Promotional Information

Cinema of Actuality analyzes Japanese avant-garde filmmakers' struggle to radicalize cinema in light of the intensifying politics of spectacle and a rapidly changing media environment, one that was increasingly dominated by television.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction  1
1. Intermedial Experiments and the Rise of the Eizo Discourse  13
2. Cinema, Event, and Artifactuality  53
3. Remediating Journalism: Politics and the Media Event  88
4. Diagramming the Landscape: Power and the Fukeiron Discourse  115
5. Hijacking Television: News and Militant Cinema  149
Conclusion  183
Notes  203
Bibliography  239
Index  255

About the Author

Yuriko Furuhata is Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies and the World Cinemas Program at McGill University.

Reviews

"Cinema of Actuality is a tour de force, a potentially field-changing intervention in Japanese film studies, TV and media theory, and the study of postwar world film culture. Yuriko Furuhata shows that during the 1960s and 1970s, major political events and their portrayal in the media formed the basis for an entire Japanese cinema. At the same time, she poses vital questions about media theory and representation more broadly. This is a singularly important work." - Akira Mizuta Lippit, author of Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video "This is a really exciting book. At last there's a book that reads the Japanese cinema of the 1950s to 1970s - Oshima, Matsumoto, Wakamatsu, Adachi - in a cross-media context and with a rigorous historical and theoretical eye. Elegantly and precisely argued, this is a book that is both exemplary and surprising. From manga to militant cinema, from landscape theory to Pink Film, Yuriko Furuhata gives readers the discursive and political history that allows a new understanding of the Japanese film and media of this era." - Miryam Sas, author of Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return "In Cinema of Actuality...Yuriko Furuhata explores how avant-garde Japanese films of the 1960s and early 1970s integrated themselves into other media forms, including the manga cartoon, the still photograph, television and, most importantly, journalism in print and on screen...She offers a highly theoretical analysis, relating the films to intellectual debates motivating directors...Furuhata is not the first to discuss this theory, but she convincingly shows how awareness of it is a prerequisite for understanding some of the era's key films, writing suggestively on how they expose the use of urban planning as a force for social control [...] Furuhata convincingly sketches the intellectual and social environment that gave birth to some of Japan's most distinctive films." - Alexander Jacoby, Times Literary Supplement "Yuriko Furuhata hasn't merely proffered a history of the Japanese avant-garde here; she's re-conceptualized the very nature of Japanese documentary and avant-garde practices over roughly a two-decade span to reveal early examples of converging media cultures. Discussing not just the films of Toshio Matsumoto and Nagisa Oshima, but each of their active political roles in both activism and writing theory, the scope of insights attained by Furuhata has the feeling of a critical work that cannot be contained by its subject matter, since its insistence that research must be conducted from a materialist, evidentiary basis is not just an academic plea, but an ethical one, meant to prevent further falsified claims from being accepted as fact. Cinema may not have always been postmodern, but Furuhata's book is sure to remain a staple in film-studies courses for years to come." - Clayton Dillard, Slant Magazine