Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film (English and Japanese Edition)
Language: English
Pages: 268
ISBN: 071030529X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
A New History of Documentary Film
being exposed in utero, and Yasuko gets leukemia seven years later) – striking the viewer as all the more tragic. Their plight reminds us of the fate of an historic Hiroshima victim, Sasaki Sadako, who died of leukemia at the age of twelve, ten years after exposure, and who achieved a mythical status as ‘equivalent of the Anne Frank legend’ in Japan.23 Both films draw their emotional efficacy from this conjunction between childish purity and innocence, the horror of the bomb’s ‘desecration’ of
full bloom, and whose tragic fate epitomizes the evanescent quality of beauty, and the fragility and ephemerality of human existence in general. Such conceptions become further linked with the emotive-esthetic theme of mono no aware, or the ‘suchness’ and ‘sad beauty’ of existence.28 These are extremely potent cultural concepts in Japanese society, and certainly appropriate in other contexts, but they become problematic when applied uncritically to A-bomb victims, whose deaths and illnesses, as
women in the films are depicted much more negatively, and as implicit threats to the mentality and customs embodied by the ‘Maidens.’ Aside from the fact that such depictions contain an obvious ideological message to women (hibakusha or not), who are urged to remain within traditional gender definitions, the representation of the female hibakusha as paragon of tradition contributes to an essentializing view of A-bomb suffering, which, like the heroines themselves, becomes sanctified and frozen
by Micronesian Islanders backs up the advertising and the title‘s reference to King Kong. Thus the film tells a different story to its new audience. Although the scenes with Martin largely replace similar scenes with a Japanese reporter, the shift in narrative perspective is crucial to the subsequent appropriation of the film‘s message. The film begins with a voice-over by Martin of inserted scenes showing ‘scorched flesh’ and the destruction of Tokyo. He describes himself as a reporter cast
effective as a film in scenes which depict this ‘reluctant teacher.’ These tend to be scenes of relative stillness, with little, if any, dialogue. This may seem paradoxical, because Kurosawa is considered first and foremost the master of dynamic scenes, of the awesome choreography of battle or, in his gendaigeki, of the tense psychologically based dialogue. Nevertheless, in these later films, scenes of relative stillness and silence are his strength, and the movement away from these qualities,