Humanities: Special Issue on Modern Japanese Literature and Media Industry, 2022
This paper attempts a close study of Abe Kobo’s novel Woman in the Dunes and its screen adaptatio... more This paper attempts a close study of Abe Kobo’s novel Woman in the Dunes and its screen adaptation (dir. Teshigahara Hiroshi 1964). Engaging adaptation studies, media studies, and sound studies, this paper moves from the conventional focus on the linear transfer of text from a source to a result, to examine adaptation as a multilevel, multisensory, and multidirectional process of remediation. By mediating documentary cinema and avant-garde tradition, the filmic adaptation, as the paper argues, not only provokes and enhances its literary original, but also illuminates existentialist concerns that gained critical currency in the 1960s. The paper moves on to analyze Takemitsu Toru’s score in relation to Teshigahara’s surrealist imagery; in doing so, it elucidates the way the film gives the sand a form of human agency alluded to yet not fully realized in Abe’s novel. Scrutiny of Abe and Takemitsu’s early years in Japan-occupied Manchuria further connects Abe’s work to the issue of postcolonial identity while opening Woman in the Dunes to more interpretative possibilities as an I-Novel. Through mediating collective history and personal memory, adaptation opens a dialogic intersubjective horizon where questions of identity and affect intersect in the post- war media environment.
This paper examines the complex relations between life-writing, female (in)visibility, and agency... more This paper examines the complex relations between life-writing, female (in)visibility, and agency by investigating the life and career of Sakane Tazuko, Japan's first female director. In her lifetime, Sakane worked as Mizoguchi Kenji's screenwriter, editor, and assistant director on multiple projects before making her directorial debut in 1936. Despite being the only female film director working in a critical period of silent-sound transition, she has long been marginalized, if not erased, from the history of Japanese cinema. Invoking Michel-Rolf Trouillot's notion of " two historicities " – " what happened " and " what was said to have happened " – I would like to compare Sakane to Tanaka Kinuyo, a successful actress-turned-director that has long been believed to be " Japan's first female director. " The comparison of their biographies, I will argue, sheds light on Sakane's structural absence from the historical narrative of Japanese cinema that erroneously positions Tanaka as the first female director. Sakane's eschewing conventional femininity, as I will illustrate, on the one hand enabled her to mobilize filmmaking as a site for resisting and readdressing the oppressive gender role, on the other hand ironically lead to the careless disinterest from the public that sought to eroticize the presence of female working women at the time. In a discussion of Sakane's photographic image and its lesbian connotation, I will further argue that Sakane's absence reveals some historians' homophobic and heteronormative imperatives that severely restrict the writing of history. Even more significantly, I intend to highlight that the two women directors' stories both have been constructed in a way that centralizes Mizoguchi the male auteur. These Mizoguchi-centered narratives hints towards the fact that being Japan's first female director in their own right isn't sufficient to situate them in the narrative of Japanese film history as such. Ultimately, the gap between and the overlap of two historicities – " the one who was Japan's first female director " and " the one who was said to be Japan's female director " – altogether lay bare the problems concerning how we talk about (and more often do not talk about) women film workers historically, and calls for critical intervention to open up new horizons for plurality suppressed by patriarchal and phallocentric singularity.
This paper takes the liminal position of colonial Manchuria as an entry point to interrogate cine... more This paper takes the liminal position of colonial Manchuria as an entry point to interrogate cinema's two boundaries—geographical and medial. In the age of imperial expansion, " nation " as a naturalized category is simultaneously useful and inadequate in tracking the transnational and translocal circulation of knowledge and discourse around cinema. By the same token, the notion of " medium " is equally destabilized against the vibrant mediascape of Japanese Empire and cinema's historical interplay with photography, literature, and theater, among others. How did the German concept Kulturfilme migrate to Japan as bunka eiga and eventually to Manchukuo as qimin dianying? How did the documentary perspective in presenting landscape and indigenous people in Man'ei fiction films borrow from photography to produce colonial knowledge? How did the cross-cultural and cross-medial formation of the Chinese wuxia genre in Manchukuo play into the politics of empire-building? How did Prokino Film Movement and Native Soil Literature Movement bring together otherwise unlikely bedfellows from Chine and Japan via translation? Critically engaging with Miriam Hansen's notion " vernacular modernism " and Lydia Liu's concept " translingual practice, " this paper attends to colonial cinema as a mass-mediated experience of modernity, and more importantly, the struggle over power to inscribe meaning and demarcate boundaries, from both inside and outside Manchuria. This paper as a whole addresses a set of problems raised with particular film practices that are connected by an uneasy relation to Manchukuo's search for nationhood and modernity. By exploring the palimpsest history of Manchukuo cinema, this paper argues for (re)situating colonial cinema in an expansive media ecology—or a process of " worlding " —that ideologically and affectively registers the shifting dispositif of the Empire and the global unfolding of colonial modernity.
