Meiji Gakuin Film Workshop on the 27th

[Alex Zahlten]

Dear KineJapaners,

For everyone who is in the Tokyo area, please join us for the next meeting of the Japanese Film Workshop at Meiji Gakuin University on Thursday, January 27th, from 7 to 9 PM at the Shirokane Campus of Meiji Gakuin University. The venue is *room 7418* on the 4th floor of the Hepburn hall (a tall building standing next to the main building). The Japanese Film Workshop is open to all, and directions from stations and the campus map are attached below as a PDF file. The workshop is open to all, and welcomes participants from any discipline. After the presentation and discussion, everyone usually moves to an Izakaya in the area to continue the conversation. We look forward to seeing you there!

This time the workshop will feature a presentation by Namhee Han, on the topic of ?Screens to Be Bigger, Radios to Be Smaller?: Widescreen Cinema and Postwar Japan, a chapter from her dissertation-in-progress, ?The Cinema of Anamorphic Vision: Widescreen Cinema and Film Culture in Postwar Japan, 1953-1975.?


Presentation Abstract

This presentation discusses the emergence and establishment of widescreen film culture in postwar Japan, focusing on the transitional period between 1953, when the Hollywood widescreen film The Robe was first released in Japan and 1962, the year in which the 35mm anamorphic widescreen process had become firmly established in the Japanese film industry. A range of widescreen film practices?the postwar cinema-building boom, local audiences? consumption of Hollywood widescreen films, the production of early Japanese widescreen films, and critical discourse on widescreen aesthetics?is examined in order to probe into the historical, social, and cultural meanings of Japan?s embrace of widescreen film technology and widescreen cinema. Exploring how widescreen cinema mediated or was mediated by Japanese postwar modernity and modernization, it is argued that postwar Japan actively employed the new physical and critical frame of widescreen cinema as a concrete tool to rebuild !
 postwar film culture as well as to redefine the medium of film.

Namhee Han is a Ph.D. candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago.

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


For more information, please contact: alexzahlten at hotmail.com 

Alex Zahlten
Postdoctoral Scholar
Meiji Gakuin University
Tokyo

-- 
alex at nipponconnection.de

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