Japannual Vortrag: Tradition and Innovation in Japanese Cinema von Graham Parkes

Vortrag von Graham Parkes: "Tradition and Innovation in Japanese Cinema"

Mittwoch, 4. Oktober 2017, 16:30 im Filmcasino, Eintritt frei! Vortrag in englischer Sprache.

It’s a truism that Japan is above all a traditional culture, while being equally well known for its power of innovation, especially in the realm of high technology. The forces of tradition and innovation inform the development of Japanese cinema in interesting ways. Filmmakers in Japan were inspired by classic cinema from the United States as well as Europe—and were inspired as well to innovate in ways that derived from traditional Japanese arts and aesthetics, bringing old ideas to bear upon a new technology. Japanese people’s connections to traditional culture were weakened by the nation’s defeat in the Pacific War, and some great directors have chronicled the process and aftermath. Their responses range stylistically from controlled to anarchic, and emotionally from elegiac to deeply nihilistic. I’d like to demonstrate and discuss the interplay between innovation and tradition with reference to directors such as Ozu Yasujiro, Kurosawa Akira, Miyazaki Hayao, and Oshii Mamoru. I invite you to see for yourselves the extent to which such innovations, which are no longer new, have been retained in Japanese film in 2017, or whether something might have been lost along the way—and whether it even matters.