Faculty & Staff

Faculty

Michael Raine, Ph.D.

Assistant professor in Japanese Cinema, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Committee on Cinema and Media Studies.

mjraine@uchicago.edu

Teaching/Research Interests:

Youth, body, and subjectivity in Japanese cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, Japanese political modernism, "popular baroque" cinema, history of film theory, subtitling.

I have been working on the ways in which youth, body, and subjectivity (seishun, shintaisei, shutaisei) are articulated in the commercial Japanese cinema that produced the famous "Japanese New Wave" around 1960. More recently, I have been working on Japanese Political Modernism -- the theoretical and practical critique of existing forms of narrative cinema that characterized independent films of the late 1960s, especially those produced by and/or exhibited at the Art Theater Guild (ATG).

In future work I will seek 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."

Looking further back into Japanese film history, I have been developing an interest in wartime film culture. Focusing in particular on the documentary (bunka eiga) and the propaganda film (kokusaku eiga, also kokumin eiga), I am trying to reconstruct the place of Japanese cinema in the preparation of citizens oriented toward "total war." I would like to turn the emphasis of this project away from identifying ideology (too easy) and weighing complicity (too hard) toward trying to understand how cinema exists as both agent and symptom of social processes. In particular, I would like to trace the role of cinephilia in the discourse on the "film-like film," and how the specific qualities of film as a medium were used to mobilize national subjects.

Outside of Japan and the 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 that the one that has so far been put forward in film studies. Although Peirce was more interested in "semeiotics" as a philosophy of science than as an aesthetics, I think there are resources in his thought for rethinking the relation of the audio-visual image and the profilmic (usually called "indexicality") as well as for rethinking the idea of "medium" in film, video, and digital media. Finally, I am interested in subtitling, both as an historical practice and as an aesthetic problem in the relation between text and image in the cinema.

Selected Publications:

Masumura Yasuzo's Giants and Toys in Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts (New York: Routledge/AFI), forthcoming.

"Documentary Film as Visual Culture in Wartime Japan," in Looking Modern, ed. Katherine Mino, forthcoming.

"Contemporary Japan as Punishment Room in Ichikawa Kon's Shokei no heya," in Kon Ichikawa, ed. James Quandt (Toronto: Cinemateque Ontario, 2001).

"Ishihara Yujiro: Youth, celebrity, and the male body in 1950s Japan," in Wording the Image. (Cambridge UP, 2000).

Courses