Intermedial Experiments: Cinema and the Eizô Discourse
Yuriko Furuhata - Assistant Professor,Department of East Asian Studies, McGill University
From the mid-1950s through the 1960s Japanese film theory increasingly dealt with the question of cinema’s specificity in relation to other forms of image-making media. A concept that played a crucial role here was the “image” (eizô), a term that dominated the debates around image-making practice and designated a special class of images produced and mediated by technological apparatuses. The rise of television played a key role in prompting this engagement with “image theories” (eizôron). Yet, the need to theorize television was not the sole cause of this discursive shift. Rather, the theorization of television coincided with the growing concern with the image in general. Focusing on the question of remediation this talk situates concurrent cinematic experiments undertaken by filmmakers such as Matsumoto Toshio and Oshima Nagisa within this media context marked by the problematic of the image (eizô).