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Media_04


has 1 film 1
Home renovation: reimaging domestic spaces in contemporary Japanese cinema and literature 
Convenors:
Colleen Laird (University of British Columbia)
Lindsay Nelson (Meiji University)
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Format:
Panel
Section:
Media Studies
:
Auditorium 2 Franz Cumont
Sessions:
Friday 18 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels

Short Abstract:

This multimedia panel of both traditional paper presentations and videographic essays engages with contemporary Japan narratives about the spaces and experiences of “home” to explore how artists and storytellers are reimagining 21st century domesticity.

Long Abstract:

The literal and figurative boundaries of home, family, and domestic space shift constantly. Our understandings of “home” draw relationships between an emotional and psychological construction of place, a physical house, kinship networks, and a complex web of meaning between all three, ever shifting, ever reimagined. Contemporary Japanese artists and storytellers are creating visions of home that contest and contrast with a long legacy of domestic ideals, entrenched gender roles, and the very infrastructures of home spaces. How, then, are we to understand the concept of the 21st century Japanese home? Our panel of multimedia presentations engages this central inquiry from multiple perspectives, focusing on recent narratives in film and literature that depict the changing nature of home, family, and domestic space in Japan. Beginning the conversation with a hybrid presentation of a formal paper and a video essay, the first presenter examines images of “haunted houses” in Japanese cinema, focusing on the 2017 film Watashitachi no ie (Our House), which depicts women living in a single house existing in two alternate realities. The next presenter then explores the “Day to Day Project,” a series of Japanese short stories written during Japan’s first COVID-19 state of emergency, that construct the home as an ambiguous space of both comfort and fear. The next panelist looks at the representation of the home as a symbolic space for the dissolution of a woman’s sense of self in Miike Takashi’s 2014 horror film Kuime (known in English as Over Your Dead Body). The final presentation offers an alternate practice of home in the works of Japanese women directors in her videographic essay that illustrates how a new generation finds familiarity outside the home through routines of repetition. By focusing on these provocative texts by a diverse collection of contemporary creators, this panel offers new considerations of the constantly shifting and uncertain boundaries of home, family, and domestic space in the context of the considerable economic and social developments of our times.

Accepted papers:

Session 1 Friday 18 August, 2023, -
Panel Video visible to paid-up delegates