Fwd: Reminder: Modern Japan History Workshop on Incoherence and Fetishism- Friday, Sep. 2

[Aaron Gerow]

Begin forwarded message:
>
>
> From: Paul Roquet <inqualia at gmail.com>
> Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2011 23:59:05 +0900
>
>
> Please join us for the next meeting of the Modern Japan History  
> Workshop
> on Friday, September 2nd, 2011 from 6 to 8pm at Waseda University.
>
> The workshop is open to all, and directions to the venue can be  
> found on our
> website:
>
> http://sites.google.com/site/modernjapanhistoryworkshop/
>
> Best regards,
> Paul Roquet
> PhD Candidate in Japanese/Film Studies
> UC Berkeley
>
> September 2, 2011
>
> Cinematic Rorschach Test: Incoherence and Fetishism in the Minor  
> Film Fandom of
> Inagaki Taruho, Shibusawa Tatsuhiko and Mishima Yukio
>
> Ryan Cook
> Ph.D. Candidate, Yale University, Film Studies and Japanese Literature
> Visiting Researcher, Waseda University
>
> The transition of Japanese cinema at the end of the 1950s is a  
> familiar story of
> mass commercial decline and of new waves, of political shifts and  
> "movements,"
> and of changing critical conceptions of what cinema itself should  
> be, with new
> formulas for the proportion of "actuality" to film language and  
> expression. The
> test of these well-rehearsed historical narratives is to be found  
> in what I
> cautiously call the "minor literature" of this cinematic turning
> point. This paper examines the writing of three such minor literary  
> film fans -
> Inagaki Taruho, Mishima Yukio, and Shibusawa Tatsuhiko - whose  
> contributions
> were essentially estranged from movements, uniquely semiotically  
> wired,
> primitivist or otherwise outdated, and fetishistic.
>
> These writers are also set apart by the fact that they belong to  
> the so-called
> pre-war or wartime generations in contrast to the proper postwar  
> generation who
> came of age in a democratic Japan. Taruho, who was born in 1900 and  
> first made
> his name as a prewar literary modernist, had a tendency to revisit  
> the past,
> and the operative concept in his film writing is "kotomukei," an  
> approximate
> equivalent of "nonsense" with a nuance of incoherence. This was the  
> quality of
> the disjointed misemono silent films remembered from his youth.  
> However, to
> recall these films was not merely to project backward; these  
> recollections were
> part of an ongoing postwar rewriting and a rhetoric on behalf of  
> something like
> a cinematic ontology. Mishima also wrote of his affection for the  
> "kotomukei"
> quality of earlier fantastical adventure films (conceivably  
> borrowing from
> Taruho) in contrast to his disdain for the naturalism of present- 
> day melodramas
> in the 1950s. And Shibusawa, translator of Sade and collector of  
> decadent
> specimens from European art history and literature, drew  
> inspiration from
> surrealism and engaged the prewar term "photogenie" to promote  
> cinema's
> capabilities to bypass logical thought and reason and to put the  
> "irrational"
> into direct expression.
>
> In a moment of change and reinvention, these writers thus  
> incongruously
> emphasized prior cinematic modes that turned away from a critical  
> semiotics of
> engagement. In other words, they promoted the power of cinema to  
> evade or
> trouble "sense," particularly in the form of coherence. What I call  
> their minor
> status is itself an expression of incoherence, and of individual  
> fetishism which
> overvalued the role of the cinephile subject in "creating" a film  
> while at the
> same time revealing the conditions of this authorship to be  
> arbitrary, an
> unreasonable form of coherence that confessed its own nonsense  
> (kotomukei). I
> propose that such minor positions alter the established cinematic  
> landscape of
> the 1960s, especially with respect to the diversity of practice and  
> the
> expectations of film movement spectators for whom cinema and  
> liberation were
> equally elusive ideals.
>