パネル3：The Imagination of Disaster 1: Historical Imagination

Ruins and the Imagination of Joseph Michael Gandy / Hallie Rebecca Marshall (University of Oxford)
Aside from the Grand Tourists, for most English people in the late 18th and early 19th centuries contact with the remains of classical antiquity was mediated through art in a variety of forms. While it was in a ruined state that travelers encountered the ancient past, and it is upon these ruins that the romantic poets would meditate, for the most part when classical antiquity was reimagined for more general audiences at home it was presented restored to its full glory; ruins reassembled and the world of the ancients brought back to life. Joseph Michael Gandy created scenery for stage productions of classical plays, designs for neo-classical architecture, as well as paintings. But Gandy was not only reimagining the past as it might have been, but also using the ruins of the past as a model for reimagining the present. Gandy completed two paintings for the architect John Soane it which he depicted the recently built Bank of England as a ruin. This paper will discuss Gandy’s Architectural Ruins—a Vision, which was painted as part of a pair—one painting of the newly completed rotunda intact and one of it as a ruin — contrasting the images to Hubert Robert’s similar pair of paintings of the Louvre, and situating the works in the context of the historical realities of the period, especially the threat posed to the physical fabric of European cities by the Napoleonic Wars, but also the imaginative landscape fostered by the ruins of Greco-Roman antiquity.

Earthquake Melodrama and Heavenly Punishment: Cinematic representations of the 1923 Kanto Earthquake / Alex Bates (Dickinson College)
The 1923 Kanto earthquake was a disaster of immense proportion that left 100,000 people dead and destroyed the political, economic and cultural capital of the Japanese empire. Despite the impact on the infrastructure, the earthquake quickly spawned a plethora of works that attempted in some way to bring the disaster into the realm of representation. Within these texts we can see hegemonic struggles to control how the earthquake was inscribed with meaning. This paper addresses the representation of the Kanto Earthquake in the various fictional melodramas that were made in its aftermath. It explores first, the way these melodramas performed what Roland Barthes has called a “spectacle of suffering,” and second, how that spectacle interacted with the contemporary “heavenly punishment” or tenken discourse. The idea of tenken, first proposed by industrialist Shibusawa Ei’ichi, suggested that the quake was punishment for Japan’s decadence and laxity toward Confucian morality. These films drew upon the many accounts of real suffering found in contemporary newspapers and magazines to emphasize a particular class based moral code made legible through the melodramatic mode. In some cases, especially the Nikkatsu films produced in the later months of 1923, the morality resonated with tenken discourses, yet in unexpected ways. They took Shibusawa’s conception of decadence and linked it not to the cultures of Asakusa movie houses and dance revues, but to the excesses of the wealthy. In so doing they adapted the discourse to comment on the inequalities of Taisho Japan.

The Cultural Representations of Disaster in the New York-based 70-80s Exploitation Movies. A socio-political overview / Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb (University of Lorraine)
In the nineteen sixties and seventies, the grindhouses were local movie halls which showed uninterrupted independent films of series B quality, today known as “exploitation flicks” or exploitation films. The 70-80s have produced copious of these exploitation movies flirting with imagination of disaster. This paper explores some key figures of the cultural representation of politics, crime, justice and law offered in (post)apocalyptic New York–based movies. We examine particularly the imagination of a vertical geography of justice; the urban vigilante hero; survivalist themes and the figure of local democracy after social disaster(s). A recurrent theme of post-apocalyptic fictions is the reference on the scale of values connecting justice and morals in the New York social structure. Why New York? Because in these fictions the city is generally showed as the symbol of the organized life of ordinary people (especially in “survivalist” fictions) while metaphoric function of Washington, DC, is to reflect the seat of power. So, the first target of directors focusing on New York relates to the dysfunctions of the local and domestic democracy as a symbol of the ordinary world. This paper discusses these issues with Boltanski, and Foucault human geography concepts about justice and heterotopias.

Perspectives in Disaster Landscape / Yoshiko Suzuki (Tokyo University of the Arts)

I would like to talk about how the perspective shapes our understanding of disaster landscape. In this presentation, I begin with my analysis by introducing a problem of the perspective. The exhibition room in Reconstruction Memorial Hall(in Sumida-ku, Tokyo) and the picture, Kojimachi Gobancho. Visitation by Prince Regent, displayed at the center of this space, form as one an one-point perspective. Our body sensory perception of this perspective is reflexed to the imaginary gaze of the emperor, who at the center in the landscape of debris looks at sufferers from his exalted position. Terrible realities of the Great Kanto Earthquake such as the suffering of victims and its traumatic memories are eliminated under his gaze, and rewritten into a success story of reconstruction, finally into the history of the nation.
Then I will take up a photograph, River (Former temporary housing sites on both sides of the river. Overlooking post-disaster public housing deep in the center), taken by Tomoko Yoneda in 2004 in Kobe. In this picture Yoneda tries to represent the memories of each site, including numerous solitary deaths in the post-disaster public housing. Also in this picture, one-point perspective is emphasized extremely. But its focal point splits, because three similar buildings of the post-disaster public housing, as were copied, appear at the very heart of the image. By shaking its own one-point perspective in this way, River summons the apparition of still remaining aftermath of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquke. A success story of reconstruction is thus dismantled in this picture.