パネル8：The Imagination of Disaster 3: Present / Future / Conditional

Ozu Yasujirô’s Cinema and the Moving Images as Disaster / Suzanne Beth (University of Montreal)
In our contemporary world, considering the imagination of disaster chiefly means dealing with images, and especially with moving images. In this regard however their failure to address disasters properly is recurrently stressed. The relationship of moving images to disasters then appears to be paradoxical, bearing both a sense of intimacy and of impotence.
This paper intends to consider this paradoxical situation at the level of an epistemological inquiry of the cinematographic medium, based on the hypothesis that film itself can be understood as bringing disaster into the world – or, in other words, that moving images as such are a kind of disaster. In a manner that might be surprising at first, this epistemological reflection is guided by Ozu Yasujirô's cinematographic practice, and especially by an analysis of I Was Born But... (1932).
This quite early film in Ozu's work is indeed the first one to actually tackle what will become Ozu's major subject, namely destruction in as much as it is set within the family. Very interestingly, the film revolves around a mise-en-abîme scene showing the projection of a movie. The purpose of this paper is then to clarify what this reflection embedded in the media itself can teach us about the moving images' destructive dimension: what does it threaten? This study, backed by Giorgio Agamben's thought, will show that what is at stake here is not so much a look at a past conception of what a family should be but the very possibility of community.

Spectacles of Mass Destruction: Roland Emmerich and the Disaster-Tourist Gaze / Mike Dillon (University of Southern California)
My paper surveys the films of Roland Emmerich, specifically the disaster epics The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and 2012 (2009), which are widely known (and often ridiculed) for their repeated reliance on several familiar genre conventions – notably an America-centric core storyline and the spectacular destruction of famous geographical landmarks worldwide. While adhering to this formula no doubt plays a useful role in each film’s marketing strategies, I argue that the important narrative functions of this globe-trotting convention invites a touristic form of spectatorship among audiences. This, in effect, informs how the films envision, and, more significantly, mass-market such images of global disaster to global audiences.
By “touristic,” I do not merely refer to a colloquial notion of something easily digested or enjoyed in passing; I refer to a mode of spectatorship embedded in power relations and consumptive practices that echo the geopolitical hierarchies of power that have historically shaped modern tourism. Drawing specifically from a subset of tourism studies called “dark tourism” (an area of scholarship recently applied to sites like New York’s Ground Zero and post-Katrina New Orleans), I address the ways in which world-ending destruction – the very threat of annihilation – is made consumable through touristic subjectivities. Using this approach, I consider the films’ representations of worldwide disaster and what they indicate about geopolitical hegemony and the organization of public spaces.

Muted and Unreal: Making Sense and Sound out of Accidents in Jia Zhangke’s Work / Megan Steffen (Princeton University)
This paper examines the way director Jia Zhangke uses sound to represent accidents in his work. Whether in the form of a wall falling on a demolition worker as in Dong (2006), a fatal gas leak as in The World (2004), or a child lost forever in an unforgiving crowd as in 24 City (2008), accidents dominate, drive, and disrupt the filmic lives of Jia’s subjects and characters. Although Jia’s work is often praised for taking a realistic, unflinching look at the PRC in particular, here I argue that the films’ inclusion of unexpected, unintended, and undeserved misfortunes indicates a fixation with the unreal elements of actual life in general. The unrealness of accidents in Jia’s films is best conveyed by the fact that, in each case, the event itself is never seen, only heard or inferred. The first section of this paper uses a close reading to show how sound is used to compensate for these visual omissions. In the second section, I follow anthropologists James Siegel, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, and Marcel Mauss as well as philosopher Jacques Derrida to explore why societies often fail to find an idiom that properly represents accidents and how that failure itself often becomes a revelation. Finally, I argue that the repeated tendency to fail to represent accidents visually and to rely on an excess of sound to convey narrative information in Jia’s work is, in its own way, an idiom working to cover the dangerous gap accidents represent by drowning it out.

Philosophical Reflections on “the Apocalypse of Cinema through Cinema”: Thoughts after Resnais, Tarkovsky, Imamura, Boganim and Kobayashi / Elise Domenach (Ecole Normale Supérieure Lyon)
Yoshida talks about Tokyo Story of « an apocalypse of cinema through cinema ». The film results in an « absence of the world » and a reversal of perspective between the world and objects and men : the objects and the world watches at us. In this talk, I would like to question the cinematographic forms of apocalypse, through the comparative analysis of excerpts of films that deal with the nuclear catastrophe : Hiroshima mon amour, Black Rain, Stalker, The Land of Oblivion and Women on the Edge. They all use the cinematographic medium to annihilate the human look on the catastrophe, to limitate our vision of it, mirroring the effect of the "pika-don" through the use of intertwined temporalities in Resnais, of silence and noises of the catastrophe that never appears in Tarkovsky, of blindness in Imamura, of a shocking photography of Pripiat and the Tchernobyl zone in Boganim, of still setting and moving figures in Kobayashi. Depending on the time that will be given for this talk I will reduce the number of exceprts analysed. But my purpose is to put forward a philosophical reading of these films that builds on the concept of apocalypse in the writings of the American philosopher Stanley Cavell, in relation to Nietzsche, in Conditions Handsome and Undhasome as well as in Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow.