In Japanese, “gentou” (magic lantern, slide, filmstrip) means visual media projecting still images onto screen. In Japan, gentou had first thrived during the Meiji period and revived in the Showa period from war-time to post war 1950s. In both case, gentou had been introduced as “educational media” for school, social and home education, with the recommendation of the Ministry of Education and some authorities of education. However, since the Treaty in Peace with Japan in 1952, gentou was also flourished as documenting and propagandizing media for several social movements as labor movement or anti-war movement. In this paper, I would like to focus on the self-producing gentou movement in the Tokyo University Kawasaki Settlement, which established in Kawasaki industrial area in 1951 for the purpose of providing free services such as healthcare, legal advice, education and children’s care to improve the welfare of the community. The Kawasaki Settlement Children’s Club self-produced three gentou films based on the works of “seikatsu-tsuzurikata” (life document) and paintings created by the children themselves. Examining these works, I would like to clarify the possibility of the gentou as the “life document art” to establish the alternative public sphere where interactive communications and learning among the activists, the children, and the people in the local community were enabled.

Le present article se consacre à l’étude sur Numéro zéro (1971) de Jean Eustache (1938-81). En soulignant le contexte dans lequel s’inscrit le film, nous essayons de mettre en lumière un aspect curieusement peu commenté jusqu’a present: Jean Eustache l’a réalisé en marge de la télévision. Malgré son apparence naïve, Numéro zéro représente pour le cinéaste une forme de ≪manifeste≫ et de ≪prototype≫ qui joue un rôle déterminant dans l’orientation de son cinema. Cependant, afin de saisir la potentialité du film, il faudrait également traiter de la télévision, en particulier de la série Les Conteurs (1964-73) d’André Voisin et de l’expérimentation de Jean Frapat. Effectivement, souvent plus fréquente à la télévision qu’au cinéma (les emissions de rencontres, d’interviews et de débats), la tentative eustachienne de filmer la parole est enracinée surtout dans la lignée ouverte par André Voisin depuis les anneés soixante avec la collection Les Conteurs. Cinéaste légendaire des années soixante-dix, ≪auteur≫ par excellence du cinéma, Jean Eustache semble développer et radicaliser de telles pratiques apparues au sein de la télévision. Toutefois, son entreprise de toucher à l’≪automatisme≫ du cinéma est incompatible avec la télévision de l’époque.

After cinema came to Shanghai at the end of the nineteenth century, it had been mainly exhibited at commercial amusement sites, most of which were notorious for the lack of public morals. However, during the l 910s, Shanghai Y.M.C.A.’s noncommercial film exhibitions contributed to the improvement of the cinema’s social standing and the discovery of films’ educational values.

The Y.M.C.A. exhibited films as “wholesome and healthful entertainment,” which means that the film screenings at the Y.M.C.A. were completely disconnected from the vulgarity of Shanghai’s other commercial film exhibitions. These film exhibitions can be roughly categorized into two types: as entertainment during recreation events and as visual aids for lectures. Both these types helped to prove that cinema had great usefulness, especially for social education in China.

They also allowed many young new elites in China, who considered the Y.M.C.A. as a place to develop their social skills and create human networks, to be absorbed into cinema.

The film exhibitions by the Y.M.C.A. can thus be said to have led to the awakening of China’s new film exhibition culture, which flourished during the next decade.

Ryoju (1961, Gosho Heinosuke) is a film that can be categorized as bungei-melodrama, which was a subgenre of Japanese film melodrama for female audience. However, the film has, nevertheless, a great similarity to Hollywood family melodrama that is a subsequent generic category in terms of style, technology, themes and women’s film. Interestingly, in Japanese film discourse during the 1950s, some films such as Written on the wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956) were considered works resembling to bungei-melodrama. This fact challenges current discussions that have assumed that these films were rarely understood as “melodrama” or “women’s film” in those days. The main purpose of this paper is to define Ryoju as a paradigmatic work of bungei-melodrama, engaging the Japanese genre with major discussions of melodrama in film studies. It also considers some critical differences between two “melodrama” genres. First of all, the paper will analyze Ryoju by focusing on three critical issues: the representation of the upper middle class, the organization of sexual power struggle, and ideological contradiction in film criticism. Second, it will demonstrate how the three issues allow us to see both similarity and difference between Japanese bungei-melodrama and Hollywood melodrama. Finally, the paper will explore the way to associate two genres, discussing genre re-genrification, one of critical interests in melodrama.