[KineJapan] Tsunami and heartwake 2011 Av coverage

Tue Apr 8 01:08:18 EDT 2014

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 representations of the
>> 1923 earthquake in film, though I'm probably overlooking important examples.
>> >
>> > Ryan
>> >
>> >
>> > ________________________________________
>> > From: kinejapan-bounces+ryancook=
>> fas.harvard.edu at lists.service.ohio-state.edu [kinejapan-bounces+ryancook=
>> fas.harvard.edu at lists.service.ohio-state.edu] on behalf of Jim Harper [
>> jimharper666 at yahoo.co.uk]
>> > Sent: Monday, April 07, 2014 5:34 AM
>> > To: Japanese Cinema Discussion Forum
>> > Subject: Re: [KineJapan] Tsunami and heartwake 2011 Av coverage
>> >
>> > Forgive me butting in here, but I'm curious about a couple of things.
>> >
>> > a) Has much been written about the presentation and portrayal of
>> disaster in Japanese cinema in general, prior to 3/11?
>> >
>> > b) Have specific disasters- like the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 or
>> the 1995 Kobe Earthquake- been heavily represented in contemporary film,
>> also prior to 3/11?
>> >
>> > Can anyone help? Just a couple of brief answers would be very much
>> appreciated. Thank you!
>> >
>> > Jim Harper.
>> >
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