This weeks screening from CUEAFS “Annyong Kimchee” was in collaboration with Zipangu Fest, and personally picked by Zipangu curator Jasper Sharp. Jasper gave an interesting lecture on the history of Jishu eiga (the genre of “Annoyang Kimchee”) independent or as Jasper likes to call them; ‘I-movie’.
I was also lucky enough to interview Jasper on behalf on CUEAFS about Zipangu Fest, Pinku Eiga and other aspects of Japanese cinema and film festivals.
About Us
The Coventry University East Asian Film Society/ CUEAFS aims to promote and to celebrate cultural diversity by raising cultural awareness of South East Asian cinema for all students in the department of Media and Communication.
主体概括：
考文垂东亚及东南亚电影协会向所有媒体传播学学生开放。本电影协会通过介绍东亚及东南亚电影文化意识，同时提升和发扬文化多样性的理论与实践。
The Society will screen movies from throughout the South East Asian region which includes China, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia etc under the banner ‘Coventry Close Encounters’.
在 “考文垂近距离邂逅”的旗帜下，电影协会将致力于放映来自于东亚及东南亚不同地区的电影，包括 中国，中国香港，中国台湾，朝鲜半岛，日本，泰国，马来西亚，等等。
Films will be screened on a weekly basis in the Ellen Terry Building on Wednesdays at 2pm. The screenings will also provide a forum for critical discussion and debate on East Asian Film.
所有电影都将会在每周三，下午2点，Ellen Terry教学楼里放映供大家观赏。此放映活动还将会建立相应的讨论平台，以供批判性，理论性的辩论和探讨。
Screenings are free and everyone is welcome. The screenings have been linked into PDP (101MC) modules across all degree programmes, students must attend at least 3 screening and write critical reviews and reflections.
本放映活动是完全免费，且欢迎所有人的加入。此外，本活动的其另一个重要性是：电影放映直接联系到所有学年的课程PDP （Personal Development Portfolio），关于PDP，每个学生必须至少参加3次放映活动，并且做一定的电影影评和凡响。
Whilst the appreciation of East Asian film is paramount, the goal is to facilitate and encourage international students to have a better experience at Coventry University and to offer a space to promote social interactions and relations among all our students.
当然，对于东亚及东南亚电影欣赏和支持是最重要的。同时与其同样重要的是电影协会的目标，其宗旨在于促进和鼓励国际学生能更好的体验考文垂大学的学习生活，在此基础上也为所有的学生提供了一个去提升社会交流的机会以及体验社会关系的空间。
Activities
Alongside our weekly screenings the society also recieves invitations to film premieres, East Asian film festivals and other special events. Recently CUEAFS attended the Udine Far East Film Festival in Italy and the Terracotta Far East Film Festival in London where the CUEAFS team interviewed directors, producers and actors from the East Asian Film industry such as Teddy Chen and Derek Kwok. CUEAFS have also attended the world premiere of debut director Momoko Ando’s “Kakera – a piece of our life” (japan 2010) in London where the CUEAFS prodction team filmed DVD extras for the release of the film on DVD, as well as having the opportunity to interview the director.
Teams
Active members of the society can join our specfic teams to help maintain and improve the society and its activities such as:
| Production Team | To document the societies activites and to produce videos to promote CUEAFS and special events of surronding East Asian Film in the U.K. The team is made up of Camera, Sound, Producers, Directors, Editors and Researchers. |
| Promotion Team | To promote the societies activites inside and outside of the university as well as fundraising for special events |
| Writers Team | Team of collaborators who write film reviews, articles and report on news in the East Asian Film industry for the CUEAFS online newsletter and collaborate with external world cinema review website: www.cine-vue.com |
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Our website is www.cueafs.com
or you can follow us on twitter at: http://twitter.com/CUEAFS
and on facebook http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/group.php?gid=83791809981&ref=ts
CUEAFS also has a channel on youtube with our interviews with directors, producers, actors and academics from the East Asian Film industry such as Teddy Chen and Momoko Ando
http://www.youtube.com/user/CUEAFS
If you have any questions about CUEAFS please feel free to contact the president at:
Japanese Director and Writer Satoshi Miki follows up from “Adrift in Tokyo”(2007) with a film about losing your father ,your job , your rabbit and your mother (momentarily in a coma). But wait, as pessimistic as that all sounds, leave the tissue box where it stands, “Instant Swamp” (2009) is hilarious, up beat and inspiring.
Third Window Films have yet made another excellent choice, bringing to the U.K a film that should not be missed. Instant Swamp’s World premiere took place at the wonderful Udine Far East Film Festival last year, leaving audiences up lifted and leaving taps on wherever they went.
The film starts with an extremely fast paced montage of the stresses, highs and mostly lows of the rat race that is everyday working life of the brilliant leading lady Kumiko Aso who plays Haname, a failing journalist who feels she has a lack of control and in her own words her life, is a “gradual erosion” . “Another monotone day in her monochrome life” , she is desperately in the need for a more colourful existence. Haname ‘s Father left the family home on her eight birthday, in which she reacted to by throwing all of her possessions that her Father had brought into a nearby swamp, including her birthday cake and a cat talisman which she is convinced cursed her as it sunk in bog. Haname believes that the cat’s curse is the reason for her lifetime of bad luck despite this she always tries to maintain an optimistic attitude, but when she discovers that her Father is not the man she originally thought, through her mother being hospitalised whilst water sprite fishing, she decided to take matters into her own hands and discovers not only her Father but a new way of living and looking at life.
Haname’s Father Noburo or Light Bulb, is the exact opposite to his daughter, who has been swallowed up by the rat race of life, he is a hippy with his own antique shop (which has no real antiques in it), who loves to play practical jokes, especially on Haname. He is also friends with a young punk known as Gas. It is no concidence that Satoshi chose both a punk and a hippy as characters in his film, as figures of renegardes against mainstream culture, who help Haname leave behind the life that disappointed her, to start a new improved alternative life of her own, where her eyes are open to the crazy yet beautiful world.
Satoshi use of humor is recurrent throughout the film, with layers of slapstick, which us brits just adore. Also another recurring theme of teh film and humor is the random people passing by, who looks on at the events in Haname and Noburo’s life, giving an secondary layer to the connection that human being’shave, be it a distant one or a closer one , resulting in a hilarious over view of the film.
The film is extremely quirky, with its characters over active and vivid imagination but also in the deliverance in its message, which is enjoy life and the people that surround you, but most of open your eyes to life and don’t get caught up in the rat race.
So watch the film, turn the tap to life on and enjoy!
The celebration of the female director has become paramount to film festivals globally. This years, The Japan Foundation dedicated their annual touring film program to the rise of involvement for women in the film industry, entitled ‘Girls on Film: Females in Japanese Film industry’. Whilst there is no denying that the global film industry is still considerably male dominated, the rise of the female director has always been one of endurance and perseverance, constantly fighting off the stigma of labels such as feminist film-makers or the more begrudging and derogatory categorization of their work as merely ‘women’s films’.
Although the consideration and appreciation of the Japanese female director is becoming ever more widely recognized, this has not always been the case. There have been countless examples of female directors in Japan since the late 1930s, with Tazuko Sakane accredited as the first with her 1936 film Hatsu Sugata. However, a sense of acceptance for the female film maker in Japan would only truly begin in the 1980s.
Female directors are often critically compared to fellow women in film, such as Momoko Ando herself being considered as Japan’s answer to Sofia Coppola. In this case, the comparison was not made because of correlating methods or recurring themes but due to both directors having extremely influential fathers in the film industry (Ando is the daughter of actor and director Eiji Okuda). However it is problematic to compare Ando to a Hollywood female director, as this marginalizes any consideration of the Japanese socio-cultural context (the imperial gaze strikes again!) The pertinent question this raises is why can’t female directors be compared and considered in relation to other directors with shared thematic concerns, regardless of biology or gender?One possible answer rests upon a seemingly positivist common consensus that female film makers offer an alternative depiction of the portrayal of the woman in cinema, especially compared to the traditional and classical Hollywood studio analysis of Mulvey’s ‘male gaze’, and the inherent negative connotations this has for the representation of women on film. For example, Momoko Ando used particular scenes in Kakera to advocate a naturalistic and realistic representation of the female, such as the scene of Haru getting ready to go out, rejecting a mode of presentation which fragments and sexualizes the female body. Ando purposely includes scenes that depict her protagonist Haru getting ready in the morning, sitting awkwardly on the toilet and more notably openly dealing with her menstrual cycle. This scene in particular represents an attempt at a more natural and realistic representation of the femininity, an overt challenge to the the male biased myths of the sexualized women so prevalent in Japanese cinema.
During the London premiere of Kakera I was lucky enough to interview Momoko Ando on the behalf of CUEAFS, in which I asked her about these particular scenes and their purpose. She replied, “I just wanted to say fuck off to all of this. Boys have some kind of stupid fantasy towards girls and we are actually human.” Ando also revealed that she cast Hikari Mitsushima (she can also be found in the excellent Love Exposure [2008], also on release from Third Window Films) in the timid, self conscious role of Haru because the actress has a huge male following in Japan. Ando wished to subvert not only the representation of women in her film but also challenge the consensus of the female as a sex object.
It seems that female directors have always attempted to deconstruct the female as an object for decades. Rather than Coppola, Ando is more accurately following the footsteps of her Japanese female predecessors such as Sachi Hamano, who has made over 300 films in her life time. One of her most well-known, mainstream releases Lily Festival (2001) features elderly women who learn to re-explore their own sexuality when a male newcomer joins there retirement home. The film depicts how love, passion and sex are not confined to the young, but can also belong to an older generation of women. Both Ando and Hamano explore female sexuality, but also purposely chose to portray their female characters in a light that breaks male constructed images of the female, resulting in a more realistic representation.Ando states that Kakera is “ about identity, it doesn’t matter if its boy or girl. It’s the person you should concentrate on”. Her debut is not explicitly about gender; it is about individualism and being free to express yourself as physically, emotionally or sexually as you may wish.