Humanities: Special Issue on Modern Japanese Literature and Media Industry, 2022
This paper attempts a close study of Abe Kobo’s novel Woman in the Dunes and its screen adaptatio... more This paper attempts a close study of Abe Kobo’s novel Woman in the Dunes and its screen adaptation (dir. Teshigahara Hiroshi 1964). Engaging adaptation studies, media studies, and sound studies, this paper moves from the conventional focus on the linear transfer of text from a source to a result, to examine adaptation as a multilevel, multisensory, and multidirectional process of remediation. By mediating documentary cinema and avant-garde tradition, the filmic adaptation, as the paper argues, not only provokes and enhances its literary original, but also illuminates existentialist concerns that gained critical currency in the 1960s. The paper moves on to analyze Takemitsu Toru’s score in relation to Teshigahara’s surrealist imagery; in doing so, it elucidates the way the film gives the sand a form of human agency alluded to yet not fully realized in Abe’s novel. Scrutiny of Abe and Takemitsu’s early years in Japan-occupied Manchuria further connects Abe’s work to the issue of postcolonial identity while opening Woman in the Dunes to more interpretative possibilities as an I-Novel. Through mediating collective history and personal memory, adaptation opens a dialogic intersubjective horizon where questions of identity and affect intersect in the post- war media environment.
This paper examines the complex relations between life-writing, female (in)visibility, and agency... more This paper examines the complex relations between life-writing, female (in)visibility, and agency by investigating the life and career of Sakane Tazuko, Japan's first female director. In her lifetime, Sakane worked as Mizoguchi Kenji's screenwriter, editor, and assistant director on multiple projects before making her directorial debut in 1936. Despite being the only female film director working in a critical period of silent-sound transition, she has long been marginalized, if not erased, from the history of Japanese cinema. Invoking Michel-Rolf Trouillot's notion of " two historicities " – " what happened " and " what was said to have happened " – I would like to compare Sakane to Tanaka Kinuyo, a successful actress-turned-director that has long been believed to be " Japan's first female director. " The comparison of their biographies, I will argue, sheds light on Sakane's structural absence from the historical narrative of Japanese cinema that erroneously positions Tanaka as the first female director. Sakane's eschewing conventional femininity, as I will illustrate, on the one hand enabled her to mobilize filmmaking as a site for resisting and readdressing the oppressive gender role, on the other hand ironically lead to the careless disinterest from the public that sought to eroticize the presence of female working women at the time. In a discussion of Sakane's photographic image and its lesbian connotation, I will further argue that Sakane's absence reveals some historians' homophobic and heteronormative imperatives that severely restrict the writing of history. Even more significantly, I intend to highlight that the two women directors' stories both have been constructed in a way that centralizes Mizoguchi the male auteur. These Mizoguchi-centered narratives hints towards the fact that being Japan's first female director in their own right isn't sufficient to situate them in the narrative of Japanese film history as such. Ultimately, the gap between and the overlap of two historicities – " the one who was Japan's first female director " and " the one who was said to be Japan's female director " – altogether lay bare the problems concerning how we talk about (and more often do not talk about) women film workers historically, and calls for critical intervention to open up new horizons for plurality suppressed by patriarchal and phallocentric singularity.
This paper takes the liminal position of colonial Manchuria as an entry point to interrogate cine... more This paper takes the liminal position of colonial Manchuria as an entry point to interrogate cinema's two boundaries—geographical and medial. In the age of imperial expansion, " nation " as a naturalized category is simultaneously useful and inadequate in tracking the transnational and translocal circulation of knowledge and discourse around cinema. By the same token, the notion of " medium " is equally destabilized against the vibrant mediascape of Japanese Empire and cinema's historical interplay with photography, literature, and theater, among others. How did the German concept Kulturfilme migrate to Japan as bunka eiga and eventually to Manchukuo as qimin dianying? How did the documentary perspective in presenting landscape and indigenous people in Man'ei fiction films borrow from photography to produce colonial knowledge? How did the cross-cultural and cross-medial formation of the Chinese wuxia genre in Manchukuo play into the politics of empire-building? How did Prokino Film Movement and Native Soil Literature Movement bring together otherwise unlikely bedfellows from Chine and Japan via translation? Critically engaging with Miriam Hansen's notion " vernacular modernism " and Lydia Liu's concept " translingual practice, " this paper attends to colonial cinema as a mass-mediated experience of modernity, and more importantly, the struggle over power to inscribe meaning and demarcate boundaries, from both inside and outside Manchuria. This paper as a whole addresses a set of problems raised with particular film practices that are connected by an uneasy relation to Manchukuo's search for nationhood and modernity. By exploring the palimpsest history of Manchukuo cinema, this paper argues for (re)situating colonial cinema in an expansive media ecology—or a process of " worlding " —that ideologically and affectively registers the shifting dispositif of the Empire and the global unfolding of colonial modernity.
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