Dear Sarah,

Thank you for your query—it’s good to see someone else from Rochester on the SCREEN-L list! I’d recommend Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse ("Kairo”) of 2001, which uses the device of a ghostly virus transmitted through the internet to address contemporary isolation and malaise in Japan. I actually think this title could be more relevant to students today than Ringu, as it focuses on how communication technology can break down links between human beings. As Tom Mes of Midnight Eye wrote on the film, "The horror lies not in the threat of an almighty, autonomous technology that might take over or destroy our lives, but in the effects that the presence of technology, and in particular communications technology like the internet and mobile phones, has on our lives and our ways of communicating as human beings in society.” Steven T. Brown’s Tokyo Cyberpunk: Posthumanism in Japanese Visual Culture also approaches issues informing Kurosawa’s Pulse, and may be useful for you, though I haven’t read it in full.


Best regards,

Joel Neville Anderson
PhD Student, Visual and Cultural Studies
University of Rochester
978.394.3292
www.joelnevilleanderson.com


----
Learn to speak like a film/TV professor! Listen to the ScreenLex
podcast:
http://www.screenlex.org