Dear colleagues,

It is my pleasure to inform you about the July meeting of the Kansai Modern Japan Group. The lecture is in English, the comments and discussion either in English or Japanese, all interested are welcome.

Here are the data:

SPEAKER: Abé Markus Nornes (University of Michigan)
TITLE: Calligraphy in East Asian Cinema
DATE: Wednesday 13 July
TIME: 18:30
PLACE: ISEAS office, Nihon Itaria Kyoto Kaikan, 4th
floor
(075-751-8132)
Yoshida Ushinomiya-cho 4, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto

The ISEAS (Italian School of East Asian Studies)
premises are on the 4th floor of the Nihon Itaria Kyoto
Kaikan. The Nihon Itaria Kyoto Kaikan is in the
immediate vicinity of Kyoto University, near the
crossing of Higashi-Oji and Higashi-Ichijo. For reasons
of academic isolation there is no train station that
will get you close to Kyoto University, but the Keihan
line will get you into walking distance (either
Marutamachi or Demachi-Yanagi station). Kyoto City Bus
no.31, 201, 203 and 206, however, will get you almost
to the doorstep of ISEAS.
You should get off the bus at Kyodai Seimon-mae. The
Nihon Itaria Kyoto Kaikan is on the north-west corner
of the crossing, on the north side of Higashi-Ichijo.

This is our last meeting before the summer break. Our
next meeting will be in mid-September in Osaka.

Those willing to present at one of our monthly
meetings, please send an abstract of the presentation
you propose to dick.stegewerns@xs4all.nl

I look forward to welcoming many of you next week.

Best regards,

Dick Stegewerns
Kyoto University & Oslo University

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ABSTRACT:

Calligraphy in East Asian Cinema

Western avant-garde film theorists and practitioners,
such as Sergei Eisenstein and Alexander Astruc, have
famously connected cinema with the art of handwriting.
The former described cinematic image-making as a
combination of shots that, like Asian ideograms, are
both depictive, or figural, and intellectual; the
latter equated the film camera to a pen, the
caméra-stylo. Yet their work has remained as suggestive
as it is
isolated: it has not prompted systematic studies of
calligraphy in film history in the same way attention
to calligraphy has influenced other scholarly
endeavors, including the history of letter- and
book-writing, philology, literary biography, typography
and the avant-garde, or even graffiti and popular
culture. My own fascinations, admittedly informed by my
work and interest in Asian cinema, stem from the
complex phenomenology of calligraphy in films. We see
how the cinematic styles are often re-enacted in
calligraphic style. Calligraphy creates meaning both
linguistically and paralinguistically, by virtue of its
semantics and the semiotic/material qualities of color,
line and even animation.
Indeed, calligraphic script lends itself to the art of
cinema — literally, the “writing of movement” — by
virtue of the “liveness” and the suggestion of
“movement.” Furthermore, the ontology of the calligraph
— being the product of an individual’s brush and
expressing both the being of the artist and the frozen
moment of production — seems roughly analogous to the
ways in which film theorists have considered the
indexical qualities of the photo-chemical image. The
pasting of objects’ reflections on film is akin to a
form of writing. All this helps explain the persistence
and ubiquity of the written script in East Asian
cinema, where text has a different status than cinema
in the rest of the world.

Abé Markus Nornes is Professor of Asian Cinema at the
University of Michigan. His latest book is A Research
Guide to Japanese Cinema Studies (UM Center for
Japanese Studies), which was co-written with Aaron
Gerow.
His previous books include Cinema Babel: Translating
Global Cinema, Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and
Postwar Japanese Documentary Film, and Japanese
Documentary Film: From the Meiji Era to Hiroshima (all
Minnesota UP).