[KineJapan] Japanese Media 1970s and Beyond (Friday, February 27 4PM PST online and multi-part series)

[Miryam Sas]

Hello all,
We will be having an exciting multi-part series this semester hosted by
Berkeley's Center for Japanese Studies on "Japanese Media 1970s and
Beyond." The first event is a brief online panel--and after that all the
rest are in person here in Berkeley. We welcome all of you to join us
for these events. See below for information and descriptions. Registration
for this Friday is here:
https://berkeley.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_sZ8pPLaJS22stXzFywTAiQ#/registration

Hope to see you at one or all!
Best,
Miryam

The website to find more details on locations/times is here
<https://events.berkeley.edu/cjs/all/tags/center%20for%20japanese%20studies>
: https://events.berkeley.edu/cjs/all/tags/center%20for%20japanese%20studies

Japanese Media 1970s and Beyond ~ Part 1

Scholarship on postwar Japan has often focused either on the politicized
protest-adjacent culture of the 1960s, or on the “postmodern” consumerism
of the 1980s bubble economy and its aftermath. The 1970s has consequently
most frequently been narrated as a transitional period that marks the
defeat of resistance against capitalism and the nation-state. However, such
a view overlooks the sheer diversity of alternative and experimental media
practices in Japan’s 1970s. In this series, speakers share their research
on how different media practitioners and theorists sought to reconfigure
the increasingly reified categories of technology and sociality. Ranging
across a variety of media such as photography, film, television, and video,
this series seeks to open up Japan’s 1970s as a period of rich media theory
and practice, in which the question of redefining mediation was itself at
stake, and to reconsider the legacies of these interventions today.

*Part 1 (2/27 4PM-5:15PM Pacific time, Zoom): Photography and Media Theory*

*Speaker: Junnan Chen (NYU Shanghai)*

*Title*: “Taki Kōji: Image of the World”

This talk examines the writings of photographer and critic Taki Kōji.
Emerging from the experimental photography journal Provoke in 1968, Taki
became one of the most wide-ranging thinkers in postwar Japan, working
across art history, media theory, politics, and semiotics from the 1970s
through the early 2000s. The talk provides a sketch of his intellectual
contour; moreover, it focuses on the methodological problems Taki’s
writings ask us to reconsider. Following Taki’s expansive practice and a
mode of writing that tests the limits of critique, description, and
intervention, the talk thinks with Taki and asks what forms of scholarly
language and critical praxis remain possible today.

*Speaker: Elise Voyau (Kanagawa University)*

*Title*: “Photography across Media: Print, Text, and Exhibition in 1970s
Japan”

In the post-1968 Japanese media landscape, photographic practices underwent
significant institutional transformations. Whereas photographers’ careers
had previously relied primarily on printed production—particularly in
photobooks and magazines—their work increasingly came to incorporate
exhibition-making as a central component. This took the form of ephemeral
installations and performances in independent galleries, as well as the
display of “original prints” in museums. Drawing on examples from
photographers associated with the Workshop School of Photography
(1974–1976), I will discuss how these developments, far from constituting
separate practices, instead lead to images circulating between different
spaces and modes of display, forming shifting, interconnected
constellations within a broader media ecology in which texts played a
crucial role.
*Speaker:* Junnan Chen
<https://shanghai.nyu.edu/academics/faculty/directory/junnan-chen>, NYU
Shanghai
*Speaker:* Elise Voyau <https://researchmap.jp/3529?lang=en>, Kanagawa
University
*Moderator:* Miryam Sas <https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/faculty/miryam-sas>
, UC Berkeley

   *Part 2 (in person, March 5): Julia Alekseyevna, "Matsumoto Toshio’s
   Antifascist Queer Becomings”*

   This talk introduces the work of avant-garde documentary filmmaker
   Matsumoto Toshio and conceives of his “neo-documentary” as an antifascist
   practice. In addition, the talk contextualizes his most famous film, the
   1969 *Funeral Parade of Roses* , alongside other revolutionary queer
   films from the era. The talk conceives of these productions by directors
   such as Hani Susumu, Okabe Michio, and Terayama Shuji alongside leftist
   politics of the era, and especially the concept of “self-revolution,” in
   connection to surrealism, experimental art practices, and documentary form.
   *Speaker:* Julia Alekseyeva
   <https://www.english.upenn.edu/people/julia-alekseyeva>, Associate
   Professor, University of Pennsylvania
   *Moderator:* Miryam Sas
   <https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/faculty/miryam-sas>, Professor, UC
   Berkeley

   *Bonus ("...and Beyond") (in person, March 18): Namiko Kunimoto,
   "Imperial Animations in Japan's Art Historical Present"*

