Author: Yui Nozawa

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Transcultural Cinema Forum 2025

The Transcultural Studies Division holds lecture series as a part of the course, “Transcultural Asian Cinema” conducted by Prof. Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano.

The Transcultural Cinema Forum in 2025 will consider what “cinema” means: the cinema, born at the end of the 19th century and regarded as the king of entertainment throughout the 20th century, is undergoing a major transformation in its form with the advent of the Internet in the 21st century. The purpose of this course is to reconsider the question “What Is cinema?” from the perspective of the year 2025.

To this end, the Transcultural Cinema Forum will invite six guest speakers over the course of nine weeks, each of them an expert in his or her field, to define and reflect on “cinema” from all angles. In addition, films will be screened in class while matching each week’s topic. Since this course will be held in two sessions combined, the duration of the lecture will be 8 weeks instead of 15 weeks. Students will also be visiting the movie theater, Demachi-za/出町座, to view a film on the big screen and to analyze the theater itself in May.


Director/Editor: The joys and difficulties of making films.
Guest Speaker: Yamazaki Ema/山崎エマ
Date & Time: 2025.4.15 (Tue), 15:00-18:15
Please find posters here: PDF

Film Producer/Editor: What does it mean to produce a documentary film?
Guest Speaker: Hata Takeshi/秦岳志
Date & Time: 2025.4.22 (Tue), 15:00-18:15

Distributor: Why I started my own distribution company.
Guest Speaker: Kojima Atsuko/小島烈子
Date & Time: 2025.5.13 (Tue), 15:00-18:15

Film Theaters Owner: How do I run a movie theater called “Demachiza”?
Guest Speaker: Tanaka Seiichi/田中誠一
Date & Time: 2025.5.20 (Tue), 15:00-18:15

Archivist: What does it mean to archive a film?　
Guest Speaker: Tochigi Akira/とちぎあきら
Date & Time: 2025.6.3 (Tue), 15:00-18:15

Film Festival Curator: What does it mean to promote Asian cinemas to the market through film festival?
Guest Speaker: Ishizaka Kenji/石坂健治
Date & Time: 2025.6.10 (Tue), 15:00-18:15

Location: Lecture Room 9(講義室9), Basement Floor,
Research Building No.2 (総合研究2号館)
Language: English
Free to All

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Prof. James Welker Book Talk (2024/12/12)

Date & Time: December 12, 2024, 13:15-14:45
Location:Lecture Room 9, Besement Floor, Research Building No.2, Kyoto University (MAP㉞)
Language: English
Prior registration is required.
Click here to register.

Everyone is welcome to attend.

Book Talk: Transfiguring Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan: Feminists, Lesbians, and Girls’ Comics Artists and Fans
In the early 1970s, Japan saw the emergence of three dynamic and overlapping communities of women and adolescent girls who challenged Japanese gender and sexual norms: the women’s liberation (ūman ribu) movement, the lesbian community, and a sphere comprised of artists and fans of queer shōjo manga (girls’ comics). In this talk, Prof. James Welker introduces his new monograph, Transfiguring Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan: Feminists, Lesbians, and Girls’ Comics Artists and Fans, which examines these communities and their cultural import. As he shows, individually and collectively, they found the normative understanding of the category “women” untenable and worked to redefine and expand its meaning by transfiguring ideas, images, and practices selectively appropriated from the “West.” They did so, however, while remaining firmly fixed on the local. Prof. Welker argues that their transfiguration of Western culture into something locally meaningful had tangible effects far beyond these communities.

About the Speaker
James Welker is a professor in the Department of Cross-Cultural Studies at Kanagawa University, Yokohama, Japan. His research examines gender and sexuality in postwar and contemporary Japan as well as the global spread of Japanese popular culture. He is the author of Transfiguring Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan: Feminists, Lesbians, and Girls’ Comics Artists and Fans (Hawai‘i, 2024). He is also the editor of Queer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media in Asia (Hawai‘i, 2022), BL ga hiraku tobira: Hen’yō suru Ajia no sekushuariti to jendā (BL opening doors: Sexuality and gender transfigured in Asia; Seidosha, 2019), and a special issue of the journal Mechademia: Second Arc on “Queer(ing)” (2020), as well as a co-editor of Rethinking Japanese Feminisms (Hawai‘i, 2018), and Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan (Mississippi, 2015), among other publications.

Poster

For inquiries, please contact:
Prof. Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano
wadamarciano.mitsuyo.6w[at]kyoto-u.ac.jp

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Screening of Documentary Film, The Roots (2013)

Professor Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano will be hosting a screening of a documentary film, followed by a Q&A session with the director.

Date & Time:
Monday, October 28, 2024
15:00-18:15

Location:
Seminar Room 2, 2nd Floor, Faculty of Letters Main Building, Kyoto University (MAP⑧)
https://www.kyoto-u.ac.jp/ja/access/campus/yoshida/map6r-y

Guest:
Kaoru Ikeya (Film Director, Professor at Konan Women’s University)

Language:
Japanese (English subtitles)

Free to all

For inquiries, please contact:
Prof. Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano
wadamarciano.mitsuyo.6w[at]kyoto-u.ac.jp

Find the poster here