Kinema Club 4
catherine russell
crus at vax2.concordia.ca
Fri Oct 15 11:00:50 EDT 2004
I was unfortunately only able to attend the first day of Kinema Club 4, but
from what I saw and heard, it was another successful meeting. It was well
attended, and featured some lively discussion. Congratulations to Anne McKnight
for hosting and organizing the whole thing. And she cooked up a fabulous meal
to boot. Anne asked me to summarize the papers that were presented on the first
day for those who could not be there, so here goes:
Michael Cronin: Hurtling Through History: Sennen joyuu Cronin discussed this
anime film by Kon Satoshi as an allegory for Japanese history. He showed a
number of clips from the film in which the actress-protagonist Chiyoko is seen
to be propelled through the history of Japanese film, and by extension, through
Japanese history, accompanied by her adoring fan and his cameraman. While the
fan, Genya, is a documentary filmmaker clearly in love with his subject, the
cameraman is a more ironic figure, closer to the otaku generation of the films
own genesis. Discussion at the workshop covered a number of issues raised by
Cronins paper, including the role of melodrama and gender in the construction
of Japanese history; and the films embodiment of mythic history. In addition
to questions of gender paradigms, the film also raises the question of the
place of anime in the history of Japanese cinema. The relation between the two
mediums is articulated on the levels of identification and referentiality,
although the discussion was somewhat inconclusive on the ultimate significance
of the film as a critical history of Japanese film culture.
Sarah Frederick, Redolent of Roses excess in Yoshiya Nobukos Fiction
Frederick discussed the fiction of the woman writer Yoshiya Nobuko in terms of
some of the paradigms of film melodrama and film editing. With special emphasis
on the book Two Virgins in the Attic (Yaneura no ni shojo, 1920), in which
Yoshiya uses roman characters as well as unique typographical features such as
exclamation points and ellipses, Frederick discussed the strategies of excess
in terms of emotional intensity and romantic narration. Workshop participants
discussed the role of Yoshiyas work as prototypical of shojo culture; they
also
discussed the effect of ellipses in modernist film practice and other cinematic
strategies of excess and expressive devices. The question of irony and the way
in which Yoshiyas signs of excess are to be read was also raised by Frederick
and the other workshop participants.
_________________________________
Catherine Russell, Professor
Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema
Concordia University
1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W.
Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3G 1M8
tel: (514) 848 2424 ex. 4657
fax: (514) 848 4255
http://cinema.concordia.ca/russell/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/kinejapan/attachments/20041015/888c8a68/attachment.html
More information about the KineJapan
mailing list