Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

An intermediate course in critical studies in cinema addressing a variety of topics. This course can be repeated once for credit if the topic is different. Students with credit for CA (or FPA) 337 may take this course for further credit if the topic is different.

COURSE DETAILS:

Documenting the Invisible: Japan’s Documentary Filmic Responses to Radioactive Fallout and Injustice

Documentary realism is a common stylistic choice among modern filmmakers responding to human-made disaster as a means of getting at “the real.” However, despite the style’s commitments to immediacy, straightforwardness, and objectivity, filmmakers often find there are multiple reals to consider. This course attends to this heterogeneity of realisms in documentary and fictionalized cinematic responses to the 2011 radiation releases in Fukushima, Japan. Even within documentary and realistic styles, radiation seems to impose a sense that any attempt to grasp a holistic reality is doomed to reification. At the same time, inequalities that develop in the aftermath of radioactive fallout demand that decisions are made about what is “real.” How have films’ realistic and aesthetic choices responded to this challenge? The course explores the politics of these choices in a variety of realistic cinematic formats: from films of those locally affected, to big budget re-enactments, to popular fantasy films that utilize “documentary evidence” as a central conceit. The course contextualizes this politics within the Japan’s social, religious, and aesthetic historical context.

To that end, the course begins by screening some of the most cultural and politically significant films responding to the radioactive aftermaths of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki atomic bombings—Hiroshima (1953); Godzilla (1954); Black Rain (1989)—as each help think the situation in Fukushima given the political differences of the radioactive fallout, the common propensity to imagine monsters in real events, and the repetition of radiation discrimination. The course will then screen Your Name (2016), unpacking how the film mixes both Hiroshima/Nagasaki- and Fukushima-based “documentary” imaginaries to a problematic degree. The course will then move to documentary films focusing on critiques of life amongst radioactive fallout and the massive Tokyo-based protests after March 11, 2011: Surviving Internal Exposure (2012), A2-B-C (2013), and Tell the Prime Minister (2015). We then screen fictionalized re-enactments of the Fukushima-based radiation releases: Land of Hope (2012); A Town of Love and Hope (2014); Fukushima 50 (2020). The course concludes with Shin Godzilla (2016) whose filmmakers claim responds “realistically” to the Fukushima events.

 

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

- Students will learn to write critical essays responding to culturally impactful films.
- Students will learn to construct arguments responding to the cultural repercussions of cinematic choices.
- Students will learn how and why to use film scenes, motifs, and strategies as part of evidence to forward arguments.
- Students will learn to focus on the imbrication of production and meaning in their own artistic/filmic practices.
- Students will develop a capacity to respond to the challenge of cross-cultural interpretation, reflected in their essays.
- Students will develop skills in discussing cultural and politically sensitive topics as a group while also learning how to collaborate.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: