Panels Schedule
Friday (Michigan League)
9:00 - 11:00am First Frame
Panel 1: Continuing Technologies
Vandenberg Room
The Transcriptive Apparatus: Imamura Taihei on
Animation and Documentary
Thomas Lamarre, McGill University
Film as fukusei geijutsu: social psychology at the movies
in 1950s Japan
Michael Raine, University of Western Ontario
Written Through an Anamorphic Lens: Japanese Critical
Discourse of Widescreen Cinema
Namhee Han, University of Chicago
Maeda Ai’s Cinematic Narratology
Takushi Odagiri, Duke University
Panel 2: Laughing/Crying
Hussey Room
The State of “Displacement”: History of Geopolitical States
in North East Asian Film Studies
Misono Ryoko, Waseda University
The Wound and the Knife : The Affective-Performative
and the Queer Body in Matsumoto Toshio’s Funeral
Parade of Roses
Livia Monnet, University of Montreal
Disciplining Laughter: The North Korean Theory of the
Comic and the Emergence of Film Comedy in the 1960s
Dima David Mironenko-Hubbs, Harvard University
Light Touches that Can Be Heavy: Sang Hu, Lubitsch and
Remaking of Melodramatic Realism
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Adrian Song Xiang, University of Chicago
11:00am - 1:00pm Second Frame
Panel 1: Politicizing Theory/Theorizing Politics
Vandenberg Room
A Condition of Theory: Im Hwa and (Im)Possibility of Film
Theory in Colonial Korea
Irhe Sohn, University of Michigan
Enlightenment Modality and/as Film Theory: The Politics
of Aesthetics in Colonial and Cold War Koreas
Steven Chung, Princeton University
The Aesthetic Education of the Masses: Chinese Film
Criticism from Schiller to Socialist Realism
Hongwei Chen, University of Minnesota
Panel 2: Translating Theory
Hussey Room
A Theory on the Desk? or A Theory of Yearning?
Kim Soyoung, Korean National University of the Arts
A Layman’s Movie Review: Lu Xun as a Translator,
Cultural Critic, and Semicolonial Reader
Jessica Ka Yee Chan, Macalester College
Film Theory in Translation: The Pure Film Movement and
Japanese Film Style
Laura Lee, University of Chicago
The Neglected Tradition of Phenomenology in Japanese
Film Theory
Naoki Yamamoto, Yale University
3:00-5:00pm Third Frame
Panel 1: Essence of Cinema
Vandenberg Room
Hani Susumu’s Theory of Performance and the Place for
Staged Liberation
Justin Jesty, University of Washington
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Kim Jong Il’s On the Art of the Cinema and the “Cinematic
State”
Travis Workman, University of Minnesota
An Alternative Mode of Realism?: Theoretical Debates on
Hong Kong Cantonese Cinema, 1960-82
Victor Fan, McGill University
The Importance of Realism in the Development of
Cinematic Modernization: The Example of Taiwanese New
Cinema
Chang-Min Yu, Tainan National University of the Arts,
and Duncan McColl Chesney, National Taiwan University
Panel 2: Grounding Theory: Space, Landscapes, and the State
Hussey Room
Trans-media Criticism and the Revolt Against
“Landscape” in 1970s Japanese Visual Media
Franz Prichard, Harvard University
Theorizing Urban/Rural Representations and Practices in
Chinese-Language National Cinema Studies
Dennis Lo, UCLA
Making the Cinema-State through On the Art of the Cinema
(a.k.a
Yongwhayesulron) by Kim Jong Il
Kim Sunah, Dankook University
Panel 3: The Soviet Connection
Michigan Room
Making a National Film by Stateless People: the
Discourses of KAPF’s Cinema Movement in Colonial Korea
Kim Chung-kang, Hanyang University
Liu Na’ou, City Symphony, and
Transcultural/Transmedial Film Aesthetics in 1930s
Shanghai
Ling Zhang, University of Chicago
Haiku and Montage 2.0: Terada Torahiko’s Writings on
Linked Poetry and Cinematic Montage”
William O. Gardner, Swarthmore College
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Saturday (Michigan Union)
9:00 - 11:00am Fourth Frame
Panel 1: Boundaries of the National
Pond Room
Film Theory on the Ground: Tsurumi Shunsuke and the
Postwar Discourse on Mass Culture in Japan
Junko Yamazaki, University of Chicago
Cinema of the Oppressed: Minjung Film Theory and
Filmmaking in the 1980s South Korea
Nam Lee, Chapman University
Vernacular Queer Aesthetics in Taiwan Cinema
Kai-man Chang, Tulane University
Panel 2: Intermedia Theory: Lost & Found
Wolverine Room
Cinema and Mechanization: Staging R.U.R. (Rossum’s
Universal Robots) in Japan
Diane Wei Lewis, Meiji Gakuin University
Expanded Film Theory: Cinema, Graphic Design, and
Architecture
Yuriko Furuhata, McGill University
Intāmedia: Early Developments in the Theorization of
Intermediality in Japan
Julian Ross University of Leeds
Media Theory in Japan: the Ensenzberger Moment
Miryam Sas, University of California, Berkeley
11:00am - 1:00pm Fifth Frame
Panel 1: Claiming Realism
Pond Room
What Was Cinema In China: Medium Specificity and Early
Chinese Film Theory
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Weihong Bao, University of California, Berkeley
Imamura Taihei’s Theory of Japanese Cinema
Rea Amit, Yale University
Beyond Sovereignty: Cinematic Responsibility
Phil Kaffen, University of Chicago
Apologia for Film—When Theory Meets Fei Mu
Yiman Wang, UC Santa Cruz
Panel 2: Sound and Screen
Wolverine Room
Early Japanese Filmmusic: Theoretical Musings about
Putting Music to Film
Johan Nordstrom, Waseda University
Early Film Music Theory in Japan: Nakane Hiroshi’s Tōkī
ongakuron
Kerim Yasar, Notre Dame University
The sound-making of Japanese silent movies
Shuhei Hosokawa, International Research Center for
Japanese Studies
The Master-slave Dialectic in Chinese Opera Film, 19541965: From "Filming Opera" to "Filmic Opera"
Zhang Yeqi, Nanjing University
From Shadowplay to Montage: The Introduction of Soviet
Film Theory to Early Chinese Cinema
Jinying Li, Oregon State University
2:30 - 4:30pm Sixth Frame
Panel 1 (Preconstituted Panel): Genealogies of Japanese Media
Theory: From the 1960’s to Zeronendai
Moderator: Marc Steinberg, Concordia University
Wolverine Room
Tadao Umesao’s Theory of Information Industry and
1960s Japanese Media Theory
Kadobayashi Takeshi, Kansai University
McLuhan in Japan: Media Theory and Advertising Practice
Marc Steinberg, Concordia University
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Girlscape: Consumer Demographics and Lifestyle
Environment in Early 1970s Japanese Media
Tomiko Yoda, Harvard University
Enter the Media: Ironical Theory as
Commodity/Resistance in 1980s Japan
Alexander Zahlten, Dongguk University / Harvard
University
Panel 2: Philias and Phobias and the Contexts of Theories
Pond Room
“Poisonous Weeds” and Cinephobia: Film Criticism as
Political Campaign in the Mao Era
Jie Li, Princeton University
The Janus-face of Critical Cinephilia: The Impacts of
Western Contemporary Film Theories on the 1990s’
Korean Film Sphere
Kim Jihoon, Nanyang Technological University, and Lee
Sun Joo, Chung-ang University
A Psychoanalytical Undercurrent in Japanese Film Theory
Maureen Turim, University of Florida
Chinese Cinephilia in the Internet Age
Yomi Braester, University of Washington
Panel 3: Starts and Fits
Anderson Room
Nation, Juche Film Theory, and Filmmaking in North
Korea
Dong Hoon Kim, University of Oregon
Im Hwa’s Thesis of “Transplantation through
Appreciation[鑑賞]”: the Origin of Korean Cinema
Baek Moonim, Yonsei University
Early Development of Film and Media Studies in Japan
Kukhee Choo, Tulane University
The Last Film Movement in Korea: Seoul Film Collective
and Korean Film Theory
Seung-hoon Jeong, New York University Abu Dhabi
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Abstracts
Friday (Michigan League)
9:00 - 11:00am First Frame
Panel 1: Continuing Technologies
The Transcriptive Apparatus: Imamura Taihei on Animation
and Documentary
Thomas Lamarre, McGill University
The film theory of Imamura Taihei presents a number of concerns
that make it worth careful reconsideration today. Although he tends
to separate animation and documentary separately in his writings,
he made both central to his film theory. As such, animation is not
relegated in advance to the realm of fantasy in contrast to the
reality of cinema, nor conversely is documentary seen entirely in
terms of objectivity in contrast to the subjectivity of fiction.
Imamura’s interest in both animation and documentary leads him
to ground his film theory in a variation on apparatus theory. Instead
of an emphasis on the monocular lens of the camera and regimes of
one-point perspective, however, Imamura stresses the descriptive,
explanatory, and even narrative force of the camera and
photography both in cartoons and documentaries. His is a theory of
the ‘transcriptive apparatus.’ While the prescriptive implications
and cultural nationalism of Imamura’s approach merit criticism, it
was via the apparatus that Imamura tried to make good on his third
concern, a Marxist concern to highlight the relation between cinema
and capitalism. Imamura thus highlights something that concerns
us today: what does it mean to seize an ‘apparatus of transcription’?
Film as fukusei geijutsu: social psychology at the movies in
1950s Japan
Michael Raine, University of Western Ontario
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This presentation excavates the importance of social psychology to
the turn to popular cinema by Japanese intellectuals in 1950s Japan.
