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CJS Noon Lecture ~ "In and Out of the Body: Corporeal Visions and Ecstatic Perception in Wartime Japanese Training"

Thursday, November 17, 2011
12:00 AM
Room 1636. School of Social Work Building, 1080 South University, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1106

After the start of the Pacific War, state policy increasingly made cinema an "optical weapon" for the mobilization of citizens for total war across the expanded Japanese empire. This presentation analyzes widely viewed training documentaries as aspects of body culture. The ecstatic montages and other visual effects of these wartime documentaries compensate for anxieties about physical inadequacy and incorporate an audience-in-training that included both the future pilots expended in "body smashing" attacks and a broader audience that experienced the elevated consciousness of the oly warrior through an ecstatic experience of the cinematic apparatus itself.
Michael Raine is writing a book on image culture in wartime Japan and its territories.