Preliminary Schedule for KCX in Hawai'i

[Mark Nornes]

Kinema Club X


In Hawai’i



July 30-August 1, 2010

 




Preliminary Schedule

Friday, July 30

2:30-4:30 pm

Panel 1

Trond Lundemo (Stockholm University)

Ideography and Japanese Culture in Film Theory

A. M. Nornes (University of Michigan)

The Restless Calligraph

Roger Macy

The 1929 Moscow Japanese Cinema Exhibition in Context

 

Panel 2

Choo Kukhee (University of Tokyo)

Virtual /Daikoku/: The New Japan imagined in /Coil-A Circle of Children

Miryam Sas (UC Berkeley)

Intermedia moments in Japanese experimental animation

Marie Thorsten (Doshisha University)

Cartoon Reality?: The Animated Documentary and the Art of Darkness

Melek Ortabasi (Simon Fraser University )

(Re)animating Folklore: Raccoon Dogs, Foxes and other Supernatural Japanese Citizens in Takahata Isao’s Heisei tanuki gassen pompoko

 

5:30 pm

Reception/dinner

 

8:00 pm

Migration to official bar 

 

Saturday, July 31

9:00 am

Breakfast

 

9:30-11:30 am

Panel 3

Michael Arnold (University of Michigan)

On Location: Tsuda Ichiro, Pink Photography, and the Possibilities of Representation 

Kirsten Cather (University of Texas at Austin)

Stilling the Moving Bodies of a Nikkatsu Roman Porn: Kumashiro Tatsumi’s 1973 Yojōhan fusuma no urabari”

Ryan Robert Mitchell (York University, Toronto)

The Phenomenology of Alterity in Wakamatsu Koji’s Go, Go Second Time Virgin

Julian Ross (University of Leeds)

Interdisciplinary Activities of Shinjuku Bunka and Sasori-za: Theatrical Impact on the Early ATG Films

 

Panel 4

Livia Monnet (University of Montreal)

The “Cocoro of Rococo:” Girl Subcultures, Humor, and Animetism in Nakashima Tetsuya’s Kamikaze Girls

Paul Berry (Kansai Gaidai University)

Black Lizard Playground: Gender Performance in the Kurotokage films by Fukasaku, Maruyama, and Mishima (1968) and the 2007 Takarazuka Version

Bryan Hikari Hartzheim (UCLA)

Hosts and Hostesses: Limits of Fiction and Non-Fiction in Jake Clennell’s The Great Happiness Space –

 

11:30 am

Lunch

 

12:45-2:45 pm

Panel 5

Jie Li (Harvard University)

Phantasmagoric Manchukuo: Films of the Manchurian Motion Picture Association (Man’ei), 1937-1945

Eija Niskanen (University of Helsinki)

From Coastal Finland to Urban Tokyo: The Moomin Brand in Japan

Dan Herbert (University of Michigan)

Horror remakes

Boel Ulfsdotter (Örebro University)

The Image of Japanese Film through Western Film Posters

 

Panel 6

PRECONSTITUTED PANEL: Re-imagined Communities: Undoing the Relationship of Gender, Sexuality, and Nationalism through Postwar Japanese Films 

Tsukada Yukihiro (Kansai Gakuin University)

Scandal Japan: Sexual Politics in Kôji Wakamatsu’s Early Works

Nakagaki Kotaro (Daito Bunka University)

Locality and Gender/Body/Identity Switching: Ōbayashi Nobuhiko’s Two Versions of Exchange Students and Transitions of Shōjo Images

Suzuki CJ (Lehigh University)

New Media and Neo-nationalism in Postmodern Japan

 

3:00-5:00 pm

Panel 7

Sharon Hayashi (York University)

Film, social movements and freeter culture 

Christine Marran (University of Minnesota)

Toxic Waters: On Visibility, Invisibility, and the Ecopolitical in Cinema

Misono Ryoko (University of Tokyo)

Suspension of the Law: The Meaning of the State and the Enunciating Subject in Oshima Nagisa’s Death by Hanging (1968)

Jonathan M. Hall (Pomona College)

Direct Video Action: The Distance and Brevity of Neoliberalism

 

Panel 8

Michael Raine (University of Chicago)

Adaptation and Propaganda: Stagecoach and the kokumin eiga

Naoki Yamamoto (Yale University)

Struggles over Cinematic Subjectivity: Nikkatsu Tamagawa and the Development of Realist Film Practice in Wartime Japan

Ushida Ayami (Nihon University)

日本映画評論・批評における戦争責任

Seio Nakajima (University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa)

Mapping the Transnational Genesis of the Post-War Japanese Cinematic Field: Case Studies of the Productions of Madame White Snake (1956) and Legend of the White Snake (1958)

 

6:00-8:00 pm

Beach Party (planned)

 

8:00 pm

Migration to official bar

 

Sunday, August 1

9:00 am

Breakfast

 

9:30 am

Film and Discussion (Film TBA)

 

11:30-1:00 pm

Lunch

 

 

PAPER ABSTRACTS (in panel order)

 

PANEL 1:

 

A. M. Nornes

The Restless Calligraph

 

Western avant-garde film theorists and practitioners, such as Sergei Eisenstein and Alexander Astruc, have famously connected cinema with the art of handwriting. The former described cinematic image-making as a combination of shots that, like Asian ideograms, are both depictive, or figural, and intellectual; the latter equated the film camera to a pen, the caméra-stylo. Yet their work has remained as suggestive as it is isolated: it has not prompted systematic studies of calligraphy in film history in the same way attention to calligraphy has influenced other scholarly endeavors, including the history of letter- and book-writing, philology, literary biography, typography and the avant-garde, or even graffiti and popular culture. To my knowledge no one has written on the subject of calligraphy and cinema in any concerted or interesting way. My own fascinations, admittedly informed by my work and interest in Asian cinema, stem from the complex phenomenology of calligraphy in films. We see how the cinematic styles are often re-enacted in calligraphic style. Calligraphy creates meaning both linguistically and paralinguistically, by virtue of its semantics and the semiotic/material qualities of color, line and even animation. Indeed, calligraphic script lends itself to the art of cinema—literally, the “writing of movement”—by virtue of the “liveness” and the suggestion of “movement.” Furthermore, the ontology of the calligraph—being the product of an individual’s brush and expressing both the being of the artist and the frozen moment of production—seems roughly analogous to the ways in which film theorists have considered the indexical qualities of the photo-chemical image. The pasting of objects’ reflections on film is akin to a form of writing. All this helps explain the persistence and ubiquity of the written script in East Asian cinema, where text has a different status than cinema in the rest of the world.

 

Trond Lundemo

Title: Ideography and Japanese Culture in Film Theory

 

In this presentation, I propose to examine the role of ideography in the formation of film theory in the 1910s and 1920s. These constructions draw not only on Japanese writing but also on a larger idea about Japanese culture during these years. Ideography is frequently made up to be the ‘other’ of alphabetic writing.  The most famous text drawing on ideography in this context is Sergei Eisenstein’s “Beyond the Shot” (1929), finding in Japanese writing a true principle of montage, which he identifies as completely absent in Japanese cinema at the time. Eisenstein’s account is indebted to a line of film theoretical inventions centering on ‘the writing in pictures’ and ‘the hieroglyph’ since the mid-teens, as in Vachel Lindsay’s chapter on hieroglyphs in The Art of the Moving Picture (1915), Jakov Lintsbach’s construction of a visual esperanto in 1916, and texts by Bela Balázs and others during the 1920s. These issues are revisited by Roland Barthes, Christian Metz and Raymond Bellour in the textuality debates in the 1970s, the intermediality issues in the 1990s (Mikhail Iampolsky) and in computer theory. In a Japanese context, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro approaches the role of writing in interesting ways in some of his early texts on cinema (translated in Shadows on the Screen (ed. Thomas Lamarre).

