No.258 Seminar ： Japan in the 1950s: Film as Object of Inquiry and Research Method
- Anastasia FEDOROVA Associate Professor , Graduate School of Letters
- 2024/11/05 4:45pm
- Research Administration Building, Basement Floor (Conference Rooms 1&2)
- English
- Onsite
Summary
The talk will address Film Studies as a discipline, surveying its
history in Japan and abroad, illuminating the challenges facing modern
film scholars in an increasingly globalized field of study. As is often
the case with other fields in humanities and social sciences, the
definition of “success” in film scholarship can alter drastically
depending on the national context in which one’s research is being
perceived and critically evaluated. Acknowledging this issue, I would
like to present my Hakubi project on the cinematic “democratization” of
Japan during the early 1950s both as a research topic and a
methodological approach that can equally meet the academic requirements
within Japan and beyond. At the end of the talk, I intend to include
further examples from my ongoing “side project” on the depiction of
Siberia in the works of Japanese and Soviet filmmakers, using Kurosawa
Akira’s “Dersu Uzala” (1975) as a rich source material for investigating
(trans)national film history and the ontological nature of cinema.