From aaron.gerow at yale.edu Fri Apr 3 07:44:19 2026 From: aaron.gerow at yale.edu (Aaron Gerow) Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2026 20:44:19 +0900 Subject: [KineJapan] Ogigami Naoko Message-ID: I can finally announce that the film director Ogigami Naoko (Kamome Diner, Close-Knit, Megane, etc.) will be a visiting scholar at Yale during the 2026-2027 academic year. She will do a number of events at Yale, focused on her own films as well as those of colleagues, and will also try to create a short film with students. She will also be present on campus for many other events, and is looking forward to experiencing an academic year at Yale. She will be on campus from September to May, though she will have one period where she has to return to Japan to direct a TV drama. I mention this because Ogigami-san would be glad to visit other institutions if she has the time and the scheduling works. Feel free to write me at first if you are interested in doing an event with her. Aaron Gerow Alfred W. Griswold Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Film and Media Studies Yale University On leave AY 2025-2026 320 York Street, Room 108 PO Box 208201 New Haven, CT 06520-8201 USA Phone: 1-203-432-7082 Fax: 1-203-432-6729 e-mail: aaron.gerow at yale.edu website: www.aarongerow.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From reeldrew at aol.com Thu Apr 9 04:14:43 2026 From: reeldrew at aol.com (reeldrew at aol.com) Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2026 08:14:43 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [KineJapan] my concern about the safety of the Iranian film archive References: <260387325.1417294.1775722483949.ref@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <260387325.1417294.1775722483949@mail.yahoo.com> ?? ?Over a year ago, I inquired here about the safety of the Syrian silent film, Taht sama'a Dimashq, in light of the victory of the collaborationist regime headed by the Western-backed terrorist leader, Al-Jolani. In spite of my inquiries, I have been unable to obtain information as to whether this rare surviving Arab silent feature has been protected.? Now we may be facing a far graver situation with respect to the preservation of the Middle Eastern cinema heritage. A fascist madman named Donald J. Trump in collaboration with the equally evil dictator of America's 51st state of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, launched an unprovoked attack on Iran on February 28, 2026, an aggression that is the mirror image of the Japanese militarists' assault on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. As part of the genocidal impulse that is at the root of this aggression, many outstanding Iranian cultural sites have been damaged by the US/Israel bombers. Whether the Iranian film archive has so far been spared such damage I don't know. Following ominous threats from our Dear Leader which caused world-wide alarm, there is a fragile so-called ceasefire although brutal bombings are still occurring elsewhere in the region, especially Lebanon, and there is no guarantee that Iran will be spared future attacks. ? I tried to find out if FIAF had any concern about this situation but they did not reply to my inquiry. Not knowing who to address about this issue, I decided to raise it here. While I know from the posts on this group that people here seem to be almost exclusively focused on Japan and rarely if ever discuss Japanese cinema in relation to other cinemas, I feel it should not be considered in isolation as has so often been the case. Although modern Japan is often described as a Western country, it is, in fact, an Asian?country. Considering that no Europeans are known to have visited the country until the 1540s and following a century's contact with the West Japan then closed its doors to the outside world for 200 years, it is probably the least?Western country on the planet. Consequently, I feel that an appreciation of Japanese culture including its cinema should encompass all of what used to be called the Orient--China, Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East all the way to Egypt at the junction of Africa, Asia and Europe. In this context, I wish there were a discussion group called KineAsia. ? Before the declaration of a ceasefire, the lunatic Trump was threatening to obliterate Iran, to wipe out its people and civilization, the country upon which he launched an unprovoked war. Regardless of the outcome of this terrifying moment, I think there should be some reflection on all the decades, indeed centuries of Asiaphobia in the West that brought us to this. Particularly with the conversion of the West to Christianity, the rise of Islam and the Crusades followed centuries later by Western exploration of the Far East, Europeans saw the world divided between Christendom and the far more advanced but "heathen" civilizations of the East with their millions of Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. Inspired by Protestant fundamentalism, the United States inherited this prejudice from Europe, a deadly bias that continues to poison the minds of much of our ruling class to this day.? ? This bias is wedded to an ignorance and willful neglect of Eastern culture in the West, a neglect that extended to its cinema history as I found out to my frustration many years ago. Captivated by the handful of Japanese silents I was able to see in my youth in the 1970s (Kinugasa's A Page of Madness, Ozu's?I Was Born, But. . .,?Passing Fancy,?A Story of Floating Weeds, Mizoguchi's?Taki no Shiraito?and?Orizuru Osen), upon the suggestion of Joseph L Anderson I corresponded with the late Shunsui Matsuda who expressed eagerness to share silents from his remarkable collection with American classic film devotees. