[KineJapan] Tsunami and heartwake 2011 Av coverage

Dolores Martinez dm6 at soas.ac.uk
Tue Apr 8 06:13:10 EDT 2014


Dear all, again somewhat off topic, but I've been following this discussion
with interest as I'm writing a paper on Fish Story, the disaster 'comedy'
that came out on March 12, 2011 and obviously did not do well at the box
office.  Has anyone written on this film specifically or on the genre
generally (and yes, I know the Godzilla literature!). I was interested to
see Paul Berry mention Megalopolis, as an alternative reality anime. I have
always wondered if it had attracted scholarly attention -- but anything on
this topic would be useful for me. Thanks,
Lola

On Tuesday, 8 April 2014, Christian Morimoto Hermansen <
christian_hermansen at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Another two dealing with the Hanshin Awaji Daishinsai are
> 1. The 2010 drama-docu Kobe shinbun no nananichikan 神戸新聞の7日間
> 〜命と向き合った被災記者たちの闘い〜 動画
> on how the News must be published no matter what; starring Sakurai Sho as
> a Kobe Shinbun photographer covering the disaster.  Quite well done.
> 2. Sakamoto Junji's "Kao" from 2000, where the main character escapes
> Kobe, for other reasons, on the morning of the Earthquake.
>
> Christian
>
> ------------------------------
> Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 08:08:18 +0300
> From: eija at helsinkicineaasia.fi<javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','eija at helsinkicineaasia.fi');>
> To: kinejapan at lists.service.ohio-state.edu<javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','kinejapan at lists.service.ohio-state.edu');>
> Subject: Re: [KineJapan] Tsunami and heartwake 2011 Av coverage
>
> In one of the last Otoko wa tsurai yo films Yamada placed Tora-san in
> post-quake Kobe, helping the victims. That is the only one I can remember
> about the Hanshin earthquake.
> Eija
>
>
> 2014-04-08 5:02 GMT+03:00 Jeremy Harley <jeremyharley at gmail.com>:
>
> Yes, I would think there are certain times when you have to approach the
> topic from the opposite direction, as in not "are there quake films?" but
> "where is the quake in these films?" And I would also think it important to
> look beyond the films themselves.
>
> I remember when The Day After Tomorrow came out in 2004, as a New Yorker
> who also happened to be in the city on 9/11, I found the scenes of the city
> being destroyed to be quite personally upsetting.
>
> A crime that led to disaster and tragedy for a city had been appropriated
> as war against the Nation, and New Yorkers were against the Iraq War and
> (it had seemed at the time) the orgy of crimes the Nation was cooking up in
> "retaliation". In that context it felt like a big middle finger to New York
> and to the whole Northeast, which becomes unlivable by the end of the film.
>
> I don't want to say that that was necessarily anyone's intention, I'm
> speaking purely of my own very personal (and possibly excessive) reaction,
> but I want to say that I would imagine such reactions should be integral to
> this kind of discussion.
>
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 10:02 AM, J Abel <jandj.abel at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Jim,
> Yumeno’s reflection actually cuts both ways because he talks about the
> fact that there were very few films that dealt with the earthquake
> directly, then he talks about the rise of decadence (actually pre-empts or
> influences Sakaguchi Ango’s postwar daraku discourse) and makes the point
> that maybe those decadent films in the wake of the quake are actually quake
> films.
> Jon
>
> On Apr 7, 2014, at 7:58 PM, Cook, Ryan <ryancook at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>
> >
> > Jim,
> >
> > This was an issue that came up at times at the Berkeley symposium and
> was a theme in my own paper which situated 3/11 fiction films in relation
> to atomic bomb and hibakusha films.  I personally came across an
> observation that the Kanto and Hanshin earthquakes had received
> surprisingly little attention from fiction/narrative filmmakers.  I'm not
> quite comfortable making that claim myself because I haven't followed up on
> it very much, but Jonathan Abel gave a paper at Berkeley in which he cited
> an interesting quote from an essay by Yumeno Kyusaku written shortly after
> the 1923 earthquake.  Yumeno had interviewed an official responsible for
> film censorship who noted that there had been a lack of screenplays dealing
> with the disaster submitted for official approval at the time.  The
> conclusion was that screenwriters had exercised self-restraint at least in
> the historical moment.  Self-restraint (jishuku) has also been a theme
> since 3/11, but evidently not to the point of altogeth
> > er preventing films from being made.
> >
> > The Wind Rises contains a dramatic depiction of the Kanto earthquake, as
> someone else just mentioned.  That's interesting in that it is a depiction
> of the earthquake from a post-3/11 vantage point (at least the film was
> released in 2013... I don't know when production began), and in that sense
> it is also a "3/11 film."  Miyazaki of course has publicly come out against
> nuclear energy, and it seems reasonable to imagine a subtext in all the
> talk of Japan "exploding" and the persistence of the wind motif in the
> film, the wind being as ambivalent as the dream of flight, lifting
> beautiful things into the air, but also spreading fires and poisonous
> things.  Wakamatsu Koji was reportedly planning an adaptation of the
> nuclear fallout graphic novel "When the Wind Blows" before his death.  Off
> the top of my head, I can't think of other dramatic re
>
>
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