This paper examines Masao Adachi’s film Ryakushō Renzoku Shasatsuma (A.K.A. Serial Killer) (1969), a documentary of the nineteen-year-old serial killer Norio Nagayama, which initiated and has been analyzed as a visual representation of the theory of fūkeiron (Landscape Theory). Fūkeiron does not specifically explain the production method, although the implication may be found in its criticism of everyday life. This paper reconsiders the film itself and examines Adachi’s close relationship with the contemporary art of his time.

In the first section, the relationship between the leftist ideology of fūkeiron and the life story of Norio Nagayama is summarized. Subsequently each shot in Ryakushō Renzoku Shasatsuma is analyzed in detail. Furthermore, the characteristics of Masao Adachi’s work that differ from interpretations of fūkeiron are identified. In the final section, the reasons the film was not publicly screened are investigated, including Adachi’s notions as an experimental filmmaker and his close relationships with contemporary artists, especially Genpei Akasegawa.

This study analyzes Robert Bresson’s film The Diary of a Country Priest (1951) from the perspective of narratology and acting theory. After an examination of how the story is described and how the narrative and acting are connected in this film, this study aims to clarify the relationship between the actual author and the narrator in the text. First, I will provide an overview of the social conditions in which Bresson was situated at the time of the film’s release and consider how these circumstances affect our understanding of the narrative. Then, I will discuss that the film which appears to be narrated by the priest in the first person, evidently requires the assumption of another narrator and that the narratives by the priest and the other narrator are mixed up. Next, I will demonstrate that the structure of the narrative is connected to the manner in which the actors utter their voices and argue that the actual author is gaining proximity to the narrator in the text through his acting instruction. Finally, I conclude that Bresson, the actual author, structures the text as if he were speaking of the entire film as an “invisible narrator.”

Silent film was a distinctly cosmopolitan medium, as diverse language versions could be produced by simply replacing intertitles. Coexisting with this, so-called applied color techniques, such as dye-tinting, toning and stencil color, flourished. The process of positive cutting, in which colored images and intertitles were assembled by hand to create each individual projection print, remained dominant in German-speaking countries until the mid 1920s.

From the mid to late 1920s, machine processing enabled to finish an entire roll of projection print without splices. Furthermore, newly released film stock specifically designed for duplication purposes made it easier to produce negatives for each language version with sufficient image quality. With this completion of the modern system of negative cutting, applied colors became a disincentive to the overall post-production process and the frequency of color changes decreased. Monochromatic tinting remained partial but eventually disappeared completely.

The negative cutting was a prerequisite for the transition from the silent to sound film that took place around 1929. Sound film as a technological innovation was only possible after multi-year struggles in the areas of cutting, duplication as well as film processing, which transformed film from a hand-crafted artifact into an industrial product.

This study examines the peculiarities of space that appears in Masumura Yasuzo’s films. In Masumura’s films, closed spaces that imply asymmetrical power structures between men and women frequently appear. Many critics have focused on the actor’s body, especially the female body, that breaks through the confinement of such spaces.

Therefore, this study first focuses on the existence of a peculiar “closed area” in Blind Beast (1969) that emerges through the stage design. By focusing on the differences between this film and the original novel by Edogawa Ranpo, I argue that the darkness of the “closed area” is emphasized in the film. In Music (1972), the aforementioned darkness also has a strong presence. By analyzing the shots of the film and examining them spatially, this study examines the way in which the darkness extends to the space outside of it. The analysis of those two films reveals the importance of darkness in Masumura’s cinematic space. Finally, by examining the darkness in Masumura Yasuzo’s early works, this study concludes that the “black” color of darkness is symbolic of power derived from the feudal family system and social structure.

Planet Bibliothèque de Cinéma, a group established by Yasui Yoshio and his colleagues in Osaka in 1974, has long been involved in independent screenings in addition to collecting films and related materials. Based on the author’s experience working at the Kobe Planet Film Archive in organizing materials related to the group (flyers for independent screenings, bulletins), this study aims to examine the history of the screening activities held in Kansai from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s.

Specifically, it attempts to confirm that the screening activities of Planet Bibliothèque de Cinéma were developed through connections with film collectors and other independent screening groups and that a wide variety of films produced in Japan and abroad, including classics, animation films, documentaries, experimental films, and personal films is examined. Next, the manner in which independent screening groups procured the film for screening is examined. Finally, the differences between the independent screening activities and the mini-theater culture are investigated by considering the OMS CINEDELICK series, which Planet Bibliothèque de Cinéma was involved in during the late 1980s, as a case study.

This paper discusses the actor’s speech in Straub-Huillet’s works from the perspective of mise-en-scène. In previous studies, this peculiar actor’s speech with unnatural accents and pauses has been discussed with words such as “musical” and “alienation effect,” but only abstractly. In this paper, I aim to examine in detail the speech that Straub calls “recitation” by using materials such as interviews with the artist, rehearsal videos, and scripts with notes to explore the process of its production and the influence of other arts.

To this end, the first section takes as an example Klassenverhältnisse (1984), an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s Der Verschollene, and confirms the director’s pre-rehearsal conception. In the second section, based on the rehearsal footage, I analyze how certain words are actually embodied. The following section confirms what role the utterances play in the production. Finally in the last section, I will discuss the methodology of repetition which emphasizes both the actor’s body and the text.