University of St Andrews

Graduate Student, Film Studies

PhD candidate

Department of Film Studies, St Andrews

Thesis Title: Cultural Specificity in Transnational Flows: The Non-National Cinema and the Construction of Japaneseness

About

The amount of literature dedicated to Japanese cinema is considerable and wide-ranging, yet the majority of scholarship available remains fixated upon the supposed ‘Japaneseness' of the cinema and is fraught with issues of Western-centric analysis. As I have found, similar concerns are evident in attempts to identify national cinema as a clearly-defined film category and by association the nation as a finite cultural space. How does one measure the ‘nationality' of national cinemas? How is our assessment of this affected by geopolitics, the ‘global' and the transnational, as well as the decision-making of national film industries which either accentuate or deemphasise national characteristics?

In my research, I am looking at contemporary Japanese cinema (and specifically films that have been exported successfully to Western markets in recent years) as a case study with which to explore the transnational status of national cinema. I aim to locate the study of national cinema according to a more expansive set of criteria, taking into account cross-cultural exchanges that inform an alternative conception of cultural specificity - the non-national - and investigate the ways in which nation-ness is precariously constructed from both within and without. In this sense, certain national cinemas appear both global and local, and as a result downplay nation-ness while displaying stereotypical cultural characteristics.

In the context of modern Japanese cinema, a non-national framework enables us to look beyond the academic construction of Japanese aesthetics, film form and subject matter, and suggest that the nationality of national cinema is continually in flux, always in a state of ‘becoming', as Andrew Higson has suggested, and cannot be fully assessed through traditional approaches.

Films under discussion in this research include: Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (Shinya Tsukamoto, 2009), Western Sukiyaki Django (Takashi Miike, 2001), Visitor Q (Takashi Miike, 2001), and Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008).

As an undergraduate I received an MA Honours in Liberal Arts from the University of Glasgow (specialising in English literature) before moving on to complete a MLitt within the St Andrews Film Studies department. Aside from my current research, my other interests include issues of invisibility in queer cinema since the 1920s, the stereotyping of East Asia in both Western and Asian cinemas, extreme cinema, and horror films in general.

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