Search results
In contrast to the canonical history of cinema and film theory, often dominated by academic texts and Western and/or male voices, this article presents a casual conversation held in 1961 between four of the most influential women in the post-war Japanese film industry: Kawakita Kashiko,,Yamamoto Kyōko, Tanaka Kinuyo and Takamine Hideko. As they openly discuss their gendered experience in production, promotion, distribution and criticism, their thoughts shed light on the wide range of opportunities available to women in filmmaking, but also on the professional constraints,and concerns which they felt came along with their gender. Their conversation reveals how they measured themselves and their national industry in relation to the West; at times unaware of their pioneer role in world cinema. This piece of self-reflexive criticism contributes to existing research on both womens filmmaking and the industry of Japanese cinema, and invites us to reconsider non-hegemonic film thinking practices and voices.
The purpose of this article is to analyse the ambivalent politics of looking and discourses of gender, class and sexuality in a variety of 1960s–70s Japanese studio-made exploitation films, known as sukeban films. It first contextualises their production within a transnational and domestic shift emphasising sex and violence in film and popular culture. The article then highlights instances where the visual, narrative and discursive articulation of non-conforming femininities flips the gendered power balance, as in the sketches that satirise men’s sexual fetishes for girls. In conclusion, it suggests to understand the filmic construction of young women’s agency, and their bodily and sexual performance, in terms of a recurring modus operandi of Japanese media that ambivalently panders to and co-constitutes youth phenomena.
Since the 1970s, many academics and teachers have been taking the study of film out of Film Studies by producing curricula and critical literature hostile to notions of artistic endeavour and aesthetic value. Montage simply is the joining together of different elements of film in a variety of ways, between shots, within them, between sequences, within these. This book offers specific experiences of montage. Though there are clusters of experiences and practices that films share in common, each film is specific to itself. The book is led by that specificity towards these clusters and away from them then back to the films once more. Eadwaerd Muybridge's studies of human and animal locomotion consisted of photographed plates that reproduced bodies in movement in a sequence of still photographs he published in 1887. These reproductions, though sequential, were composed of intermittent, discontinuous immobile units, in effect, a linked series of snapshots. The game in
2 Nihonjinron, women, horror: post-war national identity and the spirit of subaltern vengeance in Ringu and The Ring Over the past fifteen years, as a post-9/11 United States has sought to increase its international influence over the strategically significant nations of Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and North Korea, there has been an exponential increase in both the consumption of Japanese horror films and in American remakes of Japanese horror for an English-speaking international audience.1 Most commercially successful and, it seems, culturally resonant, has been
contemporary artists who were active in conceptual art and neo-Dadaist circles at that time. The programme also included the work of John Cage, and caused the first tremors of so-called ‘Cage-Shock’ to reverberate through Japan’s avant-garde community. Ono had initially met Cage in New York, through her marriage to Toshi Ichiyanagi (one of his former students), and he had attended the Chambers Street ‘loft concerts’ she had organised with La Monte Young. Other associates of Cage who performed in that 1962–64 season at SAC included David Tudor, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper
One of the most distinctive traits of Korean film is its strong political nature. Since its introduction in 1903, film in Korea has always been under governmental censorship. During the Japanese colonial period (1910–45), the government severely suppressed those films that would inspire anti-colonial sentiments among the Korean audience. On the other hand, the colonial government employed film as a
was the stereotyping of the Italian matriarchy or the representation of Maiorca that brought about the ban. One would have expected the Japanese to be far more offended by the quite gratuitous stereotyping they are subjected to in the last, fateful, free-diving competition, but the film was quite a hit there (half a million entries). Mayol is credited as part of the team of scriptwriters who adapted Besson’s original idea
Introduction On 15 August 1945, shortly after the cataclysmic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Emperor Hirohito took to the radio waves to acknowledge in highly circumspect courtly language that the ‘war situation’ had developed ‘not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.’ In order to avoid what he termed ‘the total extinction of human civilisation,’ Hirohito proclaimed to a weeping public that Japan would have to ‘endure the unendurable and suffer the un-sufferable’ by accepting the nation’s unconditional surrender to Allied, specifically American, forces.1 In
’être une oeuvre scandaleuse. La publicité a évidemment insisté sur I’image du couple, sur la relation entre un homme de couleur jaune et une femme blanche’ (Leutrat 1994 : 37). 2 On the response in Japan, Robert Jay Lifton reports: ‘The film inevitably aroused opposition in Hiroshima, even while being made, because some hïbakusha [Hiroshima survivors] felt that its sensuality was an insult to the A-bomb dead’ (Lifton 1967
death in battle. These cultural aspects, taken together with the stereotyped Asiatic appearance of Klingons (particularly in the early series) provoke an inevitable comparison between them and America’s foes of the Pacific War, the Japanese. The characteristics ascribed to the Klingons correspond to the simplification and negativity of wartime Japanese stereotypes, with the addition (in the earlier series) of a caricatured oriental inscrutability. The samurai mentality of the Klingons elevates self-sacrifice and cheapens the ‘life’ which the Federation is committed to