Faculty & Staff

Faculty

Michael Raine

Michael Raine, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations, Committee on Cinema & Media Studies, and the College.

mjraine@uchicago.edu

Teaching/Research Interests:
Japanese New Wave cinema, Wartime image culture, political modernism, history of film theory, digital media and subtitling.

I am writing a book on the tension between a "culture of the copy" in postwar Japanese commercial cinema and a "culture of authenticity" in the famous "Japanese New Wave" around 1960. I think it is important to put contemporary ideas about film authorship and the nature of cinema in the context of developments in literature and celebrity culture, looking beyond the "Shochiku New Wave" of Oshima, Yoshida, and others to the surrounding trends at other studios, and to independent and avant-garde film production. At its most ambitious, this project aims at an institutional and economic history of Japanese cinema in the period of high economic growth, seen through the lens of the changes in film style that those conditions provoked.

I am also developing a project on image culture in wartime Japan and its territories, with a particular focus on the rhetorical construction of documentary (bunka eiga) and propaganda films (kokusaku eiga). I argue that questions of medium and aesthetics become more pointed in wartime when they are tied to claims for national culture autonomy. Japan's wartime expansion rendered those questions even more complex, and pertinent to the present day, as definitions of "culture," "nation," and "citizen" became increasingly unstable. I would like to turn the emphasis of this project away from identifying ideology (too simple) and weighing complicity (too complex) toward trying to understand how cinema exists as both agent and symptom of broader social processes that supported the flowering of Japanese art cinema as well as the transnational action genre known as the "People's Film" (kokumin eiga). 

More recently, I started a project on Japanese Political Modernism -- the theoretical and practical critique of existing forms of narrative cinema that characterized independent films of the late 1960s and early 1970s, especially those produced by Art Theater Guild (ATG) and/or exhibited in ATG's cinema, the Shinjuku bunka. In future work I hope to connect the popular genre cinema produced at Japanese film studios to these "serious" films, as well as to the wider context of formally adventurous poster art and underground theatre. Rather than insist on the exclusivity of categories of high and low, we should recognize in Japan as well as in the West the reciprocal specification of the one by the other, producing a style of cinema that I am calling the "popular baroque." 

Outside of Japanese cinema, I will be developing a long-standing interest in the history of film theory. In particular, I would like to make the philosophy of Charles Peirce the basis for generating a different notion of film as sign than the one that has so far been put forward in film studies. Although Peirce was more interested in "semeiotics" as philosophy of science than as aesthetics, I think his ideas can help us rethink the relation of the audio-visual image and its object (usually called "indexicality") as well as for rethinking the idea of "medium" in film, video, and digital media. 

Finally, I am interested in using computers and digital media in film teaching and research. I have developed a web site to support teaching film analysis, and I am analyzing video data streams to extract information about form (shot length, composition, etc) from a large corpus of films. I also have an interest in subtitling, both as an historical practice and as an aesthetic problem in the relation between text and image in the cinema. 

Selected Publications

Courses