Past events
Women Filmmakers in Post-war Japan - 23/10/2018
- Venue: Old Library Building: 2.29 - Joint event with the Japan Group
- Start: Tue, 23 Oct 2018 17:00:00 BST
- End: Tue, 23 Oct 2018 18:00:00 BST
Following the defeat in 1945, Japan went through a period of radical transformations. The new post-war constitution not only gave women the right to vote but also guaranteed them equal rights within the family and in society. New spaces, professions and images were proposed and opened to women who, nevertheless, often had to negotiate their aspirations with the gender constrains of the everyday life.
In male-dominated fields such as the Japanese film industry, women occupied a central position in terms of representation and audiences, but a more marginal one behind the camera. On screen, female characters and stories, mainly depicted by male filmmakers, embodied the traumas and contradictions of post-war Japan, but most of the time didn't represent the experiences and subjectivity of women. However, for the first time in Japanese film history, we can find a reduced but significative number of female filmmakers working as directors, screenwriters or producers and constructing unusual representations of female subjectivity, sexuality and desire.
This lecture explores the figure of female actor and director Tanaka Kinuyo (1909-1977) who directed six films between 1953 and 1962. As the only female director working during the post-war golden age of Japanese cinema, the career of Tanaka behind the camera offers us a unique example to examine the role and agency of women as producers of representations in the Japanese film industry. Collaborating with other women filmmakers and adapting women´s stories, Tanaka created a position of female authorship from which constructs a female gaze in post-war Japanese cinema.
Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández is a Ph.D. candidate at University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid (Spain), writing a dissertation on female authorship and representation in the films directed by Tanaka Kinuyo. She has been a visiting researcher at the Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo (Japan) with the support of the Monbukagakusho Scholarship and the Japan Foundation Fellowship. Her research interests and publications include the study of women filmmakers in Japan, gender representations in Japanese cinema, art and popular culture and transnational film connections between Japan and Latin America. She is currently based in London and works at the Japan Society.
Sponsored by the Asian Studies Research Group (ASRG) and the Japan Group, Newcastle University