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" [eigagaku] in 1950s Japan would "de-provincialize" western film  
studies of the auteurism and political modernism that came to define  
it. 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. A close reading of Japanese films and film culture in the  
1950s and 1960s shows the importance of social psychology to Abe Kobo  
and other critics' embrace of musicals as a form of anti-naturalist  
critique. 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. His research explores 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. He is  
also developing a project on image culture in wartime Japan and its  
territories, with a particular focus on the rhetorical construction of  
documentary [bunka eiga] and propaganda features [kokusaku eiga]. His  
other interests in film studies include the history of film theory,  
particularly political modernism and the potential for a Peircian  
theory of film, and using digital media for teaching and research,  
including subtitling as both an historical practice and an aesthetic  
problem in the relation between text and image.


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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