Papers by Chika Kinoshita
Femmes et enfants en lutte. Sur la spectatorialité dans les critiques de cinéma de Hasumi Shiguéhiko
Ebisu
Mise-en-scene of desire: The films of Mizoguchi Kenji
This dissertation sheds new light on the Japanese director Mizoguchi Kenji's films made betwe... more This dissertation sheds new light on the Japanese director Mizoguchi Kenji's films made between 1925 and 1956, bringing them into conversation with Japanese modernity and transnational film history. It revises the concept of mise-en-scène that refers to how to orchestrate actors and things in a concrete setting within the frame. While, traditionally, it has been regarded as a vehicle for the auteur's worldview, I extend the meaning to map out a configuration of the subject and object of desire in power relations. The focus on power relations allows this dissertation to construct a coherent thematics out of Mizoguchi's changing stylistics and opportunistic politics. Chapter 1 centers on Mizoguchi's films made within the context of Proletarian arts movements and the flourishing culture industry in 1929-1930. They dramatize power relations through lurid contrasts between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat by means of montage, unlike his later films. A close look at contemporary discourse suggests that Mizoguchi's films---together with other mass cultural artifacts such as serial novels and hit songs---appropriated the modernist principle of montage, i.e., juxtaposition of heterogeneous parts that generates a new significance, in vernacular forms, seeking to articulate the experience of industrial modernity and the class system. Chapter 2 highlights how a multi-dimensional crisis brought by the transition to sound in Japanese cinema, 1929-1935---a crisis of the concept of the text in film, of the film industry, of the cinematic time and space---provided Mizoguchi with a set of aesthetic and stylistic possibilities in playing out power relations. Fostered by a cinephilic film culture concerned with the medium specificity of the talkie, Mizoguchi established his signature long take-deep staging/focus style that takes advantage of the spatiotemporal continuum. Chapter 3 examines Mizoguchi's sexual politics through close analysis of his sound films. His mise-en-scène is built upon the woman's act of giving at the origin of reflexive masochism, i.e., introjection of aggression. I argue that this structure highlights workings of the woman's subjectivity and negotiation, rather than valorize her suffering, within a historically specific patriarchy in modern Japan that selectively appropriated the so-called feudal remnants
Feminist Media Histories, 2015
In 1935, actress Shiga Akiko was arrested for an offense under the Criminal Abortion Law. From 19... more In 1935, actress Shiga Akiko was arrested for an offense under the Criminal Abortion Law. From 1936 to 1937, her case generated substantial media coverage and public debate. Liberal intellectuals generally viewed Shiga as a victim of the pronatal state; her scandal provided feminists with an opportunity to analyze the relationships among working women, their work environment, and the politics of reproduction. On the pages of women's magazines, readers avidly followed Shiga's case because she was caught up in contradictory forces, as most of them were: pride in work, love for movies, fascination with celebrity culture, and normative femininity. This essay contextualizes discursive and filmic responses to the Shiga scandal within historical processes in the late 1930s Japan. The state attempted to fully incorporate women into the nation-state as subjects for the imminent war. In order to mobilize half the population—indispensable for reproduction—without granting them full rig...
The Mummy Complex
Horror to the Extreme, 2009
The Benshi Track: Mizoguchi Kenji's <i>The Downfall of Osen</i> and the Sound Transition
Cinema Journal, 2011
Drawing on production memos, film magazines, and censorship records, this essay locates the forma... more Drawing on production memos, film magazines, and censorship records, this essay locates the formative moment of Mizoguchi's style within the sound transition. The Downfall of Osen , with the benshi (film lecturer) narration recorded on its soundtrack, weaved the transformation of exhibition practice and the emergent "talkie" aesthetics into its textuality.
Sanshō Dayū. By Dudley Andrew and Carole Cavanaugh. London: British Film Institute, 1999. 79 pp. $12.95 (paper)
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2001
This booklet is devoted to Mizoguchi Kenji's Sambo Dayu (1954), also known as Sansho the Bail... more This booklet is devoted to Mizoguchi Kenji's Sambo Dayu (1954), also known as Sansho the Bailiff, one of the most internationally celebrated Japanese films. It belongs to BFI Film Classics, a series published by the British Film Institute intended to present a reading of one film chosen by the author out of the 360 "classics" in the British Film Institute's film archive. This series has provided both film specialists and the general audience with intelligent and informative companions as well as in-depth analyses of film texts; Sansho Day it is no exception. Sansho Dayu presents a curious example of academic collaboration. The two authors, Dudley Andrew and Carole Cavanaugh, contributed chapters to the book. Andrew, one of the founders of film studies as an academic discipline in the United States, has widely published on the French film culture, film theory, as well as on Mizoguchi's films. His Kenji Mizoguchi: A Guide to References and Resources (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981) is indispensable for any research on the director. Cavanaugh has linked her expertise in modern Japanese literature to the reading of film, and recently co-edited Word and Image in Japanese Cinema (London: Cambridge University Press, 2001) with Dennis Washburn. Thus, Sansho Dayu suggests a valuable site of superimposition, rather than juxtaposition, where two different disciplinary backgrounds, film studies and Japanese studies, can augment each other. This collaboration effectively eliminates two of the dangers symptomatic to Japanese film studies: the essentialist reduction of a film to an embodiment of a Japanese tradition without any sense of its historicity, and the arbitrary interpretation of a Japanese film without knowledge of film history and international film culture. In other words, Andrew and Cavanaugh share an acute awareness of the context in which the film is enmeshed.
The Edge of Montage: A Case of Modernism/Modanizumu in Japanese Cinema
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2013
The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan: The Flash of Capital : Film and Geopolitics in Japan
Film Quarterly, 2004
In the Twilight of Modernity and the Silent Film: Irie Takako in The Water Magician
Camera Obscura Journal of Feminism and Film, 2005
... or Ninjin Kurabu (Carrot Club), an independent production house established by actresses Arim... more ... or Ninjin Kurabu (Carrot Club), an independent production house established by actresses Arima Ineko, Kishi Keiko, and Kuga Yoshiko,24 ... in a glamorous Western dress, with the caption Irie Takako: The Queen of the Silver Screen. Viscountess Higashibo¯jo¯ Kimiko tells the ...
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Papers by Chika Kinoshita