FS/AS 321 - Contemporary Japan on Screen

The purpose of this course is to explore contemporary (and future) Japan through film from the late 1980s to the present and beyond. The foundations of the course lie in Film Studies in its broader sense. It is not intended to simply summarize the sociopolitical issues of contemporary Japan as depicted in films. Rather, it is designed to analyze the films themselves in order to understand, through their aesthetics and formal aspects, what new forms of production, distribution and consumption, the intersection of screens (in theatres, at home, in our pockets), pop culture and the media mix, etc., tell us about Japan and how its society is evolving. Among the themes covered in this course are the social impact of technology (digitization, robots); Japan in a globalized world (the Cool Japan initiative, geopolitics); demography (an aging and decreasing population depopulation of rural areas); history (how films look onto the past to understand/justify/criticize the present); and apocalyptic narratives and gender issues.