Kinema Club III still has space

[Mark Nornes]

Kinema Club III still has a few seats left, if anyone wants to make a  
late decision to join us in New York City. Contact us off-list if you  
are interested.

Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto & Markus Nornes

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 
++

Announcing...
Kinema Club III
New York University, February 13-14, 2004
Organized by Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto and Ab? Mark Nornes

The success of Kinema Club II in Honolulu left participants screaming  
for more. So here you go! ?Kinema Club III will be held at New York  
University, and the format will be more like our first outing. Papers  
will be distributed beforehand in mid-January, and presenters will give  
only the barest of introductions before opening the floor to  
discussion. ?

This also means that space at the table is limited to about 20  
participants. We will fill those seats on a first come, first served  
basis starting with this email. If you would like to come to New York  
for Kinema Club III please contact us now. ?

If you are unable to come (or get turned away for that matter) fear  
not. We will hold Kinema Club IV in late spring/early summer 2005. This  
will be a large gathering---perhaps larger than this year's event---and  
if you would like to host it please contact us directly. ?

Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto (my15 at nyu.edu) & A. M. Nornes (amnornes at umich.edu)

Schedule
February 13 (Friday)
15:00-18:00
--Tom Lamarre, ?Worlds without Others: Anime and the World-Making Power  
of the Fetish?
--Satomi Saito, ?The Evolution of Anime Language: Anime Consumption?

February 14 (Saturday)
9:00-12:00
--Daisuke Miyao, "Stardom and Japanese Modernity: Sessue Hayakawa and  
the Pure Film Movement"
--Mark Anderson, "The Star System in Japanese Cinema"

14:00-17:00
--Michael Raine, "Non-intensive Mise-en-scene: Textual Analysis and  
Japanese Popular Ephemera"
--Catherine Russell, "Naruse at P.C.L. (1935-37): The Moga and her  
Sisters"

Abstracts

Worlds without Others: Anime and the World-Making Power of the Fetish
Thomas Lamarre
This paper is basically a comparison of two kinds of fetish, one that  
opens world-making power, one that forecloses it. ?My examples of the  
foreclosure of world-making power come from recent series that try to  
construct histories across different media ? primarily Blood: The Last  
Vampire with its animated film, video game, novels and manga; and the  
recent Matrix sequel, with its video game and animated films (a  
strategy borrowed from Blood and other anime series). ?I argue that the  
multi-planar aesthetics (or internal montage) characteristic of many  
anime films and series allow for the production of ?signature layers?  
within the image. ?The spectator attends to, and often notes the  
difference between, character designer, writer, producer, and director.  
?The use of signature layers has allowed anime to explore the  
possibilities for histories across media ? and potentially new ways of  
imagining history and media. ??Yet it is a strategy of serialization  
that remains so close to the logic of the commodity fetish that is  
almost indistinguishable from it. ?These series foreclose the  
world-making power of the fetish in the commodity.????????

As an example of animation that opens world-making power differently, I  
call on a recent Japanese animated series, Chobits, based on the  
popular manga penned by the four-women team named CLAMP. ?(CLAMP is  
team known for their reworking of different genres, and Chobits is  
their version of (or response to) hentai.) ?Although Chobits also  
remains disturbingly close to the logic of the commodity fetish, the  
way in which Chobits reworks the conventions of hentai allows us to see  
what is at stake in hentai ? the narrative and visual construction of a  
?world without others.? ?I look at how Chobits works narratively and  
visually to construct its world without others ? to remove otherness  
from the structuration of the visual field. ?This not only tells us  
about how hentai works. ??It also offers another way to think about  
how, in the drive to produce new worlds, the multi-planar aesthetics of  
anime strive to go beyond the logic of commodity fetish. ?While  
(perhaps inevitably) Chobits and other hentai may fall short, their  
virtue is to show the problem so clearly.