“[T]he need to understand the effects of the extensions o f man becomes more urgent by the hour”(McLuhan:1964:11)
Michael Winterbottom’s “Code 46” (2003) deals with many themes that are the headlines and debates of today‘s contemporary society, by its use of the genre sci-fi to give an outlook on the resulting factors of a global culture and its extensive obsession with a technological society.
The global social dominance of technology is increasingly strengthened daily by the evolution of the average person’s lifestyle. For example Britain’s Identity cards would have created a database of the biographical and biometric fingerprint data of all U.K residents. Due to expense and the intrusive nature of the I.D card it was cancelled, however the same culture who found the I.D cards as a symbol of invasion into their privacy and becoming heavily monitored by the government has an obsession with social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter. Taking Facebook as an example, the social networking site is a catalogue of people from over the world, with details of their date of birth, hometown, gender and work and education (Not forgetting holiday, family and friends pictures). Twitter and Facebook, both now have a” places” or a location monitor ,so the site publishes the whereabouts of individuals from their input of information such as status updates. Surveillance is also an issue of technology that the film deals with, as the camera angles would alternate to and from the footage of the surveillance camera. This is a common debate within today’s culture as British government claims the over active and over numbered amount of CCTV coverage is for our own protection. It seems that where ever technology is concerned, so is the issue of individuals freedom, but also our dependence of technology. “Code 46” displays people of two classes; The city dwellers/ The Connected/Conformists and The outsiders/ Disconnected/Non-Conformists. It seems the Connected had a easier way of life, but their freedom was questionable, whereas the Outsiders seem to have a harder life but had true freedom.
The more connected or reliant humans become towards technology , the less connected we become with the roots of our evolution and nature itself. It could be considered that evolution is no longer a natural or biological determinate, but it has become culturally adapted and technologically determined. “Code 46” embodies this concept, portraying a global cultural in an era of transhumanism. It seems the more technical we become, the less religion or spirituality has an impact or a hold of us. However when religion has shaped the code and morals of that particular society for centuries, the society has to find a new post religion code of living for a technological society. Pro choice is a subject of strong debate due to religious frameworks that have been sustained in that culture.”Code 46” through the mandatory abortion under the act of Code 46, offers an outlook at how once controversial topics would become acceptable/normal. If “Code 46” offers any answer on the nature vs. Nurture, it could be presumed that nurture could win the battle as the global socio cultural aspects especially reproduction becomes more technical. “Code 46” presents ‘Nurture parents’ as the familiar and natural parents as nothing more than a scientific process.
In “Code 46” the designer babies or human clones become nothing more than a product sold as an ideology of the perfect child, therefore not to mention the ethical and controversial issues surrounding this subject, the notion that under a consumerist culture, nothing is left sacred, everything has a price, even a human being. A warning or a forecast of how the progression of our global culture can become nothing more than a materialistic world, where everything is a brand? Some might argue that it already is and that “Code 46” is an extreme reflection of the current state of the consumer culture, with its establishing shots of the city being bombarded with brands and logos.
The question of what is the main undertone theme of “Code 64” is a difficult one and dependable on the individual viewing the text. My position as a researcher is within a feminist epistemology, therefore I usually analyse the medium of cinema and its relationship towards the female representation alongside gender roles or gender issues within the film. “Code 46” as I have deliberated, deals with many debates and themes however I felt more connected( or biased) with the issues of the female, Maria. The recurring dream on her birthday of her trying to find someone (or her fate as she interprets) before the train stops, and how every year the stops become less and less. The constant reminder for the female to fulfil her biological job of motherhood, the body clock is working against her because she is a female. Pregnancy/ reproduction and abortion concern the woman’s body. Love story’s are considered as feminine and is the dominate plot with the film .Even the idea of nature vs. Nurture, could be considered as Mother Nature v.s. Man made culture. For myself, I interpret the film’s main theme as the gender issue concerning the woman and her placement with a patriarchal society. McLuhan’s name of his book “Understanding Media: the extensions of man” (1964) is an example of how the consideration of the female is a technological context is considerable undermined. Hence cyborg theory specifically looking at the gender issues of a post humanist society.
With Freudian subjects such as dreams and the Oedipus complex in “Code 46”, it is hard not to apply psychoanalysis as a method of interpretation or analysis, like the majority of feminist film theorists. However If one was to consider this exploration of the Oedipal theory, as the undertone of patriarchal existence, considering that Freudian psychoanalysis itself is often criticised as outdated and prejudice. If evolution is in the form of a culturally global space that exists and culture is patriarchal then is the placement of the female to be forever subordinate still? “Code 46” leaves Maria in the Outside, disconnected, left only with memories of her love and loss, where as William’s wife is in the inside, conforming. Is this suggesting the female will be outside of the technological global space , unless she accepts her place as the subordinate? It seems no matter how technical our global society progresses the same gender issues remain.
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