[PAST EVENT] Critical Lyricism in East Asian Cinema: Fei Mu?s Spring in a Small Town and Ozu Yasujiro?s Late Spring

October 3, 2017
5pm - 6:20pm
Location
Washington Hall, Room 301
241 Jamestown Rd
Williamsburg, VA 23185Map this location
Access & Features
  • Open to the public
Spring in a Small Town

Dr. Satoru Hashimoto's lecture will examine two films produced in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War in China and Japan, Fei Mu?s Spring in a Small Town (1948) and Ozu Yasujir?s Late Spring (1949), to explore possibilities of postwar East Asian cinema as a critical medium, especially in its historicization of wartime experience. While set against the backdrop of the tumultuous beginnings of the postwar era ?? one in China during the Civil War and the other in Japan under the Occupation ??these films are characterized by their singular modes of lyricism which belies such eventful historical contexts. His lecture analyzes these work?s lyrical cinematic languages as an aesthetic topos which intertwines the exigencies of postwar national reconstruction with the long shadows of wartime trauma, thereby critically revisiting some of the ideological premises for conceptualizing the ?postwar? in East Asia. 


Dr. Satoru Hashimoto received his Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University in 2014, and is currently Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is now completing a book manuscript which examines how modern literature in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan in the late-19th to the early-20th centuries was produced within the contexts of these countries? interrelated cultural traditions. Prior to joining the University of Maryland, he was Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago from 2014 to 2015. He is Associate Editor for the Journal of World Literature. 


Contact

Chun-yu Lu [[w|clu02]]