 

The focus in this presentation is how ideography and Japan serve as a projection field for the invention of a truly cinematic culture in these writings, constructing a duality between a Western and Japanese traditions. I will also show how these early writings on film were as much engaged with ‘archive theory’, understanding the shot as an element that could be engaged in ever changing contexts, rather than in the established ‘works’ forming the point of departure for later, ‘classical’ film theory.

 

 

Roger Macy

Title: The 1929 Moscow Japanese Cinema Exhibition in Context

 

The 1929 Moscow Japanese Cinema Exhibition has been known, if at all, in English-language sources as the departure point for Eisenstein’s essay, zakadrom, sometimes translated as “The Cinematic Principle and Japanese Culture.”  Because of the immense influence of Eisenstein, the lack of any translation of the catalogue to which he was responding and the rarity of that Moscow catalogue, the exhibition itself has had little consideration in the context of Japanese cinema in the west, except through this devastating filter: “a country that has no cinematography.” A translation of the catalogue into English by Stephen P. Hill is offered, and the catalogue reviewed through that translation. A short account of the selection and assemblage of the materials is given, referring to some Japanese sources. The catalogue is considered as a Soviet characterization of Japanese film history, and compared with some other western viewpoints of this, and subsequent eras. An acknowledgement is made of the influence of Eisenstein as a filter on the Soviet perception of Japanese arts, and consequently, on all western perception of Japanese visual arts. A critique is made of the impact, or lack, of the Exhibition on Soviet cultural life [RM has no claim to be a Russian specialist]; with some speculations on other Soviet filters of perception on Japan.

 

A brief view is taken of Soviet relations with Japan, with some possible bearings on Soviet portrayals of Japanese culture and on Russo-Japanese cultural relations of the period. A short comparison is made of highly contrasted representations of Soviet and Japanese cinema internationally, in the increasingly polarized positions of the subsequent period; with a brief examination of possible triggers for this divergence. It is appreciated that some of these topics require more expertise than one individual can offer, and so the paper does not attempt to be definitive, but merely attempts to frame some discussion.

 

PANEL 2:

 

Kukhee Choo

Title: Virtual /Daikoku/: The New Japan imagined in /Coil-A Circle of Children

 

Created by Iso Mitsuo, “Coil-A Circle of Children” (/Denno- Koiru/) is a science fiction anime that aired on Japanese national broadcast television station (NHK) in 2007. The narrative revolves around the virtual reality city Daikoku, where the landscape infrastructure mostly consists of digital data and the Internet. Children run around the city wearing their special “augmented reality” glasses that can manipulate the data surrounding their daily lives. The glasses function as the Internet, but the space that they access and control are their own reality.

 

In /Coil/, temporal and spatial realities have no boundaries. The blurring of the digital and the physical external alters the linear notion of space and time. As the story unravels, we encounter a larger conspiracy that tries to cover up the danger of the newly developed virtual technology, which creates “ghosts” that are remnants of the left over old data. According to Azuma Hiroki, Japanese anime and its avid fans called Otaku have created a space where modes of communication have been altered into a postmodern “database-like” structure. The signified are codified into bits and pieces of information that can be summed up in the notion of “moe,” a term that summarizes the appealing and exciting elements in a character. Moe elements do not have a linear history that can add up to the characters’ attractiveness. In fact, the characters themselves become an embodiment of the entire history of anime character development and thus, become a transcending figure of the otaku culture. In other words, contemporary anime (and its characters) are produced with prior creations as stepping stones, only to further blur the boundaries of narratives, visuality, and the history of the medium itself. Therefore, the entire genre of anime becomes an amalgam of postmodern pastiche and stereotypes, which appears to be epitomized in anime such as /Coil/.

 

Evoking the trite bias of techno-Orientalism, Daikoku (which echoes the term “great nation” in Japanese) as a virtual reality city replicates the notion of great economic and technological development that Japan once represented. When data virus-eliminating machines sweep the cityscape, the only spaces to which the children can safely evacuate are the old temple sites. Here, we can witness the tension among the past, present and future. With the Japanese government’s concentrated international promotion of anime into the global market, and further its embracing of anime as being part of Japan’s traditional arts, the production of /Coil /at this juncture of time presents an interesting development of Japanese anime as a whole. This study will examine the notion of space and time in /Coil/ and situate its production within the larger socio-economic structure of the Japanese anime industry in the 21st century.

 

Miryam Sas

Title: Intermedia moments in Japanese experimental animation

This paper takes as its starting point the 1967 film Ninja bugeichō [Chronicles of the warrior arts of the Ninja/Band of Ninja] by Oshima Nagisa, in order to explore intermedia moments in Japanese experimental animation of the 1960s. Ninja bugeichô follows on Oshima’s Diary of Yunbōgi, another activist film made up completely of filming of still photographs with voice-over. Through it, Oshima arrived at a method for adapting Shirato Sanpei’s manga by making it into a film “as is,” through moving and still shots of the original work. The rhetoric of filming an object “as it is” pervades not only documentary theories of direct representation but also anti-art movements and visual arts movements like Mono-ha. Yet here, with the backdrop of ATG cinematic representations of historical moments of revolution, Oshima claims that the “adventures” of the ninja in this film correspond to a spirit of cinematic adventure, which simultaneously interrogates the nature and process of social revolution. Pushing against congealed assumptions about what cinema can be and represent, he attempts through this experimental montage to realize a spirit of revolution, experimentation, and adventure at once.

In this paper, then, Oshima’s film will be a starting point for a study of several experiments in animation from the Sōgetsu art center, placed in the context of the experimental cinema of the time. The abstract forms of the film and its political message echo the relationship between the political and the formal experiment in many other works of the era, but press on them in a new way. These works choose to frame strict formal limits as a paradoxical path to freedom and new, provocative forms of thought.

 

Marie Thorsten

Title: Cartoon Reality?: The Animated Documentary and the Art of Darkness

 

In his film, Waltz With Bashir (2008), Ari Folman introduced the seemingly incongruous category of “animated documentary”: a cartoon representation of the real. Documentaries as memory quests are not entirely unlike cartoons: War Neurosis (1917), tried to document surrealism through war reenactment and PTSD experienced by hospitalized British soldiers. The Fog of War (2003) references Robert McNamara’s memories from age two and his quest for personal and national redemption as Defense Secretary in the Vietnam War, with McNamara’s own exhortation that “There's something beyond one's self.” Bashir presents the fragmented memories of Israeli soldiers in the Lebanese conflict in the 1980s referencing dreams and war reenactments, particularly in the director’s own quest to overcome amnesia. Edward Said argues that the strength of the comic aesthetic is to reach into places unreachable. When Said (favorably) compares artist Joe Sacco to the enigmatic character of Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, he apparently hints at an even greater complexity for understanding Sacco’s work, with insights applicable to other cartoon (film animation or print comics) documentarians such as Folman. This paper will read Waltz With Bashir with reference to The Heart of Darkness, aided by Said’s commentary, and noting the motifs of imperialism, encounter and self-confrontation.

