[KineJapan] Tsunami and heartwake 2011 Av coverage

[Jeremy Harley]

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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