Aaron Gerow's Blog, page 9
April 30, 2016
War and Nationalism in Recent Japanese Cinema: Yamato and Divided Lenses
Way back in December 2008, I took part in an excellent conference��at Stanford��on war and memory in East Asian cinema. The talk I delivered was on Yamato (Otokotachi no Yamato, 2005), Sato Jun���ya���s box office hit��that was produced by the maverick Kadokawa Haruki about the ill-fated battleship Yamato. Taking into consideration not only the long history of films on the Yamato, but also some contemporary kamikaze war films, I argued that the film is not just reworking wartime memory for the sake present-day historical revisionism towards WWII, but that it is utilizing its own depiction��of violence to create a kind of�����vicarious trauma��� whose main effect is a forgetting of the postwar and its own traumatic history of the Cold War.
The plan even then was to turn the conference into an anthology, but for various reasons, the plan dragged on. When it was clear the anthology was not going to appear very soon, I got permission to publish a very��abridged version of my piece in Japan Focus under the title, "War and Nationalism in Yamato: Trauma and Forgetting the Postwar.��� It then took about another five years for the anthology to come out, but it finally has, and it looks great. Here���s��the reference for my piece:
February 29, 2016
Donald Richie and Transnational Japanese Cinema
Donald Richie, one of the most important introducers of Japan and its cinema, passed away about this time three years ago. The following July, Iwamoto Kenji hosted a symposium on Donald at Waseda University. I talked about the famous Japanese film history he produced��with Joseph Anderson, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry. While noting its problems, especially its��orientalism and Cold War worldview, I also pointed out how its own stance of being other to Japanese film culture enabled it to provide a depiction of that culture,��especially of such seemingly innocuous phenomena as the state of an average movie theater, that Japanese sources could not offer. In the end, I argued that, while Richie himself was not innocent of othering Japan, his decision to himself remain other to Japan���for instance, refusing to assimilate���was itself often productive.
That essay, plus some others presented that day, have been combined with many other articles (most composed as part of a series of workshops Iwamoto was holding), to create the anthology:��
December 30, 2015
Aoyama Shinji���s ���Nouvelle Vague Manifesto��� and Japanese Film Theory
An English translation I did of one of the Japanese film director Aoyama Shinji���s major writings on film, "Nouvelle Vague Manifesto;��or, How I Became a Disciple of Philippe Garrel,��� has finally appeared in print in the sixth issue of LOLA, the online film journal edited by Adrian Martin and Girish Shambu.
Aoyama Shinji,��"Nouvelle Vague Manifesto;��or, How I Became a Disciple of Philippe Garrel,��� LOLA 6 (December 2015).The article is accompanied by a short introduction I penned that explains the manifesto���s basic points and its historical place.��
I want to thank Aoyama for not only allowing me to publish this, but also for helping me find the citations for the many quotations in the piece. I also need to thank Adrian and Girish for publishing this. I did the translation years ago���and Adrian expressed interest in it years ago���so I apologize for the delay, even if some of the time taken was necessary.
Aoyama���s manifesto was published in 1997, right when he debuted as a director, and represents his thoughts on his positionality and future direction. While the manifesto never became the defining document of an organized film movement, I argue that it helps us understand not only Aoyama���s cinema, but also an in certain ways representative intervention in the cinema world at the time. As such, it can help us comprehend one definition of a politics of film style (the use of the long take, the rejection of image as representation, etc.) and how that relates to the politics of post Cold War Japan (the problem of the individual, the problem of the Other), especially in contrast to the political modernism of the 1960s New Wave. Along with Aoyama���s later essay, ���The Geography of Cinema��� (Eiga no chirigaku), published in his essay collection Ware eiga o hakkenseri (Seidosha, 2001), the manifesto is one of the major theoretical contributions of the time. I have used it not only in my article on Aoyama in Yvonne Tasker���s Fifty Contemporary Film Directors (Routledge, 2010), but also in my book on Kitano Takeshi.
