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- Convenors:
-
David Pinho Barros
(Faculty of Arts of the University of Porto)
Miguel Patrício (FCSH-UNL)
Luís Mendonça (Instituto de História de Arte, FCSH/NOVA)
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- Stream:
- Visual Arts
- Location:
- Torre B, Piso 5, Auditório 3
- Sessions:
- Friday 1 September, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This panel wishes to unite distinct takes on an oft-neglected topic within the field of Japanese films studies: the use of colour. It intends to focus on three different periods and examine the phenomena of rejection and attraction colour has inspired in several filmmakers of paramount consequence.
Long Abstract:
Colour has always been a stylistic element of capital importance for the understanding of film history and aesthetics, but in the case of Japan it is particularly significant, since it is closely associated with chief paradigm shifts within individual filmographies, but also considering the nation's film history as a whole. Serious attention has been recently paid to this subject, namely with the influential two-part film season of the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna. Some well-known articles on the topic, such as Nagisa Oshima's "Banishing Green", have also been published in the West, integrated, for example, in the acclaimed 2006 Routledge anthology "Color, the Film Reader".
However, much is to be done in the scholarly analysis of this rich field, especially when it comes to relating the use of these elements with the phenomena of rejection and attraction. In fact, colour was not pacifically integrated in the Japanese film industry, having found notorious resistance by many production companies and directors on the grounds of its technical incipiency and aesthetic poverty. Nonetheless, although the country had to wait until 1951 (sixteen years after the pioneering American film "Becky Sharp") for the first colour feature to be released, Keisuke Kinoshita's "Carmen Comes Home" immediately set the tone for what would be the history of colour in national cinema: an infinitely complex creative adventure. Chromatic options varied greatly from director to director, from period to period and even from film to film within the filmmakers' careers, and these fluctuations are the core interests of this panel.
They will mainly be studied according to concepts which have revolutionised colour studies, specifically the notion to which David Batchelor gave a new life in his 2000 book "Chromophobia". In this work, the British artist and professor dissects what he sees as the chromophobic impulses of Western culture, and we defend that it is fundamental to establish a rich dialogue with the late introduction of colour in Japanese film and filmographies, as well as to analyse the opposite experience, that of the programmatic and wildly innovative embracing of colour by certain Japanese filmmakers.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 1 September, 2017, -Paper short abstract:
This paper proposes to elaborate on the transition from black and white to colour in Ozu's film career by establishing a dialogue with the "clear line", a concept originally employed to characterise Hergé's style and where colour is a major element of graphic composition and narrative significance.
Paper long abstract:
In the article "From the Art of Yasujiro Ozu", critic Tadao Sato stated that the graphic organisation in Ozu's cinema is defined by a desire to scrupulously lay out "the lines in the picture and the forms of people and things within it". After any viewing and reflection upon his last six features films, it is impossible not to consider colour as one of the elements that, together with line and form, collaborate to this meticulous arrangement, given that it is absolutely preponderant in the way the Japanese filmmaker conceived his cinematic images.
However, Ozu's embracing of colour was a late one, since the director rejected the new techniques on the grounds of their incipiency, and it was not until 1958, seven years after the first Japanese colour film, Keisuke Kinoshita's "Carmen Comes Home", that he finally abandoned black and white. Curiously (and, I argue, uncoincidentally), this chromophobic dismissal and its subsequent chromophilic impulse has a significant parallel in Franco-Belgian comics: Hergé, before integrating colour in his "Tintin" series in uncommonly creative ways, violently resisted its introduction, preferring, in the words of his biographer Pierre Assouline, to stick to his "famous black trace", "which formed the bone structure of his drawing style".