 

Melek Ortabasi

Title:  (Re)animating Folklore: Raccoon Dogs, Foxes and other Supernatural Japanese Citizens in Takahata Isao’s Heisei tanuki gassen pompoko

 

Folklore as a genre is generally associated with the premodern; indeed, the birth of folklore study was a form of resistance to the modern. At the same time, oral narrative is often retold in modern contexts, becoming a useful resource in nation-building. As a result, folklore’s contradictory identity is manifested in a variety of cultural products all over the globe. But perhaps none underline its narrative and political flexibility as well as the animated film. Experts in a medium that is still most commonly associated with a juvenile audience, the directors of Japan’s popular Studio Ghibli make daring and creative use of this flexibility in their frequent appropriation of the genre.

 

Takahata’s Pompoko (1994) is a striking example within the Ghibli repertoire, all of which invokes and reimagines Japanese and world folklore to some extent. Because it employs a particularly realistic, contemporary Japanese setting and folk iconography that is culturally specific, however, Pompoko has never achieved the global popularity enjoyed by other Ghibli films – especially those directed by Miyazaki Hayao, Takahata’s more famous compatriot. The interactions of the magical but embattled tanuki (raccoon dogs) who play the main characters somehow lack the broad emotional appeal of the interhuman (and interspecies) relationships depicted in films such as Tonari no Totoro (1988) and Majo no takyūbin (1989). Similarly, though the film has a liberal, environmentalist tone that many international audiences would understand, it does not deliver its message in the globally fashionable and euphemistic mode of speculative fiction, as do Kaze no tani no Naushikâ (1984), Mononokehime (1997) and even Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (2001).

 

This paper will examine Pompoko’s visual and narrative characteristics and how they relate to more “traditional” tanuki lore. I will argue that the film’s literal interpretation of the fantastic allows the tanuki to become more than a nostalgic metaphor for lost ways of (Japanese) life. Using the anime medium to create composite images and sequences in which the realistic and fantastic encounter each other, Pompoko seeks to unfold the fourth dimension of the Japanese landscape and give folklore a (post)modern voice. The film’s visual strategies redefine the genre itself, and not just its “folksy” content, suggesting that folklore can be an effective tool to understand the present and future of Japan, as well as its past.

 

PANEL 3:

 

Mike Arnold

Title: On Location: Tsuda Ichiro, Pink Photography, and the Possibilities of Representation

 

In 1980, 38-year-old Tsuda Ichiro published The Location (Za rokeshon), a document of the photographer’s experiences as a cameraman on the set of Japan’s Pink Films (Pinku eiga)—the controversial industry of low-budget, narrative erotic cinema that flourished in the decades before adult video and still continues today. Winding over 200 pages, Tsuda’s casual anecdotes about Pink personalities and their misadventures are illustrated by scores of black and white pictures from Pink Film sets and highlighted by Tsuda’s musings on photographic realism. Despite (or perhaps due to) its somewhat eloquent approach to such a visceral subject, the book was a commercial success. By 1984, The Location had been reprinted nine times and adapted into a feature film by Shochiku Studios, helmed by one time “Otoko wa tsurai yo” director Morisaki Azuma and starring Nishida Toshiyuki. In 1989, while continuing his freelance Pink photography, Tsuda received the ninth Domon Ken Award for his collection of non-Pink Film related photographs, The Narrow Road (Oku no hosomichi). Today he continues his work as a still and promotional photographer for Pink Films as well as hardcore adult videos.

 

While The Location takes pains to note (and show) the representational limits imposed on the erotic film in Japan (in particular by the Administration Commission of Motion Picture Code of Ethics, Japan’s film censorship board), Tsuda’s privileged photographs of the cast, crew, and camera in historical space offer an alluring view of the Pink set. Balancing between the acknowledged artifice of the moving picture and the presumed documentary reality of the still, the book attempts to triangulate the location of a ‘reality’ beyond the surface of this melodramatic body genre, hinting at a point of stress in the cinematic apparatus that is seen in the friction between the differing indexical values of competing photographic media. Framed by my own experiences as a photographer on the Pink set and my first-hand observations of Mr. Tsuda at work, I will address The Location’s alternative view of profilmic space as a valuable catalyst for addressing the realism of the pornographic image in Japanese cinema and examining the material and historical conditions of Pink Film production itself.

 

Kirsten Cather

Title: Stilling the Moving Bodies of a Nikkatsu Roman Porn: Kumashiro Tatsumi’s 1973 Yojōhan fusuma no urabari

 

When a literary classic is adapted into a film, the results invariably invite scorn from critics and fans alike. The 1973 Nikkatsu roman porn film adaptation of a short story by one of Japan’s most esteemed novelists, Nagai Kafū, was no exception. This paper considers how and why the film took considerable liberties in adapting the story, in particular its conspicuous incorporation of archival photographs that document the rise of Japanese militarism in the late Taishō period (1912-26). Throughout the film, sepia-colored still photographs of violent rice riots, revolution, and, most provocatively, the dead hanged bodies of Korean dissenters interrupt and punctuate the central storyline – an extended scene of sexual intercourse between a geisha and her client. I consider the political and aesthetic effects of injecting such stilled images into a genre famous instead for its lush color moving ones. As the film made Japan’s top film journal’s top ten list of films in 1973, the integration of these seemingly incompatible photos into a generic pornographic film seems to have been a success, suggesting curiously enough both the evidentiary and masturbatory potential of the archival photo.

 

Ryan Robert Mitchell

Title: The Phenomenology of Alterity in Wakamatsu Koji’s Go, Go Second Time Virgin

 

The ethical criticism of film is a practice that seeks out those moments where our ‘mastery’ as viewers is challenged by the uncertain affect and desire generated by cinema. This theory posits that the ‘gaze’ is a property of the cinematic object that announces its alterity rather than the all-powerful viewer. At disruptive moments, the image—or Other—gazes back at us challenging the space we inhabit as viewers. The ethical criticism of film involves interrogating the ways in which we as subjects, in our consumption and enjoyment, are implicated in relations of power through the production of images.

 

My discussion of the ethical criticism of film will be grounded within the Japanese exploitation genre of pinku eiga. Specifically, the work of the radical director Wakamatsu Koji will be considered with reference to how his films disrupt genre expectations and viewer identification. The presentation will focus specifically on 1969’s Go, Go Second Time Virgin, a nihilist film that depicts the bleak love relationship that develops between two abused teenage outcasts. I will be making the claim that within the context of pink cinema, Wakamatsu's film opens space for an ethical interrogation of the one's position as spectator.

 

Drawing from such post-phenomenological works as Emmanuel Levinas’ Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being, this presentation will examine our affective relationship with the moving image, how it positions us as desiring subjects, and how alterity announces itself within the Wakamatsu’s radical pink eiga.

