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Announcing...
Kinema Club III
New York University, February 13-14, 2004
Organized by Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto and Abé Mark Nornes
The success of Kinema Club II in Honolulu left participants screaming
for more. So here you go! Kinema Club III will be held at New York
University, and the format will be more like our first outing. Papers
will be distributed beforehand in mid-January, and presenters will give
only the barest of introductions before opening the floor to
discussion.
This also means that space at the table is limited to about 20
participants. We will fill those seats on a first come, first served
basis starting with this email. If you would like to come to New York
for Kinema Club III please contact us now.
If you are unable to come (or get turned away for that matter) fear
not. We will hold Kinema Club IV in late spring/early summer 2005. This
will be a large gathering---perhaps larger than this year's event---and
if you would like to host it please contact us directly.
Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto ([log in to unmask]) & A. M. Nornes ([log in to unmask])
Schedule
February 13 (Friday)
15:00-18:00
--Tom Lamarre, “Worlds without Others: Anime and the World-Making Power
of the Fetish”
--Satomi Saito, “The Evolution of Anime Language: Anime Consumption”
February 14 (Saturday)
9:00-12:00
--Daisuke Miyao, "Stardom and Japanese Modernity: Sessue Hayakawa and
the Pure Film Movement"
--Mark Anderson, "The Star System in Japanese Cinema"
14:00-17:00
--Michael Raine, "Non-intensive Mise-en-scene: Textual Analysis and
Japanese Popular Ephemera"
--Catherine Russell, "Naruse at P.C.L. (1935-37): The Moga and her
Sisters"
Abstracts
Worlds without Others: Anime and the World-Making Power of the Fetish
Thomas Lamarre
This paper is basically a comparison of two kinds of fetish, one that
opens world-making power, one that forecloses it. My examples of the
foreclosure of world-making power come from recent series that try to
construct histories across different media — primarily Blood: The Last
Vampire with its animated film, video game, novels and manga; and the
recent Matrix sequel, with its video game and animated films (a
strategy borrowed from Blood and other anime series). I argue that the
multi-planar aesthetics (or internal montage) characteristic of many
anime films and series allow for the production of ‘signature layers’
within the image. The spectator attends to, and often notes the
difference between, character designer, writer, producer, and director.
The use of signature layers has allowed anime to explore the
possibilities for histories across media — and potentially new ways of
imagining history and media. Yet it is a strategy of serialization
that remains so close to the logic of the commodity fetish that is
almost indistinguishable from it. These series foreclose the
world-making power of the fetish in the commodity.
As an example of animation that opens world-making power differently, I
call on a recent Japanese animated series, Chobits, based on the
popular manga penned by the four-women team named CLAMP. (CLAMP is
team known for their reworking of different genres, and Chobits is
their version of (or response to) hentai.) Although Chobits also
remains disturbingly close to the logic of the commodity fetish, the
way in which Chobits reworks the conventions of hentai allows us to see
what is at stake in hentai — the narrative and visual construction of a
‘world without others.’ I look at how Chobits works narratively and
visually to construct its world without others — to remove otherness
from the structuration of the visual field. This not only tells us
about how hentai works. It also offers another way to think about
how, in the drive to produce new worlds, the multi-planar aesthetics of
anime strive to go beyond the logic of commodity fetish. While
(perhaps inevitably) Chobits and other hentai may fall short, their
virtue is to show the problem so clearly.
The Evolution of Anime Language: Anime Consumption
Satomi Saito
Japanese animation, now commonly referred to as anime, is an
interesting field of study, not just because of its popularity in the
global market today but because of the way it disturbs existing
disciplinary boundaries. Despite its demand from the side of students,
anime has always been a nuisance for scholars and teachers of literary
studies, Japanese studies, and film studies. Anime resists these
disciplinary approaches firstly because anime’s dominant format, which
is the serialized TV program, is hopelessly multiple denying the notion
of authorship and textual coherency. Moreover, anime cannot fit into a
single medium, cell-animation, since it developed along with fan
cultures that traverse several different media such as manga, music,
garage kits, idol culture, and a game. What we see in anime culture is
a media-mix consumption that characterizes the global consumer market
today. If we fail to see the role of anime in media-mix global
markets, we end up reinforcing the same disciplinary problems by
accommodating anime harmoniously into existing boundaries.
In my paper, I would like to discuss possibilities of a new visual
theory for anime analysis that makes it possible to treat anime not as
a coherent category, but as dynamic media-mix phenomena. When Japanese
animation started to target young adult audience, which is also the
birth of “anime,” it went through changes in its visual aesthetics.
Characteristics of limited animation, i.e. segmentation of shots and
reliance on still images, introduced the issue of point-of-view
comparable to cinema. This point-of-view links the discourse not
simply to the story-world as in cinema but also to the characters that
are extremely fetishized with excessive details, shades, and highlights
which inevitably makes the images flat and static. This change in
visual aesthetics is resulted from the changes in consumer habits in
the 80s. The consumption of stories, which facilitated the
proliferation of manga-based animation (telebi manga) in the 70s, was
gradually substituted by the consumption of images (anime characters)
in the 80s. Instead of plots and stories, rapidly consumable “flat”
characters became primal commodities that traverse multiple media in
the 90s. In such circulation of images, stories these characters
convey become more and more marginal; or rather they become something
that can be fabricated depending on the consumers’ demands in its
aftermarket.
By treating anime as a new mode of consumption, my paper will offer an
alternative to the thematic analysis of anime that presumably reflects
contemporary Japanese society and to the historical analysis of anime
that traces its chronological history to pre-war era presupposing
anime’s identity as cell-animation.
Stardom and Japanese Modernity: Sessue Hayakawa and the Pure Film
Movement
Daisuke Miyao
Sessue Hayakawa (1886-1973) was a very popular silent film star in the
United States from 1915 until 1922. He was the only non-Caucasian movie
star who had the status of a matinee idol. Hayakawa’s unique stardom was
formed and received at the complex intersection of global film culture
and
social and cultural discourses, especially on race, class, gender,
nation,
and modernity. Films and film stardom have been produced and consumed in
locally specific contexts and various conditions of reception. Miriam
Hansen claims, "To write the international history of classical American
cinema, therefore, is a matter of tracing not just its mechanisms of
standardization and hegemony but also the diversity of ways in which
this
cinema was translated and reconfigured in both local and translocal
contexts
of reception." This paper examines the way Hayakawa’s stardom was
differently appropriated and articulated within the social and national
formation by various and contradictory political, ideological, and
cultural
interests before, during, and after his or her public circulation.
The 1910s was the time when the American film industry achieved global
market dominance, largely during and due to the First World War. The
1910s
and early 20s marked a pivotal period with Hollywood coming into
existence
as a global center of film production and promotion to a certain degree.
Japanese audiences were often dismayed by the result and protested
against
Hayakawa’s representation of Japan in the light of authenticity.
Simultaneously they tried to utilize Hayakawa’s star image for their own
political or nationalist purposes. Since the end of the nineteenth
century,
the Japanese government domestically adopted a modernization policy.
Particularly after World War I, Japan tried to participate in world
politics
and economy as a modernized nation. As an attempt to compete with
European
and American cultural colonialism and to bolster nationalism using
cinema,
Japanese intellectuals and government officials initiated a movement,
or a
trend, called "jun’eigageki undo," the Pure Film Movement, to
appropriate
Hollywood-style filmmaking for the purpose of modernizing cinema in
Japan.
In such a trend, Hayakawa’s American stardom was incorporated into
Japanese
modernity in a complicated way. As an American import, Hayakawa was
praised
because his star image had a universal appeal well beyond Japanese
cultural
boundaries. As a Japanese actor, Hayakawa was praised as an ideal
representative of Japanese people and culture for his popularity in the
US,
but simultaneously he was often criticized for appearing in
anti-Japanese
films that were considered as distorting actual Japanese national and
cultural characteristics.
The Star System in Japanese Silent Film
Mark Anderson
I am interested in a collaborative project that undertakes a
historical survey of the star system in Japanese film, its ties to
genre, and the
evolution of typecasting as it relates to gender, class, and ethnicity.
The paper I will be presenting examines the shimpa to silent film
transition in connection with Konjiki Yasha and Hototogisu. There are
seventeen silent versions of Konjiki Yasha. My preliminary research
indicates that rival studios placing their stars in this vehicle have
something to do with this incredible proliferation of remakes.
The notices on silent versions of Konjiki Yasha I've found so far
generally relate Entertainment Tonight type of information: where the
film
is being shot, which stars are involved, and how anxiously the film
release
is being anticipated. Much of the story seems to come from the press
buzz
around the celebrity actors and actesses.
My paper will develop this line of questioning toward answering how
casting was conducted in early silent family drama and from what point
casting was relied upon in packaging and marketing film to the public.
Lastly, I will try to examine what the particular codes of typecasting
assume concerning gender, class, and ethnicity in film roles and
celebrity
as sold to the Japanese public in the early 20th century.
Non-intensive Mise-en-scene: Textual Analysis and Japanese Popular
Ephemera
Michael Raine
In the middle of Taiyo no kisetsu, the first of the "taiyozoku" films
of 1956, a scene opens with a high angle extreme long shot of a group
of young men about to launch a boat in the harbor at Hayama. At the
bottom of the screen we see that they are chased by a group of young
women in swimsuits. After importuning them for a ride on the boat the
leader of the girls asks where the boys are from, which brings a
geographically implausible reply that sounds like "Shiga-ken, sa". But
the line also sounds like "see you again, sa" a play on the girls'
strikingly foreign bodily presentation -- a low angle shot of swimsuits
and sunglasses -- that is reinforced when their leader replies to her
own question, saying that they're from the Yoshida English school. When
the boys' spokesman asks for the girls' names their leader replies,
"Mary, Sally, Michi, Judy … Elsa". That response leads one of the boys
to ask after their nationality to which Elsa replies, equally
facetiously, "Issei, of course. Everyone says so". That foreign
affiliation seems the point of a scene that ends without resolution (it
is not clear whether the girls get their ride, nor do they appear in
the rest of the film), a point confirmed by one of the boys who
highlights this feminine detournement of nationality by dubbing each of
the boys with an archaic male name suited only for jidai-geki.
Since "gender" is the single category most often applied to ideology
critique in the cinema, this scene should pose few problems. In these
arguments women are made to bear either the burden of nationality (the
woman as the threatened "Japanese thing" that must be preserved) or the
mark of a suspiciously anti-national modernity (the moga, the pan-pan,
or the apure ge-ru). The task of the critic is to choose between these
fetishizing and sadistic representations, and to prosecute the film
accordingly. Perhaps in the end that's the best thing to do with Taiyo
no kisetsu, a film for which it would be difficult to mount an
aesthetic defense. Instead, I would like to consider the importance of
non-intensive "mise-en-scene" to this portrayal of linguistic and
bodily "miscegenation", as it relates to 1950s Japanese "audio-visual
culture". That is, rather than find in the film hidden resources of
formal play or ideological tension, I will claim that the film's
relation to the social phenomena that produced it was one of citation,
and that a more productive understanding of how we should think of the
film as a film comes from an study of its connection to wider
extra-cinematic discourses.
In the course of that project I will discuss the aural and visual
composition of the scene, and the place of such mise-en-scene analysis
in the recent theorization of "visual culture" in the recent writing of
Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, and Nicholas Mirzeoff. I will conclude that
attempts to find abstract and non-exclusionary formulations of visual
culture fall back on less sophisticated "logic of the form" assumptions
to give them structure. Nationality (and Americanization) will still be
the foreground topics of the piece but I will also be concerned with
changes in Japanese cinema as an institution, and to changes in
Japanese "body culture." Perhaps in the end, this scene from Taiyo no
kisetsu is most interesting for its striking typicality: audio-visual
culture is best understood as a web of nodes with no center, and no
automatic political consequences, rather than as a field punctuated by
self-deconstructing texts.
Naruse at P.C.L. (1935-37): The Moga and her Sisters
Catherine Russell
In 1935 Naruse Mikio was invited to join the new studio P.C.L. as a key
new director of their “modern” cinema. The move also corresponds to his
shift to sound film production. The analysis of Naruse’s films during
the two years before P.C.L. was integrated into the Toho enterprise
suggest how his representation of women and urban space coincided with
the larger shifts in Japanese culture and mass media during this
period. Cultural historians Miriam Silverberg and Harry Harootunian
have discussed the interwar period in terms of the construction of
Japanese modernity as a discourse of everyday life. Naruse’s cinema
demonstrates how this discourse was articulated in filmic form, and how
the dynamics of “modan culture” gave way in the latter part of the
decade to a very different national culture that nevertheless remained
grounded in the everyday.
While Naruse’s cinema studiously avoided any direct acknowledgement of
the ascendancy of the military in Japanese life, two of his films of
this period include pairings of women associated with modernity and
tradition. Otome-gokoro sannin kyoudai (Three Sisters With Maiden
Hearts, 1935) and Uwasa no musume (The Girl on Everyones Lips, 1935)
are both about sisters living in downtown Tokyo. While these two films
include characters close to the infamous moga figure of interwar Japan,
in Naruse’s cinema female characters are given a greater complexity
than is usually associated with the moga stereotype. Tsuma yo bara yo
no ni (Wife! Be Like a Rose!), the first Japanese feature to be
distributed in the U.S., includes his most engaging female character of
the period, played by Chiba Sachiko. Although there is no evidence to
support Burch’s claim that Naruse “refused certain norms of Western
cinema,” Tsuma yo bara is indeed among his most well-executed films. I
will argue that, despite Burch’s analysis, Naruse was not engaged in
any kind of “transgressive” practice; and while his films of the 30s
are certainly stylistically and formally idiosyncratic, his experiments
were motivated more by a need to find an appropriate means of
expression for modern Japanese life, than to challenge established
patterns of representation.
The paper will also include brief discussions of some of the other
titles Naruse was responsible for during this period: Sakasu gonin-gumi
(Five Men in the Circus, 1935), Kumoemon Tochuken (1936), Nynoni aishu
(Feminine Melancholy, 1937) and Nadare (Avalanche, 1937). These films
suggest how Naruse contributed to a popular culture in which gender
norms were under continual revision and contestation. The volume of
films is in itself remarkable (he made 10 films during these three
years), and although the quality is uneven, there is a consistent
articulation of a “vernacular modernism” appropriate to the shifting
dynamics of the public sphere. Precisely because of its association
with new industrial methods of mass culture, Naruse’s cinema provides a
privileged insight into the shifts in the symbolic cultural economy of
the period. My reading of these films is thus particularly attuned to
the details of fashion, architecture, music and narrative as well as—or
as elements of—cinematic style and effects of gender.
----
Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the
University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu
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