Inter-area/Border Crossing

Organized Panel Session

(3) - Redefining Networks: The Shift from “Amateur” to “Autonomous” Film in 20th-Century Japan

Defining media produced by individuals and collectives outside of a commercial context as “amateur” has a pervasive history in the 20^th century (Zimmerman, 1995). The negotiation of the exact role of “amateur” film and photography took on a central and complex role in this discussion, and it changes considerably over time. In the context of Japan, a number of competing terms joined the Japanized “amachua,” and they all had considerable impact on the different forms of social and media networks and political organization these activities suggested (Ross, 2015).

This paper will map the transition in Japan from an internationalist conception of “amateur” film production from the late 1920s onward to an “autonomous” model of non-corporate production and distribution in the 1970s. It will examine the lines of communication, often catalyzed by international “amateur” film competitions, in the 1930s Japanese empire. The paper compares the ideals implicit in this form of organization with the new ideas concerning networks that emerge in what by the 1970s begins to become called “autonomous” (jishu) film. This shift entails a number of accompanying reconceptualizations, including a different model of history––for example in the mytho-epic 8mm films of Hara Masato­­––as much as the redefinition of networks themselves as a form of politics, as observable in the utopian charge the genre held for leftist critics such as Matsuda Masao. The paper therefore tracks a discourse now often associated with digital media culture to much earlier existing instantiations.

Speaker(s)

• AZ

  Alexander Zahlten

  Harvard University