 

Julian Ross

Title: Interdisciplinary Activities of Shinjuku Bunka and Sasori-za: Theatrical Impact on the early ATG Films

 

This paper will focus on the activities of the Shinjuku Bunka and Sasori-za in the 1960s and early 1970s assessing the impact of non-filmic events on the early films co-produced by the Art Theatre Guild. Despite evidence of high levels of collaboration and communication often revolving around ATG, many discussions on ATG emphasise the impact of their initiative to screen foreign art cinema and little has been developed on the effects of the interface between film and other art forms that flowered in Shinjuku’s artistic community.

 

In particular Shinjuku Bunka was a centre of gravity for such artistic communion and, I will argue, actively encouraged filmmakers and artists to experience different cultural forms and engender fruitful collaborations. Late-night performances began in the mid-60s and Kuzui Kinshiro soon built the performance space ‘Sasori-za’ underneath Shinjuku Bunka which became the heart of angura theatre, a platform for experimental film screenings and a stage for butoh dances, all-night jazz concerts and drunken conversations between artists. The referencing of ‘premodern’ art forms, the rethinking of relationships between art and audience, the questioning of reality and the limitations of singular artistic media will be discussed as concerns in the art community and as crucial within the ATG films.

 

Specifically, the paper will propose that dialogue with angura theatre played a decisive role in shaping the thematic and stylistic trends of the films that ATG came to produce. It will illustrate these concerns through reference to cinematic works by Shinoda, Matsumoto and Terayama, analysing the space of theatre within their filmic diegesis. Terayama’s Throw Away Your Books, Get Out Onto the Streets, first a collection of essays, second a dramatic performance, and finally Terayama’s ATG debut, will be of particular importance.

 

The paper will place film history within the larger pantheon of art history to offer an interdisciplinary perspective on Japanese film in the 1960s and 1970s.

 

PANEL 4:

 

Livia Monnet

Title: The “Cocoro of Rococo:” Girl Subcultures, Humor, and Animetism in Nakashima Tetsuya’s Kamikaze Girls

 

Rococo… embodies the spirit of punk rock and anarchism more than any other philosophy. Only in Rococo — elegant yet in bad taste, extravagant yet defiant and lawless — can I discover the meaning of life… This is the Cocoro of Rococo (a little pun in Japanese if you please. Cocoro [kokoro] means “spirit”).
(Novala Takemoto, Kamikaze Girls, trans. Akemi Wegmüller, San Francisco: VIZ Media, 2008,7)
 
This talk examines Nakashima Tetsuya’s exhilarating adaptation of Takemoto Novala’s best-selling light novel, Shimotsuma monogatari (Shimotsuma Story, translated as Kamikaze Girls, 2002). A highly entertaining, stylish and inventive comedy, Kamikaze Girls (2004) depicts the growing friendship between two high-school students, Lolita fashion addict Momoko and Yanki biker Ichigo. I shall argue that the film’s sympathetic representation of girl (“gal”/gyaru) subcultures as resistance to (what it envisions as) the parochial, consumerist, conservative mainstream culture of contemporary Japan is at once undermined and reinforced by its recourse to parody, humor and animetism as surface  effects.
Indeed, Kamikaze Girls’ anarchic slapstick humor, parodic mise-en-abyme, and animated sequences showing the heroic actions of the legendary leader of all-girl biker gangs, Himiko, resonate strongly with Deleuze’s approach to humour and Thomas Lamarre’s theory of the anime machine. In The Logic of Sense Deleuze defines humor as the co-extensiveness of sense with non-sense, an art of the surface and of doubles, “of nomad singularities and the always displaced aleatory point,” which substitutes “the savoir-faire of the pure event” and a new type of esoteric language of the surface for the philosophy of the depth and height of becoming, of tragedy and irony (The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, New York: Columbia UP, 1990, 139-41). Lamarre argues that anime, or the art of Japanese  “full limited animation,” is also an art of the surface. It may be envisioned as a heteropoïetic machine — an assemblage of technological, conceptual, aesthetic and socio-cultural relations that folds into itself universes and territories of thought, technical operations and affective machines while unfurling divergent series of animations. Anime’s multiplanar (or superplanar) anime image is a type of time-image, a distributive field of exploded projection in which movement and depth are created, or simulated through the sliding of the image’s constitutive planes, and which saturates the surface of the image with the ontological crisis of the movement-image and the existential crisis of the characters’ flattened identity and subjectivity to such an extent that the latter are pushed out of the frame and become migrant “soulful bodies.” (Lamarre, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation, Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2009). Shimotsuma monogatari’s protagonists, Momoko and Ichigo, are depicted precisely as such disconnected, unbound soulful bodies wearing their affects and ontological crises as it were on the surface of the skin, characters or images corresponding to Deleuze’s notion of the incorporeal double or the ego that dissolves itself in the phantasm-event while liberating the impersonal, pre-individual singularities it contained within itself (Logic of Sense, 8-11, 213-16). It would thus appear that the film subscribes entirely to Deleuze’s and Lamarre’s notion that “the most profound is the immediate” (Logic of Sense, 9), and that subversion, if at all, occurs at and as the surface of language/the anime image. (Kamikaze Girls tends to conflate cinematic perspectivism with animetism’s “raising to power” of the “ballistic perception” of cinema [see Lamarre, The Anime Machine, 26-94, 124-44]). Nevertheless, the deconstructive logic of parody and of mise-en-abyme; the pop postfeminist representation of girl (shôjo/gal/gyaru) bonding; and finally the paradoxes of the temporal loop and the possible worlds at work in Nakashima’s film suggest that the flattening of subversion and resistance produces a “new esoteric language” — that of inversion or perversion — that in its turn requires a rethinking of the logic of the subcultures and “translocal” media of neoliberal consumer capitalism.
 

Paul Berry

Title: Black Lizard Playground: Gender Performance in the Kurotokage films by Fukasaku, Maruyama, and Mishima (1968) and the 2007 Takarazuka Version.

 

Mishima Yukio published a play titled Kurotokage in Fujin gaho in 1961 based upon the original 1934 novel by Edogawa Ranpo. Mishima’s play was performed in 1962 while simultaneously a Kurotokage film with a script by Shindo Kaneto starring Kyo Machiko was released to the theaters.  The most noted film version was directed by Fukasaku Kinji in 1968 loosely based on Mishima’s play starring Maruyama (Miwa) Akihiro with Mishima in a cameo as a “living doll.” The 1968 version gained considerable international attention after it was revived at the Chicago Lesbian and Gay International Film Festival in 1985 that was followed by a VHS release in 1992 in the US. In the following decades a variety of TV dramas and theatrical versions of Kurotokage were produced. In 2007 Takarazuka staged a musical drama of the Kurotokage plot and produced a film version of the stage play for release on DVD.

 

Contrasting the plots and performances of the female role of Kurotokage played by Maruyama Akihiro in 1968 with that of Sakurano Ayane in 2007 and the male role of the famed detective Akechi Kogoro played by Kimura Isao in 1968 and Haruno Sumire in 2007 allows a revealing analysis of gender performances. In these two films same sex actors playing opposite gender roles performed tragic love stories for a broad popular audience. A key question is the degree to which these actors of one sex playing the opposite gender role serves to undercut or support the standard gender conventions of cinema.
 

