Inaugural Lecture - Carole Cavanaugh

Kawashima Professor of Japanese Studies, Carole Cavanaugh will give this Inaugural Lecture.

The Optics of Resistance in Japanese Cinematic Arts, 1968-2018

The “superflat” vision of artist Murakami Takashi, though strikingly contemporary, is rooted in 1960s political protest. Japanese resistance to renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty culminated in 1968 in violent demonstrations against government support for American escalation of the war in Vietnam. The popular arts became a locus of ideological and optical opposition. Makers of 1960s manga (graphic novels) and anime (animated films) defied the “regime of realism” imposed by the imported illusion of fixed-point perspective. Their works reclaimed the two-dimensional graphics of native design. Live-action cinema, subject to the three-dimensionality inherent in the photographic medium, became an unexpected site of ocular resistance in Double Suicide. Shinoda’s 1969 film stands as a tour-de-force recovery of pre-photographic planarity. The lecture traces the disquieting optics of the “superflat” movement to its modern origins in the avant-garde vision of Shinoda’s film.

Reception will precede the lecture at 4:00 p.m.