The motion picture Hua Mu Lan (1939) was made in the foreign concessions in Shanghai, the so-called “isolate island,” in the period after the Second Shanghai Incident. This paper is an investigation into the circumstances of the production and distribution of Hua Mu Lan, especially how it was explained in different places. Hua Mu Lan was screened in Shanghai, Chongqing and Japan during the Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War, and the reactions that it fostered in those times and places were not all the same. It could be called an anti-Japanese picture in some cases or a pro-Japanese or a “Greater East Asian” picture in others. This paper will reveal and interrelate historical facts, the materials recording the history of this movie, and the opinions offered about it in those days.

After confirming these historical facts, this paper will discuss from the viewpoints of ethnicity and gender how Mu Lan, the legendary heroine, was imagined yet her color totally changed, and how Mu Lan was made to be the representative of peoples of belligerent countries. This paper will also discuss how Hua Mu Lan crossed borders and was accepted by Japanese.

This paper aims not only to talk about a motion picture standing right on the crossroads of the historical time and space, but also use it to analyze in detail the situation in the “isolated islands” and the movie world in Chongqing, as well as the actual circumstances of Chinese film production in the Kokusaku Eiga Company. What is important is to emphasize the necessity of examining the connections between wartime movies in the context of war, and to build up one part of the history of cinematic exchange between China and Japan.

This essay deals with the Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist (1966-). Since the late 1980s, she has worked in a range of media, not only one-channel video works on screens and monitors, but also video installations in interior spaces, TV programs in Switzerland and the huge billboard screen in New York’s Times Square. Frequently, her video works are made up of video images, music, performances, poems, and sometimes sculptures applying (her, women’s or our) body/bodies within her many-layered œuvre. Her works pose the question of the permanent body image and the sensation involved in receiving the image medium within our visual experience.

In 1988, she produced a prominent one-channel video work, [Absolutions] Pipilotti’s Mistakes, by shooting her aberrational performances and recurrent activities of falling and failure, adding a poetic narration spoken by her protean voice. She represented various and expressive error images all over the picture.

Focusing on this work, this essay consists of two main parts. 1) I consider several issues raised regarding her, especially by Peggy Phelan and Elisabeth Bronfen, so as to figure out the two important levels in her project. One is the conceptual matter of Rist focusing upon personal “mistakes” and psychosomatic disorders that are revealeal in body performances. The other is the mode of presentation, whieh adopts sorts of visual errors that she calls “the subconscious of the video machine.” 2) From this viewpoint above, I examine [Absolutions] Pipilotti’s Mistakes as represcnting Rist’s close relation between the body and “the subconscious of the video machine,” referencing Walter Benjamin’s idea of the “unconscious optics” of mechanical reproduction.

An amateur filmmaker OGINO Shigeji exhibited his works at an international contest in Budapest held in 1935, and three of his works of “flowering” “expression” and “rhythm” were chosen for the first prize. I can certainly call these works absolute films if I watch them morphologically.

When he produced these films, there was a fashion for the principle of abstraction in a field of graphic, one that was accepted equally in the art world, especially by painters. There were critics who demanded the principle of the avant-garde in even small-gauge film, so there was even a genre of experimental cinema in amateur filmmaking.

Wilhelm Worringer stated that there was “spiritual agoraphopia” (Plazangst) at the root of abstract art, but OGINO, imfluenced by Shinto and Mahayana, was able to easily make abstract works as an artisan rather than an artist without any such fear.

Le présent article traitera de plusieurs films multilingues produits en Suisse pendant et après la Seconde Guerre mondiale et entreprendra d’étudier la formation d’une identité nationale dans chacun d’eux parallèlement aux bouleversements sociaux de l’époque, en se focalisant sur la question des langues dans le cinéma soulevée dès l’avènement du parlant.

La Suisse est un petit pays multilingue divisé en quatre cultures linguistiques, ce qui entraîne des difficultés internes difficiles à imaginer dans les pays unilingues quant à la production et la présentation des films de son pays.

En partant des films multilingues apparus au début du parlant pour résoudre le problème de compréhension des films étrangers, cet article retracera l’histoire de l’essor du cinéma suisse qui introduisit le multilinguisme et développa son usage de façon subtile pour répondre à la demande sociale de chaque époque, et enfin se lança sur le marché international au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. J’entreprendrai de montrer ainsi l’une des grandes possibilités offertes par les films parlants et réalisées par le cinéma d’un pays multilingue et de revisiter la processus de la formation de son identité nationale, en mettant en parallèle l’histoire du pays et celle de son cinéma.

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan, one of the most influential academic figures in the 1960s, saw the end of the mechanical age and the advent of the new electronic age in the ongoing transformation of media environments. In this medium-oriented view of history, TV, in particular, was regarded as the most relevant medium which signals the advent of the electronic age. In fact, the medium of TV had spread rapidly through the North American society in the 1950s, and social transformations brought about by this saturation of TV coincide with the emphasis McLuhan laid on TV. The aim of this paper is to interpret the figure of TV in McLuhan’s text within the broader context of the structural transformations in the contemporary society, and draw from this particular reading more general and theoretical insights into imaginations of a medium in its early stage. In this attempt, it is understood that the figure of TV, which McLuhan regarded as tactile, cool and mosaic, was in fact a symbol of the transformation itself which a medium imposes on society and individual minds.