   Gotō Yasuka, a Hiroshima-based artist, born in 1982, has created
   portraits of renowned Japanese artists such as Fujita Tsuguharu, Miyamoto
   Saburō, and Koiso Ryohei, who were active as war artists or military men in
   the Fifteen-Year War, raising the sensitive issue of war-time
   responsibility that many in Japan would rather evade. Over two hundred
   visual artists were sent to the front between 1938-1945, many of whom
   resumed their artistic lives after the war with ease. Retrospectives on
   these artists often exclude paintings done during the war (or re-situate
   the artists as unfortunate victims of the times), but I argue Gotō’s
   portraits return us to these historical elisions, thereby raising questions
   about how the current rise in Japanese nationalism is built upon the
   refusal to accept responsibility for Japanese Imperialism and all its
   violent consequences. Her works are not concerned with determining the
   degree of complicity for each artist; on the contrary, her works illustrate
   the quotidian nature of each artist-soldier’s activities, how they shared
   time together, how they survived, and how they created. At the same time,
   these small, everyday acts of painting, smoking, and existing on colonized
   land were still very much a part of the Japan’s fascist movement and
   enabled and abetted the violence and oppression that characterized Japan’s
   Fifteen-year war. Gotō’s contemporary portraits invite viewers to learn
   more about each artist’s individual stories, including, rather than
   erasing, their involvement with fascism. Set within the contemporary
   gallery space, the framed artworks ask us to be critical about how these
   artists are situated in the present. This presentation examines Gotō’s
   contemporary portraits as historical portals that encourage viewers to
   imagine Japanese war painters as they were active in the 1940s, thereby
   making it difficult to support the notion that the painters were only
   “being artists.” By extension, I argue, Gotō’s portrayal of these artists
   asks viewers to reconsider the “passive” role of the population as a whole
   during the war, and perhaps edges some to consider what a “neutral”
   political position might be risking in Japan today.

   *Speaker:* Namiko Kunimoto
   <https://history-of-art.osu.edu/people/kunimoto.3>, Associate Professor, The
   Ohio State University
   *Moderator:* Miryam Sas <https://ealc.berkeley.edu/people/sas-miryam>,
   Professor, UC Berkeley

   *Part 3  (in person, April 9): Patrick Chimenti, “You Are Nothing More
   Than a ‘Presence’: Ethnography, Performative Remediation, and the Making of
   Place in Konno Tsutomu’s Television Documentaries”*

   In this talk I explore how media infrastructures transformed popular
   perceptions of distant and peripheral sites in postwar Japan and how media
   practitioners engaged with these sites through literature, film,
   television, and print media to address emerging social, cultural, and
   ecological crises. Focusing on the “ethnography boom” of the 1970s, when
   peripheralized sites, former colonial holdings, and marginalized
   communities were thrust into the spotlight of Japan’s national imagination,
   I argue that these complex and highly mediatized sites, or “media
   ecologies,” offer critical insights into shifting configurations of
   national identity and the experience of place at this time, with lasting
   effects on Japan’s media landscape.

   Television played a pivotal role in reshaping these sensibilities.
   Drawing on case studies from television director Konno Tsutomu’s
   groundbreaking documentary programs *I Want to Go Far Away* (1970–), *The
   Emperor’s Century* (1973-1975), and *From Europe With Love* (1975), I
   examine how television forged new aesthetics of ethnographic realism in the
   post-high-growth era through a performative remediation of historical media
   imaginaries of place. While prior scholarship on Konno’s television
   programs has tended to read his documentary practice through theories of
   realism and regimes of truth rooted in the discursive legacies of the late
   1960s, I argue that at the foundation of these experimental approaches to
   televisual realism was a novel methodology of “creative empiricism,”
   drawing on the media-specific capacities of television to generate aleatory
   models of place and time capable of unsettling normative paradigms of
   historical causality and relationality. Reading these programs in the
   context of Konno and his collaborators’ burgeoning media theory, I
   demonstrate how *genbasei* 現場性 (“place-ticity”) emerged in this period
   as a critical heuristic through which media practitioners conceptualized
   television’s creative and ethical capacities to problematize overdetermined
   narrativizations of Japan’s cultural history.


   *Speaker:* Patrick Chimenti
   <https://cla.umn.edu/about/directory/profile/chime025>, Assistant
   Professor, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
   *Moderator:* Miryam Sas
   <https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/faculty/miryam-sas>, Professor, UC
   Berkeley

   *Part 4: In person, April 16, Nina Horisaki-Christens, "Against Japanese
   Video: Process, Discourse, and Translation in 1970s Tokyo."  (Further
   details will be posted on CJS website)*





-- 
*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
<https://www.dukeupress.edu/feeling-media> *(Duke University Press, 2022).
Intro here
<https://assets-us-01.kc-usercontent.com/f7ca9afb-82c2-002a-a423-84e111d5b498/c8d038df-83a3-4f91-b9a1-d034ce9496cb/978-1-4780-1849-0_601.pdf?fm=webp&auto=format&lossless=true>
.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/kinejapan/attachments/20260224/8d3713a2/attachment-0001.html>