Reminder: UTCP Talk: "Film as a 'Synthetic Art': Imitation, Copyright Infringement, and Masquerade in the Toho Film Musical"

[Mark Roberts]

Dear KineJapaners,

Please join us at UTCP for a talk by Michael Raine (University of  
Chicago) on Tuesday, December 14 at 16:30.

Title: "Film as a 'Synthetic Art': Imitation, Copyright Infringement,  
and Masquerade in the Toho Film Musical"
	「"総合芸術"としての映画――東宝ミュージカル映画 
における模倣、コピーライト侵害と変装」

Place: University of Tokyo, Center for Philosophy, Collaboration Room  
1, 4th Floor, Building 18, Komaba Campus.

Access: http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/campusmap/map02_02_e.html

Language: English | No registration required

Details: http://utcp.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/events/2010/12/talk_by_michael_raine/index_en.php

Abstract:

The project of "unthinking eurocentrism" in film studies asks us to  
incorporate non-western practices of filmmaking and film criticism  
into a global history of cinema. Earlier attempts to write Japanese  
film history often reinforced its exotic difference but recent work  
emphasizes the cultural permeability and global simultaneity of  
Japanese cinema, as well as the geopolitical incline between Japan and  
the West. This presentation argues that a reconsideration of film  
study in 1950s Japan would "de-provincialize" western film studies by  
reminding us of alternatives to the auteurism and political modernism  
that came to define it. In particular, the importance of social  
psychology in the 1950s and 1960s marks an interest in the popular  
audience that motivated Abe Kobo and other critics' embrace of  
musicals as a form of anti-naturalist critique. In its most extreme  
form that defense celebrated a “culture of the copy” that stood in  
opposition to a “culture of authenticity” canonized in the Japanese  
New Wave.
Japanese film around 1960 was a synthetic art [sogo geijutsu] in two  
senses: the aesthetic dialectic of avant-garde music and theatre in  
the "Japanese New Wave" was housed within a synthetic "transmedia  
exploitation" of musical and televisual celebrity in popular genre  
cinema. This presentation expands on that reading formation to explore  
how practices of imitation, copyright infringement, and cultural  
masquerade in the Toho studio's color-coded musical-comedy celebrity  
vehicles, from Janken Girls (1955) to You Too Can Succeed (1964),  
could be understood as forms of "modernist mimesis" that modeled the  
experience of postwar modernity in Japan even as they furthered the  
growth of celebrity culture.

Michael Raine is Assistant Professor in Japanese Cinema at the  
University of Chicago. He has a palimpsest on the tension between a  
"culture of the copy" in postwar Japanese commercial cinema and a  
"culture of authenticity" in the Japanese New Wave around 1960, and is  
developing a project on image culture in wartime Japan and its  
territories, with a particular focus on the style and significance of  
the People’s Film [kokumin eiga]. His other interests in film studies  
include rethinking the history of film theory through pragmatism, and  
using digital media for teaching and research, including subtitling,  
data-mining, and a metrical analysis of Ozu Yasujiro’s “silent”  
films.


For more information, please contact <mroberts37 AT mail-central DOT  
com>.

Mark Roberts
Research Fellow, UTCP
http://utcp.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/members/data/mark_roberts/index_en.php

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