March 2, 2026/ 1:00 PM

TBD

Colloquium with Earl Jackson

The Japanese “New Wave” is a peculiar a category as the two directors most commonly associated with it, Oshima Nagisa and Yoshida Kijū, both rejected the term and resented being included in it. On the other hand, Masumura Yasuzō was either only reluctantly numbered among the New Wave, despite his often cutting-edge work, because of his adherence to Daiei studios, as a “company man.” Ironically, it was Oshima himself who suggested ways of characterizing directors that reflected a careful reading of their respective orientations. In a 1958 essay, Oshima observed that of all the currently promising directors, Masumura the “keenest sociological consciousness”. Following Oshima’s lead, it seems plausible to consider Oshima’s films as exercises in a semiotics of responsibility, and Yoshida Kijū’s films as a phenomenology elaborated on the screen.

In this lecture, I will distinguish Yoshida’s phenomenology from its legacy of perceptions isolated from politics and history. Yoshida’s “acts of seeing” are situated within an explicit historical consciousness and often inform or even constitute resistance. I will begin by considering Yoshida’s theorizing two technologies of seeing: the camera lens and the mirror. His study of the former leads him to conclude that a film is a process of transforming lived-in space into a space of meaning. The mirror intrigues Yoshida as both a plane of reception and a plane of expression. Yoshida transposes the dual functions of the mirror onto the screen itself whose capacity is extended in Yoshida’s lensed acts of seeing that map micro- and macro- social contradictions onto a continually redefined space.

I will draw on Yoshida’s theoretical essays, his films and the video essays on art history he produced for European television. Among his films, I will pay special attention to the collaboration with Okada Mariko in terms of the relations between embodiment and representation.

Earl Jackson is Associate Professor Emeritus from the University of California, Santa Cruz and Professor Emeritus from National Chiao Tung University. He is the author of Strategies of Deviance. Studies in Gay Male Representation; the contributing co-editor (with David Desser) of The Cinema of Kinoshita Keisuke. Films of Joy and Sorrow; and the forthcoming Critical Conditions: Theory and Practice in Japanese Cinema. He has published essays on Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Hungarian cinema, and is currently completing a monograph on Japanese genre film and collaborating on a book project on sex and anxiety in the cinema.

Sponsor(s): Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies