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What can film from Japan tell us about the strange pair of intensifying global interconnections and rising nationalism in the world today?
Global Japanese Cinema introduces some of the masterworks from the rich history of Japanese cinema as a way of exploring the global language of film. Participants will learn how to analyze moving images and the ways they influence us – a basic media literacy that we all need for life in a media- saturated society. Additionally we will learn how culture, in this case moving images, flows across the globe and transforms its meaning in site-specific ways.
We will see how Japanese cinema’s use of slow motion entered the American gangster film, or how samurai films helped create the Italian “Spaghetti Westerns”, and many other examples. How do moving images constantly nudge us into a specific worldview, and how does the global circulation of these media subtly shift those nudges in unexpected ways? What does it mean that we nonetheless share a common media memory despite living in very different parts of the world? Join the course and explore how moving image culture functions in a networked, media saturated world!