Japan

Screening Memory and Reframing Loss in Contemporary Japanese Cinema

Date
Thu April 27th 2017, 4:30 - 6:00pm
Event Sponsor
Center for East Asian Studies, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Location
Knight Building, Room 102, 521 Memorial Way
Screening Memory and Reframing Loss in Contemporary Japanese Cinema

Speaker: Earl Jackson Jr.-Associate Professor emeritus from UC Santa Cruz

Free and open to the public. Please RSVP here.

PLEASE NOTE TIME CHANGE: This event has been moved from 4:15 - 5:45 pm to 4:30 - 6:00 pm.

This talk will examine changes in the relations of cinema, memory, and loss in Japanese cinema focusing on technological redistribution of memory and the expansion of the subject of loss in the Japanese cinema at the turn of the millennium. The reading of You Were Like a Wild Chrysanthemum (Kinoshita Keisuke 1955) will be contrasted with readings of Love Letter (Iwai Shunji 1995) and Miike Takashi’s Dead or Alive trilogy: Dead or Alive (1999-2002). Professor Jackson will delineate the divergence of the millennial film from the melodrama by examining a feature they share: the experience of loss as an orientation to the world and its meanings, although the forms of loss vary: bereavement (loss of an other); nostalgia (loss of home); and alienation (loss of identity). Loss in the classical melodrama is represented and reconciled within a primarily aesthetico-ethical system, while loss in the contemporary film is adjudicated through commodification of memory and articulated through socio-political antagonisms.

Earl Jackson Jr., Associate Professor emeritus from UC Santa Cruz, is currently Professor at National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. He is author of Strategies of Deviance: Studies in Gay Male Representation, and essays on Japanese literature and Japanese and Korean cinema. He worked in Korean indpendent cinema as screenwriter, editor, and actor. He appeared as the villain in Barbie (Sangwoo Lee 2010).  He has recently completed a monograph on Japanese anime, Technopoetic Japan, and is currently writing a study of  the relation of theory and practice in Japanese Cinema.

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