KC VII

[Aaron Gerow]

Wearing my conference organizer's hat: Thanks, Sarah, for the kind 
words. Now that over a week's worth of guests and events is over, I can 
finally get some sleep!

Wearing my KineJapan owner's hat: As I always do after a KC event, I 
ask those who attended KCVII to please send in their reports about the 
conference to KineJapan. Many members wanted to go but could not, so it 
would be great if those who attended could talk about what they heard 
and saw, and what they thought about it.

As for a discussion about Loft, that would also be great. I heard both 
positive and negative comments, much of which depended on whether 
people thought Kurosawa was being either serious or self-conscious 
about the wild turns in this film. I personally can see that if people 
thought Kurosawa was really trying to make a scary horror film, Loft 
would seem to be a failure, but at the same time, if you step back from 
this assumption about intentionality, it could be seen as a brilliant 
discourse on genre and assumptions of continuity and identity. (From an 
auteurist standpoint, I could side with the latter, given his cinema's 
long stance of being self-critical about genre.)

Kurosawa himself was quite visibly pleased to have the good comments he 
did get, and as a whole was thrilled to be at a conference where, as he 
said, people really thought about films.

Aaron Gerow
KineJapan owner

Assistant Professor
Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
Yale University

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