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a reciprocal interest on the part of the US film establishment. For years I lobbied 16mm. rental companies in the US to purchase copies of Japanese silents and film archives in this country to have a comprehensive retrospective of the Japanese silent cinema--but to no avail. The rental companies rejected my request with the claim that Japanese silents were not marketable here while the archives hemmed and hawed and essentially dismissed my suggestion. While since the dawn of the present century, a number of early Japanese films, both silent and sound, have finally become a part of mainstream film history, most pioneering film artists in China, India and Egypt as well as Latin America still largely remain neglected by the film history establishment in the West.? The standard history of world cinema developed by Iris Barry and others in the 1930s dismissed film production in Asia or the Orient (whatever you wish to call it) and Latin America as unimportant with no effort to explore or preserve the heritage of such major film-producing countries as Japan, China, India, Egypt, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. This reflected both the phobia directed at Eastern civilizations as alien menaces to the West and the patronizing attitude toward Latin American countries as mere colonies of the USA and Europe with no real cultures of their own. ? ?Thanks to the spread of VHS and VCD technology in the 1990s and early 2000s, I was able to at least see far more of Japanese silent cinema than in all the previous years and to at last view China's classic silent films. Grateful thanks to the KineJapan members who translated for me the intertitles in Japanese silents and made it possible for me to write about them. I was also able to finally see the treasures of Latin American silent cinema and found them equally creative. ? Following the 9/11 attacks and the spreading madness? of Islamophobia, I was determined to find out as much as I could about early filmmaking in the Middle East. I was able to obtain on VHS some excellent silents from the region. I then proposed to the Pordenone Silent Film Festival that they have a retrospective of surviving silent films from the Middle East produced in Egypt and other Arab countries--Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon--as well as Iran and Turkey. I thought it would make an excellent follow-up to their retrospectives of silents from India, China and Japan. But despite my repeated requests, the result was the same as my experience in the 1970s in trying to persuade US archives to have a Japanese silent film retrospective--a basic indifference to my proposal on the part of the Pordenone people. ? I think there ought to be some reflection on the part of Americans as to why we are always at war with Asia. While unlike the conflicts that followed one can reasonably make the argument that the war with Japan was a just one, that hardly excuses the criminal, racist aspects of the conflict that have left enduring scars--the wartime internment of the Japanese-Americans, the vicious firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities and most horrific of all, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, universally recognized as a monstrous war crime by everyone except American ultra-nationalists. The peace was also scarred by such attacks on Japanese culture as the burning of a number of Japanese films by occupation forces in a bizarre attempt to promote Western "democracy" and an outrageous if short-lived attempt by the US government to convert the Japanese people to Christianity by distributing Bibles in Japan, an effort totally at odds with the spirit of the First Amendment of the US Constitution. ? None of the subsequent wars with Asia should be considered just. The US' intervention in the Korean War on behalf of the dictator it favored led to the mass murder of one fourth of the Korean population in the north and the almost total destruction of Korea's film heritage including classic silents from the 1920s that had survived the harshest years of Japanese occupation in World War II only be lost in the later conflict. As a schoolboy in the 1960s, I remember all too well the war in Vietnam and its subsequent spread to Laos and Cambodia. The widely believed rationale for the war as disseminated by government propaganda and as believed by many Americans at the time was that the Vietnamese were the proxies, not of the Soviets, but of the "Red Chinese" who had temporarily replaced the Russians as our principal Cold War enemy. What came to be known as the Domino Theory would ultimately be exposed as a