Aaron Gerow's Blog, page 10

Lone Wolves & Stray Dogs: The Japanese Crime Film, 1931-1969

I'm very glad to announce the start of Yale's second collaboration with the National Film Center in Tokyo: the film series “Lone Wolves & Stray Dogs: The Japanese Crime Film, 1931-1969.” Our first collaboration in 2012, "The Sword and the Screen: The Japanese Period Film 1915-1960," was actually the first time the NFC collaborated with a foreign university, and was a great success. 

The new series, co-sponsored between the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale and the National Film Center of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, will present ten masterworks of Japanese gangster film, detective cinema, and Japanese noir, in subtitled archive prints that have rarely been seen abroad. The series will conclude with a symposium featuring an international panel of experts on Japanese crime film, and a world premiere screening of a newly struck English subtitled print of the classic gangster melodrama, Chutaro of Banba (Mabuta no Haha). The series kicks off on January 22, 2015, with the film Stray Dog, and concludes on February 15 with the world premiere and closing symposium.

The Net, Copyright, and Japanese Cinema and Anime History

One of the problems for us interested in Japanese films or anime is access. Only a fraction of what was produced—even if it still exits in celluloid form—is readily available on DVD or some other form. Some of my students still don't understand that. Especially the young ones interested in American film think that everything is available either on DVD or on Netflix, when it is not, even in the case of the USA. Films from certain nations are more available, but that only enhances the illusion that those countries are the core of film history. Access is crucial not only for scholars, but for narrating the world heritage of film history.

In the case of Japan, it doesn't help that Japanese archives are expensive, hard to use, and themselves not easily accessible. Even professional scholars have a hard time viewing prints of films that definitely exist.

So I am sure many of us are thrilled when we see some rare Japanese film or anime uploaded on YouTube or some other site. We now have access! But for a long time I have warned my students about the backside of this illusion of access, a problem that has recently hit home.

On Wildgrounds and on Film Theory and Criticism

As I mentioned regarding my interview on the MacMillan Report, I am rather embarrassed appearing on camera. But I will do it when asked. I was surprised and honored when Michael Stern over at Wildgrounds asked to do a video interview while I was in Paris for the Kawabata Yasunari symposium. He came to both the symposium and to my hotel, and it was at the latter that we talked for over an hour. Somehow he edited that down to about four minutes, in quite a professional manner, focusing on my discussion of the importance of Japanese film theory, particularly with regard to Hasumi Shigehiko, and the current state of Japanese film criticism, especially how its moribund condition may bode poorly for the future of Japanese cinema. 

Kawabata Yasunari on Cinema

This coming week I will be attending an international conference in Paris on the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Kawabata Yasunari. Entitled "Relire Kawabata au 21e siècle - modernisme et japonisme au-delà des mythes," it will take place on September 17 and 18, 2014, at the Maison de la culture du Japon (for the first day) and the Université Paris Diderot (on the second day). It will feature some of the top literature scholars in Japan, Europe, and the United States, including Michael Bourdaghs, Kensuke Kono, Hirokazu Toeda, Hirofumi Wada, Yuko Brunet, Tomi Suzuki, and Cécile Sakai (who is the main organizer). The novelist Tawada Yoko will give a talk on the evening of the first day. Click here for the program (in French). 

My own interest in Kawabata is rather long held. One of my first published articles, "Celluloid Masks: The Cinematic Image and the Image of Japan" (in Iris 16 [Spring 1993]: 23-36), considered how Kawabata's and Tanazaki Jun'ichiro's literary representations of cinema connected to their constructions of Japan. And of course my second book, A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan, is about the film Kawabata was individually involved in making. 

Nuclear Nation Twice and Cinema after 3.11

This week and next week I will be participating in two events in Tokyo centered on films about the disasters on March 11, 2011, both of which—by chance—happen to feature screenings of the documentary Nuclear Nation (Futaba kara toku hanarete) and a discussion with the director Funahashi Atsushi. 

The first will take place on July 18 at Josai University, and will include a panel discussion with me, Hayashi Chiaki, Kitano Keisuke, Abé Mark Nornes, Mark Roberts, Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, and Akira Mizuta-Lippit on the issue of cinema after 3.11 Details can be found here. 

The second will take place on the following Friday, July 25, at Sophia University. That will focus more on the film and will feature a talk after the screening between me and Funahashi-san. Details are available on this pdf.

There are a lot of films being made on 3.11—though many with some difficulties—which are increasingly becoming the subject of academic studies.

Ewha-Yale Conference: ���Korean Literature, Art, and Film from 1910 to 1945���

This weekend I will be taking part in a conference coordinated by Ewha Women's University in South Korea and Yale University. Entitled�����Korean Literature, Art, and Film from 1910 to��1945��� that is being held at Ewha. A number of Yale and Ewha faculty will be taking part, as well as a former student of mine, Naoki Yamamoto, who is at the University of California, Santa Barbara. While I am not an expert on Korean cinema, I hope in my paper, "Colonial Era Korean Cinema and the Problem of Internalization," to pose some questions about the relation of film form to colonial subjectivity. Here is the abstract of my talk:

The internalization of the values of the colonizers in the mind of the colonized���the colonization of the mind���can be as crucial to the perpetuation of colonialism as the violence of legal or military force. I would like to analyze some colonial era films that I think pose some interesting questions about the problem of internalization during Japan���s colonization of Korea. One could see in films like Military Train (1938) or Volunteer (1941) examples of characters internalizing the voices or visions of Japanese empire. Yet I wonder if these films do not also show us complications in these narratives of internalization. First, they may seem in part to internalize Japanese film language or style, but given fraught debates in Japan over what constituted a national cinema, Koreans were at best internalizing a cinema that Japanese authorities themselves had not internalized as sufficient to represent the modern Japanese nation. This situation may affect the entire phenomenon of internalization. What I am curious about is less whether there was internalization of Japanese cinema or not, than the shape of the ���internal��� within the colonial spatial dynamics: what the cinema tells us about the fraught nature of internalization itself, for instance about how the boundaries between internal and external are demarcated or rendered ambiguous, about the construction or deconstruction of internalized subjects, and the contradictions of representing internal states through external means like cinema. I wonder if we cannot hypothesize that, if colonial era Korean cinema seems often concerned with internal states, it is less because it is opening up the space that will be internalized by the colonial cinema, than it is exhibiting the cracks and contradictions in internalization itself and the problems of colonial subjectivity. I thus was particularly interested in the number of stories, such as Fisherman���s Fire (1939), where gazes mattered, but which were often presented without point of view structures, or through point of view editing or eyeline matches that are considered wrong according to the rules of classical Hollywood cinema.

You can check out the schedule at the Yale CEAS site.

Ewha-Yale Conference: “Korean Literature, Art, and Film from 1910 to 1945”

This weekend I will be taking part in a conference coordinated by Ewha Women's University in South Korea and Yale University. Entitled “Korean Literature, Art, and Film from 1910 to 1945” that is being held at Ewha. A number of Yale and Ewha faculty will be taking part, as well as a former student of mine, Naoki Yamamoto, who is at the University of California, Santa Barbara. While I am not an expert on Korean cinema, I hope in my paper, "Colonial Era Korean Cinema and the Problem of Internalization," to pose some questions about the relation of film form to colonial subjectivity. Here is the abstract of my talk:

The internalization of the values of the colonizers in the mind of the colonized—the colonization of the mind—can be as crucial to the perpetuation of colonialism as the violence of legal or military force. I would like to analyze some colonial era films that I think pose some interesting questions about the problem of internalization during Japan’s colonization of Korea. One could see in films like Military Train (1938) or Volunteer (1941) examples of characters internalizing the voices or visions of Japanese empire. Yet I wonder if these films do not also show us complications in these narratives of internalization. First, they may seem in part to internalize Japanese film language or style, but given fraught debates in Japan over what constituted a national cinema, Koreans were at best internalizing a cinema that Japanese authorities themselves had not internalized as sufficient to represent the modern Japanese nation. This situation may affect the entire phenomenon of internalization. What I am curious about is less whether there was internalization of Japanese cinema or not, than the shape of the “internal” within the colonial spatial dynamics: what the cinema tells us about the fraught nature of internalization itself, for instance about how the boundaries between internal and external are demarcated or rendered ambiguous, about the construction or deconstruction of internalized subjects, and the contradictions of representing internal states through external means like cinema. I wonder if we cannot hypothesize that, if colonial era Korean cinema seems often concerned with internal states, it is less because it is opening up the space that will be internalized by the colonial cinema, than it is exhibiting the cracks and contradictions in internalization itself and the problems of colonial subjectivity. I thus was particularly interested in the number of stories, such as Fisherman’s Fire (1939), where gazes mattered, but which were often presented without point of view structures, or through point of view editing or eyeline matches that are considered wrong according to the rules of classical Hollywood cinema.

You can check out the schedule at the Yale CEAS site.

Film Criticism and the Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema

One of the trends in academic publishing these days seems to be an effort to provide information in a more condensed, easy-to-consume fashion. There are series like "Short Cuts" and its brief books on various topics in film (such as on New Korean Cinema). There also seems to be an explosion in publications of various handbooks or companions to this or that subject. I participated in one with my article on ”Japanese Film and Television" in the Routledge Handbook of Japanese Culture and Society edited by Vicky and Ted Bestor and Akiko Yamagata; and in another with the piece "Nation, Citizenship and Cinema" in A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan edited by Jennifer Robertson. 

There are now a number of these handbooks or companions being prepared on Japanese cinema. I've been asked to contribute to most of them (and even approached about editing one). The first to come out may set a standard that will be difficult to surpass:

Daisuke Miyao, ed. Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema. Oxford University Press, 2014. ISBN 9780199731664.

Archival Film Festivals and Japan

A couple of years ago, I wrote a review of Tokyo FILMeX's "Nippon Modern" retrospective of Shochiku films from the 1920s and 1930s for Undercurrent, the online journal of FIPRESCI. It was a critical take on not just the retro, or even Sato Tadao's article for the catalog, but of a longer history of Japanese critics and institutions declining to think sufficiently about Japanese film history, in part by not thinking about the history of thinking about cinema in Japan. The piece was another in my efforts to think about the history and problems of film theory in Japan, which I mentioned in my last entry.

The Undercurrent article caught the eye of Alex Marlow-Mann, who asked me to expand on it for a volume in the "Film Festival Yearbook" series put out by St Andrews Film Studies. This volume, number five in the series, was on archival film festivals. My piece, entitled "Retrospective Irony: Film Festivals and Japanese Cinema History," sketches the history of retrospectives of Japanese film originating in Japan, beginning with those organized by the Kawakita Nagamasa and his wife Kashiko (the Kawakita Memorial Film Institute), and explores what kind of Japanese cinema they were constructing, especially for a foreign other. As with the Undercurrents piece, I note how these retros frequently did construct a Japan or Japanese cinema that was itself not supposed to be the object of critical theory, even when these events were held at home.

Talking about Japanese Film Theory

I've appeared on television and radio multiple times, but I never like to watch or hear myself afterwards. Maybe some of it has to do with some complex over my self image, but mostly it's because I don't like how the ephemeral moment has been preserved forever. Like with writing, there's little you can do after it has been made public (unless you're writing for the net or can work with multiple editions of a book), but at least with writing you can rework the text multiple times until it's reasonably good before publication. With interviews on radio and TV, however, it's usually one take and that's it, mistakes and fumbles and all. I recognize my feelings are contradictory here. Cinema's value lies in part in its ability to capture the unrehearsed moment, to offer a glimpse of what's behind the performance of reality—as well as the performance itself—and lay bare some of its faults and inconsistencies. I admire that about cinema, but I guess I just don't like becoming naked that much myself. One realizes the camera's power once you get in front of it, and realize your image is being captured and projected into the ether.