{"title":"Landscape and the crisis of representation in Nakae Yūji’s Panari nite (1986)","authors":"Kosuke Fujiki","doi":"10.1080/17564905.2021.1920815","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17564905.2021.1920815","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In Japan, the ideological implications of landscape were hotly discussed throughout the 1970s. In his response to this discussion, the film scholar and critic Hasumi Shigehiko characterized ‘landscape’ as a cultural apparatus that dictates one’s perception of the physical world. A comparable view on landscape can be found in Panari nite (On an Offshore Island, Nakae Yūji, 1986), which evinces a critical engagement with landscape through drawing on the mythologized life of Vincent van Gogh in Arles. As with the Dutch artist, who sought an imagined Japan in southern France, the film’s protagonist, a painter from Tokyo, carries along his fantasies when he comes to an island in subtropical Okinawa, where he confronts the devastating gap between reality and representation. Through analysis of the film, I will assess Hasumi’s formative influence upon Nakae, arguing that the film employs Hasumi’s critical approach to landscape in order to counter the dominant stereotype of Okinawa as an exotic Other within Japan’s national boundary.","PeriodicalId":37898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema","volume":"13 1","pages":"22 - 37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17564905.2021.1920815","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44906506","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Continuing as an ‘open incompleteness’: Motoshinkakarannū and uncanny Okinawa","authors":"Nakazato Isao, Kosuke Fujiki","doi":"10.1080/17564905.2021.1914886","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17564905.2021.1914886","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema","volume":"13 1","pages":"38 - 43"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17564905.2021.1914886","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43137278","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reminiscences of a journey to Okinawa: landscape film as essay, and Takamine Gō’s Okinawan Dream Show (1974)","authors":"R. Ma","doi":"10.1080/17564905.2021.1914887","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17564905.2021.1914887","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This study places itself at the intersection between essay film, landscape film (fūkei eiga), and Okinawa. It aims to understand how such an intersection contributes to rethinking independent (documentary) filmmaking in Japan (and Okinawa) during the late 1960s and early 1970s. I highlight Okinawa-born, Kyoto-based filmmaker Takamine Gō, particularly his first nonfiction feature, Okinawan Dream Show (1974). Whereas ‘landscape film’ is used to frame and describe a spectrum of discursive articulations and the concomitant filmmaking practices centreing around ‘fūkei’ (landscape), I unpack landscape film with insights borrowed from the discussions of essayistic cinema. I shall argue that Okinawan Dream Show leverages interstitial strategies to configure a temporal and affective assemblage to envision an Okinawan landscape that is both lost and yet to come.","PeriodicalId":37898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema","volume":"13 1","pages":"4 - 21"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17564905.2021.1914887","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44661061","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"In/visibility in post-war Okinawan images 1","authors":"R. Ma, Kosuke Fujiki","doi":"10.1080/17564905.2021.1930474","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17564905.2021.1930474","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema","volume":"13 1","pages":"1 - 3"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17564905.2021.1930474","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47099595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The melodrama of Ozu: Tokyo Story and its time","authors":"D. Miyao","doi":"10.1080/17564905.2021.1906501","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17564905.2021.1906501","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The Japanese filmmaker Ozu Yasujirō openly expressed his disgust for melodrama in a December 1952 interview. And yet, curiously, he said Tokyo Story (Tokyo monogatari), which was released only a year later, had ‘the strongest melodramatic tendency’ among his films. Ozu never said he disliked his acclaimed 1953 film. How should we interpret this contradiction? In this essay, I take Ozu’s conflicting claims as indicative of the complexity of the discourse of melodrama in Japan. I locate Tokyo Story in two contexts: the context of Euro-American studies of film melodrama and that of the discourse on melodrama in Japanese film criticism. The first context reveals that Tokyo Story cannot be comfortably categorized as a melodrama, though the film shares elements of the melodramatic imagination. The second context demonstrates that Tokyo Story is not a simple melodrama. Ozu’s contradiction stemmed from an ambivalent definition of melodrama in Japan in the first half of the twentieth century. By closely analyzing Ozu’s Tokyo Story, and how melodrama was imagined and constructed between the 1930s and the 1950s, we can gain a stronger understanding of the film’s relation to the mode.","PeriodicalId":37898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema","volume":"13 1","pages":"58 - 79"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17564905.2021.1906501","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42562684","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"South Korean Cine-Feminism on the Move","authors":"H. Park","doi":"10.1080/17564905.2020.1847759","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17564905.2020.1847759","url":null,"abstract":"Hyun Seon Park is currently a visiting professor at Yonsei University and a co-editor-in-chief of Munhwa/gwahak [Culture/Science]. Park received her PhD from the University of California, Irvine, a...","PeriodicalId":37898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema","volume":"12 