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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the videotape segments in Yui Kiyohara’s Remembering Every Night (2022) in relation to a global trend of videonostalgia and the film’s theme of memory, emphasising the role played by home video in the depiction of personal history within 21st century Japanese narrative cinema

Paper long abstract

Much like how vinyl records have come back into fashion, many filmmakers (see Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun) have been returning to the medium of video, often using it to talk about themes of memory and identity. In line with this nostalgic reappraisal of obsolete media, one scene in Yui Kiyohara’s Remembering Every Night (2022) features two characters watching a series of 90s home videos, as they are being converted from their original analogue tapes. Replicating a home movie gaze, these could-be family archives depict childhood birthdays, walks in the park, and other universal life experiences. Rather than subscribing to a popular, found footage tradition that uses video as mere documentary matter, Kiyohara weaves these tapes into a fiction narrative focusing on traces and the tension between “History” and “small histories”.

Drawing on Ina Blom’s definition of video as a “memory technology” (Blom, 2016) and Catherine Russell’s emphasis on the relationship between analogue video and autoethnography (Russell, 1999), this paper looks at the intrinsic relationship between memory, personal history and the physical medium of the video cassette as is speculated by Remembering Every Night. Linking the film’s interest in archaeology and historical artefacts to Laura U. Marks’ framework of “haptic visuality” (Marks, 1999) and Russell’s concept of “archiveology” (Russell, 2018), I look at how Kiyohara treats these tapes as physical artefacts capable of recording traces and goes beyond an "archival effect".

By examining the content of these tapes and their textual likeness to amateur media and using Shunji Iwai’s All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001) as a point of reference, I aim to situate Kiyohara’s film within a tradition of 21st Century Japanese cinema that relies on home video as a generational marker and a mediator of direct and personal experience. Given the centrality of films like Ringu (1998) within the discourse on videotape and Japanese cinema, this paper also aims to shift that focus from a territory of genre filmmaking and technological anxiety to one of intimacy, domesticity and contemporary identity.