This paper proposes to discuss Yasujirô Ozu's switch from black and white to colour by situating the director's late works in the context of the clear line, a visual and narrative style first detected and theorised in the field of the European bande dessinée but with an undeniable potential for a transmedial use. In this school concerned with the art of simple and straightforward storytelling, and of which Hergé is a preeminent figure, colour is always used, according to Adelaide Russo, "'in flat stains', without shadows or gradients, in the hope of conferring a bigger 'readability' to the drawings". I will argue that Yasujirô Ozu's use of colour has the same applications and aesthetic and narrative consequences of that of the clear line comics, and therefore that the shift from a chromophobic approach to a chromophilic one forged a completely new semiotic system in the director's career.
Paper short abstract:
In his "eroductions", Kôji Wakamatsu showcased a surreal use of colour as opposed to Toshio Matsumoto's resistance to its symbolic power in Shura. However, in both cases, colour and shadow entertain a dialectical relation: the emancipation of the former is made possible by the latter and vice-versa.
Paper long abstract:
In Japan, cinematically speaking, the 1960s were the last decade when black and white and colour coexisted as equally feasible production options, despite being considered, even by the studios, two entirely different methods of shooting film. Colour films implied bigger budgets and additional pressure to provide a return on investment, while monochrome productions typically had more freedom to engage in risky subject matter and display the singular world-views of an emerging generation of filmmakers.
Pink film ("pinku eiga") was born in this context. Defined by one hour long, black and white, low budget erotic productions, this new genre of film often featured isolated colour scenes when characters engaged in sexual activity. Kôji Wakamatsu, unlike his fellow pink directors, never used colour as a means to sexually arouse his spectators. In an interview several years prior to his passing, he compared his sudden shifts to colour to explosions of strong redness, confessing that he was "using colour to create shock." Tracing an unusual chromophilia in his films from the late 1960s, we will see how, rather than inducing libidinous trances in viewers, Wakamatsu agitated them by using colour in key scenes, and made them access other planes of reality to an extent.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, Toshio Matsumoto, who came from the documentary scene, perfected a monochromatic aesthetic with his first two feature-length films, "Funeral Parade of Roses" (1969) and "Demons" (1971). He once said that "Funeral Parade of Roses" was about a "bright white world" ("shiroi sekai"), while "Demons" was about a "dark world" ("kuroi sekai"). Despite this "dark world", Shura begins with a colour scene, a "sizzling red setting sun", and then is engulfed in darkness to never return. Opposed to Wakamatsu's brief but radically expressive use of colour, the permanent world of shadows contained therein illustrates a peculiar case of chromophobia in which the refusal of brightness is tied to the utter impossibility of redemption by its main characters.
Paper short abstract:
Since "Only Yesterday", Isao Takahata is enticed by the so-called negative space or ma. Most of his films erupt from white, a colour that represents light but that also conveys the anguish of emptiness.
Paper long abstract:
There is a distinct difference between the films made by Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki, the two founding fathers of Studio Ghibli. Looking at the surface of Takahata's animation style we notice how rarefied his gesture is compared to Miyazaki's drawings, which are much more lineate and vividly colourful. Takahata works in a very different "economy of style". He is the one to sustain that "when you're drawing fast there's passion. With a carefully finished product that passion gets lost". Takahata is interested in speed, but he takes much more time finishing a picture than Miyazaki - for instance, he took fourteen years to complete his latest film "The Tale of Princess Kaguya" (2013).
Since "Only Yesterday" (1991), he is enticed by the so-called negative space (Manny Farber) or, as the Japanese called it, "ma", perfecting a kind of "zero degree" style (Roland Barthes) of animation. His films seem to erupt from white, a colour that represents light (Goethe), but that also conveys the anguish of emptiness. He draws or "adds up" over the "espace anéanti" (Roger Munier): "Le néant n'est que l'excès du réel. Le réel incandescent, brûlant de sa propre réalité, la consumant." The prevalence of white doesn't mean that his films are deprived of full-blown and even earthly characters. Quite the opposite: in Takahata's sublime aesthetics reality glows in so much as fantastic fantasy is put aside.