During the 1960s and early 1970s; Japanese avant-garde filmmakers intensely explored the shifting role of the image in political activism and media events. Known as the "season of politics;" the era was filled with widely covered dramatic events from hijackings and hostage crises to student protests. This season of politics was; Yuriko Furuhata argues; the season of image politics. Well-known directors; including Oshima Nagisa; Matsumoto Toshio; Wakamatsu KÅji; and Adachi Masao; appropriated the sensationalized media coverage of current events; turning news stories into material for timely critique and intermedial experimentation. Cinema of Actuality analyzes Japanese avant-garde filmmakers struggle to radicalize cinema in light of the intensifying politics of spectacle and a rapidly changing media environment; one that was increasingly dominated by television. Furuhata demonstrates how avant-garde filmmaking intersected with media history; and how sophisticated debates about film theory emerged out of dialogues with photography; television; and other visual arts.
#2350667 in eBooks 2013-08-19 2013-08-19File Name: B00F44AYAS
Review
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. EcoDreaming On Trial in a Cultural CourtBy Andrew WilsonJulie Szursquo;s family and academic backgrounds inform and empower this book. The first scene in her introduction is set overlooking an eco-city that never got built. By the end of the page she has mentioned ldquo;eco-dreamsrdquo; which are pretty much doomed by the time she gets to defining ldquo;eco-desirerdquo;; still only half way to the start of Chapter 1. Szu doesnrsquo;t let up until the end of the book. She certainly does not seem to want her want her readers to dream with green blinkers on.Szu examines the reasons for the failure of Dongtan to materialise at all and the limitations of some other eco-cities including political; commercial and social factors; particularly including some major social and ecological costs such as human displacement. There is a lot of dream-busting in this book and readers will each remember their own lsquo;most tellingrsquo; points; but mine was that these projects were trying to lsquo;solversquo; degradation of the natural environment by building on more of it. We blindly rely on technological solutions; steadfastly ignoring the new problems that these lsquo;solutionsrsquo; bring in their wake; and ignoring a vast amount of local knowledge.The book is written in the academic; daresay somewhat ideological language of Cultural Studies and to me it lsquo;deconstructsrsquo; more than it creates. (It certainly creates a clearer view of what these projects were doing.) The clarity with which the author saw the Chinese stage made it seem odd to me how little the book says about the major environmental issue of global human population size.I recommend this book highly to students of environmental politics and to eco-futurists serious enough to learn from past mistakes; but I warn off those with a sentimental attachment to unrealistic eco-fantasies!