[KineJapan] Camp in Japan

[Frederick, Sarah]

Keith Vincent has lectured about camp and kitsch in Mishima's "Patriotism" and his persona - more about the story than the film but with reference to both.

Sarah Frederick
Associate Professor
Dept. Modern Languages and Comparative Literature
Boston University

sfred at bu.edu<mailto:sfred at bu.edu>

On Nov 7, 2013, at 10:28 AM, "Jason G. Karlin" <ukarlin at mail.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp<mailto:ukarlin at mail.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp>>
 wrote:

Jonathan D. Mackintosh's chapter "The Homo Cultures of Iconic Personality in Japan: Mishima Yukio and Misora Hibari" in my co-edited volume Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture (Palgrave, 2012) briefly discusses camp in relation to Misora Hibari's star image. The chapter does not focus on camp per se, but rather gay icons in postwar Japan. Mackintosh argues that Hibari and Mishima were similarly appropriated as iconic personalities by gay men in the 1970s.

Andrew Ross describes the "camp effect" as when cultural products (such as stars, fashions, genres, and stereotypes) of an earlier moment of production have lost their power to dominate cultural meanings and become available in the present for redefinition according to contemporary tastes. If there is an appropriation and ironic distancing of objects among gay men, I would say that film is one of its least common sources. More recently, I think Matsuda Seiko has become a kind of gay icon. However, the camp that she inspires through parody is more often rooted, like Misora, in terms of her stage performances.

I'm not aware of any iconic "camp" Japanese films, like the Wizard of Oz (1939) or Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) in the US. Since camp arises from audiences investing texts with new meanings, the Japanese camp film would depend upon cult audiences producing alternate readings of film texts that are not explicitly concerned with gay themes. Perhaps Misora's films are camp?

Jason G. Karlin, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
University of Tokyo
Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies
7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku
Tokyo 113-0033 JAPAN

URL: http://individuals.iii.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~karlin/
Email: ukarlin at mail.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp<mailto:ukarlin at mail.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp>
Twitter: http://twitter.com/jgkarlin


On Nov 7, 2013, at 11:19 PM, Markus Nornes <amnornes at umich.edu<mailto:amnornes at umich.edu>> wrote:

Who has dealt with camp in Japan. Not Western camp appropriations of Japanese films, but camp in the local context?

Markus



--
Markus Nornes
Chair, Department of Screen Arts and Cultures
Professor of Asian Cinema, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures
Professor, School of Art & Design

Department of Screen Arts and Cultures
6348 North Quad
105 S. State Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285

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