viz. - Japan

Real World Metropolis, Future City on Film: “Almost the Same, But Not Quite” Tokyo in Solaris

Lisa Gulesserian — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:00:00 +0000

I just watched Andrey Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris. The movie’s a whirlwind of mourning, longing, and technologizing. I won’t talk much about the plot here. Instead, I’ll talk about a scene, amongst many, that caught my attention. This scene, in the distant, fuzzy future of the movie’s setting, places us in the passenger seat of a self-propelled car on an impossibly busy highway. In Tokyo, Japan. In 1971. Like Solaris, many TV shows and movies have made use of present-day, real world metropolises to conjure up imagined future cities. In this first segment of a series called “Real World Metropolis, Future City on Film,” Tokyo in Solaris is “almost the same, but not quite” what we’re used to seeing.

In a scene that runs upwards of four minutes, Tarkovsky captures a “future” city where cars weave through fast-moving traffic along a multilane/multilevel highway. Tall buildings with dazzling billboards and glittering neon signs scroll alongside our moving vehicle. Eerie electronic notes punctuate a mostly silent drive. This scene might sound commonplace, especially for those of us familiar with the highways of Texas and California.

Los Angeles Freeway Interchange Image Credit: Stock Connection/World of Stock

But in the context of the film, it’s an unsettling drive through a future city (though the scene was filmed on Tokyo’s highways). According to the audio commentary on the Criterion Collection edition of Solaris, film critics Vida Johnson and Graham Petrie claim that Tarkovsky expressly asked for permission from the USSR to film in Japan. Although Tarkovsky’s original goal was to film the World’s Fair in Osaka (held in 1970), he was granted permission to leave for Japan in 1971 and ended up filming everyday traffic in Tokyo instead. Some critics (namely the New York Times’ Dan Kois) call the scene “the most boring” in the entire movie. Yet, to me, the scene feels anything but unnecessary and ordinary when taken in context. Even while watching the movie in the Austin of 2011, I was struck by how unsettled the scene made me feel. The extra-long takes, the startling electronic sounds, the unexpected cuts between color and black-and-white film all disoriented me.

Image credit: Screenshot from Solaris scene

I keep thinking that this scene is—per Homi Bhabha’s concept of “mimicry”—“almost the same, but not quite” the same as the highways I’m familiar with. And, I don’t think so just because I’m not used to seeing Japanese characters during interstate drives. Akira Kurosawa reads the scene with a “shudder.” To Kurosawa, “By a skillful use of mirrors, [Tarkovsky] turned flows of head lights and tail lamps of cars, multiplied and amplified, into a vintage image of the future city.” Given that the film’s protagonist, Kris Kelvin, uncannily finds someone (or something) rather like his dead wife, Hari, on Solaris, the theme of mimicry is Tarkovsky’s signature move for disorientation. Being thrown off kilter when we see Tokyo and Hari is exactly the point.

Media Sensationalism and the Crisis in Japan

ladysquires — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 14:00:00 +0000

(Image Credit: Time Magazine)

Following on the heels of Megan, Cate, and Elizabeth, I've been monitoring media coverage of the disaster in Japan and coming across some interesting points for debate. I found this Time cover shortly after reading an anonymous letter to Talking Points Memo by a Japanese scholar critiquing Western media coverage of the Fukushima nuclear power plant:

From my perspective as a scholar of Japan at a major American university―one who was also in Japan when the quake hit (I left one day later than scheduled on the 13th)―I must say that the coverage was, with some exceptions, largely substandard: full of factual errors, misconceptions, and bent towards sensationalism and alarmism. It is very unfortunate that this poor coverage will probably result in many Americans having false conceptions of Japan for years to come.

