Thinking Cinema, Otherwise

Victor Fan

Professor Earl Jackson will discuss Japanese film theories and beyond at King’s College London and Garden Cinema on 6, 7, and 9 June 2024.

King's College London

For this lecture, I will draw on my soon-to-be completed monograph, Critical Conditions: Theory and Practice in Japanese Cinema. This work focuses on four Japanese directors and the voluminous film-critical writings each left behind: Yoshimura Kozaburo; Masumura Yasuzo; Oshima Nagisa; and Yoshida Kiju. I will limit my discussion to the latter three. Furthermore, as a guiding principle, I will extract those areas of each director’s writings that support my tentative characterizations of their respective critical orientations. In 1958, Oshima praised Masumura for possessing “the keenest sociological consciousness” in the film industry. I extend that estimation, as I consider Masumura a kind of speculative sociologist of subjectivity in consumer culture. I will read Oshima’s work as an exercise in the semiotics of historical responsibility. And finally, I will take up Yoshida’s involvement with phenomenology while remaining attentive to the political import Yoshida invests in acts of seeing and the construction of space.While this presentation will primarily attempt to elucidate film theoretical positions that have not been available outside of a Japanese readership, I also hope to open avenues of dialogue on film theory across geopolitical and linguistic divisions, decentered from any default recognition of the west as either point of departure or necessary horizon of comparison.

Earl Jackson is Associate Professor Emeritus from the University of California, Santa Cruz, Professor Emeritus from National Chiao Tung University, and currently Chair Professor at Asia University. He is the author of Strategies of Deviance: Studies in Gay Male Representation, and numerous essays on Japanese and Korean Cinemas, sexuality, New Narrative writers, and the work of Samuel R. Delany. He is the co-editor, with Victor Fan of Nang 7: The Scent of Boys, and the contributing co-editor, with David Desser, of The Films of Kinoshita Keisuke. Times of Joy and Sorrow (Forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press). He has worked on Korean independent films as dramaturg, line producer, editor, and actor. The lecture is drawn on his monograph, Critical Conditions: Theory and Practice in Japanese Cinema, now under contract. Jackson is currently completing a monograph on crisis and signification in Japanese genre films.

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Thinking Cinema, Otherwise

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