAKAMINE Tadasu , God Bless America, 2002, 9m, color, video, sound
TANIKAWA Shuntaro & TAKEMITSU Toru , X (Batsu), 1960, 15m, b&w, 16mm, silent
HAYASHI Seiichi Shadow, 1969, 3m, color, 16mm, sound, screened on video *
AIHARA Nobuo, Yamakagashi 1972, 7m, color, 16mm, sound, screened on video *
HOSOE Eiko , Navel and A-Bomb, 1960, 12m, b&w, Japanese text with English
subtitles, 16mm, silent
MATSUMOTO Toshio , White Hole, 1976, 7m, color, 16mm, sound
KAWANAKA Nobuhiro , Switchback, 1976, 9m, color/b&w, 16mm, sound
AOKI Tatsu, 3725, 1981, 11m, color, 16mm, sound
TANAAMI Keiichi, Yoshikei, 1979, 12m, color, 16mm, sound *
TERAYAMA Shuji  , Emperor Tomato Ketchup, 1970, 25m, color/b&w, in Japanese,
16mm, sound
+ The screenings are followed by a short Q & A with the JPEX curators,
Michelle Puetz and Jonathan Hall.
 
SUNDAY JANUARY 9: JPEX SCREENING ?EXPANDED VISIONS?

7:00 pm de S?ve Cinema, Concordia University $5
The extraordinary canon of mid-century Japanese formal experimentation
comprised by well-recognized experimentalists such as Ito Takashi, Matsumoto
Toshio, Nakajima Takashi, Okuyama Jun?ichi, and Yamazaki Hiroshi, is
expanded and enriched in the light of the powerful and pioneering work of
feminist filmmaker Idemitsu Mako, animator Tanaami Keiichi, and contemporary
contributors to formal play. Collectively, these filmmakers probe the
possibilities of cinematic representation, linear temporality, repetition,
sensory overload, forgetfulness, perception, and delusive madness.

 
MATSUMOTO Toshio  Shiki Soku Ze Ku, 1975, 8m, color, 16mm, sound
IDEMITSU Mako  At Santa Monica 1, 1974, 6m, color, 16mm on video, sound
OKUYAMA Jun?ichi  Le Cinema, 1975, 5m, b&w, 16mm, sound
OKUYAMA Jun?ichi  My Movie Melodies, 1980, 6m, b&w, 16mm, sound
OKAMOTO Akio  Snarl-Up!!!, 2001, 8m, color, video, sound
YAMAZAKI Hiroshi  Heliography, 1979, 6m, color, 16mm, sound
NAKAJIMA Takashi  Cessna, 1974, 20m, color, 8mm on video, silent
FURUKAWA Taku Coffee Break, 1977, 3m, color, 16mm, sound
MATSUMOTO Toshio  Atman  1975, 11m, color, 16mm, sound
ITO Takashi  Spacy, 1981, 10m, color/b&w, 16mm, sound
YAMAZAKI Hiroshi  Observation, 1975, 10m, b&w, 16mm, sound
TANAAMI Keiichi  Why? Remix, 2002, 5m, color, video, sound
+ The screenings are followed by a short Q & A with the JPEX curators,
Michelle Puetz and Jonathan Hall.
 

***DIRECTIONS to the de S?ve cinema

McConnell Library Building @ Concordia University
1400 de Maisonneuve ouest
Metro Guy-Concordia

 
*** LIKELY Readings for JPEX conference-workshop:

--Wheeler Winston Dixon & Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Experimental Cinema: The
Film Reader. London: Routledge 2002 (includes essays on Yoko Ono).
--Douglas Kahn. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts.
Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999.
--Alexandra Munroe. Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky. New
York: H.N. Abrams, 1994.
--Alexandra Munroe with Jon Hendricks. Yes Yoko Ono. New York: H.N. Abrams.
2000.
--Michael Nyman. 1974. Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
--Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age
of Video. Durham: Duke UP, 1999.
--P. Adams Sitney, The Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
--P. Adams Sitney, The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism.
New York: New York University Press, 1978.
--Juan Antonio Suarez. Bike Boys, Drag Queens and Superstars. Avant-garde,
Mass Culture and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema. Indiana
University Press, 1996.
--Thomas Waugh. The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema
Thomas Waugh; foreword by John Greyson. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.

 
*we will be compiling a more comprehensive biblio during the conference.
 
For more information on the screenings or conference, contact Anne McKnight
at akmck at sympatico.ca or 514.276.8576.