Japanese Cinema and France: Who Gets to Calibrate? (A Ghostwritten History)

Japanese Cinema and France: Who Gets to Calibrate? (A Ghostwritten History)

Stephen Sarrazin - Film and Media Art Critic

Monday, April 18, 2016 - 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Room 202, Henry R. Luce Hall See map
34 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511

While Donald Richie was the first notable  foreign observer of Japanese cinema, French critics became the tastemakers when the Musee Guimet in Paris began screening post war Japanese films in the early fifties, notably by Kenji Mizoguchi, whose work was rapidly hailed by a young critic at Cahiers du Cinema, Jacques Rivette, in turn creating a model that continues to this day, of a writer discovering and ‘making’ the work ‘his/hers’ before it is embraced by festivals and distributors. This lecture will look at the chronology and key actors of this intense relationship between Japan and France, from the great masters to the new wave to the third golden age and to what was missed in between.


Stephen Sarrazin is a film and media art critic/curator and professor who lectures at Paris 8 University. He has lectured in several institutions in Japan, notably Aoyama University, the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and the Tokyo University of Art. He has written for numerous French and international publications, including Cahiers du Cinema and Art Press, Flash Art, and  InterCommunication. He is the author of ‘Reponses du Cinema Japonais Contemporain 1990-2004’,  a collection of essays and interviews on contemporary Japanese cinema (editions Lettmotif) and the editor in chief of the film and media art journal Mondes du Cinema. He lives and works in Tokyo and Paris.

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