Meiji Gakuin Japanese Film Workshop 5/30: Paul Roquet

[ryan.cook at yale.edu]

Those of you in the Tokyo area are warmly invited to attend the next Meiji
Gakuin Japanese Film Workshop on Monday May 30, 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 usually move to a
nearby izakaya to continue the conversation. We look forward to seeing you
there!


Presentation Abstract:
A Blue Cat on the Galactic Railroad

In 1984 Group TAC assembled an all-star team to produce a feature-length anime
of Miyazawa Kenji$B!G(Bs masterwork Ginga tetsud? no yoru. The film 
extends the
techniques of limited animation and sound design to realize Giovanni$B!G(Bs
movement across the galaxy, his wavering between life and death, waking and
dreaming, social strain and private refuge. The film transforms 
Giovanni into a
blue cat with wide eyes and enormous ears. His emotions are externalized into
the enigmatic landscapes of his passage through the heavens.

In this presentation, I triangulate these aesthetic choices with two contexts:
the interest in travel to the exotic and esoteric in 1980s Japan, and recent
research into the formal and functional properties of dreaming. I argue that
travel and dreaming constitute here a search for emotional salience 
grounded in
something beyond social identity, in a simultaneous movement both 
further inside
and further outside the self. Giovanni$B!G(Bs turn away from the 
social into the
dream world allows both him and viewers a much-needed venue for the perceptual
exploration of complex emotions. The voyage affords an escape from social
pressures at the same time as it builds the emotional resolve to return to the
city and persevere. Using the cosmic interiority of Ginga as an 
exemplary case,
I develop a new way of understanding the social utility of social 
withdrawal in
contemporary Japan.


Paul Roquet is a Ph.D. Candidate in East Asian Languages and Cultures at UC
Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis in Film Studies. His writing has appeared
in venues including The Journal of Japanese Studies and Midnight Eye. He is
currently in Tokyo finishing a dissertation on ambient media and the 
aesthetics
of atmosphere.



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