Prewar film theory in Japan was dominated by German art theory
(eg. Konrad Lange's book Eiga, which declared that film could not
be an art because it was a technology of reproduction [fukusei
gijutsu]) and by political critiques of the capitalist structure of the
film industry (eg. Iwasaki Akira's Eiga to shihonshugi). After World
War 2, journals such as Shiso no kagaku became centers for a
different kind of argument: writers with experience in the US
academy such as Tsurumi Shunsuke, drawing on pragmatism, and
Minami Hiroshi, drawing on social psychology, agreed with the
Marxist critique of media concentration but insisted also on the
importance of reception and cultural practice to cinema as a "total
social fact." Social psychology then became to ground on which a
new generation paid new attention to Japanese popular cinema, in
public study groups that were even employed by studios to advise
on new youth problem films, and in journals such as Shin Nihon
Bungaku, Kiroku eiga, Eiga geijutsu, and Eiga hihyo, as well as Shiso
no kagaku itself. At its limit, writers such as Nakai Masakazu and
Abe Kobo argued that film's "reproduction" of the social world was
precisely the source of its "art," anticipating 1960s manifesto's in
declaring film a new "fukusei geijutsu."
Written Through an Anamorphic Lens: Japanese Critical
Discourse of Widescreen Cinema
Namhee Han, University of Chicago
Widescreen cinema opens up a critical space in which postwar
Japanese theoretical-historical ideas of cinema can be traced. Since
the first release in Japan at the end of 1953, widescreen cinema, as a
hub where technological, material, and critical practices of Japanese
film intersect, actively participated in rebuilding postwar film
culture until the mid-1970s. This paper argues for the significance
of widescreen cinema in examining the scope of Japanese film
theories. Widescreen cinema, as a new postwar medium, prompted
Japanese critics or filmmakers to contemplate the medium of
8
cinema from a fresh perspective and further explore its historical
and aesthetic implications. The paper first maps out the range of
Japanese widescreen film discourse, attempting an imaginative but
feasible dialogue with Sergei Eisenstein and André Bazin in relation
to their understandings of the cinematic screen and widescreen
cinema. It then explores how Japanese discussions move in a unique
direction that emphasizes the political meanings of the emergence
of widescreen cinema in the postwar period. The paper finds that
widescreen cinema is a lens through which Japanese ideas of
cinema and Japanese critical discourse were practiced, enriching
our understanding of cinema as an evolving medium.
Maeda Ai’s Cinematic Narratology
Takushi Odagiri, Duke University
I examine Maeda Ai’s narrative theories, in particular, his analysis of
cinematic narrative. I begin with Maeda’s last work, Bungaku
Tekusuto Nyûmon (Introduction to Literary Texts, 1988), which
clarifies his narratological “predicativism.” In “Structures of Stories”
and “Language and Body,” Maeda discusses cinema and novel as
different forms of mediality, leading to distinct conceptions of social
reality. Maeda characterizes modern literary texts as subject to two
kinds of narrative linearity: temporal and “chrono-logical.” He
considers chrono-logic linearity as related to modern readers’ habit
of introspection. I propose that what Maeda called “predicativelyunified” narratives are not linear in either of these senses, and are
thus free from the modern habit of introspection. I then investigate
Maeda’s discussion of synecdoche as an example of his predicatetheory, and propose that his theory resembles one of montage. I
argue that Maeda’s predicativism, if modified appropriately, can
more accurately represent certain aspects of cinematic narrative
than most subject-theories can. Underlying Maeda’s wide-ranging
scholarship is his continuing interest in visuality cultures since Edo
period. Thus, I examine his earlier writings on modern readers and
printing technology, situating his narratology in a larger historical
context, the one in which cinema is merely the latest component.
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Panel 2: Laughing/Crying
The State of “Displacement”: History of Geopolitical States in
North East Asian Film Studies
Misono Ryoko, Waseda University
Since the 1970s, the history of film theory has followed the same
track as the history of critical theory of humanities in general.
Whether it was literature, art history, or architecture, film theory
has been greatly influenced by and has influenced other areas in
such a way that it became the catalyst that engendered significant
outcomes. Since around 2000, however, a backrush of the
flourishing of critical theories is evident, as film studies were
gradually and narrowly categorized as Asian film history, South
East Asian film history, North East Asian film history, and so forth.
But its impact on film theory is not necessarily a bad one, especially
from the post-colonial critical studies viewpoint. For
“provincializing Europe,” it could lead to broader thinking about
political geography. To cultivate this geopolitical interest in the
history of East Asian film theory, I reexamine the concepts of
“hybridization” (Bhabha) and “colonial modernity” (Barlow) in the
background of Asian film histories. In particular, I focus on Japanese
melodrama films in the 1930s, when the political situation in Asia
was tense in the midst of upheaval, to reconsider the state of
“displacement,” which can be found anywhere in Asian film history.
The Wound and the Knife : The Affective-Performative and the
Queer Body in Matsumoto Toshio’s Funeral Parade of Roses
Livia Monnet, University of Montreal
Bara no sôretsu (Funeral Parade of Roses, 1969) is Matsumoto
Toshio’s début feature film. Like his second feature, Shura
(Pandemonium, 1971), it was co-produced by Matsumoto
Production and the Art Theatre Guild of Japan (ATG). It is one of the
most radical, challenging, and innovative films in Japanese
independent and avant-garde cinema. Building on Deleuze, Guattari,
Brian Massumi, and on Matsumoto’s own film theory, this
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presentation argues that Bara no sôretsu may be regarded as an
affective-performative event that forces spectators to think the
unthought or unthinkable, and which is expressed as a powerful
aesthetics of the false. The film’s affective performance also
radically undermines established conventions and understandings
of genre. The second part of the presentation moves into the terrain
of schizoanalytic film theory, and 1960s Japanese debates on
political cinema. I contend that Funeral Parade of Roses envisions
the queer body as a heterogenetic abstract machine; as an
allegorical time-image of “the fundamental fictionality” (kongenteki
kyokôsei) of art and existence alike (Matsumoto); and as a new
paradigm for the construction of subjectivity in avant-garde and
experimental cinema. Thus Matsumoto’s film (like his installations
from the late 1960s and early 1970s) embodies his conviction that
the aesthetico-political is immanent in the moving image, and that
identity is queer by definition. The killing of Oedipus envisioned in
the film announces the emergence of what Guattari would call a
new aesthetic paradigm.
Disciplining Laughter: The North Korean Theory of the Comic
and the Emergence of Film Comedy in the 1960s
Dima David Mironenko-Hubbs, Harvard University
Few scholars who work on North Korea have drawn a connection
between the object of their study and humor. Yet, since the late
1950s, North Korean filmmakers, film critics, and film officials had
been preoccupied with developing a new theory of the comic. The
project was closely related to a monumental effort on part of the
North Korean film industry to create a new film genre of what later
came to be known as "light comedy" (kyŏng hŭigŭk). Experiments
with creating comedy films and articulating the principles of the
new genre were concurrent with a budding curiosity in Western
cinematic legacy and, in particular, in Hollywood slapstick comedies
and musicals, which we start seeing in the early 1960s. My paper
takes a close look at the debates among these three influential
groups, as they unfolded on the pages of the country's leading film
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journal, Chosŏn yŏnghwa. The new emerging discourse of the 1960s
on film comedy is especially interesting in light of North Korea's
momentous departure from critical modes of jocularity, such as
satire, parody, and farce, which were prevalent during the
preceding decade. My paper starts this examination with a question
of why North Koreans turn away from satire and begin to formulate
new theories of the comic at this particular historical juncture.
Light Touches that Can Be Heavy: Sang Hu, Lubitsch and
Remaking of Melodramatic Realism
Adrian Song Xiang, University of Chicago
Ernst Lubitsch's (1892-1947) directorial style helped usher in a
new era of Chinese cinema by helping Chinese directors veer away
from the dominance of D.W. Griffith's (1875-1948) melodramatic
mode in the mid-1920s and had a hand in the resurgence of comedy
during the post-WWII era. Although quite a few Chinese directors
referred to him as a source of inspiration, few discussed their uses
of it in more than a passing way. The exception is Sang Hu (19162004), who in numerous essays contemporaneous to his
filmmaking in the 1940s synthesized irreverence and indirection-his interpretation of the "Lubitsch touch" as well as the techniques
of other Hollywood directors he appreciated--with narrative and
affective techniques he found in traditional Chinese theater and
novel. In Sang Hu's view, his "Lubitsch touch" would not only inject
jazzy freedom into the earnestness of melodramatic realism but
would also, ironically, be a more effective way of delivering tragic
affect than straightforward melodrama. Sang's aesthetic musings
are an attempt at reorienting the established and powerful tradition
of melodramatic realism in Chinese cinema for a postwar market.
They also give us a precious instance of practice-anchored
theorizing concerning the influences of Hollywood on Chinese
cinema.
11:00am - 1:00pm Second Frame
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Panel 1: Politicizing Theory/Theorizing Politics
A Condition of Theory: Im Hwa [임화, 林和] and (Im)Possibility
of Film Theory in Colonial Korea
Irhe Sohn, University of Michigan
This presentation concerns the condition under which theoretical
works on film and literature by Im Hwa, one of the leading
communist critics in KAPF (Korea Artista Proletaria Federatio),
could be produced during the late colonial period. Im Hwa
described the dialectical mode of production of artworks in his
writings of the history of literature and film in Korea which are
labeled as “the theory of transplanted literature [ishik munhak-ron,
移植文學論]” by postwar literary critics. For him, cultural products
as literature and film, once totally foreign to Korean people, could
take root in the national culture through negotiation and
contestation with the traditional artistic practices. While his critical
engagement with film and literary practices was very influential
throughout the colonial period, his thoughts on culture came to be
fully formulated only after, or facing with, the dissolution of KAPF in
1935. This presentation will examine the issue of (im)possibility of
theorizing film medium in colonial Korea, articulating what he tried
to narrate with what he had encountered. It is also to rethink the
condition of the presumed lack/lag of cultural theory in colonial
Korea within the asymmetry of knowledge production between the
center and the peripheries.
Enlightenment Modality and/as Film Theory: The Politics of
Aesthetics in Colonial and Cold War Koreas
Steven Chung, Princeton University
This paper makes a claim for “enlightenment” as a fundamental
mode of 20th century Korean filmmaking and aims thereby to
rethink the relationship between art and politics as it has been
mediated in the study of Korea and film. Starting with the earliest
pictures produced on the peninsula in the 1920s and looking most
closely at film cultures under Japanese colonial and postwar
13
authoritarian rule, the paper traces a genealogy of the codes and
practices that constitute the enlightenment modality. It also casts a
wide net over the shaping of enlightenment discourses in literary
practice and scholarship and attempts to differentiate those from
the production of enlightenment rhetoric in film criticism, policy
and institutions. The core texts here will be a series of roundtable
discussions focused on the question of “Choson cinema” published
in newspapers and film journals in the late colonial period, debates
about mass culture and national culture waged in print in the
liberation and early division years, and the ideologically hardened
positions taken up in policy and opinion statements on both sides of
the peninsula through the 1950s and early 1960s. These discourses
and debates are consistently polemic and often advance an
instrumentalist politics of film at the same time as they attempt to
theorize complex problems of realism, visuality, locality, and
language. My readings yield a view of the enlightenment modality
as eminently modern, easily translatable across formal and political
boundaries, and durably forceful in signifying the politicity of
cinema.
The Aesthetic Education of the Masses: Chinese Film Criticism
from Schiller to Socialist Realism
Hongwei Chen, University of Minnesota
“The Aesthetic Education of the Masses” investigates the formation
of the aesthetic regime of film criticism within the “seventeen
years” period of Chinese cinema. In it, I argue that the struggles
within the 1950s within film criticism cannot be separated from the
debates in previous decades as to whether and how film could be
identified as an art. Two histories inform this discussion: the film
theory and criticism of Shanghai ciné-periodicals and lessons of the
vernacular experiments that culminated in the Yan’an conference.
These two discussions arrived at divergent conceptions of the
proper relationship between art and life; but they did so with the
terms that May Fourth intellectuals inherited from European
romanticism. My paper suggests that the Schillerian question of
14
aesthetic education, which left deep imprint on the likes of Cai
Yuanpei and Xu Zhimo, is significant in thinking socialist film
theory’s attempt apply the inheritance of Soviet debates on socialist
art as well as the lessons from Yan’an to a cinema of national
proportions. Furthermore, I suggest that the aesthetic and political
dispositifs used in socialist film criticism to separate a film’s
medium from its message makes visible the political crisis of the
early years of socialism.
Panel 2: Translating Theory
A Theory on the Desk? or A Theory of Yearning?
Kim Soyoung, Korean National University of the Arts
In 1930 just a year away from the reign of “the imperial screen,”
Choson (Korean) daily newspaper ran an article, actually a review
on the book called Film and Capitalism written by a Japanese author
Iwasaki Akira which has become a canonical work in Japan. The
book received rave reviews as it interrogated both complicit and
antagonistic relations between the film and the capitalist system. In
a bewildering move, however, the reviewer invokes a demon of
comparison; while the theoretical elaboration of Iwasaki Akira is
praised as an outcome of the praxis or the real activities since he
works not only as a soldier of Japanese Proletarian film movement
camp but as a critic, it is condemned that the theorizing effort of
“Choson Cineastes” remains on the “desk,” an idle utopian and
disinterested theory developed almost only on the desk. A
disinterested theory developed on the desk” sits still on the desk.
Here we hear a lamentation that calls for the proletarian film
movement in Choson equivalent to the one in Japan. A sense of
immobility and a distance between theory and practice in the
colonial Choson is condensed in this expression. The surface of the
desk is indicated where the geography of film theory in Choson
dwells on. It offers no space for topography. It contains, however, a
complex set of topology. The demon of the comparison is in fact a
yearning in disguise for a locally empowered theory that bridges a
gap between theory and practice, a yearning to theorize film, to
15
theorize film that was never produced. This in turn alarms
contemporary film theorists and historians when they want to look
back at the period in a search for the local classical film theory
which is in resonance with Walter Benjamin’s “To read what was
never written.” The film theory of the colonial times has existed in
“potentialities” not in “actualities.” Savaged by colonial epistemic
violence that wrecks the previous reference system, the theory
reaching out for the practice was based on yearning.
A Layman’s Movie Review: Lu Xun as a Translator, Cultural
Critic, and Semicolonial Reader
Jessica Ka Yee Chan, Macalester College
The circulation and dissemination of film theories is contingent
upon the invisible work of translators. Lu Xun’s 1931 selective
translation of Iwasaki Akira’s Film and Capitalism appears to be
predicated on a double invisibility—Lu Xun’s invisibility as a
translator and his invisibility as a self-professed layman.
Interestingly, it is in the guise of a translator’s afterword and a
layman’s movie review, where Lu Xun asserts his visibility as a
cultural critic and a semicolonial reader. Lu Xun stages his
afterword, titled “Film as a Tool of Propaganda and Provocation,” as
a mouthpiece through which he ventriloquizes and dramatizes
Douglas Fairbank’s 1929 visit to Shanghai as a cinematic encounter
between the Chinese and the foreign (imperial) guest. In the form of
a translator’s afterword and a layman’s movie review, Lu Xun
problematizes domestic reactions to orientalist depictions in The
Thief of Bagdad (1924) and, in a self-reflexive manner, highlights
the crisis of visual representation that is emblematic of semicolonial modernity. In the hands of Lu Xun, the translation of film
theories becomes an organic part of film and cultural criticism.
Film Theory in Translation: The Pure Film Movement and
Japanese Film Style
Laura Lee, University of Chicago
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This paper explores the significance of western theoretical texts
(Sargent, Lindsay, Freeburg, Lescarboura) to the Pure Film
Movement. The translation of western “film theory” was critical to
film reformers’ conceptions of a modern, pure Japanese cinema:
namely one whose visual and narrative registers worked together
in synergistic fashion. These foreign writers conceived of cinematic
magic, and the effects that made it possible, as key to the medium’s
artistic beauty and therefore responsible for elevating its status to
make it compatible with bourgeois taste, to make a popular but
poetic cinema. Although this cinematic philosophy of uplift was not
actually put into practice in Hollywood cinema, dependence on the
ideas in these primarily American texts contextualizes Pure Film
reformers’ engagement with film language, which combined the
Hollywood drive toward classical narrative style with European
cinema’s more poetic, avant-garde disposition. In this way, the
importation of foreign ideas about cinema conditioned local views
about the medium, generating a dual impulse toward a transparent,
illusory film world and toward a mediated onscreen spectacle,
thereby embodying the tensions between the pleasures of cinematic
narration and the pleasures of the visible apparatus that
characterize Japanese cinema into the 1920s and 1930s.
The Neglected Tradition of Phenomenology in Japanese Film
Theory
Naoki Yamamoto, Yale University
This paper examines the rise of a phenomenological approach to
the film experience in the context of Japanese film theory. Having
said that, my focus does not revolve around the work of postwar
film critics such as Asanuma Keiji and Hara Masataka, who
developed their writings under the influence of French
phenomenologists such as Gilbert Cohen-Seat, André Bazin, and
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Rather, I aim to provide a comparative
reading of the long-neglected two Japanese theorists—Sugiyama
Heiichi and Nagae Michitarō—who, in the early 1940s, tried to
answer the question “What is cinema?,” by prioritizing the
17
significance of their own act of viewing, their own experiences with
the world as it is lived on and through the screen. By closely looking
at the cultural conditions surrounding wartime Japanese film
discourse, this paper clarifies how Sugiyama and Nagae elaborated
on their theories through their extensive knowledge about
Bergsonian philosophy and German phenomenology, as in the case
of their French counterparts. But it also highlights the substantial
differences between Japanese and French phenomenologists,
focusing on the former’s strategic use of phenomenology as a
practical means to shy away from ideological charges of the
nationalist discourse of wartime Japan.
3:00-5:00pm Third Frame
Panel 1: Claiming Realism
Hani Susumu’s Theory of Performance and the Place for Staged
Liberation
Justin Jesty, University of Washington
I would like to introduce the film theory and practice of
Hani Susumu, a pioneer of non-scripted, observational filmmaking. I
will attend to the development of his theory, including the influence
of pragmatic psychology and progressive pedagogy, paying special
attention to his theory of performance. Hani saw performance as an
ongoing experimental process of generating “hypothetical forms”
that formed the basis of all human and animal being in the world.
Contrasted to habitual action, performance was a mode of full
engagement with the present as an “already living moment.” This
idea was central to Hani’s belief in the ever-present possibility of
individual and social change, and his idea that film was unique in its
ability to capture the instability of the unfolding performance in its
full dynamism and density. Hani’s documentaries about children
and young adults show how he put these ideas into practice.
Looking at his semi-documentary Bad Boys (Furyō shōnen, 1960), I
consider the seeming paradox of needing to create a fictional space
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for acting to return to its full potential as a force for change. Finally I
consider the connections between Hani’s theory and other
reformist performance projects such as Shakespeare Behind Bars.
Kim Jong Il’s On the Art of the Cinema and the “Cinematic State”
Travis Workman, University of Minnesota
This paper is an analysis of Kim Jong Il’s On the Art of the Cinema
(1973) as a significant text in East Asian film theory, one that
should not be disregarded as simply a manual for the production of
propaganda. The text is an important one for both the history of
socialist realist theories of film and as a document in the history of
the formation of the DPRK into a “cinematic state.” The text reflects
on the relations between realist film aesthetics, the maintenance of
party power, and historical narrative. It is based in part on Soviet
theories of socialist realism, but it also translated these theories
into the context of the Korean peninsula and the adapted them to
the particularities of North Korean history. I argue that the type of
realism that the text advocates is not propaganda, but rather the
depiction of an ideal socialist society, a kind of alienated,
spectacular version of everyday life under dictatorship. Following
Boris Groys’s reading of Stalinism, I discuss how the text imagines
the unity of art and life, taking up the avant-garde dream that the
(film) aesthetic can transform life itself, creating a “new art of
living.” It is in this idea of film art as a creative force that can
transform human life that has undergirded the “cinematic state” of
the DPRK.
An Alternative Mode of Realism?: Theoretical Debates on Hong
Kong Cantonese Cinema, 1960-82
Victor Fan, McGill University
In the 1960s, film producers in Hong Kong saw the increasing
dominance of Hollywood-styled Mandarin cinema in the local and
Southeast Asian markets, a phenomenon that took the Cantonese
industry almost two decades to recover. Yet, between the early
1960s and the 80s, film theorists and critics regarded Cantonese
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cinema as a site where new models of cinematic realism could
emerge. In my presentation, I argue that these theoretical
discourses inspired the New Wave filmmakers in the 1980s to
reboot Hong Kong Cantonese cinema as a mode of realism
dialogically related to its European and American counterparts, one
that would continue (from the 50s) to reflect upon and cultivate a
“Hong Kong” identity as an alternative to the national discourse. In
my discussion, I trace through how Hong Kong film theorists rehistoricize Hong Kong Cantonese cinema in the 1950s as a form of
realism that responded to the historical conditions and political
desires of the post-war colonial society. In addition, they tried to
understand narrational codes that are specific to its mode of
realism, offer a critique of the ideological confines of Italian
neorealism and the French New Wave, and propose contesting
visions of a new Cantonese cinema. This discussion culminated in a
heated debate on the film Lonely Fifteen (Jingmeizai, prod. Johnny
Mak, dir. David Lai, 1982), a documentary/fiction film about a
group of young women confronting sexual violence and social
“exploitation.” The film seems to realize many visions proposed in
the theoretical debate in the past decades; nonetheless, by
representing realistically the sexual exploitation experienced by
these young women and selling such image as a blockbuster, the
film ironically exemplifies how readily the film industry and market
commodify and exploit these realistic images for profit and
entertainment.
The Importance of Realism in the Development of Cinematic
Modernization: The Example of Taiwanese New Cinema
Chang-Min Yu, Tainan National University of the Arts, and Duncan
McColl Chesney, National Taiwan University
In various trends of modernization of the cinema (Italian New
Cinema, French New Wave, Czechoslovakia New Wave, etc), we can
observe that a certain kind of cinematic realism precedes these
waves, as if the cinema has to pass through “the test of reality” to be
able to explore its full potential. Likewise discourses on cinematic
20
modernism always trace the emergence of cinematic modernity
back to Italian Neo-Realism. Therefore, it seems to us that it is
impossible to understand the complicated intricacies of cinematic
modernism without really delving into the importance of the
“realist” phase in the development of cinematic modernization.
When we approach this problematic in the context of Taiwanese
New Cinema, the question becomes even more intriguing, because
Taiwanese New Cinema, as an exemplary “Asian Cinematic
Modernism,” is often described by scholars as itself “realistic.” In
this paper, we'll be dealing with 1) how "realism"(寫實主義) was
used in describing Taiwanese New Cinema and what does "realism"
really mean in this context and 2) how did critics conceive
Taiwanese New Cinema as a distinct film movement and how did
they tie so-called realist aesthetics to cinematic modernity.
Panel 2: Grounding Theory: Space, Landscapes, and the State
Trans-media Criticism and the Revolt Against “Landscape” in
1970s Japanese Visual Media
Franz Prichard, Harvard University
In this paper I explore a crucial moment in the transforming stakes
of media criticism engaged with diverse forms of citizen and
student protest that engulfed the Japanese archipelago in late 1960s
and early 1970s. My paper charts photographer and critic Nakahira
Takuma’s (b.1938) role in an emergent discourse of “landscape”
(fukei-ron) to disclose a vital nexus of exchange between media
theory and practice which arose in response to the rapidly
urbanizing terrain. Film critic Matsuda Masao’s (b.1933) notion of
“landscape” not only impelled Nakahira to reshape his photography,
but also fostered a rich dialogue across diverse forms of media. This
paper will explore both Matsuda and Nakahira’s turn against the
“landscape” and trace the trans-media concerns these provoked
through a 1970 panel discussion with Nakahira, artist Akasegawa
Genpei, filmmaker and critic Adachi Masao, “Black Tent” theatre
director Sato Makoto, and sound artist Tone Yasunao. Thus,
traversing and translating these dynamic forms of exchange, this
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paper demonstrates the ways criticism itself became the site of a
shared struggle to put a crack in the “homogenous, sealed up
landscape” articulated by nation-state and capital across the rapidly
urbanizing social spaces of 1970s Japan.
Theorizing Urban/Rural Representations and Practices in
Chinese-Language National Cinema Studies
Dennis Lo, UCLA
This study will trace and interrogate discourses of space and place
in contemporary Chinese-language national cinema studies, where
the urban and rural serve either as spatial representations, or are
material sites of film production and spectatorship. To historically
and geographically situate the New Chinese Cinemas within the
post-Reform era sociopolitical landscape while revising the urbancentricity of Chinese film theories on nativist cinema and neorealist
aesthetics, numerous theorists have adopted cultural studies
paradigms that take into account how urban/rural representations
are blurred by urbanization and regional cultural flows.
Concurrently, oral narratives of rural spectatorship and on-location
film production illustrate how personal and collective memories of
place structure the urban and rural not as a spatial binary, but
position them along a spatial continuum. Yet, the absence of
theories that mediate studies of place as spaces of representation,
or as social settings of film production/spectatorship hampers
understanding Chinese “film ecologies” on a truly micro-historical
scale. Significantly, these discussions throw into sharp relief a
disciplinary divide between film studies and practice that has
emerged in the wake of an overarching crisis in Chinese cultural
criticism, a “fallout” of the neoliberalized political economy in postReform China that Robin Visser maps in her history of the
disciplinary formation of Chinese cultural studies. To bridge this
divide, I build upon Yomi Braester’s notion of the urban contract
and John Caldwell’s investigation of practitioner theorizing in
Hollywood film and TV production cultures to examine how onlocation film pre-production practices may themselves be
22
considered a mode of “native” and interdisciplinary theorizing.
Specifically, case studies will be presented to illustrate how Chinese
filmmakers engage in “grounded theorizing” during pre-production
in real urban and rural communities, where lay sociological
methods are mobilized both to address the cultural politics of
reimagining spaces as places, as well as to reaffirm concepts of
nativism and neorealism shared by Chinese film theorists.
Making the Cinema-State through On the Art of the Cinema
(a.k.a. Yongwhayesulron) by Kim Jong Il
Kim Sunah, Dankook University
A foundation of North Korean cinema was established during the
period of the 1960s to 1970s and On the Art of the Cinema by Kim
Jong-il was placed in its core. Re-mediating the revolutionary
operas written by Kim Il-sung, The Great Leader, into the national
cinema as a modern technology, Kim Jong-il reformed North Korea
as the Cinema-state through his own film theory and practice. In
doing so, the heredity of the dictatorial power was naturalized and
necessitated just as a transmission to new modern media did. As
accelerating the centralization and unification of economy, politics
and culture under The Great Leader, North Korean cinema has been
distorted with a drastic development. Kim Jong-il deleted the
existing film history with emphasizing the tradition of
revolutionary cinema and wrote On the Art of the Cinema that
became the origin of the other art theories. Since then, Kim created
the films of The Great Leader’s figure and established the Juche
ideology (self-reliance/subjecthood). On the Art of the Cinema
provided the foundation for the aestheticization of politics and
melodramatization of a history in the Cinema-state. On the Art of the
Cinema where Kim reckoned cinema as the representative art of
socialist realism for the age of independent and creative Juche
ideology was the only art theory written by Kim Jong-il in the
1970s, emphasizing a human being's consciousness-raising, that is,
the organization of feelings and contents while it inherited the
problems of romanticism, organicism and passive human being.
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Panel 3: The Soviet Connection
Making a National Film by Stateless People: the Discourses of
KAPF’s Cinema Movement in Colonial Korea
Kim Chung-kang, Hanyang University
Koreans began to make Korea’s own feature films in the 1920s.
Various cinematic experiments and adaptations were made and
many people proposed what were the proper ways of making
“Korean film.” Due to Korea’s colonial experience (1910-1945) and
its trauma, however, regardless its actual diverse representations,
cinema under Japanese occupation often received as an emblem of
national identity and expression of nation’s subjectivity, or
reversely, mere subjugating media and cultural apparatus which
produces only propaganda. There were controversies among the
film critics and filmmakers over the issue how to define the
boundary of “national” film in colonial context and what are the film
aesthetics of a proper national culture. Among these people, KAPF,
Korea Artista Proleta Federatio (Korean Artists Proletarian
Federation) had a tremendous impact on making discourses of
national film based on the aesthetics of social-realism. In this
presentation, I will introduce the theories of making “Korean film”
by leftist filmmakers (KAPF) and the controversies revolving
around the issue of “Korean Film” with so-called nationalist
filmmakers. This discussion will provide a way of understanding the
cinema theories of colonial Korea, and also explain the post-colonial
film critics’ obsession on the theory of “realism” and the notions of
political participation of cinema in post-colonial Korea.
Liu Na’ou, City Symphony, and Transcultural/Transmedial Film
Aesthetics in 1930s Shanghai
Ling Zhang, University of Chicago
This paper will situate notions of city symphony and montage, and
their diverse trajectories, within the multimedial complex of 1930s
Chinese film aesthetics. Specifically, my study will center upon
writer/translator/critic/filmmaker, Liu Na’ou (1905-1940), born in
24
Taiwan and educated in Japan, and a pivotal figure in the early
twentieth century Shanghai mediascape. The expressive capabilities
of vertical montage and “city symphony” films to convey and evoke
speed, rhythm, and omnipotent views of the city through attention
to the mechanization and routinization of experiences of urban
space, have not only been deployed in cinema, but also in Japanese
and Chinese “Neo Perceptionist” literature (for instance, Japanese
writer Yokomitsu Riichi (1898-1947)’s novel Shanghai (19281931)). These writings reveal an affinity with distinctly modernist
desires to adumbrate new sensory and audiovisual experiences of
the city, and are shaped by larger developments in modern media
culture. Liu’s work is steeped in this interplay between forms of
literary experimentation and the innovative aesthetic potential
afforded by new media such as film: he not only interlaces Japanese
and Chinese literature, and foreign and Chinese film theory, but also
translated and penned film criticism (including Eisenstein’s works),
and made an experimental film The Man with The Movie Camera
(1933), paying explicit homage to Dziga Vertov’s Man with A Movie
Camera (1929). All of these efforts reflect the dynamic way in which
the cinematic medium came to stretch the possible limits for
modernist representations of the Shanghai cityscape and
experiences of urban life.
Haiku and Montage 2.0: Terada Torahiko’s Writings on Linked
Poetry and Cinematic Montage”
William O. Gardner, Swarthmore College
In “The Cinematic Principle and the Ideogram” (1929), Sergei
Eisenstein (1898 – 1948) cited two staples of Orientalist inquiry,
the Chinese character or “ideogram” and the Japanese haiku, as
illustrations of the principles of montage. My paper will examine
Japanese authors who responded to Eisenstein and offered their
own views of the relationship between cinematic montage and
Japanese poetic language, beginning with physicist, essayist, and
haiku poet Terada Torahiko (1878 – 1935) and his essay “Eiga
geijutsu” (“Film art,”1932). While expressing reservations about
25
Eisenstein’s application of “ideogram” and “haiku,” Terada
redirected his inquiry towards the form of renku or linked poetry,
from which the haiku form derived. I will examine Terada’s views
on the relationship between montage and the techniques and
aesthetics of linked poetry as developed in the circle of Matsuo
Bashô (1644 - 1694), showing how, even as they extended
Eisenstein’s theoretical inquiry into a productive new area, they
also contributed to a new, modern construction of the literary
category of renku. Finally, I will compare this aspect of Terada’s film
theory with other contemporary explorations of the relationship
between montage and poetry, include those of poet and film critic
Kitagawa Fuyuhiko (1900-1990) and documentary filmmaker
Kamei Fumio (1908-1987).
Saturday (Michigan Union)
9:00 - 11:00am Fourth Frame
Panel 1: Boundaries of the National
Film Theory on the Ground: Tsurumi Shunsuke and the
Postwar Discourse on Mass Culture in Japan
Junko Yamazaki, University of Chicago
While there has been increasing interest among film scholars in the
important role the journal Shiso no kagaku kenkyukai played in
shaping the postwar discourse on mass culture in general, and
popular cinema in particular, little reflection has been given to the
issue raised by the group regarding the question of what counts as
film theory. I will argue that ‘the everyday life philosophy’ of
Tsurumi Shunsuke and his colleagues offers a conception of theory
that is produced and presented in horizontal networks of
circulation and lateral movement of resources and information
rather than theory that is imagined as a vertical perspective from
which theorists contemplate the world in a totalizing way. In his
critique of idealism which he identifies as a philosophical model for,
as well as a symptom of, Japan’s rapid modernization, Tsurumi
26
turned to popular cinema in general, jidaigeki in particular, what
Hanada Kiyoteru called “the films that speak of reality according to
a totally different system of terminology.” Tsurumi regards these
films as ‘embedded’ knowledge of the world to which his
‘embodied’ knowledge of the idioms and reading habits he acquired
from kodan and manga in his childhood past, once thought to be
displaced by academic idioms he acquired in the later periods of his
life, provide a route. Furthermore, it was this type of ‘theory’ that
fueled aesthetic experiments of the postwar Japanese avant-garde
artists and their advocates who turn to cinema, as much as, if not
more than, philosophical approaches to film aesthetics.
Cinema of the Oppressed: Minjung Film Theory and
Filmmaking in the 1980s South Korea
Nam Lee, Chapman University
The 1980s marks a unique period in South Korean film history in
which a new generation of film critics emerged and engaged in an
intense theoretical discussion for a new national cinema and
identity. It reflected the major transformation in the political, social
and cultural environment in South Korea with the rise of minjung
(people/oppressed and marginalized) movement to overthrow the
brutal military dictatorship. The Gwangju Massacre in May 1980
instigated the leftist critique of bourgeois nationalist movement and
the focus of the movement shifted from minjok (nation) to minjung.
The aim of the minjung cultural movement was to raise political
consciousness among the laborers, peasants and urban poor who
would then become the agent for the democratic revolution. In this
context, young film critics sought the ways in which cinema can
contribute to this revolution and debated over the goals and
strategies of the new minjung cinema. This paper examines the
discourse surrounding the notion of minjung cinema and its major
aesthetic tenets by analyzing film journals Minjok Yonghwa
(National Cinema) and Ready Go published between 1983 and 1990.
These journals show that the minjung film theory was influenced by
leftist politics, literary debates, the notion of “Third Cinema” as well
27
as Korea’s own socialist KAPF film movement of the 1930s. Minjung
cinema sought to represent the oppressed and to incorporate folk
art, especially traditional mask dance and music, as subversive
elements in creating a new national cinema. It gave rise to a strong
underground documentary movement and the Korean New Wave of
the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Vernacular Queer Aesthetics in Taiwan Cinema
Kai-man Chang, Tulane University
Historically, the boundaries of film studies have been redrawn by
various cultural, technological and socio-political forces: from
psychoanalysis to postmodernism, from the invention of sound
cinema to digital technology, from two world wars to neoliberal
globalization. Considering how film theory continuously
incorporates methodologies and ideas from a variety of
interdisciplinary sources, this paper attempts to investigate how
local film scholars theorize the vernacular queer
discourses/images/aesthetics. Despite the influence of the EuroNorth American theories, Taiwanese film scholars have developed
their own film theories in regard to the issue of gender and
sexuality since the early 1990s. In the past twenty years, Taiwan
has witnessed an unprecedented increase of gay-themed films, such
as Tsai Ming-liang’s The River (1997), Yee Chih-yen’s Blue Gate
Crossing (2002), Chen Yin-jung’s Formula 17 (2004), Leste Chen’s
Eternal Summer (2006) and Zero Chou’s Spider Lilies (2007).
Though influenced by the globally-oriented rhetoric of Western
feminism and gay rights movement, I argue that the queer
aesthetics in Taiwan cinema does not fit easily into the Western
models of identity politics. This paper attempts to excavate a
multitude of vernacular queer aesthetics and film theories that
derive from the tensions between the individual and the collective,
between visibility and invisibility, between fiction and reality,
between the artistic and the commercial, and between the local and
the global.
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Panel 2: Intermedia Theory: Lost & Found
Cinema and Mechanization: Staging R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal
Robots) in Japan
Diane Wei Lewis, Meiji Gakuin University
From genre classifications and narrative structures, to the many
actors and directors who came from the kabuki and shingeki worlds,
the close relationship between prewar Japanese film and theater is
usually conceived in terms of the influence of theater on film. Less
attention has been paid to the impact of cinema on stage practices,
even though the famous European and Soviet experiments with film
projection in avant-garde scenography were also enthusiastically
received, and attempted, in Japan. At Tsukiji Shogekijo, film
projection was used as a scenographic attraction on the model of
productions by Meyerhold and Piscator, discussed in their coterie
journal as one component in a new, synthetic, mechanical arts. The
Tsukiji Shogekijo production of R.U.R. by Karel Čapek, a sci-fi play in
which a robot underclass rises up against human masters,
incorporated film projection and generated comparisons between
theater and film according to its thematics of man versus machine.
Using this production as a departure point, this presentation will
examine how film was theorized and applied by stage practitioners
as one element of an intermedial machine aesthetics that reflected
an increasingly mechanized society. It also examines the thematic of
machine-like bodies across 1920s film acting theory, avant-garde
theater, and sci-fi.
Expanded Film Theory: Cinema, Graphic Design, and
Architecture
Yuriko Furuhata, McGill University
The late 1960s was the time of intermedia (intaa media), expanded
cinema (kakuchô eiga), and environmental art (kankyô geijutsu) in
Japan. The boundaries between cinema and other media were
blurred and redrawn as providing a definition of the image (eizô)
became more urgent than providing a definition of film or cinema
(eiga). Arguably, the discursive attempt to theorize cinema – the
29
presumed activity of “film theory” – became inseparable from an
attempt to articulate and define what the image was and how to
understand this notion in relation to various forms and platforms of
visual media. By focusing on the work of Awazu Kiyoshi, this paper
will explore the nexus between discourses on film, graphic design,
and architecture. Awazu is a graphic designer and visual artist who
was a founding member of Metabolism (an important architecture
movement that got its start in 1960). He worked with filmmakers
such as Teshigahara Hiroshi and Matsumoto Toshio, organized a
legendary five-day intermedia event “EXPOSE 1968” at the Sôgetsu
Art Center, edited the design journal Dezain Hihyô (1967-1970), and
participated in Expo 70 by designing several multiple-screen
projection works. The aim of this paper is to use Awazu’s visual
work as well as his writings as an entry point to rethink how the
very contours of film theory was expanded during the late 1960s.
Intāmedia: Early Developments in the Theorization of
Intermediality in Japan
Julian Ross University of Leeds
Intermediality as a theoretical framework has experienced a
resurgence of interest in art historical research in the past few
years. Cinema, despite its commonly recognized trait for being a
meeting point between the arts, has only very recently seen
publications devoted entirely to its relationship with intermedia
(Pethő: 2011). Furthermore, we are also in danger of positioning
intermedia as a Euro-American privilege in spite of the wide
spectrum of global artistic activity that can be canonized as
intermedial practice. It seems pertinent now to position case
studies from East Asian cinemas, both in their approach and
theorizations, within the discourse of intermedial studies. Not only
has Japan contributed an array of films relevant to the discussion on
intermedia, Japan had also participated in the theorization of
intermedia early on in its conception. By 1967, only a year after
Dick Higgins coined the term, intermedia was discussed in Japanese
art journals. Moreover, the understanding of intermedia in Japan
30
(intāmedia) was deeply embedded in cinema and possibilities
regarding technology. This paper will analyze the early
developments of intermedia in Japan as a theoretical concept and
artistic approach with reference to related theories of sōgō geijutsu
in existence prior to the arrival of intermedia.
Media Theory in Japan: the Ensenzberger Moment
Miryam Sas, University of California, Berkeley
This paper examines the transcultural media critical discourses
circulating in Japan across multiple art forms. The presentation
approaches question of media theory in Japan through the lens of
the “Ensenzberger moment” when, on the occasion of German
writer and media theorist Hans Magnus Ensenzberger’s visit to
Japan in 1973 (he had written “Constituents of a Theory of Media”
in 1970) a symposium was held that brought together many of the
major art critics, artists, and writers of media theory of the time:
Tōno Yoshiaki, Haryū Ichirō, Taki Kōji, Matsuda Masao, Nakahira
Takuma, Terayama Shūji, Tsuda Takashi and others. Currents of
media theory—Benjamin, McLuhan, Ensenzberger—had been
running through media discourses in Japan with varying stakes
(and some confusion). This moment provides an opportunity for a
close-up of a network of media and theorists and a unique chance to
understand the stakes in these discourses at a moment of profound
media transformation.
11:00am - 1:00pm Fifth Frame
Panel 1: Essences of Cinema
What Was Cinema In China: Medium Specificity and Early
Chinese Film Theory
Weihong Bao, University of California, Berkeley
In the past two decades of Chinese film studies, much attention has
been given to what is “Chinese” cinema(s) concerning nationalism,
translationism, and geopolitics that constitute the field and our
critical inquiry. What remains to be tackled, however, is what was
31
cinema in China? Was cinema itself a fixed entity in film discourses
and audience reception? Did it undergo any permutations, and how
was it related to other media, the world, and society at large? This
paper looks at early Chinese film theory from the 1920s to the mid
1930s on the question of medium specificity. I will start with the
variety of terms for “cinema” in China at its inception and then take
a closer look at 1920s’ film discourse, when the cinematic medium
was conceived and discussed at great length with diverse
understandings. Inquiring the material-technological, semiotic, and
sociocultural definitions of cinema in relation to other media as well
as politics, I provide a new perspective to understand the “hard” vs.
“soft” film debate in the mid 1930s and point out the limit of
previous studies which had taken medium specificity for granted.
By historicizing cultural discourses and theories on cinema in
China, I propose to reassess the question of medium specificity as
an enduring problematic in film studies from the perspective of
Chinese film theory.
Imamura Taihei’s Theory of Japanese Cinema
Rea Amit, Yale University
Imamura Taihei’s writings on film, which are considered among the
most pivotal in the establishment of film theory in Japan, are
surprisingly yet understudied. This is mainly in terms of Imamura’s
thesis of “Cinema and Japanese Art.” While many studies, in Japan
and the West, had given much attention to Imamura’s theories of
documentary film and animation, and while issues with regard to
the nation in world cinema in general, and in Japan in particular,
continue to interest scholars, Imamura’s work on Japanese
cinematic medium-specificity demands wider recognition. In my
paper I intend to, first, introduce Imamura’s thesis, the many
different examples he gives for cinematic-like aspects of premodern Japanese arts, and the context in which it was written and
rewritten between the late 1930s and the mid-1940s. Secondly, I
would like to suggest an interpretation of Imamura’s aesthetic
essentialism, and to highlight the qualities that separate the thesis
32
from other theories of Japanese cinema. Finally, I will conclude my
paper by arguing for the role Imamura’s thesis can have in
problematizing the national borders of Japanese cinema on the one
hand, and medium-specificity on the other.
Beyond Sovereignty: Cinematic Responsibility
Phil Kaffen, University of Chicago
My presentation aims to take up the question of film theory as it
engages the relationship between cinema and responsibility in
Japan. The question of responsibility has once more become
prominent in the last year since the triple catastrophe of 3/11. I
want to ask how film theory might help frame the seemingly
irresolvable problem of responsibility. My starting point is Itami
Mansaku’s postwar essay “The Problem of Who is Responsible for
the War,” (Senso sekininsha no mondai). While published in a film
journal and collected in anthologies of film theory in Japan, what is
striking is that its relationship to film is arguably quite tenuous.
Hence, the essay raises the question of what the task of film theory
might be and what legitimates it as “film theory.” At stake is the
issue of specificity, and whether cinema might contribute to a
discussion of the most pressing issue of postwar Japan in ways that
are occluded in the more commonly explored realms of literature,
high arts, and intellectual history. I will then pursue these questions
further by focusing on Nakai Masakazu’s writings on subjectivity, as
a key term in relation to responsibility in the postwar. In particular,
I am interested in the ways that “cinema” speaks to the possibility
of responsibility in the absence of a sovereign subject. I will
conclude by drawing from the above inquiries questions with
regard to the limits of film (as analog, indexical, material, broadcastoriented, collectively organized, and capital intensive) in the
present moment. Within what many might describe as a radically
altered mediascape, can theory still inform and engage practices of
responsibility?
Apologia for Film—When Theory Meets Fei Mu
33
Yiman Wang, UC Santa Cruz
Many people know Fei Mu, the “poet director,” from his now
canonized postwar film, Spring in a Small Town. Few people know
that his Song of China – a silent film with a home-made music score - was the first Chinese film theatrically released in the U.S. -- after
drastic re-editing and abridgement. Indeed, although Fei Mu
directed sixteen films (including shorts) from 1933 to 1951, only
Spring in a Small Town has received sustained attention. Even
there, the discourse is overwhelmingly revisionist, i.e. simply
celebrating the reversal of Fei’s fortune – that his once marginalized
film is now finally recognized as a masterpiece thanks to our liberal
politics. In this essay, I work against the discourse of triumphant
liberalism in order to fathom the difficulty Fei encountered in
experimenting with the film language in dialog with forms of “old
opera” and “civilized play,” even while engaging with the political
and commercial interpellations in the politically tumultuous China.
Fei’s innovative practice went hand in hand with his theorization of
the film form and its audience address. Specifically, his
conceptualization of the film structure and the ambience enabled
him to build a film language that rebelled against the dramatic arc.
In terms of film structure, he transposed “narratage” (narration +
montage) (as exemplified by Hollywood talkies such as The Power
and The Glory and The Sin of Nora Moran) to a silent film, A Spray of
Fragrance. He simultaneously stressed the notion of “air” or
ambience (kongqi) in making an effective film. The experimental
quality of his work was registered in the audience’s frequent
befuddlement and his constant apology for his “failure” and
apologia for his persistent pursuit. It is precisely in between
apology and apologia that Fei Mu offered us not simply a theory, but
more importantly, a method of theorization that emerged from his
trans-media knowledge and border-crossing borrowing, and that
defied the commercial formulae and political sloganism all at once.
Panel 2: Sound and Screen
34
Early Japanese Filmmusic: Theoretical Musings about Putting
Music to Film
Johan Nordstrom, Waseda University
During the early 1930s, Japanese cinema was in the process of a
gradual transition from silent to sound film. In parallel with the
emergence of sound into the cinematic landscape, new theories of
how best to utilize this innovative technology gave birth to a new
genre of light entertainment, infused with music and song, and
often sharing traits of musical style, staging, and pacing with that of
the urban variety stage. These new kind of films where spearheaded
by Japan’s first all-talkie film studio, the Tokyo-based P.C.L. (Photo
Chemical Laboratory). This paper will examine the contemporary
discourses conducted in trade journals and newspapers between
filmmakers, such as for instance Heinosuke Gosho, producers and
film writers such as Mori Iwao, and the composers actually
responsible for creating the music. By closely examining the ideas
and approaches that were advanced by these different agents
within the industry, this presentation aims to shed light on the
attitudes and reasoning that shaped early decisions about ways to
marry music to the moving pictures in Japan during the first half of
the 1930s.
Early Film Music Theory in Japan: Nakane Hiroshi’s Tōkī
ongakuron
Kerim Yasar, Notre Dame University
Early theories of sound film had to address not only the presence of
the spoken word but also the possibilities and perils of diegetic and
extra-diegetic music. In this paper I explore the work of Nakane
Hiroshi (? – 1951), whose 1932 Tōkī ongakuron (Theory of Music for
the Talkies, a book-length collection of essays and analyses) was one
of the first extended engagements with film music theory in
Japanese. Highly regarded by Tōhō co-founder Mori Iwao (who
wrote the preface to the book and was an important sound-film
theorist in his own right), Nakane had previously been a musician
and member of the Ongaku to bungaku (Music and Literature)
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coterie magazine. Although writing from a musician’s perspective,
Nakane had an acute sense of the need for music especially
composed to accompany the moving image, and analyzed concrete
examples in thirteen films, including Sternberg’s Morocco, Clair’s
Under the Roofs of Paris, and Pabst’s The 3 Penny Opera. I situate
Nakane’s approach in two contexts: Japanese and Western debates
during the period about film music, and earlier theories of the role
of music in radio drama. I also assess Nakane’s influence on
subsequent theorists as well as on scoring practices.
The sound-making of Japanese silent movies
Shuhei Hosokawa, International Research Center for Japanese Studies
In the very early years of film projection in Japan, the brass band, a
sonic symbol for Western civilization, played in front of the theater
uninterruptedly (“ballyhoo”). With the development of the art of
explainer (benshi) accompanying the film projection, the
synchronized (in diverse senses) sound-making was regarded as an
efficient device for the perception of the audience. Around the turn
of the century, in some cases films with live musical performance
were accompanied by a phonograph recorded simultaneously,
while in other cases live musical performance was used for the
moving images recorded simultaneously. However, later in the
1910s sound practice became gradually fixed with the formalization
and industrialization of spectacle. The majority of Japanese film
produced were jidaigeki and a band mixing Western instruments
and shamisen and taiko was usually employed to play a mixed
repertory. However, intellectuals and other Western-oriented fans
preferred the imported films, which were usually accompanied by a
Western orchestra and repertory. Some large theaters in the
centers of cities were proud of producing intermission music by a
relatively large orchestra, giving the information of conductor and
title of pieces in the publicity. It functioned as a rare concert for
Western music lovers in the time when no regular orchestras were
active. The division of spectatorship was evident as for such uses of
music.
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The Master-slave Dialectic in Chinese Opera Film, 1954-1965:
From "Filming Opera" to "Filmic Opera"
Zhang Yeqi, Nanjing University
During the golden era from 1954-1965, Chinese opera films
gradually established its own formula and system, reflecting the
development of “Yingxi theory” (Shadow play theory) from the
documentary of theatre performance to the notion of cinematic
consciousness. After absorbing the ideas of Stanislavsky, Brecht and
Meyerhold’s modern theatre theories, Hollywood musical genre,
and Eisenstein’s montage dictum, Mei Lanfang and other leading
opera stars claimed: 1) the material selections for opera-adapted
films must place the stress on their characteristics of cinema, rather
than the artistic achievement on the stage; 2) acting in front of a
camera, which is essentially different from acting to a live audience,
should more focus on details and mental states of characters, and
can get rid of the instantaneous and synchronic presentation on the
theatrical stage as well as the “show-off of artistry”. Cui Wei and
other filmmakers of New China, accepted many Soviet thoughts of
cinema, and then began to overrule the established theory of
recording stage performance in opera film. Cui advocated a “filmic
opera” that requires film to “serve” the opera art. By using the word
“serve”, Cui argued that the essences of opera can be preserved in
its filmic version, specifically, his guidelines are set as follows: 1)
rewriting the loosely-organized opera script in a tight manner of
screenplay; 2) embracing a more realistic performance style to
accommodate to the camera lens, giving prominence to character
over scene; 3) using mise-en-scène to break the limit of proscenium
stage tradition, proposing a new time-space notion that combines
traditional formulated action with realistic setting. Further, Cui
suggested that opera film theory was an important branch of
Chinese film theories, and, by means of traditional opera, the most
popular art form in China over hundreds of years, Chinese film
could better represent the national character and reach a much
more mass audience.
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From Shadowplay to Montage: The Introduction of Soviet Film
Theory to Early Chinese Cinema
Jinying Li, Oregon State University
In 1928, Tian Han, a Chinese leftist poet and playwright, hosted a
semi-underground screening of Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship
Potemkin (1925) in Shanghai. Four years later, Vsevolod
Pudovkin’s Storm Over Asia (1928) entered Chinese theaters and
marked the first public screening of Soviet cinema in China. In the
following years, numerous theoretical writings by the Soviet school
were translated and introduced to China by leftist intellectuals, and
it had a profound impact on the development of Chinese cinema.
The introduction of soviet film theory not only challenged the
“shadowplay” tradition that has dominated Chinese filmmaking and
film studies since the 1920s, but it also paved a new theoretical
foundation that gave rise to the left-wing filmmaking in Shanghai
and Yan’an in the 1930s. This paper will trace such a significant
transformation in the early history of Chinese cinema, by closely
examining the theoretical writings of several leftist filmmakers and
critics, including Hong Shen, Xia Yan, Zheng Boqi, and Chen Liting.
In particular, this study examines the contemporary Chinese
theoretical debates in the 1930s that centered on the tension
between the Soviet montage theory and the “shadowplay” discourse
that drew on Chinese theater traditions and classical Hollywood.
2:30 - 4:30pm Sixth Frame
Panel 1 (Preconstituted Panel): Genealogies of Japanese Media
Theory: From the 1960’s to Zeronendai
Moderator: Marc Steinberg, Concordia University
Genealogies of Japanese Media Theory: From the 1960s to
Zeronendai
What is media theory in post-1960s Japan? What are the conceptual
genealogies of the so-called “zeronendai” (2000s) media theory?
How have these genealogical precursors laid the ground for the
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recent effervescence of Japanese media theory in the 2000s? These
are the fundamental questions this panel aims to ask. Conceived of
as one part of a larger project aiming to translate and generate
critical reflection on Japanese media theory of the 2000s, often
known as “zeronendai no shisô” – or thought of the aughts – this
panel aims to be an exploratory invitation to rethink the contours
and lineages of current Japanese media theory. The larger project
seeks to deal with questions of delimitation (where is media theory
in Japan?), questions of purview (who makes it into the media
theory of the 2000s canon?), questions of the institutional and
cultural space of media theory in Japan (how to conceptualize
theory that is fundamentally consumed as a commodity?), as well as
questions of history (what are the historical antecedents of 2000s
theory?). Propelled by questions of demarcation and problems of
translation, this panel proposes to focus on an interrogation of the
historical conditions and antecedents of contemporary media
theory, focusing on the period of 1960 to 2000 in particular.
Tadao Umesao’s Theory of Information Industry and 1960s
Japanese Media Theory
Kadobayashi Takeshi, Kansai University
Starting his academic career as a biologist and then as an
anthropologist, Tadao Umesao (1920-2010) developed a unique
theory of “information industry” through 1960s. This work
culminated in his classic text Chiteki seisan no gijutsu (The Art of
Intellectual Production) in 1969 on one hand, and the foundation of
the National Museum of Ethnology with its pioneering media library
in 1977, in which he held a position of director until his retirement,
on the other. Reminiscent of contemporaneous Western discourses
on technology and civilization such as the work of Marshall
McLuhan and Alvin Toffler, Umesao’s theory of information
industry took its place within the fluid intellectual atmosphere in
the 1960s Japan, in which interests toward popular culture also
emerged. Reconsidering Umesao’s work within the context of the
discourses on media, technology and culture in the 1960s Japan,
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this paper attempts to clarify the social and cultural background of
the media theory of 1960s Japan, which at a first glance appears
only to be an epigone of its Western counterparts, and put into
relief what is particularly envisioned in its culturally situated
thread of thoughts.
McLuhan in Japan: Media Theory and Advertising Practice
Marc Steinberg, Concordia University
Discussions of the introduction and popularization of critical theory
in Japan often focus on the introduction of structuralism and poststructuralism over the 1970s and the into the 1980s, leading to the
rise of “New Academism,” and post-structuralist film writing such
as that of Hasumi Shigehiko. This paper will look at another
genealogy of theory in Japan, and media theory in particular: the
introduction of the work of Marshall McLuhan over the years 19668. McLuhan’s work was particularly influential on the advertising
industry, and the application of his media theory to advertising
practice was explored in advertising magazines and broadcasting
journals such as Brain and Hôsô Asahi. In this paper I will look at the
context of interest in McLuhan’s work, focusing on debates around
information society, and the take-up of McLuhan by the advertising
industry. Of particular interest here is the way that the
consumption of theory is already involved in circuits of advertising
practice and (perceived) economic profitability that foreshadow the
take-up of post-structuralism as marketing theory by ad agencies in
the 1980s.
Girlscape: Consumer Demographics and Lifestyle Environment
in Early 1970s Japanese Media
Tomiko Yoda, Harvard University
In the early 1970s Japan, market segmentation emerged as a
significant media discourse, identifying young, single women as
vanguard consumers. How and why did this demographic profile
become a target of intensive speculative investment by advertisers,
marketers, and publishers? Not only did medias actively
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constituted this demographics through gender- and age-calibrated
addresses but also designed individuated lifestyle environments in
relation to it. The “girlscape” was articulated as the environment of
young women’s self-fashioning, unburdened by the tension
between city and country or Japan and the West, unmoored from
the disciplinary sites of economic production as well as sociobiological reproduction. It was evoked through a number of
visual/textual strategies, including non-perspectival visual field,
concatenation of fragmented images, non-linear distribution of
information, and whimsical cartography. This paper considers the
historical status of girlscape by examining it against the “landscape”
(fûkei), a term hotly debated among Japanese leftist filmmakers and
photographers in the late 1960s to early 1970s. The rapid
proliferation of girlscape suggests the prescience with which
landscape theorists raised questions over power and media at the
transitional moments between the two decades, while also drawing
our attention to their underdeveloped engagement with gender
politics.
Enter the Media: Ironical Theory as Commodity/Resistance in
1980s Japan
Alexander Zahlten, Dongguk University / Harvard University
In the early 1980s a shift takes place in the economy of theory in
Japan. Books on poststructuralist theory become massive
bestsellers and a public intellectual like Yoshimoto Takaaki models
for the Commes des Garcons label. Not a completely new
phenomenon in itself, this is however the point where theory and
its practice begin to converge. The writings of young intellectual
stars such as Asada Akira and Karatani Kojin place a new emphasis
on concepts such as irony and humor, and thus align their writings
with their own commodification as an ambivalent form of
resistance that lacks a distinction between interior and exterior.
The rediscovery of the term “media” in late 1980s Japan is less
frivolous yet heavily marked by these developments, and eventually
leads to a new practice of media theorization in the 2000s. This
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paper will trace the interplay between the content and form of
media theory in Japan since the 1980s, in which theory itself
becomes a medium.
Panel 2: Philias, Phobias and the Contexts of Theories
“Poisonous Weeds” and Cinephobia: Film Criticism as Political
Campaign in the Mao Era
Jie Li, Princeton University
Chinese political authorities in the Mao era (1949-1976) were both
fatally attracted to and deeply suspicious of the cinematic medium.
They might first promulgate a film to instill revolutionary
subjectivity in the masses, only to attack the same film later for its
hidden bourgeois seductions. They might first invite a sympathetic
Western director to make a documentary to improve China’s
international image, only to later denounce the resulting film for its
“vicious motives and despicable tricks.” Suggesting that verbal
denunciations of cinematic “poisonous weeds” had as much
ideological impact than films celebrated as “fragrant flowers,” this
paper traces a genealogy of film criticism as political campaign from
Mao Zedong’s 1951 editorial on the film Life of Wu Xun to the 1974
campaign against Michelangelo Antonioni’s documentary Chung
Kuo. It highlights the role played by Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, a former
actress in the 1930s Shanghai film industry, as the nation’s greatest
cinephiliac and cinephobiac, whose idiosyncratic tastes and
personal paranoia loomed over cinematic production and
censorship from the mid-1960s to the end of the Cultural
Revolution. While rarely penning her film criticisms as formal
treatises, Jiang Qing left a record of speeches, directives, interviews,
and conversations with film studio personnel. Her entourage of
writers expounded her offhand comments into polemical
newspaper editorials, echoed by more critics in published
anthologies and lists of censored films. Through an examination of
the critical discourse surrounding major cinematic “poisonous
weeds,” this paper will also draw comparisons—by way of the mass
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criticism of Antonioni’s documentary—to ideological critiques in
1970s Western film theories.
The Janus-face of Critical Cinephilia: The Impacts of Western
Contemporary Film Theories on the 1990s’ Korean Film Sphere
Kim Jihoon, Nanyang Technological University, and Lee Sun Joo,
Chung-ang University
This paper historicizes the compressed reception of Western
contemporary film theories in what we call the ‘Korean film sphere”
of the 1990s, a conceptual field in which particular aesthetic,
ontological, and cultural notions of cinemas, ranging from the
cinema in general to the ideal of Korean cinema, are imagined and
articulated through the intersection of broader cinematic practices
going beyond film production. After its national political liberation,
South Korean film culture in the 1990s witnessed the burgeoning of
dedicated film viewing ignited by the foundation of new film
magazines (Cine21 for weekly, and KINO for monthly), private
cinemathèques, university cine-clubs, and non-university
institutions dedicated to the education of humanities. The practices
formed the intellectual and discursive layers of the passion for film
as they explicitly referred to and disseminated the major lines of the
Western contemporary film theories since the 1960s—Althusserian
Marxism, cultural studies, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Deleuzian
philosophy. By examining the ways in which the theories’ concepts
and ideas were translated and refracted within the context of
“Korean film sphere,” this paper argues for both the contribution
and the limitation of critical cinephilia: the theories promoted a
renewed recognition of cinema in the Korean society of the time as
they offered the devoted spectators the repertoire of the broader
questions on cinema—film’s essence, cinema and society, and
cinema as a cultural practice—than film as entertainment; but the
theories were in some respects fossilized (that is, unable to extend
into a broader political intervention into Korean film culture and
society) when they were transformed into the recondite, fetishized
ideas that canonized arthouse cinema and cult films, and when the
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spectatorial and critical practices were turned into the age of the
Internet that threatened to dissolve the specificities of traditional
cinephilia.
A Psychoanalytical Undercurrent in Japanese Film Theory
Maureen Turim, University of Florida
In light of much new research on the history of psychoanalysis in
Japan, I propose to look at the intersections between Japanese film
theory and Japanese psychoanalytic theory. Three major figures in
psychoanalytic theory receiving renewed attention are Kosawa
Heisaku, Kitayama Osamu, and Okonogi Keigo, in addition to Doi
Takeo, whose influence on film theory has been the strongest,
especially in terms of theories of Japanese melodrama and war
films. That many specifically Japanese psychoanalytic concepts
such as the amae complex and the ajase complex concern
motherhood and are derived from Japanese folklore, Noh and
Kabuki, invites application by Western and Japanese theorists alike,
but cautionary notes have been raised by those deconstructing the
assumptions inherent in these theories, and I will look at this
debate. The theories have resonance with anime, porn, and the
thriller in particular, and may speak to the extreme depictions of
sex and violence that permeate Japanese film, while images of
innocence and attachment to childlike objects flourish alongside
these representations. I will speak to the use of these theories
historically, and their presence in Japanese literary and film theory
today.
Chinese Cinephilia in the Internet Age
Yomi Braester, University of Washington
The paper surveys the growth of a middlebrow film criticism in
Chinese internet forums and argues that the online writings
continue a trend rooted in theoretical debates initiated in the
1950s. The journal Chinese Cinema (Zhongguo Dianying, established
1956 and later renamed Film Art/Dianying Yishu) played a role
similar to the Cahiers du cinéma in bridging popular reception and
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theoretically informed criticism. I have addressed the developments
in the 1950s elsewhere; in this essay I show how concerns about
introducing film theory to a wide public have carried over to the
contents and practices of online forums as well as related
publications and curatorial activities.
Panel 3: Starts and Fits
Nation, Juche Film Theory, and Filmmaking in North Korea
Dong Hoon Kim, University of Oregon
This paper examines the development of Juche (Self-Reliance)
philosophy and its influence on film theory and production in North
Korea. The primary mission of North Korean cinema has been to
write a national history and construct a national identity, and in
writing a national history, Juche has been the sole grammar which
nobody can disobey. When Kim Il-Sung first proclaimed the ideals
of Juche to the public in 1955, it was the principle that aimed to
inspire every effort to strengthen the state. Yet as Juche idea
became closely intertwined with factional fighting in the party, it
eventually transformed into Kimism. In the Juche era, therefore, the
history of Kim Il-Sung is identified with that of nation; that is,
writing a national history is nothing but writing a personal history
of Kim. In the 1990s, however, North Korea had to remold its
nationhood and revise Juche as a way to cope with a series of
crises–the death of Kim Il-Sung, the collapse of the socialist block,
most notably–that significantly threatened the nation’s security and
even existence. Through the analysis of the two books, On the Art of
the Cinema (1973) and Juche Aesthetic Theory (1992), that initiated
the artistic revolutions in the 1970s and 1990s respecitivley by
film-theorizing Juche, this paper looks into the ways in which
cinema embodies the processes of shaping and reshaping the
nation-ness in North Korea.
Im Hwa’s Thesis of “Transplantation through
Appreciation[鑑賞]”: the Origin of Korean Cinema
Baek Moonim, Yonsei University
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Im Hwa [林和:1908-1953], one of the most prolific and influential
critics and poets of the colonial period, wrote the earliest Korean
film history, The Development of Choson Cinema, in 1941. In these
and other works, Im laid out his “transplantation through
appreciation” thesis, which foregrounded the heterogeneity of
Korean cinema in its origins and in the first 20 years of its history –
a period that was without native film production (which would wait
until as late as 1919). The notion of “transplantation through
appreciation” took clear account of the nearly simultaneous advent
of the new Western moving picture [hwaldongsajin] technologies
and the fact of Japanese colonization, and how those forces worked
to shape the new experiences of colonial spectatorship. Im therein
furnished a mold for the creation of a Korean cinema that was
conceived through the appreciation of alien cultures and developed
alongside contiguous cultural forms like modern literature and
theatrical drama, which had earlier been transplanted to domestic
soil. I seek in this paper to demonstrate how Im Hwa’s thesis casts
the vernacularization of cinema in East Asia in a way that erases its
Western origins and further highlights place-bound ethnic identity
in Korean film production. I also reframe his argument as an
attempt to advance a raison d'être for Korean cinema, which was
being fully absorbed into Japanese national cinema in the form of
propaganda after the Sino-Japanese War and the establishment of
the Korean Film Regulation in 1940.
Early Development of Film and Media Studies in Japan
Kukhee Choo, Tulane University
Film and media studies in many Asian countries have often been
analyzed through the framework of Western scholarship onto Asian
media texts and productions. However, in the case of Japan, which
already saw an emergence of domestic scholarship on popular
media during the early 20th century, the history of media studies
took a unique turn. Starting with research on the grassroots media
industries of the late 19th and early 20th century, led by scholars
involved in the Meiji Bunka Kenkyūkai (Meiji Culture Research
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Group established by Yoshino Sakuzō), and later economists and
sociologists such as Takano Iwasaburo and Gonda Yasunosuke,
Japan's media studies firmly established itself, almost
simultaneously with German's Frankfurt School, to further the
understanding of indigenous film and media culture. This
presentation will map out the trajectory of how early media studies
developed in modern Japan and how the postwar condition
progressed into a bifurcated twist between the European
theoretical frameworks and the bureaucratic academic
institutionalization introduced by the North American system.
Japan's case study provides an alternative to the dominant Western
media discourses which has often ignored the local developments.
The Last Film Movement in Korea: Seoul Film Collective and
Korean Film Theory
Seung-hoon Jeong, New York University Abu Dhabi
The Seoul Film Collective founded in 1982 by Seoul National
University’s film community members published two related
anthologies: For a New Cinema (1983) and On Film Movements
(1985). This double volume exposed the Collective’s serious
struggle to theorize an indigenous film aesthetics that can reflect
South Korea’s authentic reality and reform its film culture. The
concept was clear, typically rooted in the then student movement
for anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism: liberation from Hollywood
toward cultural nationalism. Retrospectively, however, its
uniqueness seems found within the spatiotemporal gap even in
theory between production and consumption. The Collective
introduced Western alternative movements including Third
Cinema, which all had their heyday decades ago, whereas the
neighbors’ New Waves in the 1960s Japan and 1980s pan-Chinese
countries were completely missing. This cinematic décalage,
especially caused under the totalitarian regime, indicates the long
“jet lag” of Korean film culture that went on until around 1990, just
after the Collective’s peak. Such Collective members as Jang Seonwoo and Park Kwang-soo led the Korean new wave with socially
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committed films, but they did not survive the late 1990s real boom
of Korean cinema in the wake of globalization that drastically
changed cultural environment and sensibility. The collective
attempt at an autogenous film theory was then replaced by
individual critics’ quick distribution and journalistic application of
Western theories to films on the one hand, and by the academic
trend of East Asian film studies with much focus on colonialism on
the other – which however is not a film movement. Meanwhile, the
Seoul Film Collective changed into the Seoul Visual Collective, now
the central force of independent documentary production in Korea,
but its theoretical activity stopped. In this history, the Collective’s
1980s theorization seems the last movement in Korean film theory,
whose origin traces back to socialist nationalism in the colonial
period. And this shows the long genealogy of the realist paradigm in
which the primary criterion is reference to sociopolitical reality and
the persistent task is the subjective reception and creative
transformation of all theories from outside into “our” territory. This
territorialization mostly remained amateuristic as shown in the
Colletive’s naïve understanding of Soviet Montage, French
impressionism, Italian Neorealism, etc. Their idea of “open cinema”
blurring the boundary between theater and screen space, drawn
from traditional Korean performance, sounds all the more utopian
as it never came true and then was forgotten after the demise of the
movement. But conversely, this utopian nationalism resonates with
various forms of international modernism that aimed at a new
revolutionary community of art becoming life through artistic
autonomy outside the market. The last Korean film theory may
matter in terms of this political aesthetics and its worldwide
dissolution into the postmodern global paradigm. In other words,
the long jet-lagged Korean film theory joined the global wave only
upon its death, only as an unrealized dream. This paradox will
deserve more attention.
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