Genre Tropes and Imagery in Japanese High School Films: Window Aesthetics in After the Rain (2018)
Peter C Pugsley (University of Adelaide)
Films set in Japanese high schools first gained international attention following the release of Battle Royale in 2000. Since then, the popularity of the genre has seen hundreds of feature-length high school films released (although few as violent as Battle Royale), creating a strong corpus of films set within the physical site of the schoolground, a place of familiarity and nostalgia for Japanese audiences. Many of these films draw on existing manga, anime or short novels as their source text. After the Rain [Koi wa Ameagari no You ni] (2018, dir. Nagai Akira) is just one example of a manga and anime-based film that utilises the tropes and imagery of the high school film. In this paper, I explore the overt use of the window motif in After the Rain as a visual point of entry into the classroom, and as both a barrier and a form of transparency. Nagai takes full advantage of the internal/external binary afforded by windows as a deliberate framing device, and as a ‘natural’ source of light. While the visual style of After the Rain deliberately accentuates the window motif (a direct adaptation of its ‘light-filled’ source manga), this paper illustrates how it draws from other films in the high school genre, and from precedents found in the broader ‘window aesthetics’ of global cinema through films such as Rear Window (1954, Hitchcock), In the Mood for Love (2000, Wong Kar Wai) and The Darjeeling Limited (2007, Wes Anderson).
Buried Blockbuster: Unforgetting Prophecies of Nostradamus (1974)
Guillaume Vétu (University of Adelaide)
This paper (re)introduces Prophecies of Nostradamus (Nosutoradamusu no daiyogen, Dir: Masuda, 1974), an almost-forgotten, almost-impossible-to-find Japanese blockbuster. Afforded one of the largest budgets for a domestic production at the time and a generous theatrical distribution, it was promptly pulled from theatres when hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) advocate groups condemned its depictions of irradiated savages and devolved humans as reinforcing the discrimination they suffered in real life. Toho, the major studio behind the film, placed full-page ads in newspapers across the country, making a public apology for the offence caused. Prophecies of Nostradamus then returned to theatres, with the politically incorrect scenes edited out. Despite – or perhaps because of – this controversy, it became Toho’s top box office earner that year, only to be shelved soon after, remaining to this day under a strict, self-imposed, worldwide ban. The film also happens to predict, almost forty years before it happened, the 2011 tsunami disaster and ensuing Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown, which it depicts in accurate graphic details using a model replica, thus further diminishing any chance of a re-release. Notwithstanding, this paper (re)positions Prophecies of Nostradamus as an important, multifaceted piece of Japanese popular culture, which tapped into contemporaneous Japanese anxieties about pollution, economic instability, social unrest and the nuclear, and epitomises the Japanese popular obsession with the 16th century French mystic, whose apocalyptic predictions pervaded the so-called ‘occult boom’ of the 1980s and 1990s (most notably manifested in the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway by members of the doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyō). The controversy sparked by this film and its response are also representative of post-war Japan struggles with discrimination, towards the hibakusha and others. In zombie film studies too, Prophecies of Nostradamus is emblematic of current ontological shifts regarding the living-dead and their long-postulated Afro-Carribean-American lineage.
North Korean Film Industry in the 1970s: The Rise of Juche Aesthetics in Popular Films
Jeferson Martins (Hanyang University)
This paper aims to understand the main characteristics of the North Korean Film industry in the 1970s under the concept of Juche Aesthetics proposed by Kim Jong-il. Historically, North Korean cinema is closely synchronized to the political, social, and cultural changes of the country. In 1972, the party has announced that the socialism process was completed and officially adopted a new constitution based on the Juche ideology. In other words, the Juche Idea, which essentially advocates independence in economic, political, and defense activities, officially replaced the old system based on Marxism Leninism. In accordance, the government actively used the film industry to promote its ideas. In his film treatise “On the Art of Cinema” (1973), Kim Jong-il stated that cinema must be the most important art form due to its high public appeal and propagation power. Basically, the theory emphasizes that the ideological content should always be in the center of the film in order to educate the audience through Juche and against capitalism thoughts. Additionally, while the ideological content should be emphasized, the script, directing, acting, scenario, music, and the entire production have to realistically reflect the problems and needs of the nation. In this way, there was a big shift in the cinema industry and popular films started to adopt the Juche Aesthetics. Since the most essential feature of this new treatise relies on the ideological content, this paper aims to discuss the main themes, as well as some common aesthetical characteristics explored by the most popular movies of that era. By doing so, it will be possible to understand how censorship and its impact in film discourse could be used as a tool to critically understand the country and bring to light the research on North Korean Film, which has been historically neglected by academia.
A New Inception: Reintroducing Film Genres in 1980s Chinese Cinema
Stefano Locati (IULM University)
While discussing the recent film-genre boom in PRC contemporary cinema – starting from the historical martial arts film Hero (Ying xiong, Zhang Yimou, 2002), to the romantic comedy Go Lala Go! (Du Lala shengzhi ji, Xu Jinglei, 2010) and the film noir Black Coal, Thin Ice (Bairi yanhuo, Diao Yinan, 2014), even to fantasy and horror bolstered by online streaming platforms such as iQiyi and Youku – it is often forgotten that they are not a complete novelty of the new millennium, nor a sole consequence of the influence of foreign cinemas. Genre filmmaking was on the rise in PRC at least since the 1980s, when a positive attitude towards commercial films took root in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. The paper aims at investigating the film-genre tradition in PRC cinema of the 1980s, which was arguably prompted by the unexpected success of three movies distributed in 1980 – the martial arts film The Mysterious Buddha (Shenmi de dafu, Zhang Huaxun), the thriller Murder in 405 (405 Mousha an, Shen Yaoting), and the melodrama Romance on Lushan Mountain (Lushan lian, Huang Zumo). Proceeding in parallel to the rise of the Fifth Generation, and obscured by their international success, which claimed the central stage in the critical discourse, these films lay the foundation for a commercial and genre undercurrent in Chinese mainstream cinema that continued in the next decades. Within the boundaries of the time, filmmakers experimented with thrillers, martial arts, romantic comedies, even horror; they used the new political climate to address the Chinese society from a genre perspective, with a freedom unknown in the Seventeen Years, when there wasn’t an active genre system (in a Western sense) and the only “quasi-genre”, as Dai Jinhua called it, could be considered the counter-espionage films.