SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Teaching

Programmes Convened

• MA in Global Cinemas and the Transcultural
• MPhil/PhD in Screen Arts and Industries

Courses Taught

• 1990's South Korean cinema: A critical Survey
• Cinema, Nation and the Transcultural
• Critical Approaches to the Study of Regional Cinemas
• Dissertation in Film and History
• Film as History
• Japanese Cinema: A Critical Survey
• Japanese Post-war Film Genres and the Avant-garde
• Japanese Transnational Cinema: from Kurosawa to Asia Extreme and Studio Ghibli

PhD Students supervised

• Irene Gonzalez Lopez, Prostitution in Postwar Japanese Cinema
• Irene Lopez Gonzalez, Prostitution in Postwar Japanese Cinema
• Lawrence Carter, Going Global: Studio Ghibli, Anime and the Popularisation of a Global Genre
• Lawrence Carter, Going Global: Studio Ghibli, Anime and the Popularisation of a Global Genre

Past PhD students include:

• Montre Aza Missouri Black Magic Women: Race, Sex and Afro-Religiosity in Narrative Film (Lecturer in Film Studies at Howard University, Washington);
• Katsuyuki Hidaka Consuming the Past: Japanese Media at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century (Lecturer in Media Studies at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto); and
• Ozlem Guclu Silent Female Characters in the New Cinema of Turkey: Gender, Nation and the Past (Research Associate at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul).

Research

To date, my writing has centred on the history of Japanese Cinema and to a lesser extent, Korean Cinema. I have published three single-authored books along with various journal articles and chapters in edited books. My first book, Myth and Masculinity in the Japanese Cinema: Towards a Political Reading of the Tragic Hero (Routledge/Curzon 2000), drew on gender studies to explore the ‘homosocial’ codes that underpinned Japanese films from the war-retro and yakuza genres as a principal site of audience (mainly male) pleasure. This I then framed within the wider question of how film fixes history as popular memory.

My second book, A New History of Japanese Cinema: a Century of Narrative Film (Continuum 2005) took, as its starting point, the view that the auteur theory, around which much scholarship on Japanese Cinema has been framed, was inadequate to explain how Japanese cinema functioned within Japanese cultural life. In this study, I took an essayistic approach that focused on historical themes central to the economic and social transitions Japan underwent from pre-modern to a post-war industrial market economy – modernism, nationalism, humanism, transgression and censorship.

My third book, Politics, Porn and Protest: Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, also published by Continuum in June 2011, locates the Japanese avant-garde film movement of the 1960s and 1970s as a dissentient intellectual group of filmmakers who saw cinema as an instrument through which to challenge the conservatism of Japanese post-war politics driven by US imperial imperatives – the Japan/US Security Treaty, the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Reacting against realist film movements and adapting Sartrean-derived existentialism (via Sakaguchi Ango), in theoretical terms, they politicised the ‘body’ in what amounted to an assault on social morality, ultimately challenging the censorship laws. In terms of visual style, they problematised the nature of ‘time’ as linear, challenging mainstream conceptions of history as popular memory. Following on from my work on the Japanese avant-garde, I have begun work on my fourth single-authored monograph the title of which is Ōshima Nagisa: the Politics of Cinema.

Expertise

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Available for

• Special Study Programmes
• Short Term Consultancy
• Long Term Consultancy
• Briefings

Regional Expertise

• East Asia

Country Expertise

• Japan
• Korea South

Languages

• Japanese
• Korean

Publications