lie--but not until after over 60,000 US servicemen died and millions of Indochinese perished. ? Some years after US forces fled Southeast Asia after years of fighting, the American empire relocated to Western Asia where it has remained ever since. Once again, during all these decades lie after lie has been used to justify the endless slaughter of Muslim peoples. Over and over we have been subjected to grotesque stereotypes of Eastern peoples, their culture, their religion, presenting them all as a bunch of savages. Such is our addiction to conflict with Asians that there was a hue and cry over Japan's economic success in the 1970s and 1980s as a unique menace to the US, an alarm that led to the Plaza Accords and ultimately? the bursting of Japan's economic bubble. Now many people here view with alarm China's peaceful rise as a superpower and talk darkly of a future war with the country. And lurking in the shadows is an incipient fear of another rising Asian superpower, India. ? ?The one thing that might have a chance of counteracting the constant Asiaphobia is education--a sustained effort to provide accurate information about Asian societies and the faiths in which they believe, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, greater familiarity with Asian arts, their literature, their music, their visual arts, their cinema. I firmly reject the notion that on this fragile planet of ours there must be a constant clash between East and West. As part of this, I strongly believe that we must work to ensure the preservation of the films produced by Eastern civilizations throughout the history of the cinema.?William M. Drew? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nornes at umich.edu Thu Apr 9 13:58:23 2026 From: nornes at umich.edu (Markus Nornes) Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2026 13:58:23 -0400 Subject: [KineJapan] Holy Moly Cannes! Message-ID: Judging by the Cannes lineup, this is shaping up to be a banger of a year for Japanese cinema! In competition: *ALL OF SUDDEN *by HAMAGUCHI Ryusuke *SHEEP IN THE BOX* by KORE-EDA Hirokazu *NAGI NOTES *by FUKADA Koji And in Un Certain Regard: *ALL THE LOVERS IN THE NIGHT *by SODE Yukiko And in Cannes Premiere: *KOKUROJO* by KUROSAWA Kiyoshi (THE SAMURAI AND THE PRISONER) Alas, once again, no Malick. Markus --- *Markus Nornes* *Professor of Asian Cinema* Department of Film, Television and Media, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, Penny Stamps School of Art & Design *Homepage: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nornes/ * *Department of Film, Television and Media* *6348 North Quad* *105 S. State Street**Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285* -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From roorisan at hotmail.com Sun Apr 12 23:13:28 2026 From: roorisan at hotmail.com (Lauri Kitsnik) Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2026 03:13:28 +0000 Subject: [KineJapan] Book talk "Scripts in Motion: Rewriting the History of Classical Japanese Cinema" at Waseda, Thursday, April 16 at 6:30 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Dear KineJapaners, especially those in the Greater Tokyo area, I am pleased to share information about a talk event at Waseda later this week, where I will be presenting my latest book, Tangible Images: Reading and Writing Classical Japanese Cinema. You are warmly invited to join, either in person or via Zoom. All the best, Lauri ======================== This seminar is designed for Faculty and Staff members (including RA) of FIRE. Everyone is welcome to participate. Please see the following information about the seminar. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://list-waseda-jp.zoom.us/meeting/register/PY4mZNfJR42mpAkcoMk-Gg Meeting ID: 950 6448 3632 Passcode: 412721 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ?Lecturer? Assistant Professor Lauri Kitsnik, Ca' Foscari University of Venice ?Lecturer Info: Lauri Kitsnik (PhD Cantab) is assistant professor at the Department of Asian and North African Studies, Ca? Foscari University of Venice. His main research interests lie at the intersection of Japanese literary and audio-visual cultures. He has published on adaptation, documentary film, music and performance spaces, screenwriting and stardom. His writing has appeared in Asian Cinema, Film Studies, Japan Review, Japanese Studies, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, Journal of Screenwriting, Screen, and several edited volumes. His first monograph, Tangible Images: Reading and Writing Classical Japanese Cinema was published by Venice University Press in 2024. ?Title: Scripts in Motion: Rewriting the History of Classical Japanese Cinema ?Day and Time: April 16, 2026 6:30pm- ?Venue: MAIN Conference room 4th floor Bldg.11, Waseda Campus of Waseda University (ZOOM Available) Visiting Information ? School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University ?Abstract: Japanese cinema has long been framed through the familiar triad of directors, actors, and genres: a lens that has shaped both scholarly discourse and popular understanding of the nation?s film history. Yet this focus has obscured the crucial creative labour of scriptwriters, whose contributions were foundational to the studio system and to the imaginative horizons of audiences. This talk foregrounds their often?overlooked role during the peak decades of studio filmmaking, from the 1930s through the 1960s, showing how writers not only structured the filmmaking process but also influenced the ways viewers conceptualised cinematic worlds. Central to this re?evaluation is the emergence of a specialised readership capable of engaging with film scenarios as texts in their own right, made possible by the widespread serialisation and publication of scripts that circulated far beyond studio walls. Drawing on key insights from my recent book, Tangible Images: Reading and Writing Classical Japanese Cinema (Venice UP, 2024), the talk explores how scriptwriting shaped the cultural and industrial life of Japanese cinema. It revisits the ambitions of the Scenario Literature Movement, whose advocates sought to elevate film scripts to the status of autonomous literary works. Their efforts illuminate the porous boundaries between cinema and literature in modern Japan, while underscoring the archival value of scripts as indispensable records for film preservation and historical reconstruction. Finally, the talk turns to the social and spatial dimensions of scriptwriting, examining how writers navigated the collaborative?and often hierarchical?environments of the studio system. It considers the gendered dynamics of the profession, the communal spaces in which scripts were drafted and debated, and the practice of script scouting, which enabled many writers to assert creative agency through on?site research. These practices reveal scriptwriters as mobile, observant figures whose work was deeply embedded in the textures of everyday life. By repositioning scriptwriters at the centre of Japanese film history, this talk offers a renewed perspective on the collaborative foundations of the industry and on the diverse modes of audience engagement made possible through cinema?s textual forms. ======================== -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mbsas at berkeley.edu Tue Apr 14 18:03:54 2026 From: mbsas at berkeley.edu (Miryam Sas) Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2026 15:03:54 -0700 Subject: [KineJapan] In person event with Nina Horisaki-Christens if you are in town (April 16 in Berkeley) Message-ID: Hi all This is the last in the multi-part in person Japanese Media series--Nina Horisaki-Christens joins us in Berkeley to think through approaches to Video Hiroba's experiments in early video. I will moderate. All are welcome. Best, Miryam Japanese Media 1970s and Beyond ~ Part 4: Video and Media Theory 4 p.m. April 16 3401 Dwinelle Hall [image: Kobayashi Hakud?, Earth, 1974, still from color video ? Kobayashi Hakud?] Kobayashi Hakud?, *Earth*, 1974, still from color video ? Kobayashi Hakud? - Facebook - Twitter - Copy Link *Part 4: Video and Media Theory* *?Against Japanese Video: Process, Discourse, and Translation in 1970s Tokyo?* Video emerged on the art scene in the late 1960s, positioned as a grassroots medium that could counter the centralized structure of broadcast television through person-to-person networks facilitated by air travel and mail systems. Yet just as central to early video?s identity was its supposed international transmissibility: video?s use of moving images and ability to capture environments and processes promised communications that exceeded linguistic and cultural barriers. In the wake of Osaka?s Expo ?70, which showcased Japan?s emergence as a technological power, members of the 1970s Tokyo-based collective Video Hiroba latched onto video?s international image, yet their work was often received in culturally essentialist terms. By examining their experiments not through culturally specific images but rather through the activities in which they were involved?process, discourse, and translation?this talk recovers the contributions of Video Hiroba?s experiments to early video while exposing the frictions between local and transnational video that has obscured their work to date. Rather than considering Video Hiroba?s work as ?Japanese video,? by framing their work as early video made in Japan, we can critically examine early video?s internationalist aspirations: aspirations that linger in the imaginary of ?global contemporary? art today. *Speaker:* Nina Horisaki-Christens , Lecturer, UCLA *Moderator:* Miryam Sas , Professor, UC Berkeley -- *Miryam Sas* Bernie H. Williams Chair in Comparative Literature Chair, Department of Film & Media Professor of Comparative Literature, Film & Media, and Japanese Arts University of California, Berkeley *Feeling Media: Potentiality and the Afterlife of Art *(Duke University Press, 2022). Intro here . -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From alexanderjacoby at brookes.ac.uk Wed Apr 15 03:42:45 2026 From: alexanderjacoby at brookes.ac.uk (Alexander Jacoby) Date: Wed, 15 Apr 2026 08:42:45 +0100 Subject: [KineJapan] Book talk "Scripts in Motion: Rewriting the History of Classical Japanese Cinema" at Waseda, Thursday, April 16 at 6:30 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Dear all, I reviewed Lauri's book recently for Japan Forum. I think