The writer takes the Western media to task, citing several specific examples of inaccurate reporting over the past week, particularly the consistent portrayal of relief workers as desperate and overwhelmed by the enormity of the situation. Conversely, he or she argues that reporting within Japan, "has been largely calm, rational, informed, and critical. Some of this is naturally to avoid creating panic, but it has been able to do that because as a whole it has answered many of the questions people have and thus gained a certain level of trust. As a media scholar, I can pick this coverage apart for its problems, and of course point to information that is still not getting out there, but on the whole it is functioning as journalism should." Indeed, Japan Probe's screen caps of coverage of the same event from both the Huffington Post and the BBC reveal that U.S. coverage tends to be more sensationalist:

The letter writer acknowledges that sensationalism sells and notes that foreign journalists reporting from Japan "do not have the language capabilities to access Japanese media," but he or she also argues that

[T]he coverage is rooted in long-standing prejudices held by some Westerners against the non-West: for instance, a superiority complex that feels only the West and its media have real access to the truth, which led to a downplaying of Japanese media reports. In the worst cases, there has been simple racism, as some reporters when viewing how calm the Japanese are, seem to think the Japanese are mere robots who cannot grasp the immensity of the crisis or, as one colleague reports when a Spanish reporter interviewed her, think that the Japanese are genetically tuned to accept disaster.

...
But worst of all, the inordinate and sensationalist attention given to the reactors by American and other media has taken attention away from where it should be: on the likely nearly 20,000 people who died in the quake and tsunamis, on the nearly 400,000 homeless people, and on the immense suffering this has caused for Japan as a whole. I cannot but think that the low amounts of donations given by Americans to relief efforts is not at least partially the result of this warped coverage.

Indeed, the nuclear crisis, which at first was merely one of the many destructive consequences of the quake, now threatens to become the entire story. And while the nuclear crisis and its long-term implications for the Japanese are certainly worth attending to, the casualties that have resulted from that particular problem are so dwarfed by the death toll and economic damage caused by the initital quake that I begin to wonder why it has received such a disproportionate amount of coverage. Perhaps it is simply the fact that the quake and tsunami are over and done, while the events and the reactor are a developing story. Perhaps Westerners are simply more interested in the story because it has potential implications for us, as seen in the fact that some people in California have begun taking (entirely unneccessary) iodine tablets and the fact that this disaster has sparked huge debate about nuclear energy in the U.S. (the consequences of relying on coal and oil for energy have been pretty dire in terms of damage to the environment and cost in human lives, but nuclear energy is more mysterious and thus tends to spark more alarm).

Which brings me back to the Time cover (finally). It strikes me that the editors of the magazine are trying to thread a needle here. They are attempting to cover the nuclear crisis while treating it as part of a much larger story, but I'm not sure they are entirely successful. While the photograph of the crying woman does thankfully avoid the stereotypes described above and seems to commemorate the disaster as a whole, I cannot help but be distracted by the headline. "Japan's Meltdown" centers the nuclear power plant crisis in the mind of the viewer and thereby undermines the work done by the photograph and the line "Earthquake. Tsunami. Nuclear Disaster. Resilience."

Cartooning Crisis - Images After the Japanese Tsunami

Cate Blouke — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Pedro Molina, Managua, Nicaragua "El Nuevo Diario"

Ten days after the cataclysmic 8.9 earthquake in Japan, we have only a small sense of both the immediate and long-term consequences for the country. Political cartoonists world-wide are manipulating the image of the Japanese flag, positioning the crisis as a national tragedy/catastrophe and exploring the aftershocks. The resulting images are interesting for both their visual simplicity and the complex arguments they (inadvertently?) construct.

Addressing the pedagogical implications of images and tragedy, Megan's thoughtful post from Friday opens with another manipulated image of the Japanese flag in which the rising sun has morphed into a tear drop. That image highlights the sorrow of the tragedy - evoking global sympathy for a nation in crisis. Yet from another perspective, the image could also represent a drop of blood - acting as either a memorial for those who died or, theoretically, a call to arms. Though I doubt those are the intended readings, I merely want to point out that even fairly straightforward images can be sites of contestation.

The images above and below strike me as more overtly complex arguments about the disastrous consequences for the nation. In Molina's image, the sun is now a skull, cracked and disintegrating. While the image immediately points toward the massive death toll (8,450 dead and 12,931 missing at the time of writing), it also posits the disaster as crippling (and potentially lethal) for the nation as a whole.