Bryan Hikari Hartzheim

Title: Hosts and Hostesses: Limits of Fiction and Non-Fiction in Jake Clennell’s The Great Happiness Space

 

Jake Clennell’s The Great Happiness Space (2007) is a film that, like Mitchell Block’s No Lies, involves screened lies on tiered levels: the lies of the subjects, the lies of the filmmaker, and the lies of the medium itself. Unlike Block’s film, though, it is an actual documentary, filmed during a brief stint in Japan where the director was on a separate shoot for a baseball-themed Japanese film. The Great Happiness Space documents the life of Issei, the top-ranking male host working in a popular host club in the red-light Minami ward of Osaka metropolis.
The male host in Japan shares much in common with his female counterpart – both are hired to entertain clients of the opposite sex primarily through conversation. Japanese cinema has a long tradition of dramatizing the working conditions of female entertainers with the josei eiga, or woman’s film, as it is known in the west to include the films of Mizoguchi Kenji, who chronicled the plight of geisha in countless films. The male host is represented much less in Japanese film history despite the profession being not that recent of a social development in entertainment culture. Clennell’s film is not the first non-fiction film to document the inner-workings of a modern host club, but it is unique in its emphasis on deception as a rule of thumb when working in this underground industry on the part of not only the hosts, but of the clients as well. TGHS draws upon the fictional narrative and spatial conventions of the Japanese woman’s film, in particular that of Naruse Mikio and his When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, to create a false sense of drama, but the film, and Clennell the filmmaker, also employs traditional cinema verite techniques to undermine both this constructed narrative and the limits of the “honesty” of cinema verite itself.
 

PANEL 5:

 

Jie Li

Title: Phantasmagoric Manchukuo: Films of the Manchurian Motion Picture Association (Man’ei), 1937-1945

 

Founded in 1937 to propagate Manchukuo’s “national policy” and to spread the ideology of the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, the Manchurian Motion Picture Association (Man’ei) produced 108 “entertainment” features, 189 “education” documentaries, as well as hundreds of newsreels and children’s programs. With the end of the war, this body of films was lost in the chaos of political transition, with only a small fraction recovered in the last two decades. Based on primary research into extant Man’ei features and documentaries, film magazines, and published reminiscences by former employees, this paper provides a preliminary overview of what we might call “Manchurian cinema” from 1937 to 1945 through its historical texts and contexts. With almost 2000 employees by the end of 1944, Man’ei’s staff was constituted by Japanese and Chinese, leftists and rightists, idealists and cynics, underground Nationalist agents, Communist guerrillas, and politically naive adolescent actors. Hence I argue that there may be more authorship behind these films than the monolithic articulation of a single hegemonic voice—itself subject to shifts in the wartime ideological climate.

Drawing on the film magazine Manshu Eiga, the first section of this paper outlines the way Man’ei was built up, from the recruitment of actors and crewmembers to the expansion of distribution networks, from the guidelines of its makers to the perspectives of their audiences. The remaining bulk of the paper discusses seven extant Man’ei films: wartime interracial romances starring the legendary Ri Koran (Song of the White Orchid (1939), China Nights (1940), and Winter Jasmine (1942), the historical melodrama Eternal Fame (1942), the musical My Nightingale (1943), the comedy Everybody Is Happy (1943), and the “educational documentary” Lice Are To Be Feared (1943). An analysis of these films gives a glimpse into the diversity of genres, messages, forms, and historical moments they encompass, showing that Man’ei was not a monolithic entity reducible to a stereotypical plot in the continental goodwill films or to the legendary biographies of its chief or brightest star. Transcending the simplistic binary of resistance and collaboration that characterized mainstream scholarship on Man’ei or on wartime cinema in general, this paper attends to the historical ambiguities and political contingencies faced by the filmmakers and the audiences, taking both an analytical and imaginative approach to the intended or received meanings of Man’ei cinema’s remnant fragments.

 

Eija Niskanen

Title: From Coastal Finland to Urban Tokyo: The Moomin Brand in Japan

 

The Moomin characters, created originally by the Finnish novelist/artist Tove Jansson in both novel and cartoon formats, have carved a permanent place in the hearts of Japanese people. Since the 1970s two Japanese TV anime series have been produced, the first broadcast on Fuji TV during 1969-70, and the second, Tanoshii Moomin Ikka on TV Tokyo in 1990-91. Forthcoming is a Finnish- Japanese co-production of a 3D theatrical-length Moomin movie. some famous names, such as Rintaro and Miyazaki Hayao were involved as animators for the first series.

 

Moomin rights and legally handled in Japan by two companies. Tuttlemori Agency licencing company created the early Moomin boom, and is also involved in the forthcoming 3D movie production. Moomin Character Ltd, owned by late Tove Jansson's niece Sophia Jansson, have approved the second TV series, and own the rights for most of the Moomin character goods sold in Japan. They were thus heavily involved in the second Moomin boom of 1990s.

 

My paper studies the different brand concepts that these two companies have created in Japan. I also discuss both the differences of the Japanese Moomins as compared to the original Finnish ones, as well as the different meanings that the characters have in each country - for ex . the most popular Moomin character in Japan is the freely wandering Snufkin, whereas in Finland each of the characters have their fans, for ex. young women see the strong and argumentative Littly My as their self-image.

 

Daniel Herbert

Title:

 

This paper examines the recent but now dwindling flow of remakes between Japan and Hollywood, such as The Ring (2002), The Grudge (2004), and Dark Water (2005). This cycle of activity created new industrial and intertextual connections between Hollywood and Japanese cinema and, as part of a larger system of Hollywood’s remakes of East Asian films, created new linkages with Asian cinema in general. However, any time one creates cultural or industrial linkages, structural may divisions also become more apparent, prompting us to wonder: “what was ‘Japanese” in this exchange?” “How did ‘Japan’ and ‘Japanese cinema’ find a definition here?” In an attempt to address these questions relationally, one must first look at the way that the cycle of Hollywood remakes of East Asian films significantly displaced the prominence of Hollywood remakes of films from Europe. Then, I will move from this shift to examine the major industrial players that facilitated the Hollywood-East Asian exchange and their relations to Japanese cinema. Finally, I will look at the dominant genres and themes undertaken in Hollywood remakes of Japanese films, which provide cultural counterpoints to the economic imperatives of the trend.

 

Boel Ulfsdotter

Title: The Image of Japanese Film through Western Film Posters

 

This paper offers a double-take on Western film poster practice in relation to Japanese film based on film poster material from the 1950s and 1960s. My first example concerns the general attitude among Western poster artists. Beginning with a short introduction of typical iconographical elements found in Western film posters for Japanese films at this time, I shall go on to present a case study of how certain Western poster artists cultivated a traditional image of Japaneseness in their film posters, regardless of the film genre and narrative mode of the Japanese film itself. My second example engages with the collection of film posters for Japanese films in Western and especially French film archives. We shall see that collection of these posters was often conditioned by their relevance to similar traditional Western views on Japaneseness despite the variety of Japanese film genres and individual films actually on offer at the cinemas. Based on the holdings in some European film archives, I assume that the majority of them hold only one or two archetypes of film posters related to Japanese film while other posters were considered unsuitable for collection. We may thus establish that the collected film posters generally represent a false historiography of the exhibition of Japanese film in the West. I shall finally propose that the artistic expression of Japaneseness represented in the older film posters still reign the Western image of Japanese cinema. They therefore do not only determine the archival profile of many collecting institutions but also continue to mould the general image of Japanese cinema in the West.