it's a genuinely original approach to Japanese cinema, and I am convinced colleagues will be glad to have made time to attend his talk tomorrow if they can! As ever, ALEX On Mon, 13 Apr 2026 at 04:13, Lauri Kitsnik via KineJapan < kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu> wrote: > Dear KineJapaners, especially those in the Greater Tokyo area, I am > pleased to share information about a talk event at Waseda later this week, > where I will be presenting my latest book, Tangible Images: Reading and > Writing Classical Japanese > > Dear KineJapaners, especially those in the Greater Tokyo area, > > I am pleased to share information about a talk event at Waseda later this > week, where I will be presenting my latest book, Tangible Images: Reading > and Writing Classical Japanese Cinema. You are warmly invited to join, > either in person or via Zoom. > > All the best, > Lauri > > > ======================== > This seminar is designed for Faculty and Staff members (including RA) of > FIRE. > > Everyone is welcome to participate. > Please see the following information about the seminar. > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > https://list-waseda-jp.zoom.us/meeting/register/PY4mZNfJR42mpAkcoMk-Gg > > Meeting ID: 950 6448 3632 > Passcode: 412721 > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > ?Lecturer? Assistant Professor Lauri Kitsnik, Ca' Foscari University of > Venice > > ?Lecturer Info: > > Lauri Kitsnik (PhD Cantab) is assistant professor at the Department of > Asian and North African Studies, Ca? Foscari University of Venice. His main > research interests lie at the intersection of Japanese literary and > audio-visual cultures. He has published on adaptation, documentary film, > music and performance spaces, screenwriting and stardom. His writing has > appeared in Asian Cinema, Film Studies, Japan Review, Japanese Studies, > Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, Journal of Screenwriting, Screen, > and several edited volumes. His first monograph, Tangible Images: Reading > and Writing Classical Japanese Cinema was published by Venice University > Press in 2024. > > ?Title: Scripts in Motion: Rewriting the History of Classical Japanese > Cinema > > ?Day and Time: April 16, 2026 6:30pm- > > ?Venue: MAIN Conference room 4th floor Bldg.11, Waseda Campus of Waseda > University (ZOOM Available) > Visiting Information ? School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda > University > > > ?Abstract: > > Japanese cinema has long been framed through the familiar triad of > directors, actors, and genres: a lens that has shaped both scholarly > discourse and popular understanding of the nation?s film history. Yet this > focus has obscured the crucial creative labour of scriptwriters, whose > contributions were foundational to the studio system and to the imaginative > horizons of audiences. This talk foregrounds their often?overlooked role > during the peak decades of studio filmmaking, from the 1930s through the > 1960s, showing how writers not only structured the filmmaking process but > also influenced the ways viewers conceptualised cinematic worlds. Central > to this re?evaluation is the emergence of a specialised readership capable > of engaging with film scenarios as texts in their own right, made possible > by the widespread serialisation and publication of scripts that circulated > far beyond studio walls. > Drawing on key insights from my recent book, Tangible Images: Reading and > Writing Classical Japanese Cinema (Venice UP, 2024), the talk explores how > scriptwriting shaped the cultural and industrial life of Japanese cinema. > It revisits the ambitions of the Scenario Literature Movement, whose > advocates sought to elevate film scripts to the status of autonomous > literary works. Their efforts illuminate the porous boundaries between > cinema and literature in modern Japan, while underscoring the archival > value of scripts as indispensable records for film preservation and > historical reconstruction. > Finally, the talk turns to the social and spatial dimensions of > scriptwriting, examining how writers navigated the collaborative?and often > hierarchical?environments of the studio system. It considers the gendered > dynamics of the profession, the communal spaces in which scripts were > drafted and debated, and the practice of script scouting, which enabled > many writers to assert creative agency through on?site research. These > practices reveal scriptwriters as mobile, observant figures whose work was > deeply embedded in the textures of everyday life. > By repositioning scriptwriters at the centre of Japanese film history, > this talk offers a renewed perspective on the collaborative foundations of > the industry and on the diverse modes of audience engagement made possible > through cinema?s textual forms. > ======================== > > _______________________________________________ > KineJapan mailing list > KineJapan at mailman.yale.edu > > https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/kinejapan__;!!FapE6t-4AhA!KInN_HCR1F2adFqUI720W50FCLK9wmZNsI3KGUguTRfeSfro3nrYIoR2tCVm2veDjMREj096iOO9Rcm1fLQ0O_y_UnaQ-uqlDHQKDg$ > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: