Abtracts for this have been posted on the Kinema Club website (address below). _____________________________________________________________ Kinema Club Workshop Japanese Cinema Studies in the Rear View Mirror: Re-Viewing the Discipline University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, March 26-28, 1999 Organizers: Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto and Abe' Mark Nornes The purpose of this workshop is to enable participants to engage in collaborative reflection on a series of papers on the subject of Japanese cinema studies. It will use the occasion to prepare this work for a publication in the form of a journal issue or edited book. The idea of a workshop with a publication as the final objective took shape over the last year, however, it has been the culmination of several years of discussion about the state of Japanese cinema studies in the United States. It is evident to all researchers and teachers in the field that we are in a state of flux. While the scholars who established the field came from film studies proper or from without academia, there are now people approaching Japanese cinema from a variety of disciplines including history, literature, area studies, anthropology, and comparative literature. It is apparent that the study of Japanese cinema now has no "home"----this may be a unique strength, but it also has serious implications for anyone turning it into an academic career. At this moment of blurring disciplinary boundaries, many have come to feel the need to take stock of the situation: ask where we have come from and where we are going. What is the shape of our field, and what are the most pressing issues for future work? Unlike film conferences where papers present research projects or analyze films, this workshop will deal specifically with meta-critical and methodological issues concerning the disciplinary and institutional problems of Japanese film scholarship. The workshop will feature the following six papers (click for abstracts): ***Eric Cazdyn (U of Oregon), "Film Historiography's Other Object: Theorizing the History of Writing Japanese Film History" ***Darrell Wm. Davis (Hong Kong), "Japanese Cinema in a Transnational Age: Whither National Cinema?" ***Aaron Gerow (Yokohama National U), "Japanese Cinema Studies Here and There: The Academic Subject in Global Culture" ***Jonathan Hall (UC Santa Cruz/U of Tokyo), "Sexual Worlds in National Films: Sexuality, the Dilemma of Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Stakes of Theory" ***Kato Mikiro (U of Kyoto), "What is Japanese Cinema Studies as Such?: Some Tendencies of the Discipline in Japan" ***Joseph Murphy (U of Florida), "Is There a Discipline Called Japanese Cinema Studies?" Papers that deal with questions of canon, specialization, research method, translation, theoretical paradigms past and future, pedogogy, historiography, the relationship to scholarship in Japan and the possibilities for collaboration, the problems and potentials of institutions, and the role of archives and libraries (paper and video tape collections). Authors may address topics like the avant-garde or melodrama, as long as they ask meta-critical questions: "Why has the avant-garde been ignored by Japanese cinema studies?" "What does this absence tell us about the underlying assumptions of Japanese cinema studies as a field?" "What needs to be changed?" To approach canon would be to ask if there is one, what its shape is and why, if we need one, or if there is none, why? After such discussions of substance, the group will devote the end of the workshop to drafting plans for a publication that explores the state of Japanese cinema studies in order to reconfigure it. This workshop will feature six papers, which will be distributed and read beforehand. The number of participants will probably be larger, although our ability to support the visits of non-presenters will depend upon our success in receiving grants. (In any case, non-presenters who don't mind sleeping on couches or floors can certainly be accomodated.) ***Workshop: March 26 (Friday) through March 28 (Sunday), 1999 Inquiries by mail should be directed to A.M. Nornes, Program in Film and Video Studies, University of Michigan, 2512 Frieze Building, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285 (Phone: 734-764-0147; FAX: 734-936-1846). Direct electronic correspondence to: M. Yoshimoto ([log in to unmask]) or A.M. Nornes ([log in to unmask]) +++++Abstracts and updated information are posted on the Kinema Club website: http://pears.lib.ohio-state.edu/Markus/Welcome.htm ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.tcf.ua.edu/ScreenSite