Meiji Gakuin Film Workshop with Marcos Pablo Centeno Martin - 8/10

[ryan.cook at yale.edu]

Please join us for the next Meiji Gakuin Japanese Film Workshop on Wednesday
August 10, from 7pm to 9pm.

The workshop will take place at the Shirokane Campus of Meiji Gakuin University.
The venue is *room 7418* on the 4th floor of Hepburn hall (the tall building
next to the main building). Directions from stations and the campus map are
linked to below. The workshop is open to all, and welcomes participants from
any discipline. After the presentation and discussion, we will move to a
nearby izakaya to continue the conversation. We look forward to seeing you
there!

Presentation Abstract:
POSTWAR HISTORICAL DISCOURSE AND NARRATIVE STRATEGIES IN THE JAPANESE NEW WAVE
Marcos Pablo Centeno Martin

This presentation examines the role of archival images and historical
reconstructions in the non-documentary films of the New Wave. After the end of
the Occupation Period, filmmakers were allowed to deal directly with images of
World War II and portray messages against American policy for the first time.
Filmmakers focused on two events to reconstruct the memory of the postwar
period: the surrender of Japan in the Pacific War and the struggles against the
US-Japan Security Treaty. Given the power of the image as an iconic projection
of reality and its capacity to reach the masses, the archives used became part
of the current Japanese collective memory, which must be understood in terms of
process and social construction.

In the processes of (dis-)remembering history, analysis of semiotic elements
reveals to what extent historical facts became projections of the fears of the
author, and how they were connected to contemporary needs - like the
iconographic image of the atomic bomb, working as a metaphor for fear of
nuclear disaster during the Cold War. Historical events were projected as
private and subjective experiences, rejecting the social realism of the
previous generation, and opposing disenfranchised elements and social outcasts
against the heroic visions of the mainstream war cinema, based on myth and
legendary fabulations.

This approach to history through experimentalism and avant-garde techniques
introduced new narrative codes, which drove the status of the cinematographic
medium to a new paradigm of representation, and opened the debate about the
relation between cinema and history.



Marcos Pablo Centeno Martin is a Phd Candidate in Intercultural Communication at
University of Valencia, with an emphasis in Japanese cinema. He is currently a
research fellow at Waseda University at the International Institute for
Education and Research in Theater and Film Arts.  He is also a member of the
research group "The Image and the Spanish Civil War," dedicated to studying the
role of war images in the creation of myth, legend and collective memory.
Applying the contributions of this group to the case of Japan, he has presented
his findings at conferences in Paris (Summer School - Paris 3), London (BAJS
Conference at SOAS) and Frankfurt (Goethe-Universitaet). His dissertation
focuses on Japanese youth cinema (seishun eiga) in the postwar period, from the
taiyozoku phenomenon to the New Wave, with special attention to stylistic
relationships between documentary and feature film.



A map of the campus can be found here:
http://www.meijigakuin.ac.jp/campus/shirokane/index_en.html


For more information, please contact: ryan.cook at yale.edu


Ryan Cook
PhD Candidate, Yale University
Visiting Researcher, Waseda University