[KineJapan] An inquiry about emergency lights in movie theaters

[Bruce Baird]

Dear Mathieu,

This is not an answer to your question, but just an interesting anecdote. I hope the list members won’t mind me cluttering their inbox:

Butô dancers routinely danced in cabaret shows in order to make money to finance their lives and their more avant-garde performances. Yoshioka Yumiko tells of a story in which on her first day in the cabaret (about 1976), she froze and couldn’t recall her choreography. She focused on an exit sign while her more experienced partner (Amagatsu Ushio of Sankai Juku) danced around her. Finally, she remembered her choreography and started dancing again. Since that time, she turned that experience into a sort of philosophy of performance in which she advises dancers to have an exit strategy in case something should go wrong.

Good luck with your search,

Bruce

Bruce Baird
Professor
Japanese Program
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Butô, Japanese Theater, Intellectual History

439 Herter Hall
161 Presidents Drive
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Amherst, MA 01003-9312
Phone: 413-577-2117
Fax: 413-545-3178
baird at umass.edu<mailto:baird at umass.edu>

Recently Released: A History of Butô (Oxford UP)
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-history-of-but-9780197630280

On Oct 17, 2022, at 3:38 AM, Mathieu Capel via KineJapan <kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu<mailto:kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu>> wrote:

Dear Kinejapaners,

In a 1980 piece of writing ("Seido toshite no eiga"), Hasumi Shigehiko talks about how it became impossible in Japan to watch a film in total darkness after the 1964 Olympic Games.
I was able to find an article by Tadahisa Jin ("History of the Emergency Exit Lighting Sign") who seems to confirm it ("I first got aware of emergency lights in movie theaters in the second half of the sixties", does he begin), but his history does not provide any kind of details regarding the year emergency lights began to be used, or mandatory, and so on. Unfortunately, Kato Mikiro talks a lot about air conditioning in his Eigakan to kankyaku no bunkashi, but I couldn't find anything about lights when he describes the emergence of modern movie theaters.
Would someone on the list have some more details about the so-called "end of total darkness" Hasumi refers to ?
Many thanks,

Mathieu Capel
University of Tokyo
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