CANCELLED New Media and the Occult Film Boom in Japan by Alexander Zahlten

In the 1960s the media situation in Japan changed profoundly; suddenly everything and everyone seemed connected, and the circulating information grew exponentially. It put everyone caught up in these changes under intense pressure to make sense of this new world of media connectivity. In popular culture the so-called occult boom, that manifested across media and stretched from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, tried to do exactly that. This talk will outline the different models of connectivity that the films of the occult boom presented, and how leftist politics as well tried to use the occult boom to re-energize itself.