Aaron Gerow's Blog, page 5

Conversations in Silence 5: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

As you might remember, last year I did a series of silent film events at Haremame, the event space in Daikanyama, in conjunction with the��benshi Kataoka Ichiro and the musician Kikuchi Naruyoshi. We called the series�����Conversations in Silence,��� and I mainly participated by introducing the film and leading the after-film discussion. The first one (which I wrote about here) featured Page of Madness,��and the second one centered on Fukujuso (written about here). We three also did an event on Lotte Reiniger���s The Adventures of Prince Achmed, after which I returned to the States. While I was gone, Kataoka-san and Kikuchi-san did a fourth Conversations in Silence on Sergei Eisenstein���s Battleship Potemkin, with Iwamoto Kenji, my��coeditor on the Nihon��sense eiga ronshu.��

Well, I���m back in Japan and I wanted to let you know that we will do the fifth edition of Conversations in Silence next week, on Monday June 17, 2019. We will be showing The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (using a DVD of a restored version). The three amigos have reunited, with��Karaoke��performing the benshi, Kikuchi deejaying music, and little ol' me hanging around to provide commentary. The film was quite influential worldwide, particular in Japan, providing one inspiration for A Page of Madness (as I discussed in my book on the film). Tokugawa Musei's narration of Caligari was quite famous, and Kyoko Omori at Hamilton has made available online a portion of a recording of Musei���s benshi narration, taken during a special revival some thirty years late (you can check it out here). So I am dying to see how Kataoka-san does it, and given how Kikuchi-san handled Page of Madness last year, this promises to be another very creative mix of music.��

Alexander Sokurov, The Sun, and Representing the Japanese Emperor

A year and a half ago, on the occasion of the Nichigei Film Festival��which as focused on the representation of the Japanese emperor in film (see my writeup here), I talked a bit on this blog about the difficulty of representing the Japanese emperor on film. This did not mean the emperor was never represented, but even a 1957 feature film like The Solitary One, which I discussed in the writeup, only showed the Crown Prince (later the��Heisei Emperor) metonymically though his voice or hands. The emperor became a cinematic problem, posing questions as to how the gaze at the emperor (by characters, by the camera) can be constructed, and, in some cases, how the emperor��himself can gaze. Can the emperor, for instance, be made the subject of a point of view shot, which essentially inserts the spectator���s gaze in his, and if so, how?

I had the opportunity to consider this when Alexander Sokurov made the film The Sun (Solntse, 2005) about Hirohito in the last days of WWII, with Issey Ogata playing the emperor. The right wing made threats against the film, but it ended up screening successfully in Japan. An�����official book��� was produced, and I was asked to contribute an essay. I introduced one of our Yale students at the time, Jeremi Szaniawski, who also contributed a piece (he later published his dissertation on Sokurov as The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov). Since the volume was in Japanese, I tried to save myself some time by��writing the article in English and having another Yale student, Naoki Yamamoto, translate it. (It���s unfortunately another one of my Japanese articles I never got around to publishing in English, a few of which I have begun uploading on to the Yale repository, with English versions when available, such as my 1994 article on Suzuki Seijun���s��firing from Nikkatsu and my best 30 Japanese films of 1989���1997.)

Of Sea and Soil: The Cinema of Tsuchimoto Noriaki and Ogawa Shinsuke

As I mentioned in my last post, I went to Ghent in Belgium at the beginning of April to participate in the Courtisane Festival 2019. The Festival was holding a mini-retrospective of the documentaries of��Tsuchimoto Noriaki and I was invited to give a talk, entitled�����Tsuchimoto Noriaki, Minamata, and Japanese Documentary," and introduce a couple of his films. It was a wonderful festival���small but focused���and I was thrilled to see that most of the Tsuchimoto films were practically sold out. It was also a pleasure to see Paolo Rocha���s��A Ilha de Moraes (1984),��an intriguing documentary by the Portuguese director about the Portuguese writer and diplomat��Wenceslau de Moraes, who ended up living the last portion of his life in Japan.��

Courtisane also produced a catalog of the Tsuchimoto retrospective, in collaboration with��Cinematek in Brussels, which did an Ogawa Shinsuke retro. I contributed an essay to��Of Sea and Soil: The Cinema of Tsuchimoto Noriaki and Ogawa Shinsuke��entitled�����Tsuchimoto��Noriaki and Environment in Documentary Film,��� which attempts to consider how Tsuchimoto���s environmentalism is based not simply in his film content but also his film form.��

Tsuchimoto Noriaki at Courtisane

Just a quick note, but I will be traveling to Ghent in Belgium this week to participate in Courtisane Festival 2019. This year���s film festival will feature the sidebar�����Artist in Focus: Tsuchimoto Noriaki��� and I have been invited to give a talk on Tsuchimoto and the background to his films. The Festival will show seven of Tsuchimoto���s works:

An Engineer���s AssistantOn the RoadExchange Student Chua Swee-LinPrehistory of the PartisansMinamata: The Victims and Their WorldThe Shiranui SeaUmitori���The Stolen Sea at the Shimokita Peninsula��

My talk will be on Saturday, April 6, at 15:00 in the Paddenhoek. The page on the retrospective is here.��

In addition to talking about Tsuchimoto, Minamata, Iwanami, and his approach to documentary, using several clips from his films, I will introduce the Tsuchimoto Collection, his personal papers that have been donated to Yale. Not just their contents, but the Collection itself I think speaks to important aspects of his character and approach to cinema.��

If you are in Belgium, come and say hello. If not, stay tuned for future announcements about Tsuchimoto related events and developments.

Best 30 Japanese Films���of 1989���1997

I���ve been uploading some of my old articles to the Yale repository, but most have been the ones in English. This time I decided to upload a rather unique piece I did in 1997.

As some of you know, I picked the best ten Japanese films of the year for the annual Eiga geijutsu poll for a number of years. But my first experience in producing a�����best��� list for publication was a few years before that in 1997, when the Japanese intellectual journal Yuriika (Eureka) asked me to produce a list for a special issue��devoted to the theme "Japanese Cinema: From Kitano Takeshi On." I was asked to write an article selecting the thirty best Japanese films made since Kitano Takeshi debuted as a director in 1989. The time span and the number of films was the editor���s choice, but the project intrigued me as an assertion not only that a period of cinema began in 1989, but also that the period was��significantly defined by Kitano. I of course��cited that in my book on him.

I was also intrigued by the possibility of selecting what is�����the best.��� Yes, there was a tiny bit of excitement over participating in the process of canon formation (though frankly I don���t think anyone has ever cited this list as a canon former), but I was more enthusiastic about being able to support some excellent films, including a few virtually unknown��works. More importantly,��this was an opportunity for a precocious young scholar to interrogate the concept of the�����best��� list itself.��In the end, I selected films that themselves questioned the categories assumed by the list itself, particularly the notions of�����Japan��� and�����cinema.�����

Kinema Club XVIII: Gender and Sexuality in Japanese Cinema

Our big Japanese film event at Yale this academic year is the Kinema Club conference, which is taking place February 22-24, 2019. As some of you know, Kinema Club has been around for over twenty years, serving as an informal network of those interested in Japanese film and media, including academics and non-academics. In the early years, it was primarily a means for exchanging information, but we soon took advantage of the internet and started a website at Ohio State University and began the KineJapan mailing list. We moved the website to Yale a few years ago (you can see it here), and last year moved the mail server for KineJapan to Yale as well. In the age of many other social media options, the old-fashioned mailing list is still very strong at KineJapan. You are welcome to subscribe here.

Although Kinema Club has no officers, no constitution, or membership fees, it has successfully put on conferences nearly every year in places ranging from Japan, the USA, Germany, Austria, and the UK. As a somewhat anarchistic organization, it has largely depended on a local institution or group of people to host the conference���and then everyone tries to go. Yale has hosted the event twice before: Kinema Club VII in 2006 (with Kurosawa Kiyoshi as a guest) and Kinema Club XII in 2013. Given Kinema Club���s anarchic nature, the ��formats of the conferences have varied, from full-fledged conferences with papers read to small workshops where the papers are distributed beforehand and participants only discuss them (that was what KC XII was like).��

Repetition and Rupture in the Films of Kawase Naomi

I hope everyone has been enjoying the new year of 2019. As some of you have noticed, I��have tried to use the holiday break to update Tangemania, for instance by starting a new page on my Journal Articles��(I���m not sure why I didn���t do that before), as well as adding more links on the site to my articles available on the Yale repository.