November 19, 2015
Obayashi Nobuhiko Retrospective at the Japan Society
Our Yale��event��with the great director Obayashi Nobuhiko ended with considerable success. We can���t get the crowds of New York or Boston, but we had some deep discussions about such��topics ad Ozu���s editing, 3.11, and experimental film. Obayashi-kantoku is very much the 1960s gentleman, his wife and producer Kyoko the kindest of ladies, and their daughter Chigumi a pillar of support.
We had Obayashi and his family over to our house for dinner while they were here. There were lots of entertaining stories (including one about Kadokawa Haruki) and a bit of wisdom, but I could also see how he could be a great teacher or mentor. My son showed him the film he made in class in the spring. Not just focusing on how good the film was or not, Obayashi told him that amateur films are as equally cinema as professional films. The crucial thing is to know--and positively use--one's limitations and to have control over the film, giving it unity. Thus if my son had to play 5 or 6 parts out of necessity, the important thing is for the film to be conscious of that and use it to its benefit. If an amateur film does that, it is just as much cinema as any professional film is.��Obayashi then used my son���s film as example in the talk session the next day.
November 4, 2015
A Movie: The Cinema of Obayashi Nobuhiko ��� at Yale
A Movie: The Cinema of Obayashi Nobuhiko
One of the last major Japanese directors active since the 1960s, Obayashi Nobuhiko��is doing a four-city tour of the East Coast, with Yale as the first stop. Little known outside of Japan, he gained a following in America with the DVD release of his debut feature film House, but our Yale event will present his unknown sides through screenings of three of his films and separate informal talk sessions. A pioneer of experimental film in Japan, Obayashi continued to stun audiences with his stylistic flourishes even as he became one of the hit-makers if the 1980s and 1990s. A wonderful study in contrast, he combined pop culture with literary sensibility, visual innovation with a love for classical Japanese film, and nostalgia with a celebration of cinematic artifice, a stance evident in the words ���A Movie��� he attaches to many of his films.��
Friday, November 13, 2015
12:00 pm, Sterling Memorial Library Room 218
Talk Session (with Interpreter) and Lunch��
RSVP to Suzette Benitez, CEAS:��suzette.benitez@yale.edu
7:00 pm, Whitney Humanities Center, Auditorium��
I Are You, You Am Me ��� ���Tenk��sei��� [a.k.a. Exchange Student] (Japan, 1982) 112 min., 35 mm
Complexe (Japan, 1964) 14 min., 16 mm
Director ��bayashi Nobuhiko
Introduced and followed by a Q&A with the director
(Council on East Asian Studies and Films at the Whitney, supported by the Barbakow Fund for Innovative Film Programs at Yale)
Saturday, November 14, 2015
12:00 pm, Sterling Memorial Library Room 218
Talk Session (in Japanese) and Lunch��
RSVP to Suzette Benitez, CEAS:��suzette.benitez@yale.edu
7 pm, Whitney Humanities Center, Auditorium
The Rocking Horsemen ��� ���Seishun dendekedekedeke��� (Japan, 1992) 135 min., 35 mm
Director ��bayashi Nobuhiko
Introduced and followed by a Q&A with the director
(Council on East Asian Studies and Films at the Whitney, supported by the Barbakow Fund for Innovative Film Programs at Yale)
Film synopses:��
September 27, 2015
The Pamphlet: Lone Wolves and Stray Dogs: The Japanese Crime Film
As I��mentioned before, we at Yale have done a couple of Japanese film series in collaboration with the��National Film Center��of the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. One of the conditions of the collaboration is that we produce something physical as a record of the event. We did that with our first series, The Sword and The Screen: The Japanese Period Film 1915-1960 (which took place in January and February 2012), and then used that experience to create an even longer pamphlet for our second series with the NFC: Lone Wolves and Stray Dogs: The Japanese Crime Film, 1931-1969.��
It was again a wonderful project for the grad students doing East Asian film and media at Yale, who helped translate articles, write commentaries on the films being shown, and layout and edit the pamphlet. Rea Amit, Samuel Malissa, Noriko Morisue, Hsin-Huan Peng, Stephen Poland, Grace Ting, Takuya Tsunoda, Justine Wiesinger, and Young Yi all did splendid work.
