Aaron Gerow's Blog, page 3

OBAYASHI NOBUHIKO: A Call for Papers

For nearly 60 years until his death in 2020, Obayashi Nobuhiko continued to challenge and expand the many fields of moving image production he engaged in, from experimental films to commercials, from idol movies to anti-war digital cinema. While justly celebrated in Japan, Obayashi remained largely unknown abroad until Hausu, his 1977 commercial feature debut, was finally released on DVD in English-language markets in 2010 to cult success. Even then, no serious and critical engagement with his work has been published in book form either in Japan or abroad.��

Obayashi is worthy of such deep study not only because his own work, with its interrogations of cinema and modern Japanese history, of youth and gender, of genre and the possibilities of the moving image, is profoundly rich. It is also because, with a career of involvement in experimental film, TV commercials and movies, major studio productions, genre cinema, independent film, and digital cinema, Obayashi is an extremely fruitful avenue for exploring different but interrelated aspects of postwar Japan���s history and media ecology. Just as Obayashi used media to explore modern Japanese history, so we can use Obayashi to explore modern Japanese media.

Osaki Midori and the Theory Complex in Japan

As many of you know, I have been working on a book about the history of film theory in Japan for quite some time. The larger project has already produced a number of articles (you can see some here, here, and here), journal reprints,��lectures, and even a film theory anthology, but the book is progressing slowly. I already have a good number of sections written for the pre-war volume (it looks like it��might end up being a two-volume work), but I am still working on how best to shape this for a more general audience. My former student, Naoki Yamamoto, has reworked his dissertation into a wonderful book, Dialectics without Synthesis: Japanese Film Theory and Realism in a Global Frame, but my book will not be a directed at an audience of specialists.��

That���s why I was thrilled when the folks at Light Industry, the venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, NY, asked me to give a talk about my research. This was an audience to speak to a more general, but still highly interested audience. Given the��pandemic, we opted for a podcast-like oral talk, and after some discussion, we opted for my discussion of Osaki Midori���s writings on film. As Tom Lamarre and Livia Monnet have already shown, Osaki���s approach to cinema is unique and fascinating, but I wanted to explore it in light of the context of film theory at the time. Since I am not an Osaki specialist,��this is more a discussion of my encounter with Osaki. I preface the talk with an introduction to the problem of studying Japanese film theory, primarily because I contend Osaki, if not recognizing such problems herself, can be fruitfully understood in that context.

Seeing in the Dark: Asia���s Independent Cinema Spaces in the Midst of Uncertainties

A while ago, I was involved with the magazine Nang, in helping with their special issue on film manifestos. At that time, as I reported here, I let them republish my translation of Aoyama Shinji���s "Nouvelle Vague Manifesto" (also available here), provided them with a new introduction, and arranged for Ryan Cook to pen a retrospective analysis of Aoyama���s piece.

This time, I���ve gotten involved in another special issue of Nang, this one online, focusing on independent cinema spaces in Asia. I will be writing��about mini-theaters in Japan, discussing in one section the issues such theaters faced��during the pandemic that I wrote about here. I also use Theater Kino in Sapporo as an example, based on an interview I did with owner/operate Nakajima Yo (who participated in the Japan Cuts discussion on Obayashi Nobuhiko). The issue is being edited by Davide Cazzaro and Aiko��Masubuchi, the former film programmer at the Japan Society in New York with whom I collaborated on the Obayashi Nobuhiko retro in 2015.

The Japanese Cinema Book and Early Japanese Cinema

I am trying to catch up on my blog announcements after encountering a server problem that prevented me from updating the site for several months. So here is post about a book I contributed to that appeared last year.

I am not sure if it is a trend in the academic publishing industry, but there is a spate of��handbooks and introductory anthologies that has been appearing, even in the relatively small field of Japanese film studies. Oxford was first in 2014 with the��Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema, edited by Daisuke Miyao (I have a piece in there on the history of Japanese film criticism). Last year the Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema came out, edited by Joanne Bernardi and Shota Ogawa (Routledge approached me about editing the collection, but I didn���t take them up on the offer). Blackwell has another such collection in the works, edited by David Desser, which hopefully should come out soon (I have a contribution about the early relationship between TV and cinema in Japan).��

Another such collection is The Japanese Cinema Book, which was published through the BFI and edited by Hideaki Fujiki and Alasteir Phillips. Pam Cook���s The Cinema Book, published by the BFI in 1985, was the key reference book for us studying for exams during grad school, so it was a��pleasure to be able to participate in this project. I contributed a piece (which you can access here) on Morita Yoshimitsu���s Family Game for Alastair and Julian Philips���s Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts; and published the Japanese version of my article on Japanese film criticism in Kankyaku e no apurochi, which Fujiki edited.