In the midst of doing that, I realized that I had some time ago uploaded my article on the film director and documentarist Kawase Naomi to the repository without announcing it here. Kawase-san and I go back a ways. I was one of the first to program her works at an international film festival (the New Asian Currents program of the 1995 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival), and also interviewed her in 2000 for the YIDFF periodical, Documentary Box (see the interview here). We were close enough that my wife and I had her over for dinner at our house, and when the Infinity Film Festival in Italy did one of the first retrospectives of her work in Europe in 2002, I was invited as the outside expert, and did a day-long workshop with her. I sadly have not had much contact with her in the last decade, and some people I know grumble that as she has grown famous she has distanced herself from the people who helped her get started, but I still eagerly await her new films, even as I remain occasionally critical of them (like with Kitano, I tend to be a fan of the early work).��

Rediscovering Classical Japanese Film Theory: An Anthology

It���s finally out!

As many of you know, Markus Nornes and I have been working on an anthology of Japanese film theory for over a decade. The English one is still in the works, but the first volume of the Japanese edition is finally out from Yumani Shobo under the title��Nihon senzen eigaronshu: Eiga riron no saihakken. The title in English is Rediscovering Classical Japanese Film Theory: An Anthology.

It is really the first of its kind even in Japan. There have been collections of writings on film in Japan, but��whenever��there is a collection of�����film theory��� (eiga riron), almost all the authors are foreign. It is as if�����film theory��� did not or does not exist in Japan. This is a problem I have called the�����theory complex�����in a previous article (available here).��

There is and has been, however, a plethora of fascinating and stimulating writing about the nature of cinema���what anyone would call�����theory������in Japan since the first years of cinema, some of which I have been introducing for over two decades, starting with the work of Gonda Yasunosuke (an example is here). Others have been investigating Japanese film theory as well, and so Markus and I started putting together a table of contents for what could become an anthology of the more interesting theoretical pieces on Japan. The themed issue of the Review of Japanese Culture and Society I edited in 2010 was a test run of such an anthology.��

A Prehistory of Japanese Sci-Fi and Fantasy Cinema

Continuing my project of uploading old articles onto the Yale repository, I recently uploaded a more recent piece on the history of Japanese science fiction and fantasy films in the prewar era. Mark Schilling, who has programmed several��marvelous retrospectives at the Udine Far East Film Festival, put together a series for the 2016 edition entitled�����Beyond Godzilla: Alternative Futures and Fantasies in Japanese Cinema��� to give audiences a sense of how rich Japanese��sci-fi and fantasy film is beyond the big green monster. He kindly asked me to pen a piece on prewar works for the catalog of the retrospective.

Prewar Japanese science fiction and fantasy film remains relatively��unknown, primarily because not too many films were made and few prints have survived. As I argue in the piece, against a film culture that valorized realism, such works were often confined to the margins of the industry, with movies like the��legendary King Kong Appears in Edo (1938; an ad for the film is on the right) or The Steel Man (1938; featuring samurai battling a robot) mostly being produced by third-rung studios.��Toho was the exception, making for instance the time-slip film Shimizu Harbor, Part II (1940) or Son Goku (1940), and��thus helping lay the foundations for Godzilla and postwar tokusatsu films. Son Goku was Tsuburaya Eiji���s first SFX flick for Toho, so I couldn���t help but talk about his beginnings as a camera assistant on Page of Madness (1926), one of prewar Japan���s most complex and inventive films in terms of camera effects. (An introduction to my book on the film is here.)

An Old and New Interview with Hara Kazuo

Sorry for the paucity of posts. After a year in Japan, I have returned to Yale and been bombarded with work. One of my last gigs in Japan, however, was a conversation on 18 August 2018 with the documentarist Hara��Kazuo after a screening of his��A Dedicated Life (Zenshin sh��setsuka, 1994), which was shown as part of a retrospective of his work at Uplink in Shibuya (an image of the flyer is on the right). It was the first time I had done an event with Hara-san since the Berkeley conference in May 2009 dedicated to him. The theater was basically full and we had a great conversation.

The talk centered on a number of interesting connections. On a personal side, A Dedicated Life recalled my first interview with Hara-san back in 1993 for Documentary Box, the journal of the Yamagata Film Festival that I later edited for a couple of years. In it, he talked about the difficulty of filming a subject who was gradually fading away in front of his eyes. In this case, it was the novelist Inoue Mitsuharu, whom Hara started filming only to find out he had cancer. Inoue was one of those nonconformist characters Hara likes to focus on like Okuzaki Kenzo of Emperor���s Naked Army Marches On��(1987) fame, one who stand out in society. Inoue was not only a forceful presence, who performs his idiosyncrasy, but also a womanizer. Yet his body slowly wears away on screen. Hara-san talked about the difficulty of filming such a disappearing subject.