Join us for a faculty talk with Columbia University Assistant Professor of Japanese Film and Media Takuya Tsunoda, who will workshop portions of his current book project. Dan Streible, Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at NYU Tisch, will provide a response.
The book presents an analytical account of one of the most dynamic transformational phases of the media landscape in postwar Japan known as the rise of new cinemas in the 1960s, along with its radicalized engagement with the media practices of the Cold War era. I examine the historical and theoretical intersections between media-based governmental and civic activities, cross-medial articulations of state-endorsed academicism in Japan, postwar corporate culture, and various historical motives and geopolitical tensions regarding the meanings and operations of corporate and industrial media. The central focus of the study is Iwanami Productions (est. 1950), the film division of the famed publishing house. Iwanami first began operation as a science laboratory and subsequently evolved into a major provider of state and corporate sponsored educational, science, infrastructural and public relations media works, and soon later a key player in the new cinemas of the 1960s in Japan.
Iwanami, Tsunoda argues, most vividly animated, mapped, and constituted what I describe as processive technics: the key material and epistemological nodes that articulated recursive knowledge networks, an industrial-operational web with self-referential relationality, and a looping circuity of media participation, each of which generated and organized the shifting horizons of techno-industrialization processes and epistemic transitions specific to the corresponding history of postwar Japan.
RSVP to comparativemedia@columbia.edu to receive the pre-circulated readings (and to receive campus access, for non-Columbia affiliates).