Category Archives: Japan

SOAS Centre for Film and Screen Studies presents: International Symposium: Rediscovering the Diva; Considering the Impact of Female Star Personae on Japanese Film and Visual Media

funeralparadeofroses

‘Diva fight’ – Still taken from Bara no soretsu [Funeral Parade of Roses] – Matsumoto Toshio, 1969

I will be presenting a paper at the SOAS Centre for Film and Screen Studies Symposium on the 11th of June entitled ‘The angura Diva: Photodynamism and Identity in Matsumoto Toshio’s Funeral Parade of Roses’. The paper examines the role of the transvestite diva  within a theoretical framework focusing on the visual collage and countercultural subtext of Matsumoto’s film.

Eddie

Eddie! Still taken from Bara no soretsu

If you are in London on either Monday 10th (for the Symposium screening of Kurosawa’s The Idiot), or Tuesday the 11th for what looks to be fascinating programme of speakers charting and unpicking the  diva persona in Japanese film, please do come along. Register online here and take a look at the exciting programme

Funeral parade mask

 

Still from Bara no soretsu

 

‘Site and Specificity in Japanese Expanded Cinema: Intermedia and its Development in the late-60s’ by Julian Ross | Décadrages

‘Site and Specificity in Japanese Expanded Cinema: Intermedia and its Development in the late-60s’ by Julian Ross | Décadrages

Matsumoto Toshio, Tsuburekakatta Migimeno Tameni (For My Crushed Right Eye, 1968), Still

I have just read Julian Ross’s invaluable article on expanded cinema and projection space in 1960s/early 1970s Japan. Particularly interesting is his account of the changing relationship between viewer and projection space, which was eventually marked by the waning success of Expo film programmes, towards an ‘Anti-Expo’ sentiment regarding festival screenings. The ‘space’, he argues, is never neutral, never static, and expanded cinema challenges conventional spectatorial perspective founded on a simple linear bridge between spectator and screen. Gone too, is the prescriptive concept of space as  hierarchic ally ordered – the screen is freed.

‘space is never in a state of stasis and, instead, in a perpetual state of becoming, which is most prominently displayed in the event of an expanded cinema projection’ – Ross, 2013.

Have a read:

‘Site and Specificity in Japanese Expanded Cinema: Intermedia and its Development in the late-60s’ by Julian Ross | Décadrages.

:: Photography in Japan : Mariko Takeuchi ::

 

Shoji Ueda, Self Portrait with Gorilla Mask, 1975-1982

 :: Photography in Japan : Mariko Takeuchi ::. is a great overview of the basic movements in Japanese photography measured against a socio-historical background. Mariko Takeuchi is Associate Professor at Kyoto’s University of Art and Design, and more details can be found here on her site,

Tomatsu Shohei, Blood and Rose 2, Tokyo 1969