Hatano Tetsuro

I was very sad to see that the film scholar Hatano Tetsuro (���������������)��passed away on October 2, 2020, at the age of 84. Hatano-sensei was an important figure in post-1960s film studies in Japan. He was one of the editors of the very influential journal Shinema 69 (later��Shinema 70, etc.), which set the tone for film criticism of the 1980s and 1990s, especially under the leadership of Hasumi Shigehiko. Hatano was a core member of the team that created Gendai Nihon eigaron taikei (Systems of Contemporary Japanese Film Thought, 1970-72), still the best collection of postwar film criticism and theory. Later, he teamed with Iwamoto Kenji (my co-editor on the prewar theory anthology) to produce Eiga riron shusei��(Theories of Film: An Anthology, 1982), an important anthology of foreign and Japanese film theory. Hatano's other books include Eiga kantoku ni naru ni wa (How to Become a Film Director, 1993) and translations of works such as Sheldon Renan���s An Introduction to Underground Film, and Jon Halliday���s interviews with Pasolini. He was also a filmmaker and a motorbike aficionado, most known for shooting his 16,000 kilometer motorcycle trek across Eurasia. His documentary, Salsa and Chanpuru: Cuba/Okinawa, was in his words a�����musical documentary��� about Okinawans who emigrated to Cuba, and was released in theaters in 2008.��He taught for over thirty years at Tokyo Zokei University, starting as an adjunct in 1968 and ending as an emeritus professor. He also taught at Nihon University after retiring from Tokyo Zokai.��

Nobuhiko Obayashi: A Conversation at Japan Cuts 2020

As mentioned in my��last post, I���m still quarantining in Japan. But I wanted to let everyone know about a panel discussion I did on the��work of the late filmmaker Obayashi Nobuhiko for this year���s edition of��Japan Cuts. We recorded it on June 23 and it will go live online starting on July 17��here.��

As anyone who���s read this blog knows, my relationship with Obayashi��goes back many years, beginning with simply watching him as a spectator until I finally met him in 2014. We hosted him at Yale in 2015, immediately after��which the Japan Society ran an Obayashi retrospective that I programmed. I was even��honored to write a short contribution to a book that Obayashi published. When he passed away in April this year, after his long battle with cancer, I wrote��up a remembrance that, while still quite feeble, hopefully gives a sense of what Obayashi meant to me and to my family.

In late May, Kazu Watanabe of the Japan Society contacted me about the possibility of moderating a panel on Obayashi for this year���s��Japan Cuts, which due to COVID-19 was going online this year. Japan Cuts was not only going to be showing Obayashi���s last film, Labyrinth of Cinema, along with a documentary on Obayashi and his wife/producer Kyoko, it was creating a new award for its Next Generation section named after Obayashi. Kazu explained that the festival wanted to hold some form of commemorative event on Obayashi that would be online.

Traveling to Japan in the COVID Era

This is not a piece about film, but friends suggested I post it as a kind of public service, reporting what it was like to fly to Japan in early July 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. I���ll talk about some movies at the end. This is also somewhat of a continuation of my series of posts about Japan during the pandemic (see here and here).

My wife (who is a Japanese national) and I were pretty sure we were not going to be able to make our yearly summer trip back to Japan, but issues arose with our house in Yokohama��and there were strong fears I would lose my permanent resident status if I didn���t return. So we dug into our pocket and bought tickets. The first flight to Haneda was cancelled, so we had to rebook to go to Narita.��We left on Monday, July 6, from New York. Terminal 7 at JFK (photo to the right) was empty with only one of the many shops open. I think there were only four flights leaving that day from the terminal. We flew ANA to Narita, and they boarded us in groups to avoid too much mixing. Still,��probably only a third of the seats were occupied, even in economy. So whether this was intentional or not, social distancing was rather easy. We wiped everything down, wore masks, used hand sanitizer constantly, and cut down on the trips to the bathroom. Everyone wore��masks, but a few wore hazmat suits and/or protective shields or goggles. We debated whether to eat the inflight food, but decided it wasn���t different from eating the food we���ve had delivered. The only problem is I kept on forgetting to put my mask back on after eating. It was a good flight, but it was hard to sleep so I watched a bunch of movies (more on that later). The flight arrived early probably because there is less international travel.

Japanese Film and the COVID Pandemic���Remotely in Space and Time

When there is a world historical event, it is best to write down your experiences, if only to help you remember. As that time becomes more remote, it can become more difficult to access. Perhaps writing about the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of Japanese media studies can help me���and maybe others���connect to that time at some future date.

The remoteness is not only temporal. It was probably appropriate that I experienced the novel coronavirus���s affect on the Japanese film and TV industries remotely in space. Still teaching at Yale, I could only read about the closings of theaters and the cessation of filming through news articles and postings on social media. There were ways of watching Japanese television, so I could see how certain shows were changing production, but initially that was not the case with cinema.

Theater closings occurred much sooner in Connecticut than in Japan, with the governor issuing the order on 16 March 2020. There was thus a strange disconnect between what I was experiencing and what friends in Japan were writing about. Everything was closing down here, while Japanese colleagues were arguing that the ventilation in theaters was fine and patrons were safe with just masks and hand-sanitizer. It reminded me of the cultural valences of disease, as few tried to defend movie theater ventilation in the States���and few in the West advocated for face masks. Still, fears about the virus were already affecting movie attendance everywhere.

Obayashi Nobuhiko, a Movie Man

The film director Obayashi Nobuhiko passed away on April 10, succumbing to the cancer he had been��battling for several years. He was 82.

Here is a photo I love of him with my son Ian.

Obayashi-kantoku was a guest at Yale in the fall of 2015, coming with his wife and producer Kyoko and his daughter Chigumi. They even came to our home for dinner, so the news hits me not just as a loss for cinema, but as a personal loss as well. It is in part because of such a relationship that I know we lost not just a great film director, but also a great human being.

Obayashi-kantoku was an important part of my education as a viewer of Japanese film. Like many who hit their teens in the 1970s, when Japanese cinema was supposedly in decline and rarely presented abroad, I��grew up first watching the classics, from Kurosawa to Ozu to Oshima (with luckily a lot of Daiei jidaigeki thanks to the Thalia in NYC). The exceptions were the rare new films such as��The Family Game (which I wrote about here) and Tampopo that earned US releases in the eighties. When I was in Iowa, probably in 1988 or 1989, I finally got to see a series of contemporary Japanese films new to the USA that was touring the country. Included was Obayashi���s I Are You, You Am Me (Tenkosei, 1982), a gender-bending film with an affectionate concern for amateur moviemaking that stuck with me. When I��went to Japan in 1992 (and stayed��there for about eleven years), one of the things I caught in the first year��was a series of the best films of the previous year at the Bungeiza in Ikebukuro. There I saw The Rocking Horsemen (Seishun dendekedekedeke, 1992), which remains��one of my favorite Obayashi films. Obayashi-kantoku, in a sense, was a core part of my introduction to��contemporary Japanese cinema.

Japanese Film Materials in the Time of Quarantine

Yale has moved all its classes online and the governor of Connecticut has asked residents to stay at home if at all possible. The Yale libraries are closed and even I cannot use my office anymore. I want to get out, just like my house-bound cat Hanzo (pictured). But we all need to stay safe.

This has also created problems for my Japanese film historiography course this term. The final assignment was centered on students engaging with primary archival materials, which are now out of reach. At the same time, I have heard of a number of colleagues at other institutions asking how they can continue teaching a Japanese film course when there is limited access to materials.��

If you are fortunate enough to have a library that offers journals, e-books, and even streaming services like Kanopy and Alexander Street, accessible off-site through VPN, there is still much you can do at home. Some libraries will have digital subscriptions to Japanese newspapers and magazines, and you can always get a subscription to the Criterion Channel, Netflix, or Hulu (Mubi, which has a few Japanese films viewable this month, is promoting a ���3-months-for-$1��� sale). But if you are not so fortunate���or are seeking film-related print materials in Japanese���you���re going to have a harder time.