Aoyama Shinji���s ���Nouvelle Vague Manifesto��� Revisited

I am back at Yale after a summer in Japan, and one of the pleasant surprises awaiting me when I returned was a copy of issue 6 of the magazine Nang. Nang is a magazine focused on Asian cinema that is only available on paper in expertly designed printed editions. Published twice a year by editor-in-chief Davide Cazzaro, it will continue for a total of ten issues, with each issue focused on a theme and supervised by a guest editor. Issue 6 was dedicated to the subject of�����Manifestos��� and was guest edited by Darcy Paquet.

I contributed to the issue through the republication of my English translation of Aoyama Shinji���s 1997�����Nouvelle Vague Manifesto; Or, How I Became a Disciple of Philippe Garrel.��� I had previously published that online in Adrian Martin���s journal��Lola, where you can still read it here. I had supplied an introduction to that��manifesto (seen here), one that worked a lot off of my essay on Aoyama in Yvonne Tasker���s Fifty Contemporary Film Directors (I have posted that on the��Yale repository here). For Nang, Darcy was hoping that several of the persons involved could revisit the��manifesto from today���s perspective, but Aoyama-san was just too busy to write something, and I felt someone else should offer a more novel view. So I just provided a new one-page introduction, and my former student Ryan Cook of Emory wrote up a quite interesting analysis that��reconsiders Aoyama���s relation to Hasumi Shigehiko.��