 

PANEL 6:

 

「再想像された共同体：戦後日本映画を通してジェンダー、セクシュアリティー、そしてナショナリズムを読みほどく」("Re-imagined Communities: Undoing the Relationship of Gender, Sexuality, and Nationalism through Postwar Japanese Films")

 

「日本」とは実体である以前に想像され、記述され、そして構築されてきた。かつてベネディクト・アンダーソンは、西洋の文脈において「出版資本主義（プリント・キャピタリズム）」を国民国家の基礎を形作る重要な要素と捉えたが、近代においては映画やラジオ、テレビなどがさらなる影響力をもったメディアとして「想像の共同体」を規定するようになっている。日本の科学技術・文化史において、映画やテレビといった映像メディアが描く風景や個人、そして共同体は、単に外部社会の「反映」ではなく、「理想」として想像される「日本」や「人間関係」だったりする。また、いくらかの映像作家たちは規範的となった「想像された日本」に対して異なる声を挙げ、変革を迫る者もいる。「想像された日本」とは、中央と地方、西洋と非西洋といったように想像する主体の位置や関係性によって変化し、また歴史的文脈においてそれぞれ異なって記憶される。このパネルではそれぞれ異なる歴史的な時間性・状況のなかで、個々の映画がどのように作られ、何がどのように表象され、また社会に対して／社会の中でどう振舞ってきたかを、ナショナリズム、ジェンダー、そしてセクシュアリティーの絡み合いを整理することで検討する。

 

塚田幸光 (TSUKADA Yukihiro)

タイトル：「スキャンダル・ジャパン――若松孝二初期作品における性の政治学」("Scandal Japan: Sexual Politics in Kōji Wakamatsu’s Early Works")

 

 

若松孝二は、性を政治の寓意とみなす。いかに映像は、政治をエロス化しうるのか。あるいは、エロスは政治へと転嫁しうるのか。若松作品において、この壮大な実験は、反権力の身振りと共振し、極めてラディカルな性／政治学となる。国辱映画とされた『壁の中の秘事』（1965）や『胎児が密猟する時』（1966）では、権力／暴力が性行為に投影され、両者の奇妙な依存関係が描かれる。性が暴力に接続され、その地場として、「オープンな密室」という逆説的トポスが生起するのだ。1969年の『処女ゲバゲバ』における「荒野の密室」などは、その象徴的な例だろう。本発表では、この「密室」を軸に、60年代後半の若松作品における性と政治、ジェンダーとナショナリズムのつながりを考察する。ここから、スキャンダルな「日本」が見えてくるはずだ。

 

中垣恒太郎 (NAKAGAKI Kotaro)

タイトル：「ローカリティとジェンダー／ボディ／アイデンティティの転換――大林宣彦における２つの『転校生』と少女像の変遷」(Locality and Gender/Body/Identity Switching: Ōbayashi Nobuhiko’s Two Versions of Exchange Students and Transitions of Shōjo Images)

 

　大林宣彦（1938-　）の『転校生』（83）とそのセルフ・リメイク作品『転校生　さよならあなた』（07）の二作品を素材にローカリティとジェンダーをめぐる問題について検討する。『転校生』は後に「尾道三部作」と称される、大林の郷里・広島県の「尾道」を舞台にした初期の出世作の一つであり、一方、25年の歳月を経て製作された『転校生　さよならあなた』は「長野」を舞台に移し、オリジナル版と設定や台詞を重ねながらもまったく異なる結末を提示したことで話題を集めた。この２つの作品を繋ぐ25年の間に、バブル景気／消費文化の発達とその後の長期化する不景気の時代背景があり、中でも大林が得意とする十代の少年少女たちを取り巻く環境も一変した。もともと「尾道三部作」の特徴として発表年代となる1980年代よりもずっと古い男女の価値観、少女像、そしてノスタルジックに「地方の光景」を描くことを狙いとし、私小説ならぬ「私映画」としてオリジナル版『転校生』や『時をかける少女』（83）が製作されたことを大林自身がくりかえし述べていることを想起するならば、街の光景が変わりゆく80年代に、消えゆく昔ながらの地方の光景を記録しておくかのような「尾道三部作」はまさに時代の産物としてもたらされたと言える。
　十代の男女の心と体が入れ替わるという設定からは、その時代におけるジェンダー役割が顕著に見出せるものであり、２つの『転校生』を比較することによって25年の歳月をめぐる少年少女を取り巻く状況の変化を見いだせる。オリジナル版のような形では21世紀初頭の現在、かつての少女像を再び提示することはできなかった（選ばなかった）結末の違いに注目することにより、２つの『転校生』をローカリティとジェンダーの観点から再検討していくことにしたい。

 

鈴木繁（SUZUKI CJ [Shigeru]）

タイトル：「90年代以降のニュー・メディアとネオナショナリズム：土屋豊『新しい神様』を中心に」 (New Media and Neo-nationalism in Postmodern Japan:

 

『癒しとしてのナショナリズム』（2003）のなかで、小熊英二と上野陽子は1990年代以降の日本において若者や市民の間で醸成されたネオ・ナショナリズムを分析し、その理由を次のように推論している。彼らによれば、90年代以降のネオ・ナショナリズムは戦後の国家主義（または保守主義）とは異なり、自らのアイデンティティーの拠りどころとして「草の根」的に構築されているのだとする。ほぼ同時期に日本で普及した「民主化されたメディア」であるインターネットでは、日本語のブログや電子掲示板において上記の言説に加え、民族主義的な排他的言説も溢れている。土屋豊は2000年発表のドキュメンタリー『新しい神様』においてこうした国家主義や保守主義に惹かれる数人の若者を描いた。このインディペンデント映画が可能になった背景には、カムコーダーというもうひとつの電子テクノロジー発達と浸透がある。このドキュメンタリーにおいて土屋が企図したのは、従来のドキュメンタリーの手法や文法を換骨奪胎し、超越的な観察者の位置を捨て、自らもその客体となり、対話的な物語を集合的に作ろうとするジェスチャーである。この発表は「大きな物語」が終焉したとされる「ポストモダン」な日本において、土屋の映画がどのようにオルターナティブな物語を生成し、覇権的な既存の言説／物語への引力から抵抗しようとするのかを分析する。またその際、物語生成が可能になる歴史的・社会的条件を日本における電子メディアやテクノロジーの発展と展開を参照し、近代の男性中心的／男根中止的な近代の国家主体を書き換えようとする多声的・対話的な声に注目して議論する。

 

PANEL 7:

 

Sharon Hayashi

Title: Neoliberalism and New Narratives in Japanese Cinema: The Resurgence of Collectives and the Rise of Freeter Culture 1995-2010

 

“Neoliberalism and New Narratives in Japanese Cinema: The Resurgence of Collectives and the Rise of Freeter Culture 1995-2010,”  examines new modes of filmmaking that have transformed independent film production and distribution networks in Japan since the mid-1990s. Bolstered by the explosion of films schools, the appearance of a mini-theatre circuit, and the increasing affordability of digital recording and editing technology since the mid-1990s, this film 'movement' was initially led by the ‘freeter’ generation, freelance workers in the early 1990s who chose to remain in part-time jobs after graduating from university rather than become part of the mindless corporate culture of the salaryman. The systematic loosening of labor laws since the late 1990s has allowed companies to replace their full-time regular workers with less expensive temporary employees and forced over a third of the workforce in Japan into short-term contract and temp work with none of the benefits or safety net of fulltime employees.  The transformation of the freeter generation into a ‘precariat’ (precarious proletariat) has been accompanied by a shift in themes where the DIY aesthetic is now used to present new political narratives that challenge mainstream accounts of Japan’s youth culture and the effects of the over fifteen-year recession. 