John Sherffius, Colorado, Boulder Daily Camera

Various cartoonists have played with images of fracture and symbolic post-quake cracks, but Sherffius presents a sun severed completely in half. The image posits a rupture, with one half of the nation more grievously effected. Unlike the red teardrop which unifies the nation's grief, Sherffius' image points towards an irrevocable severance.

While the symbolic value of the flag makes it universally recognizable (and superficially simple to read), when cartoonists combine the flag with other "easily recognizable" symbols of Japan, the effects become more opaque.

Damien Glez, Journal du Jeudi, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

Several dozen representations of the Japanese flag combined with the radioactive symbol have emerged in the last week, but they are mostly presented as solitary images - either the flag itself or a deserted flagpole. Damien Glez, however, depicts an anxious samurai waiving the flag aloft. The image is troubling for the way in which it suggests a connection between the radiation crisis, military aggression (a warrior in full dress) and surrender (waiving a white flag). In the post-WWII fallout this image might have made more sense, but it seems both anachronistic and insensitive now.

Political cartoons inevitably exploit stereotypes for both simplicity's sake and for comedic value, but many of the cartoons emerging after the tsunami raise questions about our ability to access and comprehend foreign nations. While the Japanese flag and the image of Godzilla are certainly immediately recognizable, if these are the images through which we understand Japan, what does that say about us?

Paul Zanetti, Australia

Disaster Pedagogy

Megan Eatman — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 14:38:25 +0000

Red Teardrop, via Anota bien.

My class, Rhetoric of Tragedy, is based on the idea that the events we normally label “tragic” are always points of contestation. The right way to remember, what we should do to ensure that it never happens again, who to blame—all of these are controversial questions that provide an opportunity to study how we argue. But it can be hard to talk about these conversations in class, especially when you are looking at visual rhetoric. How do we address these contemporary events without making the classroom an upsetting place?

It seems strange to ignore the earthquake and tsunami in a class that is built around discussion of devastating events. We talk about upsetting topics in class, although I do tell students that what they consider "tragic" is open to debate; I have received (very good) papers on, for example, Lindsay Lohan's personal decline and Janet Jackson's Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction. However, I think there is a utility to discussing scary or sad events as they happen, too. Making students aware of these moments as rhetorical as they happen seems like a key way to increase day-to-day critical literacy. What is important, I think, is making it clear that seeing the rhetoric in these public images doesn’t take away from the victims’ pain. In this case, it is actually easy to keep their pain in perspective because a potential motive (and a definite effect) of most of these images is to show how heart wrenching this event is. It gives us an opportunity to talk about how photographers show someone else’s pain: through direct images of anguish, of course, but also through the fear and fascination of seeing a building sway or an enormous crack in the ground. We can ask, why are there so many amateur videos of the destruction available online? Why do people want to see this? What work does it do? It can encourage students to think about when images help and when they sensationalize without helping. This particular event also gives us the opportunity to talk about the rhetorical power of animals, since the news coverage features images and stories of animals in peril.

Via Buzzfeed

My concern, of course, is that photographs will be upsetting for one or more students. While we're all adults, and we've certainly looked at some upsetting material before (meth PSAs come to mind), I do want the classroom to be intellectually challenging but still comfortable; students shouldn't feel as if their feelings or personal losses are being disrespected. While that is a concern for practically all of the events we talk about (especially Hurricane Katrina, because of the geographic proximity and huge affected population), there is normally at least a little distance between the class and what happened.

"Support the Tsunami and Quake Relief," Dave CT

We will talk about this event, but in a particular way. I would like students to discuss what they have been seeing, if only briefly: what images appear, and what effects do they have? Why do you think this picture was taken, published, circulated, etc--what is its rhetorical power? Additionally, I'd like to spend some time talking about the art that has come out of the event, like the first and third images in this post. Students have the option to make a poster for their final projects, so I think it is useful for them to see what one might look like. Some, like the Red Teardrop, seem very effective; others, like the image above, are somewhat more confusing for certain audiences, but potentially still persuasive. Talking about these images is relevant to the students' own work and allows us to engage with the images and the event in a way that is less likely to rub salt on a very raw, very recent wound.