Nippon Zeronen

[Michael McCaskey]

Zero is excellent in context, since "year zero" is a film reference going back to Germania Anno Zero (Germany in the Year Zero), 1947, directed by Roberto Rossellini, with screenplay by Max Kolpe. It won prizes at the Locarno Film Festival in 1948. It was shot out on the streets and in damaged buildings where real people lived, in Berlin in 1947, and living conditions for ordinary Germans were bad there, contrary to current popular impressions - though Rossellini, always militant, overemphasized a bit.

I apologize if this was already touched on--I came in in the middle of the discussion.

Michael McCaskey
Georgetown Univ.

----- Original Message -----
From: Mark Nornes <amnornes at umich.edu>
Date: Monday, March 12, 2007 1:51 am
Subject: Re: Nippon Zeronen

> 
> On Mar 11, 2007, at 3:47 PM, Jonathan M. Hall wrote:
> 
> > I'm not with my reference materials now, but if my memory serves 
> me  
> > the first kanji in the film title "reinen" is marked with 
> katakana  
> > furigana, reading "ze-ro."  For this reason, I chose to romanize 
> 
> > the title as "zero-nen".  The rei, of course, homonymically  
> > suggests the spiritual and ghostly, while the zero is more  
> > suggestive of a political and scientific finality or ur-point.
> 
> For what it's worth, I remember Fujita using 'Nippon reinen' when  
> Fukushima Yukio and I talked to him about showing the film at  
> Yamagata (back when it was still a maboroshi film).
> 
> Markus