 

 

Christine Marran

Title: Toxic Waters: On Visibility, Invisibility, and the Ecopolitical in Cinema

 

To follow Ulrich Beck, one of the characteristics of risk society is the invisibility of risk. That which cannot immediately be seen, according to Beck, must be announced and discussed and made visible. In the films of Imamura Shohei, water features prominently in the ways that philosopher Frederic Neyrat has suggested when he writes: “[W]ater, I would say, is three times chargée--loaded as a vehicle and charged as a battery. . . . There is a metaphysical load of water, a metaphorical one, and a metapolitic urgency. This triple load is related to the fundamental relations that water maintains with life, and consequently with life and death, desert sands and the marine currents, in other words Nature . . .” There is a metaphysical load of water in the sense that it is envisioned as the very source of life. And the metaphorical aspect of water can relieve water from its liquidy, slippery state by making it meaningful. The metapolitical urgency is the necessity for the ubiquity of water and the crisis of the ubiquity of toxicity in the water. My first book was about poison in the form of the metaphor. The poison woman of the early twentieth century was toxic, deathly toxic, but she was also intoxicating. A pleasure to watch. A stimulant. A corrupting force. But poison water has little in the way of metaphorical value simply for the reason of the third “load” that Neyrat suggests. Water has a metapolitical urgency.

 

This paper considers the metapolitical urgency expressed about and through water in Imamura Shohei’s Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (Akai hashi no shita no nurui mizu, 2001), Sato Makoto’s documentary Living on the River Agano (Agano ni ikiru, 1992), and Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Bright Future (Akarui mirai, 2003). Imamura and Sato’s films explicitly address the toxic in water. Imamura’s Red Bridge juxtaposes scenes of liquid ecstacy with the “Ouch-Ouch” disease. The heroine of the story plays the daughter of a woman who has thrown herself into the cadmium poisoned water of the same village in prayer for the victims of the “Ouch Ouch disease,” retelling with Imamura’s idiosyncratic dark humor the historical cases of mass cadmium poisoning in the valley that caused the severely painful softening of the bones and kidney failure. Sato’s film is about denizens dealing with mercury-poisoned water on the Agano River. And Bright Future features jellyfish that was made to grow accustomed to an otherwise toxic liquid to its life—desalinated water.

 

What is uncanny about water and the toxic is both their visibility and elusiveness. Cinema is a medium that relies heavily on the visual, so in the visual capture of water, how can we express what is toxic without narrative or productive montage? The films suggest through water that even if the visual and visibility is at cinema’s very core, water remains elusive. In these films, clear rushing water mitigates, carries, delivers, suffocates. The films under discussion highlight this double gesture of visibility and invisibility that both water and cinema insinuate. This paper will also suggest how a particular filmic aesthetic can impact our understanding of the ecological and relations between organisms through a discussion of the cinematic use of water.

 

Ryoko Misono

Title: Suspension of the Law: The Meaning of the State and the Enunciating Subject in Oshima Nagisa’s Death by Hanging (1968)

 

In the beginning of the year 1968, when the student movement was intensified on a global scale, Oshima Nagisa released a provocative film titled Kōshikei (Death by Hanging). In the preview of the film, Oshima assumed the role of the narrator himself, speaking from behind the screen in the first-person plural pronoun, “we,” and addressing the audience in the second-person pronoun, “you.” This attempt to directly address the audience despite the irony that cinema is a form of reproductive art, enabled Oshima to make this film not only a piece of work defined as “art,” but also an “event” that occurred at a specific time and place. In this act of enunciation, which occurred in the historical context of Japan in the late 1960s, Oshima and the members of Oshima’s production house, Sōzōsha, questioned the axiomatic nature of the state through an analysis of the death penalty process. This paper examines how Oshima explored the motif of the death penalty (and the failure of executing the death penalty) in the geographical framework of modern Japan and its relation to Korea, which has been Japan’s internal “Other” throughout modern history, to elucidate this film as a distinguished analysis of the system of “the state” as a legal and territorial institution.

 

Jonathan M. Hall

Title: Direct Video Action: The Distance and Brevity of Neoliberalism

 

Thanks to electronic components that allow for a quickly and inexpensively made and distributed visual format, one that allows for an immediate seeing and sharing of the recorded image (or, for that matter, an un-recorded image), portable video as a medium has been lauded since its emergence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but especially since its proliferation in home video format in the1980s, as a less aesthetic, yet inherently more political mode of visual communication. Indeed, the 1970s and 1980s saw the emergence of community-based video collectives that created and circulated fiction and non-fiction work addressing political and social issues in an unprecedented fashion, often galvanizing community support for activist purposes.  Yet, has video as a medium altered political expression? Has the medium altered the way in which politics are conducted? Ron Burnett has cautioned us against an  idea that “instrumental forms of communication can be constructed to promote political involvement and change.”   The operative assumption that Burnett warns us against is one that assumes the accessibility of the video medium has made it, by definition, a more democratic one.  In this thinking, a rationalist liberal understanding of citizen and community maps crudely onto the social positions of videomaker and audience.

 

The question is a familiar one for us twelve years after Burnett posed it.  The appearance of mobile-phone camera images as network news and the present dominance of in industrialized societies of the Internet as a source of information raise again questions of whether shifts in media technology can also presume shifts in the political relation between a subject and image. Recent scholarship has questioned earlier utopian notions of the internet as fundamentally democratic.  While not denying, for example, the possibility or radical, subversive uses of the Internet, Douglas Schuler writes, “major decisions about the development, deployment, or use of the Intnernet were made in a public participation vacuum … many of these decisions were made with uncharacteristic speed so as to avoid public input, public input that might in fact raise uncomfortable questions about social uses or public ownership.”

 

But what happens when the relation between subject and society is presumed to necessitate action?  “Direct action” has become an adopted phrase within some parts of the antiglobalization and anti-neoliberal movements.  This paper describes and considers the work of Japanese alternative media activism in the context of the 2008 Hokkaido Lake Toya Summit and beyond.  Following an overview of the kind of media activism that marked the Summit and political action that has followed it, I pursue an analysis of the historical, structural, and political qualities that characterize video activism especially as understood within the broader context faced by opponents to globalization and to neo-liberal economic policies.  In particular, I use the oxymoronic neologism of “direct video action” to describe the vital, albeit circumscribed position of the video activist today.  By inserting the term “video,” my neologism and my argument seek to examine both the necessity and the problem of video activism today.  Does not the central term within “direct video activism” undo, in some sense, the very immediacy of action itself?  I explore this question in the context of a Hokkaido Summit that saw, unprecedented in the history of G8 meetings, a localization and isolation of global opponents, where the Japanese government limited access of overseas and domestic Japanese activists. Indeed, when the physical containment of the activists to campgrounds kilometers from the G8 venue meant a “zooification” of global protest, what role could internet based video activism play in expressing a potent action against the State.

