The Activist Camera: Class, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Films of Japan

February 27 (Saturday)

The emergence of lesbian and gay activism in this decade challenges scholars and filmmakers to address questions of sexuality together with issues of class, ethnicity, and the women's movement. In bringing together filmmakers, political activists, and academics at this moment of unparalleled U.S. dominance and declining Japanese fortunes, this symposium seeks to stage a discussion on the role of film in Japan in considering the historical achievements of past political movements as well as in creating a transnational political community.


Symposium Schedule

Location: University of Chicago, Cobb Hall, Room 307 (see map)

• Nitrate Kisses 1992, color, 67 min., 35 mm., U.S. Directed by Barbara Hammer

  A cinematic meditation on the cultural and political history of gays and lesbians, Nitrate Kisses resurrects what is otherwise invisible on the pages of conventional history. A magnificent stream of visuals rides on the voices of gays and lesbians narrating their experiences in 1930s America and in Nazi concentration camps, forcing the viewer to rethink his or her attitudes toward sexuality. This film was Hammer's first full-length feature.

• Osaka Story 1994, color, 75 min., 35 mm, U.K. Directed by Toichi Nakata

  In this film Nakata dissects the internal dynamics of his own family: the tension between his Korean father and his Japanese mother; his siblings' struggles with their identities; and his own drama as a gay man refusing to marry and take over the family business. The film offers glimpses of a Korean Japanese community and questions the effects of documentary filmmaking on the filmmaker as well as the object of his/her observation. In Japanese and Korean with English subtitles.

Location: University of Chicago, Classics, Room 10 (see map)

• Cinematographer Masaki Tamura will join these panelists in a discussion of activist film.

• With a project on Japanese “gay boom” films behind him, Jonathan Mark Hall is now working on psychoanalysis and “post-Oedipal” sexualities in relation to mid—century Japanese film, historical fantasy, and the illogic of the capitalist family. &3147;I engage especially the less digestible work of critic and filmmaker Matsumoto Toshio by problematizing redemptive constructions of a sexual outside,” he says.

• Barbara Hammer has made over 70 films over three decades, with particular emphasis on lesbian sexuality. In 1998 she received a Japan Foundation Fellowship for research on a video documentary, The Collective Process of Ogawa Productions. The autobiographical Tender Fictionswas selected for the Sundance Film Festival (1996) and the Forum Section of the Berlin International Film Festival (1996).

• Akiko Mizuoguchi is currently a graduate student in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. She has been active in the lesbian community in Japan since 1993 as a “grassroots cultural lesbian activist.” She has curated many exhibititions at Spiral/Wacoal Art Center, Tokyo and has written extensively on artists such as Barbara Hammer, Catherine Opie, Sadie Benning, and Nan Goldin.

• The “long-awaited first-born son” of a Korean father and a Japanese mother, Toichi Nakata was raised in Osaka, Japan. He studied filmmaking at the National Film and Television School in the U.K., where he made Osaka Storyand Minoru & Me.He lives in London, where he is making a video about two Catholic sisters.

• Keith Vincent teaches modern Japanese literature at New York University. He has written widely on queer issues in Japan and his 1997 book, Gay Studies(coauthored with two Japanese activists), was the first to explore the potential of U.S. queer theory in a Japanese context.

The symposium has been sponsored by the Committee on Japanese Studies at the Center for East Asian Studies, the University of Chicago, with additional support from the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Isaac and Viola H. Stern Endowment Fund, the Center for Gender Studies and the Lesbian and Gay Workshop at the University of Chicago.

[Japanese Cinema Workshop] [Tamura Film Series] [Film Descriptions]
[Symposium:Activist Camera] [Map] [Links]