Kani kôsen boom

[anne mcknight]

[Apologies if this sends more than once. I've had a hard time sending it.]

Yes, I was just reading about this. There is a very interesting taidan between
Takahashi Genichir? and Amamiya Karin--of New God and Peep 'TV' Show fame in
the Mainichi on January 9 of this year about the "boom." It ironically seems
to have been stoked by the publisher, as one of the grad students (who might
want to chime in here...) pointed out in class the other day. I think
the Amamiya/Takahashi pair-up was pretty inspired. Amamiya has been involved
in protests for freeter unions in the last year. There seems to be a big
push to link freeters with the rhetoric of the pr?cariat, or the precarious
+ proletariat of the (sometimes) post-industrial world. I hear competing
genealogies for that word, some Japanese, some French.

I think I started a discussion about the sh?setsu in the context of montage
a year or so ago, which was rather lively. Chika Kinoshita and others had
things to say about montage at that point in film history. But a lot has
happened since then, as you point out.

In the interim there has been a big conference about Kobayashi at Oxford,
which some of you may have been to. If so, do tell! There is a Sankei article
(May 14) that I find interesting, because like the Wall Street Journal, they
seem obliged to report on culture.
http://sankei.jp.msn.com/culture/books/080514/bks0805140802000-n1.htm. Cool
grafix, too. It tracks the publication history, the rise in printings, and
notes that college-age readers feel an affinity with the "working poor" and
the harping on "self-responsibility" (jiko sekinin) from various neo-liberal
corners. They did not note the adaptation into cinema.

Given the "festering maggot" scene in Kani k?sen, and the general setting of
the mutiny-ing ship, I think it is pretty evident that there is a
Potemkin-ian link, over and above the narrative of revolution common to
prole lit in general. The endings rhyme, if they are not exactly the same.
Also, the presence of the benshi in the story is kind of interesting.
Potemkin itself is pretty self-contained with subtitles, and the coercive
editing of dialectical montage does not leave a WHOLE lot of room for
interpretation, of the sort benshi would do. But, it is always possible
there was leftist benshi technique that can improvise quite well with such
material.

Interesting stuff.

Anne
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