shutai vs. shutaisei ?

Nornes, Markus amnornes at umich.edu
Sat Dec 12 10:43:53 EST 2009


Oh, come on Yuriko!  Chip in!  Mathieu and Justin will go get your dissertation, but I don't know about the other 698 people following this fascinating discussion. They'll probably wait (anxiously!) for the book.

Perhaps I could cajole you into a response with this. It has to do with something Mathieu wrote:

          > Now that you mention it _is_ strange how thoroughly Matsumoto
> evacuates these parallel discussions from his own writing. I
> also see "mono" and "taikyokushugi" as deeply informing his
> writing, but you would never know that just by reading the
         > essays.

This was my impression from reading Matsumoto as well. One could see all sorts of writers he was engaging, but the points of contact were vague to say the least. When I was working on Ogawa, I chalked this up to differing standards of argumentation. Whereas we (in North American academia at least) admire writing that takes on previous scholarship, dismisses it or pushes the line of thinking in new directions, Matsumoto was working in a more DIY or riffing mode. This means our compulsive footnoting is beside the point for him, much to our consternation. I had "better" things to do when writing Forest of Pressure, so I basically threw up my hands and stuck to the main task at hand....waiting for you guys to do all the work!

Yuriko, is this a fair explanation for Mathieu's observation? Or are the connections actually quite tenuous? Or what?

Markus











On 12/12/09 9:38 AM, "Yuriko Furuhata" <yuriko.furuhata at mcgill.ca> wrote:

Dear Jestin and Mathieu,

I'm sorry to reply this late. But I just noticed your correspondence. In
my dissertation I have worked on the intellectual and theoretical
connections among figures, such as Matsumoto Toshio, Hanada Kiyoteru,
and Abe Kobo. I especially focused on the idea of neo-documentarism. If
you'd like, please feel free to consult my dissertation which should be
available electronically through Brown University's library.

Yuriko Furuhata
Assistant Professor of Film
Department of East Asian Studies
McGill University


jesty at uchicago.edu wrote:
> Dear Mathieu,
>
> Now that you mention it _is_ strange how thoroughly Matsumoto
> evacuates these parallel discussions from his own writing. I
> also see "mono" and "taikyokushugi" as deeply informing his
> writing, but you would never know that just by reading the
> essays. The primacy of the intentional relationship, and the
> attitude of starting from within a specifically located
> existence definitely sounds like existentialism, but who knows
> who or what exactly.
>
> I think spelling out the relationship between Matsumoto's
> ideas and neo-documentarism is important work that has yet to
> be done. (As for my paper it's just an "unpublished paper" and
> doesn't go very deeply into the issues.)
>
> Take care
> Justin
>
>
> ---- Original message ----
>
>> Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2009 19:12:09 +0100
>> From: Mathieu Capel <mathieucapel at gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: shutai vs. shutaisei ?
>> To: KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
>>
>>   Dear all,
>>
>>   Thank you so much for your answers, which are of
>>   great interest to me. Justin, could you give me the
>>   refererences of your quotations, so that I can
>>   mention it in my PhD thesis and quote your work ? It
>>   does seem really fascinating, as for the Matsumoto
>>   interview Yû-san refers to. I will try to read as
>>   soon as I can, but being stuck in Paris is something
>>   really unconvenient for scholars sometines... As for
>>   Markus' work, what, believe it or not, I did not
>>   know (sorry ! but I shall redeem myself as soon as I
>>   can : I saw it is available on the internet... )
>>   By the way, I do agree with Markus, and I wouldn't
>>   mind reading some japanese when it is about
>>   questions as important as the "shutaisei/shutai"
>>   debate, and the changes of policy in JCP...
>>
>>   Actually, I know that Matsumoto's theories did not
>>   come out of the blue, and relied on many other
>>   works. But I was surprised when reading Eizô no
>>   hakken not to find references to Okamoto and Hanada
>>   for instance (especially his writings about italian
>>   realim), and their attempt to merge/go beyond
>>   abstraction and surrealism, their taikyoku shugi and
>>   other "mono" considerations (especially when you
>>   know how important "mono" is for
>>   "neo-documentarism")...
>>   That's why I said that (i forgot to add an important
>>   "perhaps") those theories "pretended" to be
>>   idiosyncratic in the realm of japanese thinkers : it
>>   seemed to me that he only quoted former Japanese
>>   thinker, writer or cinematographer in order to
>>   criticize them, or prefered to deal with categories
>>   like marxism, surrealism, etc. instead of naming
>>   people... It seemed obvious when drawing a
>>   comparison with Sartre, but I may be wrong (and I'd
>>   be very pleased to be wrong, as a matter of fact)...
>>
>>   Thanks again
>>   Mathieu
>>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/kinejapan/attachments/20091212/4d65039a/attachment.html 


More information about the KineJapan mailing list