We also had our symposium guests, Yomota Inuhiko, J�� ��sawa, and Phil Kaffen, compose original and quite stimulating articles for the pamphlet. I added an introduction.��
August 29, 2015
Shinozaki Makoto���s Sharing and Cinema after 3.11
As I have argued many times before (for instance, in my writings on Kitano Takeshi, on Aoyama Shinji, or for the Japan Foundation), one of central problematics of Japanese cinema of the last two decades has been how to represent the other. In some cases, this has involved representing Japan���s others, especially minorities within the country, but on a more basic level, this has extended to questioning the ability of cinema to represent other individuals. This, I argue, has led many filmmakers of the 1990s to pursue a ���detached style��� that refrained from using close ups or analytical editing as means of enabling spectators to ���know��� what characters are thinking and feeling.
This problematic has seemingly declined in importance as new filmmakers have appeared and television���which in Japan has long offered pre-digested visions of the world, as Abe Kasho has argued in��Beat Takeshi vs. Kitano Takeshi���has come to dominate film production. But the triple disaster of March 11, 2011, may have revived it in the form of the question of how to understand those who did and still suffer.
July 31, 2015
The Sword and The Screen: The Japanese Period Film 1915-1960
In the past few years, we at Yale have done a couple of Japanese film series in collaboration with the National Film Center of the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. One of the conditions of the collaboration is that we produce something physical as a record of the event. So even though we did not include it in the budget for our first series, The Sword and The Screen: The Japanese Period Film 1915-1960 (which took place in January and February 2012), we created a quite nice pamphlet on our own.��
It was a great project for the grad students doing Japanese film at Yale, who helped translate articles, write commentaries on the films being shown, and layout and edit the pamphlet. Rea Amit, Ryan Cook, Samuel Good, Samuel Malissa, Stephen Poland, Grace Ting, and Takuya Tsunoda all did great work.
We also had our symposium guests, David Desser and Itakura Fumiaki, pen original and quite stimulating articles for the pamphlet and I added an introduction.��
The result is actually a quite good resource on Japanese period films (chanbara or samurai movies), especially given the��lack of time and the make-shift nature of the project.��
March 30, 2015
Colonial Era Korean Cinema
Although my specialty is Japanese cinema, I teach and do research in many other fields, such as animation, television, comic books, or the Western. I also work on other Asian cinemas, but have not had much of an occasion to publish on them.
I am thus glad to report that I’ve finally published my first article on Korean cinema: a piece entitled “Colonial Era Korean Cinema and the Problem of Internalization” in the journal Trans-Humanities, published by Ewha Womens University (volume 1, number 1: pp. 27–46). The origins of this piece are in a talk I gave as part of a panel discussion called “Korea’s Rediscovered Colonial Films" at Harvard in December 2010, a great session organized by Carter Eckert that also featured John Dower, Michael Robinson, and Franziska Seraphim. I am thankful to Prof. Eckert for giving me the opportunity to talk about Korean film, as well as to Ewha, which let me expand on that talk for the conference "Korean Literature, Art, and Film from 1910 to 1945" held at Ewha in July 2014. Ewha invited us to submit to their journal, which I did, in part to support the growing relationship between Ewha and Yale. My colleague, John Treat, who helped organize the conference, also has a piece in the same issue: “Im Hwa Before and After Japan.”
February 28, 2015
Japanese Film Industry Statistics for 2014
Eiren (the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan) has again released the official statistics for the film industry in 2014. The Japanese summary is here; for English, you have to scroll down to the bottom of this table for the 2014 figures. Click here to see the box office leaders in English.
Things have improved slightly from 2014. The total BO rose 6.6%, and total attendance 3.4%. The market share for Japanese films went down from 60.6% to 58.3%, largely due to the immense success of Frozen (which pulled in 25.8 billion yen), but this is the seventh consecutive year the domestic films have beat the foreign ones. The number of screens increased slightly to 3364, with the percentage of those screens being in multiplexes reaching a record 86.5% (single screen theaters, such as mini-theaters, are really dying out). The average ticket price rose to 1246 yen, the highest amount ever (it had not risen over 1260 since 2010). Perhaps Abe's inflationary policies are reaching the movie theaters.