The Evolution of Anime Language: Anime Consumption
Satomi Saito
Japanese animation, now commonly referred to as anime, is an  
interesting field of study, not just because of its popularity in the  
global market today but because of the way it disturbs existing  
disciplinary boundaries. ?Despite its demand from the side of students,  
anime has always been a nuisance for scholars and teachers of literary  
studies, Japanese studies, and film studies. ?Anime resists these  
disciplinary approaches firstly because anime?s dominant format, which  
is the serialized TV program, is hopelessly multiple denying the notion  
of authorship and textual coherency. ?Moreover, anime cannot fit into a  
single medium, cell-animation, since it developed along with fan  
cultures that traverse several different media such as manga, music,  
garage kits, idol culture, and a game. ?What we see in anime culture is  
a media-mix consumption that characterizes the global consumer market  
today. ?If we fail to see the role of anime in media-mix global  
markets, we end up reinforcing the same disciplinary problems by  
accommodating anime harmoniously into existing boundaries.

In my paper, I would like to discuss possibilities of a new visual  
theory for anime analysis that makes it possible to treat anime not as  
a coherent category, but as dynamic media-mix phenomena. ?When Japanese  
animation started to target young adult audience, which is also the  
birth of ?anime,? it went through changes in its visual aesthetics.  
?Characteristics of limited animation, i.e. segmentation of shots and  
reliance on still images, introduced the issue of point-of-view  
comparable to cinema. ?This point-of-view links the discourse not  
simply to the story-world as in cinema but also to the characters that  
are extremely fetishized with excessive details, shades, and highlights  
which inevitably makes the images flat and static. ?This change in  
visual aesthetics is resulted from the changes in consumer habits in  
the 80s. ?The consumption of stories, which facilitated the  
proliferation of manga-based animation (telebi manga) in the 70s, was  
gradually substituted by the consumption of images (anime characters)  
in the 80s. ?Instead of plots and stories, rapidly consumable ?flat?  
characters became primal commodities that traverse multiple media in  
the 90s. ?In such circulation of images, stories these characters  
convey become more and more marginal; or rather they become something  
that can be fabricated depending on the consumers? demands in its  
aftermarket.

By treating anime as a new mode of consumption, my paper will offer an  
alternative to the thematic analysis of anime that presumably reflects  
contemporary Japanese society and to the historical analysis of anime  
that traces its chronological history to pre-war era presupposing  
anime?s identity as cell-animation.

Stardom and Japanese Modernity: Sessue Hayakawa and the Pure Film  
Movement
Daisuke Miyao
Sessue Hayakawa (1886-1973) was a very popular silent film star in the
United States from 1915 until 1922. He was the only non-Caucasian movie
star who had the status of a matinee idol. Hayakawa?s unique stardom was
formed and received at the complex intersection of global film culture  
and
social and cultural discourses, especially on race, class, gender,  
nation,
and modernity. Films and film stardom have been produced and consumed in
locally specific contexts and various conditions of reception. Miriam
Hansen claims, "To write the international history of classical American
cinema, therefore, is a matter of tracing not just its mechanisms of
standardization and hegemony but also the diversity of ways in which  
this
cinema was translated and reconfigured in both local and translocal  
contexts
of reception." This paper examines the way Hayakawa?s stardom was
differently appropriated and articulated within the social and national
formation by various and contradictory political, ideological, and  
cultural
interests before, during, and after his or her public circulation.

The 1910s was the time when the American film industry achieved global
market dominance, largely during and due to the First World War. The  
1910s
and early 20s marked a pivotal period with Hollywood coming into  
existence
as a global center of film production and promotion to a certain degree.
Japanese audiences were often dismayed by the result and protested  
against
Hayakawa?s representation of Japan in the light of authenticity.

