The place of Japanese cinema in global audio-visual culture will be the subject of a five-day conference that will also feature the screening of classic and modern films.
The conference, titled "The Face of Another: Japanese Cinema/Global Images" will take place Thursday-Monday, Feb. 21-25. It is sponsored by the Council on East Asian Studies, the Film Studies Program and the Whitney Humanities Center.
Among the participants at the conference will be Masato Harada, director of such films as "Kamikaze Taxi" (1995) and "Inugami" (2001), both of which will be shown.
According to Michael Raine, lecturer in film studies, Japanese cinema has presented successive "faces" to the West. "Prized in the 1950s for its combination of universal humanist values with culturally distinctive forms of presentation, in later decades Japanese cinema was more famous for the radical 'political modernism' of filmmakers such as Nagisa Oshima," he says. "In recent years, both those early 'masks' have fallen away: from monster movies to independent cinema to animation, the variety of Japanese audio-visual production defies simple description."
"[O]ur conference aims to contribute to an understanding of this more complex, multi-faceted Japan," says Dudley Andrew, professor of comparative literature and film studies. "The first task of the conference is to consider how 'foreign elements' have been inserted into or appropriated by even the most nativist Japanese films, retracting the monocultural myth so as to survey a more varied terrain of international relations."
The conference begins on Thursday at 5 p.m. with a talk by Naoki Sakai on "Crisis of the Spirit -- Differential Investment in the West."
Other topics to be explored during the conference include "Outside-In: Foreignness in Japanese Cinema," "The Representation of Resident Koreans in Japanese Cinema, 1943-2001" and "Inside-Out: Japan in the World." Japanese fiction, film and criticism will also be explored in relation to the cinema, and there will be a discussion of wartime Japanese culture in occupied Taiwan. Invited guests from the Japanese film industry and academia will discuss their films, film distribution, the future of Japanese cinema and more.
In addition to the films named above, the films being shown are Hirokazu Koreeda's "Maborosi" (1995), Shunji Iwai's "Swallowtail Butterfly" (1996), Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Cure" (1997) and Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" (1954). For specific film times, see "Calendar," page 9.
Conference events begin on Thursday at 5 p.m., on Friday at 9:30 a.m., and on Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m. All events take place at the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St., and are free and open to the public. For further information, call the Film Studies Program at (203) 432-6764.
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