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Japan
Organized Panel Session
The catastrophe of 3.11 was one of Japan’s most devastating. As images of a wrecked landscape circulating in social media, the repercussions of the disasters were felt around the globe, almost instantaneously. In documentary cinema, a number of filmmakers are steadily gaining international notice for their expositions on the 3.11 disasters, but many have also found themselves increasingly caught in a tension between the local and the global where their works are well received, but often decontextualized and disconnected from the cultural politics tied to the nuclear industry in Japan.
Working with this tension as a point of departure, I examine a range of documentary works and explore how filmmakers embrace both the televisual and the photographic in an attempt to align their work with the social and political momentum that has been built by others over time. My aim here is to tease out the complex ways in which the interactions of these works may suggest an alternative model for thinking through the diversity of documentary practices. By tracking the documentation of the senses, and their redistribution across media-forms, I hope to demonstrate how the incipient inter-medial practices developed within 3.11 documentary filmmaking may converge with eco-critical issues on the environment, thus granting us a multi-scalar perspective on the challenges of the documentary form as it confronts the plurality of anthropogenic risks and demands we have inherited into the future.
Daniel O'Neill
University of California, Berkeley