Simultaneously they tried to utilize Hayakawa?s star image for their own
political or nationalist purposes. Since the end of the nineteenth  
century,
the Japanese government domestically adopted a modernization policy.
Particularly after World War I, Japan tried to participate in world  
politics
and economy as a modernized nation. As an attempt to compete with  
European
and American cultural colonialism and to bolster nationalism using  
cinema,
Japanese intellectuals and government officials initiated a movement,  
or a
trend, called "jun?eigageki undo," the Pure Film Movement, to  
appropriate
Hollywood-style filmmaking for the purpose of modernizing cinema in  
Japan.
In such a trend, Hayakawa?s American stardom was incorporated into  
Japanese
modernity in a complicated way. As an American import, Hayakawa was  
praised
because his star image had a universal appeal well beyond Japanese  
cultural
boundaries. As a Japanese actor, Hayakawa was praised as an ideal
representative of Japanese people and culture for his popularity in the  
US,
but simultaneously he was often criticized for appearing in  
anti-Japanese
films that were considered as distorting actual Japanese national and
cultural characteristics.

The Star System in Japanese Silent Film
Mark Anderson
?????I am interested in a collaborative project that undertakes a
historical survey of the star system in Japanese film, its ties to  
genre, and the
evolution of typecasting as it relates to gender, class, and ethnicity.
?????
The paper I will be presenting examines the shimpa to silent film
transition in connection with Konjiki Yasha and Hototogisu. There are
seventeen silent versions of Konjiki Yasha. My preliminary research
indicates that rival studios placing their stars in this vehicle have
something to do with this incredible proliferation of remakes.
????
The notices on silent versions of Konjiki Yasha I've found so far
generally relate Entertainment Tonight type of information: where the  
film
is being shot, which stars are involved, and how anxiously the film  
release
is being anticipated. Much of the story seems to come from the press  
buzz
around the celebrity actors and actesses.
?????
My paper will develop this line of questioning toward answering how
casting was conducted in early silent family drama and from what point
casting was relied upon in packaging and marketing film to the public.
Lastly, I will try to examine what the particular codes of typecasting
assume concerning gender, class, and ethnicity in film roles and  
celebrity
as sold to the Japanese public in the early 20th century.

Non-intensive Mise-en-scene: Textual Analysis and Japanese Popular  
Ephemera
Michael Raine
In the middle of Taiyo no kisetsu, the first of the "taiyozoku" films  
of 1956, a scene opens with a high angle extreme long shot of a group  
of young men about to launch a boat in the harbor at Hayama. At the  
bottom of the screen we see that they are chased by a group of young  
women in swimsuits. After importuning them for a ride on the boat the  
leader of the girls asks where the boys are from, which brings a  
geographically implausible reply that sounds like "Shiga-ken, sa". But  
the line also sounds like "see you again, sa" a play on the girls'  
strikingly foreign bodily presentation -- a low angle shot of swimsuits  
and sunglasses -- that is reinforced when their leader replies to her  
own question, saying that they're from the Yoshida English school. When  
the boys' spokesman asks for the girls' names their leader replies,  
"Mary, Sally, Michi, Judy ? Elsa". That response leads one of the boys  
to ask after their nationality to which Elsa replies, equally  
facetiously, "Issei, of course. Everyone says so". That foreign  
affiliation seems the point of a scene that ends without resolution (it  
is not clear whether the girls get their ride, nor do they appear in  
the rest of the film), a point confirmed by one of the boys who  
highlights this feminine detournement of nationality by dubbing each of  
the boys with an archaic male name suited only for jidai-geki.

Since "gender" is the single category most often applied to ideology  
critique in the cinema, this scene should pose few problems. In these  
arguments women are made to bear either the burden of nationality (the  
woman as the threatened "Japanese thing" that must be preserved) or the  
mark of a suspiciously anti-national modernity (the moga, the pan-pan,  
or the apure ge-ru). The task of the critic is to choose between these  
fetishizing and sadistic representations, and to prosecute the film  
accordingly. Perhaps in the end that's the best thing to do with Taiyo  
no kisetsu, a film for which it would be difficult to mount an  
aesthetic defense. Instead, I would like to consider the importance of  
non-intensive "mise-en-scene" to this portrayal of linguistic and  
bodily "miscegenation", as it relates to 1950s Japanese "audio-visual  
culture". That is, rather than find in the film hidden resources of  
formal play or ideological tension, I will claim that the film's  
relation to the social phenomena that produced it was one of citation,  
and that a more productive understanding of how we should think of the  
film as a film comes from an study of its connection to wider  
extra-cinematic discourses.

In the course of that project I will discuss the aural and visual  
composition of the scene, and the place of such mise-en-scene analysis  
in the recent theorization of "visual culture" in the recent writing of  
Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, and Nicholas Mirzeoff. I will conclude that  
attempts to find abstract and non-exclusionary formulations of visual  
culture fall back on less sophisticated "logic of the form" assumptions  
to give them structure. Nationality (and Americanization) will still be  
the foreground topics of the piece but I will also be concerned with  
changes in Japanese cinema as an institution, and to changes in  
Japanese "body culture." Perhaps in the end, this scene from Taiyo no  
kisetsu is most interesting for its striking typicality: audio-visual  
culture is best understood as a web of nodes with no center, and no  
automatic political consequences, rather than as a field punctuated by  
self-deconstructing texts.

Naruse at P.C.L. (1935-37): The Moga and her Sisters
Catherine Russell
In 1935 Naruse Mikio was invited to join the new studio P.C.L. as a key  
new director of their ?modern? cinema. The move also corresponds to his  
shift to sound film production. The analysis of Naruse?s films during  
the two years before P.C.L. was integrated into the Toho enterprise  
suggest how his representation of women and urban space coincided with  
the larger shifts in Japanese culture and mass media during this  
period. Cultural historians Miriam Silverberg and Harry Harootunian  
have discussed the interwar period in terms of the construction of  
Japanese modernity as a discourse of everyday life. Naruse?s cinema  
demonstrates how this discourse was articulated in filmic form, and how  
the dynamics of ?modan culture? gave way in the latter part of the  
decade to a very different national culture that nevertheless remained  
grounded in the everyday.

While Naruse?s cinema studiously avoided any direct acknowledgement of  
the ascendancy of the military in Japanese life, two of his films of  
this period include pairings of women associated with modernity and  
tradition. Otome-gokoro sannin kyoudai (Three Sisters With Maiden  
Hearts, 1935) and Uwasa no musume (The Girl on Everyones Lips, 1935)  
are both about sisters living in downtown Tokyo. While these two films  
include characters close to the infamous moga figure of interwar Japan,  
in Naruse?s cinema female characters are given a greater complexity  
than is usually associated with the moga stereotype. Tsuma yo bara yo  
no ni (Wife! Be Like a Rose!), the first Japanese feature to be  
distributed in the U.S., includes his most engaging female character of  
the period, played by Chiba Sachiko. Although there is no evidence to  
support Burch?s claim that Naruse ?refused certain norms of Western  
cinema,? Tsuma yo bara is indeed among his most well-executed films. I  
will argue that, despite Burch?s analysis, Naruse was not engaged in  
any kind of ?transgressive? practice; and while his films of the 30s  
are certainly stylistically and formally idiosyncratic, his experiments  
were motivated more by a need to find an appropriate means of  
expression for modern Japanese life, than to challenge established  
patterns of representation.

The paper will also include brief discussions of some of the other  
titles Naruse was responsible for during this period: Sakasu gonin-gumi  
(Five Men in the Circus, 1935), Kumoemon Tochuken (1936), Nynoni aishu  
(Feminine Melancholy, 1937) and Nadare (Avalanche, 1937). These films  
suggest how Naruse contributed to a popular culture in which gender  
norms were under continual revision and contestation. The volume of  
films is in itself remarkable (he made 10 films during these three  
years), and although the quality is uneven, there is a consistent  
articulation of a ?vernacular modernism? appropriate to the shifting  
dynamics of the public sphere. Precisely because of its association  
with new industrial methods of mass culture, Naruse?s cinema provides a  
privileged insight into the shifts in the symbolic cultural economy of  
the period. My reading of these films is thus particularly attuned to  
the details of fashion, architecture, music and narrative as well as?or  
as elements of?cinematic style and effects of gender.


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