1","pages":"91-97"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17564905.2020.1847759","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60398746","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Giving death: the hero as sovereign utility in Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013)","authors":"S. Asokan","doi":"10.1080/17564905.2020.1848878","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17564905.2020.1848878","url":null,"abstract":"This paper considers the theme of sacrificial heroism in the South Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s film Snowpiercer (2013). In order to become the hero, the film’s main character, Curtis, must risk ...","PeriodicalId":37898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema","volume":"12 1","pages":"138-152"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17564905.2020.1848878","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60399433","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Acting ‘like a woman’: South Korean female action heroines","authors":"Hye-Kyong Sim","doi":"10.1080/17564905.2020.1840032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17564905.2020.1840032","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Since the early 2000s, South Korean cinema has been dominated by action-noir and blockbuster ‘bromance’ films. However, after the intervention of feminist organizations into mainstream discourse since 2015, one could detect more demands for films featuring female protagonists with adequate gender representations. Beginning with The Villainess (Aknyeo, dir. Jeong Byeong-gil, 2017), women protagonists began to appear in high-budget South Korean action films and are no longer relegated to exclusively passive roles as supporting characters. However, although these new female action films feature spectacular action sequences, they revolve around a narrative structure that falls back on heteronormative and patriarchal conceptions of femininity and represent female characters as erotic spectacles. This paper analyses recent South Korean female action films The Villainess, A Special Lady (Miok, dir. Lee An-gyu, 2017), No Mercy (Eonni, dir. Im Gyeong-taek, 2019), and The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion (Manyeo, dir. Park Hun-jeong, 2018) to diagnose the current state of female action films in South Korea and interrogate what it means to perform ‘like a woman’ in South Korean action films.","PeriodicalId":37898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema","volume":"12 1","pages":"110 - 123"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17564905.2020.1840032","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48172838","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Im Hwa: colonial film criticism in Korea","authors":"Moonim Baek","doi":"10.1080/17564905.2020.1816915","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17564905.2020.1816915","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Two articles of Im Hwa on Korean film during colonial rule, originally published in 1941 and 1942, have been translated into English and appeared in the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema in 2019 and 2020. This article further introduces the author Im (1908–1953), who was an influential Korean socialist poet, literary and filmic critic, as well as movie actor. It illustrates Im Hwa’s itinerary as a film critic whose major interests were on the ontology of Joseon (Korean) cinema as a particular cinema that cannot be assimilated to then the Japanese state cinema. In his writings, Im advances the notions of ‘transplantation’ in order to articulate ‘artistic features of Joseon cinema’, which he sees as a key strategy for Joseon cinema to critically engage in the ‘transitional period’ of the early 1940s, during which the industrialization of Joseon film production had been longed for, but collapsed and absorbed into the state-run Joseon Motion Picture Corporation during the Greater East Asian War.","PeriodicalId":37898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema","volume":"12 1","pages":"153 - 162"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17564905.2020.1816915","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47665090","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Construction of the female self in South Korean feminist documentaries Family Project: House of a Father (2001) and The Two Lines (2011)","authors":"I. Nam, Nam Lee","doi":"10.1080/17564905.2020.1838149","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17564905.2020.1838149","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay pays particular attention to the strong presence of women filmmakers in the history of South Korean documentary filmmaking, analyzing two feminist autoethnographic documentaries, Family Project: House of a Father (Paemilli peurojekteu: abeojiui jip, Jo Yun-gyeong, 2001) and The Two Lines (Du gaeui seon, Jimin, 2011), to highlight how these personal documentaries create new discursive spaces for feminist issues. These films exemplify the two most prominent features of Korean feminist documentaries produced in the 2000s: autobiographical or autoethnographic approach and the critical reexamination of the family institution in the context of the twenty-first Century. The analysis of these films focuses on the role of the female narrator/the filmmaker and performativity in documentary filmmaking in order to illustrate how personal documentaries can be a useful strategy for women filmmakers to interrogate the most pressing feminist/gender issues of the time as well as to construct a new female self/subjectivity in the process of production. The act of making personal documentaries itself could be considered a process of self-exploration, and the performativity unique to making personal documentaries establishes such an act as a performative utterance.","PeriodicalId":37898,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema","volume":"12 1","pages":"124 - 137"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17564905.2020.1838149","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47364120","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}