Home birth, world cinema: Kawase Naomi's films in circulation

ABSTRACT An Asian woman filmmaker whose work is celebrated and financed in Europe yet produced in her hometown of Nara, Japan, Kawase Naomi's creative trajectory is often made to trace an economy of ‘world cinema’ sketching constructions of gender, race and nation in uneasy relation to actual patterns of reception and production. While her early self-documentary shorts are described according to artistic vision, her later arthouse features are judged for their circulation on the international film festival circuit. Yet these impulses toward aesthetic and institutional analysis are seldom integrated into a critical appreciation of the breadth of Kawase's work. This article examines a transitional period of the director's filmography in which scenes of home birth repeat across her dramatic and documentary work, placing them in context with discourses of self-documentary and personal filmmaking that aestheticize birth and sex to interrogate the act of self-expression, and challenge gendered constructions of the artist and formation of a ‘natural’ life against a cultural mainstream. While her work is criticized as narcissistically apolitical by a masculinist domestic film culture, approaching Kawase's material and institutional self-inscription reveals a feminist mediation in productive tension with neoliberal globalization's cinema of regional consumption.