Now Available! Publication, Japanese Expanded Cinema and Intermedia: Critical Texts of the 1960s

Now available through Archive Books’s website!

http://www.archivebooks.org/japanese-expanded-cinema-and-intermedia-critical-texts-of-the-1960s/

Collaborative Cataloging Japan is proud to announce the launch of its first publication, Japanese Expanded Cinema and Intermedia: Critical Texts of the 1960s, co-edited by Go Hirasawa, Julian Ross, and Ann Adachi-Tasch, and published by Archive Books, Berlin.

Japanese Expanded Cinema and Intermedia: Critical Texts of the 1960s is Collaborative Cataloging Japan’s (CCJ) first publication project. Aimed at English-language readers with a serious interest in Japanese film experiments of the 1960s, the book is intended to make important texts more widely available and make this field more accessible to interested audiences. This project accompanies the research on Japanese Expanded Cinema that CCJ and collaborators have been engaged with since 2016. The initiative first received support from the Andy Warhol Foundation through a Curatorial Fellowships grant, thanks to which CCJ conducted numerous interviews, archival research, film collection surveys, digitization of films, and commissioning of new essays.

The full version of the introductory essays by Ross and Hirasawa is available for online reading on Archive Book’s website.

This project was made possible by the generous support from the Japan US Friendship Commission and the The Japan Cultural Institute in Cologne (The Japan Foundation). 

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Excerpt from introductory essay “Situating Intermedia and Expanded Cinema in 1960s Japan” by Julian Ross

As more attention has been placed on works of Japanese Expanded Cinema, it has become necessary to situate them within the local context in which they emerged. To simply apply the definitions of terms such as “intermedia” and “expanded cinema” as they pertain to the American and European discourse would be to reduce the critical debates involving these terms upon and after their arrival into the Japanese art community. With this in mind, we asked ourselves: What was the critical and artistic context in which Expanded Cinema became a phenomenon in Japan? How were Japanese critics analyzing these works and how were event organizers promoting them? How did Japanese artists describe their own and other peers’ works? While Japanese artists and critics used the terms “intermedia” and “expanded cinema” as loanwords, the interpretation of the terms often varied according to who used them. On the one hand, these terms were often discussed in relation, often in comparison or in contrast, to the debate on media interaction and interdisciplinary practice predating the arrival of the two terms. On the other hand, “intermedia” and “expanded cinema” became terms of convenience to legitimize new work or theoretical approaches by placing one’s critical stance within a global context or qualifying a statement by aligning it with an international movement. Moreover, the terms themselves negotiated different interpretations within their birthplace of the United States and beyond, and in many ways continue to do so. Parsing through the particularities of the critical discourse on “intermedia” and “expanded cinema” within Japan became necessary in order to ensure that dominance of the English language interpretations of the terms isn’t assumed, especially with regards to the analysis of local case studies.

This desire to bring the Japanese discourse on “intermedia” and “expanded cinema” into the broader discussion on 1960s and ’70s experimental arts and expanded cinema was the genesis of this book project. Rather than assuming the interpretations of the terms were the same as their counterparts abroad, we decided to commission translations of a selection of key texts that we felt were instrumental in shaping the specific discourse around these terms. While we consider the choices to have been made with care, they are by no means meant to be comprehensive, and we of course welcome any further commitments to identifying and translating key texts on the subject. The essays selected are written by an assortment of figures in the Japanese art scene ranging from artists who themselves practiced expanded cinema, such as Iimura Takahiko, Miyai Rikurō, Jōnouchi Motoharu, and Manabe Hiroshi, to critics like Satō Jūshin and Ishiko Junzō, in an effort to demonstrate the texts were neither anomalies nor debates held in isolated cliques. The printed matter in which these essays were originally published were similarly varied. As the notion of intermedia and the practice of expanded cinema touched on different artistic disciplines, texts were published in magazines in the different fields of architecture (Shōten Kenchiku [Commercial architecture]), design (SD [Space Design]), art (SAC Journal and Bijutsu Techō [Art notebook]) and cinema (Eizō Geijutsu [Image arts], Eiga Geijutsu [Film art], Eiga Hihyō [Film criticism], and Kikan Firumu [Film quarterly], among others). Not only that, key texts on the subject were published on posters, flyers, and other ephemera printed on the occasion and for the promotion of several events that took place and that are broadly considered to have been integral to the discussion on intermedia and expanded cinema. While printed matter of this kind is often denied importance, it arguably shaped how audiences—including the artists themselves and the critics—experienced the artworks in a more impactful way, as they were directly accessible to the attendees, unlike magazines and journals.[1] Our selection of critical texts also includes several articles that predate the arrival of the terms “intermedia” and “expanded cinema,” even in the United States, and certainly in Japan. Their inclusion was important in order to acknowledge the existence of discussions surrounding the subject before it got crystallized, as well as to paint a picture of the context in which these terms were imported. In some cases, as will be discussed later, Intermedia and Expanded Cinema, written in katakana, were distinguished as loanwords, giving the writer an opportunity to use these terms to be in dialogue with the latest international and contemporaneous discourse on the arts. Whether the articles were for publication within the pages of journals or on the pamphlet of an event series, the writer’s position and their intention must be acknowledged in all these cases: much of these texts were written to advocate a certain way of understanding the terms rather than analyzing them, which may account for why so many artists practicing expanded cinema wrote about it.[2] In this sense, the way “intermedia” and “expanded cinema” were discussed and practiced was mutually reciprocal and influential. On the one hand, the works categorized as expanded cinema directly impacted upon how these terms were interpreted; on the other hand, the discussion of the terms themselves influenced the forms and approaches expanded cinema would take.

[1] Here I acknowledge the work of our colleague Uesaki Sen, ex-archivist at Keio University Art Center, who handled documents related to Sōgetsu Art Center in their archive and was instrumental in setting up the online publication of these ephemera as part of the launch of post (https://post.at.moma.org/), the online platform for C-MAP (Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives), an internal research initiative by the Museum of Modern Art, to which Ann Adachi-Tasch, Hirasawa Go, and I contributed. In his role as archivist and researcher, Uesaki is concerned with the temporality of ephemera, particularly as it pertains to events, and that promotional materials shouldn’t be considered historical evidence of what took place at an event as it was printed prior to it taking place.

[2] This is also a reflection of the Japanese art community in the 1960s and ’70s, where artists participated in critical discourse as editors, writers, and participants of panel discussions that were transcribed and published. For example, Iimura Takahiko and Matsumoto Toshio were both on the editorial board of Kikan Film [Film quarterly] as well as being regular contributors.