Reminder: Abe Mark Nornes & Two Sato Makoto Films

[Jonathan M. Hall]

The University of California Berkeley Center for Japanese Studies,
the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures,
the Program in Film Studies, and the Berkeley Film Seminar Present:

Two Films by
Sato Makoto
&
A Colloquium on Subtitling
with Ab? Mark Nornes
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Film Screening 1

Thursday, May 1, 2008
7 PM-9 PM
142 Dwinelle Hall

Sato Makoto's Living on the River Agano  (??????)
1992. 115 minutes

?

Prof. Ab? Mark Nornes will introduce the film. A short Q & A will  
follow.

Film Screening and Colloquium

Friday, May 2, 2008
2:15 PM? 4:00 PM
142 Dwinelle Hall

Film Screening 2
Sato Makoto's Memories of Agano (?????)
2004. 55 minutes

?

Colloquium Accompanying Screening 2:
Subtitling Can be ?Disterbing?:
Memories of Agano and  its Abusive Translation

?
Kitamura Ryuhei, Versus, 2002

Ab? Mark Nornes
Screen Arts & Culture/Asian Languages & Cultures
University of Michigan

In 1992, director Sato Makoto released Living on the River Agano, a  
documentary closely examining the impact of Minamata Disease on a  
rural community in the mountains of Niigata.  It was the result of  
several years spent living with the old farmers in the area.  Ten  
years later, Sato and his cameraman returned to Niigata to renew  
their friendships with the farmers?at least those that had survived  
in the intervening years, and on this occasion, they made a more  
experimental sequel: Memories of Agano (2004).

These two films posed a range of challenges to the subtitler. This  
began with the remarkably thick dialect of Niigata, which actually  
required subtitling in Japanese.  Sato wanted his sequel to  
steadfastly resist the reduction of these people to the Disease,  
deciding that his goals could be best served by forcing spectators to  
listen to how people spoke rather than simply what they were saying? 
so he didn't use Japanese subtitles and forced spectators to struggle  
with incomprehension.

This posed a novel challenge to the English subtitler: how does one  
subtitle a language no one can understand? Nornes used Memories of  
Agano as an opportunity to bring his theorization of an "abusive  
subtitling" into thorough practice.  After screening Memories of  
Agano, Nornes will discuss his collaboration with Sato, who thought  
that the translated version was better than the original film.

Ab? Markus Nornes is the author of Cinema Babel (Minnesota UP), a  
theoretical and historical look at the role of translation in film  
history.   He also wrote Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and  
Postwar Japanese Documentary and Japanese Documentary Film: From the  
Meiji Era to Hiroshima (both Minnesota UP).  He co-editedJapan- 
American Film Wars (Routledge), In Praise of Film Studies (Kinema  
Club), and many film festival retrospective catalogs.  He is on the  
editorial boards of Documentary Box (Japan), International Studies in  
Documentary, and Mechadamia and has been co-owner of the internet  
newsgroup KineJapan since its inception.

Prints are provided courtesy of Siglo, Co. and the Japan Foundation.

The events are free and open to the public.






----
Jonathan M. Hall
Japanese Film, Media, and Modern Literature

Visiting Assistant Professor (Spring 2008)
East Asian Languages & Cultures
UC Berkeley

Assistant Professor, Comparative Literature / Film & Media Studies
320 Humanities Instructional Building
UC Irvine, Irvine CA 92697-2651 USA
office: 1-949-824-9778
fax: 1-949-824-1992

Co-Chair, Caucus Coordinating Committee, Society for Cinema and Media  
Studies
Co-Chair, Queer Caucus, Society for Cinema and Media Studies



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