Agenda

Will Gardner, Swarthmore College

Abstract
My talk will discuss the relationship between modernist poetry and cinema in Japan, particularly the theory and practice of the "cinépoème" genre that flourished in the years 1928-1930. I argue that these works problematize the relationship between physical fragments caught in discrete moments of time to dynamic forces and temporal flows. The relationship between “fragment” and “flow” explored by these writers was also a noted artistic concern of Futurism, and was closely related to the paradigmatic twentieth century visual technologies of photography and cinema. I will examine the literary works and theoretical statements of such figures as Kanbara Tai, Kitagawa Fuyuhiko, and Yokomitsu Ri'iichi for their exploration of this formal tension between fragment and flow, as well as the historical contexts and political stakes of their intermedial explorations of cinema and poetry.

Bio
Will Gardner teaches Japanese language, literature, and film at Swarthmore College in the United States. He is the author of Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920’s (Harvard University Asia Center Publications, 2006) and The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), as well as numerous articles on Japanese modernism, science fiction, media, architecture, and urban culture. 

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Photo credits: Ogata Kamenosuke, Doromichi no saka to ushi no atama (Pendio di strada fangosa e testa di mucca, 1924)