The subject of this article is the still-image projection equipment/medium called “gentô” (magic lantern, filmstrips, slides) in Japan. Although a number of studies on gentô in 19^th century Japan have appeared, it has been considered as “pre-cinema” medium which was superseded and driven out by cinema in the early 20^th century. However, gentô revived during WWII as visual-aids for school, factory and military education or wartime propaganda tool. During the Occupation, gentô continued to develop and reached a peak in the mid 1950s.

In this article, I will examine “post-cinema” gentô history in Japan, focusing on 1950s independent gentô production and screening within the educational and social movements. Within the 1950s social movements like labor disputes, the anti-nuclear movements and the anti-militarybase movements, participants often produced and screened original gentô films for the purpose of documenting and propagating their activities, and tried to establish the sphere for “the exchange of experiences” about their movement. Analyzing newly found materials like films and scripts of these 1950s independent gentô, I would like to clarify how these gentô films, with their peculiar characteristics, created the sensation of “the exchange of experiences” among their audience, and explore the possibility of the independent history of gentô, without subordinating it to the history of other media like cinema, photography, or fine arts.

UEHARA Ken (1909-1991) was the star who made a spectacular appearance in the woman’s film (josei-eiga) produced at the prewar Shochiku-Ofuna studio. It is, thus, often considered that Uehara, as a Shochiku-Ofuna star, performed a typical male role of nimaime, a kabuki character implying the refined young lover in classical Japanese cinema. His star image is, however, apparently different from a traditional masculine figure in the kabuki and the jidaigeki.

It is usually mentioned that classical Hollywood cinema had influenced Japanese cinema at various moments during the period of the 1910s to the 1930s. Japanese film melodrama, whose origin was in foreign, had to be transformed to one of domestic genres in Japanese mainstream cinema. In this aspect, Uehara should be reexamined as a star who was born as the first typical hero of domestic melodrama in Japan.

From a view point of film genre theories and star studies, this paper investigates Uehara and his star persona. The main purpose of this study is to explore critical questions of female spectatorship and possibilities of women’s visual pleasure. Finally, it demonstrates that the woman’s film starring Uehara Ken is one of the prototypes of melodrama in Japanese cinema of the 1930s.

This article focuses on issues of two bodies in director Theo Angelopoulos’ film Megalexandros (1980), widely considered to mark a transition point in his career, and examines the image of specter in his work after the 1980s.

Generally, Angelopoulos’ original visual style, characterized by the gesture and the image of those characters that appear repeatedly in his films, has been interpreted as showing his unique “artistic personality”. The classic definition of “film auteur” has still some essential meaning in the study of his works. However, there are problems that are not yet fully grasped through the previous studies that have attempted to understand his films in terms of the identity of a director or by situating them in their cultural, political and social context. One of those unnoticed problems is about two bodies in Megalexandros. In this film, the body of the character called Great King has a double weaning. It is a body possessed with past specters, while it is also a physical body for realization. The epilogue of this film does show that the body is divided into a broken statue and a boy, and the images of the two bodies have come to appear repeatedly in his films after the 1980s. The recurring images do not demonstrate any trace of “artistic personality”, but indicate that the filmmaker is in crisis.