Japanese Film Workshop

[Naoki Yamamoto]

Dear KineJapaners,

Please join us for the next meeting of the Japanese Film Workshop on  
November 12 (Thursday), 7PM, at Meiji Gakuin University, Shirokane  
campus. The venue is called "Kyozai junbi shitsu" (教材準備室), a  
room next to the office of the Department of Art Studies (芸術学科)  
on the 6F of the main building. The Japanese Film Workshop is open to  
all, and directions to Meiji Gakuin can be found at:

http://www.meijigakuin.ac.jp/access/index.html

The Alterity of Cinema: Subjectivity, Self-Negation, and Self- 
Realization in Yoshida Kijû’s Film Theory

Patrick Noonan--PhD Candidate at University of California, Berkeley.

In a number of articles written between the late 1950s and the early  
1970s, filmmaker Yoshida Kijû sought to re-theorize the production and  
consumption of film in Japan.  He called for a cinematic form in which  
filmmakers paradoxically disassociated themselves from the production  
of they very films they were creating.  Renouncing control over a  
film, he believed, would prevent filmmakers from communicating a  
specific message to an audience and, thereby, provoke an audience to  
interpret and complete a film’s significance. Creating such a film,  
he contended, required a new understanding of the filmmaker’s self.  
The previous generation of filmmakers, Yoshida thought, saw themselves  
as entities distinctly separated from others, entities that used film  
to express a particular idea, often politically disengaged fantasies,  
to an audience of passive receivers. For Yoshida, by contrast, the  
filmmaker’s self always existed in relation to an other – the very  
film itself, an actor, or an audience. By “negating” the  
individuated self during production, a filmmaker could create a film  
that would cause audience members to analyze it and, in turn, incite  
them to scrutinize and engage in the social and political situation of  
the time.

Yoshida’s film theory, I argue, displays an ethics of self- 
realization in its formulation of the relationship between the self  
and other. In his theory, self-negation (jiko hitei) leads the self to  
know itself as other, as essentially unknowable to itself, through its  
interaction with others. At a time when devotion to a theory of self- 
negation ultimately led sects of student activists to violently attack  
one another with the intent to eradicate those that adhered to  
differing revolutionary ideologies and tactics, Yoshida’s use of the  
term led him to formulate a theory of ethical social life wherein self  
and other remain mutually exclusive yet bound to one another through a  
common activity: the creation of cinema. Within the context of the  
1960s, Yoshida’s theory represents one among many attempts to  
conceptualize and practice a form of collective life outside of or in  
contrast to the dictates of dominant institutions and ideologies of  
the time.

For more information, please contact: naoki.yamamoto at yale.edu

Naoki Yamamoto (Coordinator)
PhD Candidate
East Asian Languages and literatures/Film Studies
Yale University