lecture Nornes at Kansai Modern Japan Group July meeting

[Dick Stegewerns]

Dear colleagues,

It is my pleasure to inform you about the July meeting of the Kansai 
Modern Japan Group. The lecture is in English, the comments and 
discussion either in English or Japanese, all interested are welcome.

Here are the data:

SPEAKER: Abé Markus Nornes (University of Michigan)
TITLE:   Calligraphy in East Asian Cinema
DATE:    Wednesday 13 July
TIME:    18:30
PLACE:   ISEAS office, Nihon Itaria Kyoto Kaikan, 4th floor 
(075-751-8132)
          Yoshida Ushinomiya-cho 4, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto


The ISEAS (Italian School of East Asian Studies) premises are on the 
4th floor of the Nihon Itaria Kyoto Kaikan. The Nihon Itaria Kyoto 
Kaikan is in the immediate vicinity of Kyoto University, near the 
crossing of Higashi-Oji and Higashi-Ichijo. For reasons of academic 
isolation there is no train station that will get you close to Kyoto 
University, but the Keihan line will get you into walking distance 
(either Marutamachi or Demachi-Yanagi station). Kyoto City Bus no.31, 
201, 203 and 206, however, will get you almost to the doorstep of ISEAS. 
You should get off the bus at Kyodai Seimon-mae. The Nihon Itaria Kyoto 
Kaikan is on the north-west corner of the crossing, on the north side of 
Higashi-Ichijo.


This is our last meeting before the summer break. Our next meeting will 
be in mid-September in Osaka.

Those willing to present at one of our monthly meetings, please send an 
abstract of the presentation you propose to dick.stegewerns at xs4all.nl

I look forward to welcoming many of you next week.

Best regards,

Dick Stegewerns
Kyoto University & Oslo University

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ABSTRACT:

Calligraphy in East Asian Cinema

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. 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.


Abé Markus Nornes is Professor of Asian Cinema at the University of 
Michigan. His latest book is A Research Guide to Japanese Cinema Studies 
(UM Center for Japanese Studies), which was co-written with Aaron Gerow. 
His previous books include Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema, 
Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary 
Film, and Japanese Documentary Film: From the Meiji Era to Hiroshima 
(all Minnesota UP).