 

PANEL 8:

 

Michael Raine

Title: Adaptation and Propaganda: Stagecoach and the kokumin eiga

 

What does "adaptation" mean? If it is a form of translation, can we in turn adapt theories of that movement originating in the linguistic domain to inter-medial transformations, or even further to adaptation within the film medium? This presentation traces the echoes of John Ford's Stagecoach – one of the last US films publicly screened in Japan before the start of the Pacific War -- in several wartime films. It attempts to show that well-known history is part of a larger process by which foreign, and especially American, cinema was "adapted" to the propaganda needs of total war, becoming one of the most significant, if often unspoken, understandings of the complex notion of kokumin eiga (People's Film) that displaced the existing demands of the kokusaku eiga (National Policy film). The development of a wartime action cinema out of (in relation to) prewar Hollywood cinema entailed a shift from policy to experience, understood at the time as the medium-specific effects of film form. That shift was only one instance in a series of stylistic (affective, if you prefer) "adaptations" performed by Japanese cinema that have variously been understood under the rubric of "imitation," "copying," "remaking," etc and that I call, even more rebarbatively, "transcultural mimesis." Paying attention to the history of the kokumin eiga shows that process to be still active, in all its complexity, even in the midst of total cultural war. 

 

Naoki Yamamoto

Title: Struggles over Cinematic Subjectivity: Nikkatsu Tamagawa and the Development of Realist Film Practice in Wartime Japan

 

This paper explores how realist filmmaking was developed and became dominant in Japan after the introduction of sound cinema in the early 1930s. To address this intricate issue aptly, I narrow my focus to works by Nikkatsu Tamagawa, a major studio founded in 1934 as the contemporary drama departement of Nikkatsu. Though active only for a little over seven years (1934-1942), Nikkatsu Tamagawa soon garnered reputation for its devotion to the production of high-brow realsit films mostly adopted from contemporary domestic novels. Indeed, the studio's oeuvres such as Kumagai Hisatora's Sobō (1937), Tasaka Tomotaka's Robō no ishi (1938), and Uchida Tomu's Tsuchi (1939) continuously ranked high in the Kinema Junpo's annual top ten list, enhanching popularity of the newly emergent genre called “bungei eiga.” At the same time, the studio also took initiative in merging fiction and documentary in war films, as Tasaka's Venice prize-awarded Gonin no sekkohei (1937) provided a template for the subsequent prosperity of this phenomenon.

 

While tracing the development of realist film aesthetics in these works, this paper investigates into Tamagawa's particular production policy that tactifully advocated its autuer-oriented mode of filmmaking with an overt antogonism against capitalism. It is this seemingly “liberal” policy that confirmed the studio's fame as the producer of conscientious realist films. However, such a “liberal” policy also gained ardent support from most “conservative” critics like Tsumura Hideo and Sawamura Tsutomu, who ultimately became the adamant suppoters of state control of the domestic film industry at large. I contend that this unexpected coalition between liberals and consevatives was not a paradox in history, but rather the result of their unceasing attempts to establish a realist mode of filmmaking: In order for any filmmakers to be a “realist,” they first had to attain a strong subjectivity with which to see through the “truth” of social reality. Thus, studying their mutual struggles over the notion of “film auteur,” I argue, would provide us with a new perspective on Japanese film practice in the transitional period toward World War II.

 

Ushida Ayami

Title: 日本映画評論・批評における戦争責任

 

現在、『キネマ旬報』『記録映画』『映画評論』『映画芸術』『思想の科学』『新日本文学』を中心に1951年から1970年までの日本映画評論・批評の系譜に取り組んでいる。先行文献資料として、映画評論家・小川徹の編纂した『現代映画論大系』（全6巻、冬樹社、1970年～1972年）がある。『現代映画論大系』は優れた評論・批評のみの掲載であり、日本の評論・批評を広範囲に記したものではない。が、評論・批評に関し、手本となる先行文献である。そこで映画評論の指針としての分類は先行資料に習い「戦後映画の出発－日本占領下から解放－」「個人と力の回復－戦前からの映画監督たちの復活－」「日本ヌーベルバーグ－1950年代後半から1960年代にかけての状況－」「土着と近代の相剋－日本の家族制度の崩壊－」「幻想と政治の間－50年安保と60年安保の学生運動－」とした。この分類からも明確であるように、日本映画における「戦争」という映画評論・批評に着目し、日本の映画評論家・批評家は映画を通じ、何を語りたかったのか論じる。

 

Seio Nakajima

Title: Mapping the Transnational Genesis of the Post-War Japanese Cinematic Field: Case Studies of the Productions of Madame White Snake (1956) and Legend of the White Snake (1958)

 

By extending recent seminal efforts by scholars such as Yau Shuk Ting and Tze-yue G. Hu, this paper analyzes the transnational factors that led to the (re)emergence of the post-war Japanese film industry, presenting comparative case studies of the productions of Madame White Snake (Byakufujin no yōren, dir. Toyoda Shiro, 1956) and Legend of the White Snake (Hakujaden, dir. Yabushita Taiji, 1958). Past studies have effectively highlighted the existence of the transnational, particularly the Japan-Hong Kong, nexus of film industrial production in the immediate post-war era. However, in a move to go beyond the “methodological nationalism” (Ulrich Beck), when it comes to integrating the “textual” analysis and the “institutional” analysis, the existing studies have often presented a simplistic geopolitical arguments. For example, a typical study would argue that the “non-authentic” depiction of Chinese culture in Legend of the White Snake was the result of the strategic move by the Japanese film industry to become the leader in animation production in the Asian region by having distinctive Japanese translation of Chinese culture. However, such a “reflection theory” entails a danger of falling into a tautology of explaining existing reality by rational-choice, strategic concerns. In this paper, in order to avoid such a pitfall, I develop an approach sensitive both to the nature and content of cultural products (film as discourse) and to the social arrangements and organization of production of those cultural products (film as institutions). This is done by putting to work two interrelated but distinct approaches in sociology: Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the “field of cultural production” and the “theory of fields” in economic sociology and organizational analysis. My central argument is that even when the scope of analysis is transnational, without the detailed mapping of the field of cultural production of domestic industry (e.g., position and reputational status of Toei Animation Studio within the field of cultural production of all the film studios existing in Japan at the time, distinctive dispositional “habitus” and career “trajectory” of the managers and the workers of the film studio as compared to those of other existing studios), the analysis remains within the “methodological nationalism” in the sense it takes the transnational action of a certain film studio as somehow representing Japanese, national geopolitical concerns. In other words, in order for us to truly move toward a transnational approach, we need to bring the “national” back in more seriously into our analytical purview. I attempt to present a preliminary sketch of such an approach by presenting detailed case studies of the two films co-produced by Japanese (Toho and Toei Animation Studio) and Hong Kong (Shaw Brothers) film studios in the 1950s.

 
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