Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that filmmaker Seto Momoko's experimental shorts, Planet Sigma (2014) and Planet Infinity (2017) present a speculative vision of post-extinction worlds while at the same time articulating a subtle immanent critique of anthropocenic imaginaries in contemporary visual culture.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation argues that filmmaker Seto Momoko's experimental shorts, Planet Sigma (2014) and Planet Infinity (2017) present a speculative vision of post-extinction worlds while at the same time articulating a subtle immanent critique of anthropocenic imaginaries in contemporary art, the humanities and visual culture. This critical vision is expressed mainly through three strategies: 1)The staging, by means of "magical" techniques such as time-lapse photography and VR (virtual reality), of uncanny, primordial toxic worlds; 2)the foregrounding of the agency and potentiality of in/nonhuman non/life and forces; 3)a dispassionate, post-or nonhuman perspectivism that displaces the postapocalyptic horror and epic survivalism in much "Anthropocenema" as well as the techno-fix optimism of some eco-documentaries. These strategies are in turn sustained, in the two films under discussion, by several experimental techniques and aesthetic choices: outsized scale (e.g. the frozen insects that come back to life in Planet Sigma are gigantic); a processual poetics of repetition and loops; an insistence on the surplus-value-of-alterlife. Building on the emerging science of evolutionary mineralogy, immanence philosophies, and recent feminist decolonial discourses, I will show that Seto's films envision post-extinction worlds as a radical ecology of nonhuman alterlife (already altered life) that not only challenges the humanist hubris and anthropocentricism of Anthropocene science but also insists that the crucial agency of the "tangled geochemical continuum" of life and nonlife in building the planet's systems requires a reconceptualization of the notion of life and of its materialities and temporalities.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines two Japanese hit films as collaborations between extremist novelists and 'innocent' filmmakers. Both films shift the window of discourse; these collaborations take extremist rightwing novels out of the fringe and, remade in a less objectionable filmic form, into the mainstream.

Paper long abstract:

The Japanese film industry, like others worldwide, is laudable for being deeply collaborative in nature. But there is a darker side of collaboration in contemporary Japanese film: the process by which the work of controversial novelist-politicians like Ishihara Shintarō and Hyakuta Naoki, rendered into film by allegedly apolitical movie-makers, converts their extremist views into socially acceptable and indeed seemingly mainstream opinions.

This paper examines two influential twenty-first century Japanese blockbusters and the effects of their collaboration between extremist novelists and 'innocent' filmmakers. These films, For Those We Love (2007) and The Eternal Zero (2013), are very similar in tone, narrative structure, content and message, which is no accident; both are collaborations to take the work of extremist rightwing novelists out of the fringe and, repackaged in a less objectionable filmic form, into the mainstream.

These films do something the controversial novels on which they are based cannot: free consumers from the social desirability bias. By working to push Japan's national discourse on the wartime past from its spiral of (vaguely ashamed) silence into vocal pride, they offer 'low-information viewers' a tantalizing spectacle of a wartime past of which they can and should be publicly proud rather than ashamed. 'Mainstream' viewers are free publicly to commend the films without suffering the negative consequences of professing love for the original novels. The films, which thanks to their collaborative nature have been purged of the polarizing taint of the right-wing extremist novels on which they are based, assuage such viewers that things were better before, and only by spiritually returning to the past can Japan be made great again.

If such collaborations between fringe ultranationalist novelists and reputable movie studios continue, they will further shift the (Overton) window of discourse, normalizing an extremist right-wing vision of the once and future Japan. Another generation of young, impressionable viewers might conclude—shielded by the collaboration nature of the film projects from suffering the negative consequences of association with extremism, or indeed from ever even knowing the extremist origins of the stories they watch—that Japan's only way forward is to retreat into the beautified past.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I will analyze Ōshima Nagisa’s film Kōshikei (Death by Hanging, 1968) as a paradigmatic case of Japanese New Left cinema. I will discuss the prevailing interpretative lines about the film and propose an alternative one based on an ideological contextualization.

Paper long abstract:

Although all films can be interpreted from many points of view and there is no single valid conclusion but usually a myriad of open interpretations, this does not mean that analyzing a film is a relativistic exercise. We need to use the epistemological tools that bring us closer to an objective view of cinema. One of the ways to accomplish this is through an ideological analysis of cinema. This means observing the immediate context of the film in question, identifying the ideologies present at the time and in the place in which it was released, and finding the lines connecting the film discourse with the ideology that it fits with most.

In this paper I will base this ideological analysis approach to address the Japanese cinema of the long 1968 on the paradigmatic case of Ōshima Nagisa’s film Kōshikei (Death by Hanging, 1968). Two recent interpretative lines about this film prevail: an Althusserian interpretation that considers that the film’s axis is the political domination by ideological state apparatuses, and another that considers that the axis is a humanist denunciation of the oppression of the Korean minority in Japan. However, I consider these two interpretations to be removed from the immediate ideological context of the film, which I consider close to the Japanese New Left, the core of which comprises an assertion of subjectivity as self-denial. I will back this interpretation with the political theories of some of the most important ideologues of the Japanese New Left, such as Umemoto Katsumi and Yoshimoto Takaaki. This approach will serve not just to produce a new interpretation of this film, but also to gain a better understanding of the Japanese New ideology to which it is related.