Alexander Zahlten (Harvard University).

Technology, Indexicality, Memory: Japanese and Korean War Film Lineages as Prehistories of Current Media Loops

As the baby steps of generative AI pick up speed, anxiety around the status of history and memory is once again running high. With Japanese and to some degree Korean cinema at the center this talk will trace a longer term trajectory of how the current intensification - of both the “generated” materials and the discussions around them - are prefigured in the long arc of film in the twentieth century.

This talk will track various developments in film technology, film form, and industry strategies in terms of how they intervene in considerations of indexicality, memory, nation, and history. Cinema throughout the twentieth century was seen as intimately connected to all of these themes. From the early proliferation of film theaters to the creation of subgenres such as Pink Film and (somewhat more obviously) giant monster films, war films long have had a catalytic function in the discourse around cinema and media-technological history.

Bio

Alexander Zahlten is Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His work touches on topics such as the dramatic changes in the Japanese film and media industry after 1960 in his book The End of Japanese Cinema (2017), 'amateur' media production, or the history of the connection of electricity and the film industry in Japan. From 2002 to 2010 he was program director of the Nippon Connection Film Festival. Zahlten was Assistant Professor in the Department of Film & Digital Media of Dongguk University in Seoul, South Korea for one and a half years before joining Harvard in 2012. Publications include his co-edited volume Media Theory in Japan (Duke University Press, 2017, with Marc Steinberg), “Between Two Funerals: Zombie Temporality and Media Ecology in Japan” in positions: asia critique (2021), “Before Media Mix: The Electric Ecology”, in A Companion to Japanese Cinema (David Desser, ed., 2022), or “Media Mix is Nonsense”, in Mechademia (2023).

Marcos Centeno (University of Valencia). 
Transnational Memories in documentary Film: Haneda Sumiko’s The Japanese Settlers…
 
This lecture seeks to re-examine the history of Japanese colonisation in Manchuria through the long-neglected voices of the children of the settlers who travelled to Manchukuo during the final years of World War II and were left behind after the Japan’s surrender, as they are captured by Haneda Sumiko’s full-length documentary The Japanese Settlers to the Manchuria and Inner Mongolia of Mainland China (Aa manmōkaitaku-dan, 2008). Through the testimonies documented in the film, it will be discussed the ambiguous position of the Japanese settlers in the colonial enterprise: while they were part of the violent militarist structures in Manchukuo, they also ended up being victims of them. The topic is addressed within the broader revival of the memory concerning the Japanese settlers in Manchuria: Why were these settlers recognised as victims by Chinese institutions before the formal acknowledgment in Japan? Why most of the victims were women? Why were those who managed to repatriate decades later stigmatised in Japanese society? This presentation will seek to cast light into these questions. 

Bio
 

Marcos Centeno is reader at the University of Valencia (UV)where he teaches Film and Japanese Studies, and is research associate at the Japan Research Centre, SOAS, University of London. Previously, Centeno held positions in the UK, as the Japanese Programme director at Birkbeck, University of London, and as lecturer for the Department of Japan and Korea at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), where he coordinated the MA Global Cinemas and the Transcultural. Centeno’s main research interests revolve around documentary film, wartime memory in East Asia, transculturality and visual representation of the Ainu people. He has led several projects, most recently TRAMEVIC (Transnational Memories in East Asian Visual Culture), funded by Valencia Council of Education, Culture, University and Employment, Ref. CIGE/2023/066, and a project on Haneda Sumiko, funded by Sasakawa foundation and other institutions resulting in a coedited book recently published in Routledge. Centeno has also been Council on East Asian Studies grant holder at Yale University (2022/23), research associate at Oxford University (2024) and served as a guest lecturer at the Centre for Japanese Studies at Nanzan University, Nagoya.
 

Funded by:

• Eurasia Foundation (from Asia)

In partnership with:

• Vicerectorat d’Internacionalització i Multilingüisme de la Universitat de València
• Departament de Teoria dels Llenguatges i Ciències de la Comunicació
• Institut Universitari de la Creativitat i Innovacions Educatives (IUCIE)
• Unitat d’Investigació Japón -Universitat de València (UIJ-UV)