CALL FOR PRESENTERS: Details here.
Thursday, July 16 at 6 p.m. (JST)
Fūkei Film Locations and Knowledges
Shayne Bowden (University of Sydney)
This paper will discuss dissertation fieldwork undertaken during the first half of 2026 in Tokyo. My dissertation research is concerned with the creation of an intersection between rephotography, cinephilic pilgrimage, and fūkeiron (landscape theory). The fieldwork involved revisiting and rephotographing a select number of locations associated with fūkeiron, particularly locations associated with two films that have become synonymous with fūkei cinema, Ryakushō: Renzoku Shasatsuma (1969) and Tōkyō Sensō Sengo Hiwa (1970). Using the methodology of rephotography, the fieldwork sought to assess the spatial changes occurring within the said locations evident by way of a comparative imaging of stills and sequences from those films and how these variations complement the main tenet of fūkeiron, that all banal space is saturated with the invisible power dynamics of the state.
In dissertation chapters on rephotography, film pilgrimage, and landscape theory, those topics were introduced as respective methodologies, spectatorial practice, and activist theory that are complementary by way of commonalities, the recognition/discussion of which has mostly been lacking from respective discourses and research. During this presentation, I want to consolidate these three factors and discuss how these parts were exercised in the field, in actual film locations associated with fūkei cinema, in order to demonstrate how these pieces or components complement and work as theoretical and practical visual means to measure how film locations spatially transition through time. By doing so, this may substantiate or conflict with fūkei cinema as a proposed measure of power dynamics in space, as well as with the rephotographical possibilities of observing and measuring spatial change, and how visiting film locations is also a reconciliation of spectatorial trauma.
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