バイリンガル・パネル：Melancholy Ethics – Ecocriticism and the Moving Image in a Planetary Age

Moving Images as an Environmental Issue in Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Cinema / Suzanne BETH (University of Montreal)

As Jean-Luc Nancy puts it, powerfully dramatizing the tragic of our contemporary condition, “we have, indeed, transformed nature and we cannot talk about it anymore1.” If we cannot talk, can we make images? And then, what kind of images? This paper intends to consider this issue at the level of an epistemological inquiry of the cinematographic medium, based on the hypothesis that film itself can be understood as an environmental problem. The cinematic medium is then regarded as having actual effects on the world as a place suitable for life and especially as a space that can be shared. Is it possible to live along with moving images?
These effects and their logic will be specified in a study of two films among Japanese director Kurosawa Kiyoshi's production, Charisma (1999) and Kairo (2000). These films elaborate two aspects of the ethical implications of our current life with images, in narratives that problematize the cohabitation of human beings with the dead ones (Kairo) and with other species (Charisma). Kairo focuses on the way in which moving images broadcasted through screens literally depopulate Tokyo, jeopardizing its existence as an actual living space. On the other side, Charisma hints toward a therapeutic relationship of filmmaking to images as ambiance or milieu.

Doubts, Denial and Recognition: A Cavellian and Oreskian Approach to Films on 311 / Élise DOMENACH (Ecole Normale Supérieure Lyon / University of Tokyo)

My presentation aims at questioning our ethical positions towards images of destruction. Are we doomed to express doubts over the sublime images of catastrophe in films on 3.11 ? Can we recognize our condition in those figurations ? I will be making use of three concepts from American philosophers who investigate our ethical relation to knowledge and skepticism, Stanley Cavell and Naomi Oreskes : doubts, denial and recognition. I will proceed to the screening and the analysis of one brief segment from Yojiu Matsubayashi’s Horses of Fukushima (dealing with environmental and sanitary consequences of the nuclear accident), one scene from Atsushi Funahashi’s documentary Radioactive (showing the « cultural production of ignorance » about radiation that Oreskes sees on issues relative to Ozone or tabacco industry that apply as well to radiation expertise) and one scene from fiction film Odayaka by Nobuteru Uchida (dealing with denial amongs mothers, within a japanese public school). My ambition is to show how Japanese films force us to unveil the “cultivation of denial” under a nuclear sky that Cavell pointed out in 1986 (the year of Tchernobyl accident) and the “science of ignorance (agnotology)” that Oreskes is considering as part of a planetary sciences project in Harvard University at present.

After Species Being: Gender, Sexuality, and the Critique of Industrialization / Diane Wei LEWIS (Washington University in St. Louis)

How did machine production change thinking about man’s relationship to nature?

Marx addressed this issue in the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” where he describes the impact of alienated labor on man’s relation to nature. Marx argued that it is in the relation of man to woman that man’s relationship to man, as well as his relation to nature, is most “immediately” and “sensuously” manifested. Marx’s concept of “species being” described the sexual relation as both natural and social, defining heterosexual reproduction as the most essential form of labor: life-producing life, life as a means to life, and labor which is totally merged with life-activity.

What happens when labor loses its connection to the natural body? In the early 1920s, plays such as Kaiser’s Gas trilogy (1917-1920), Capek’s R. U. R. (1920), and Toller’s The Machine Wreckers (1922) represented the crisis of estranged labor as a disordering of normative heterosexual relations. In The Machine Wreckers, mechanization leads to demasculinization as craftsmen find their life’s labor broken up into repetitive, mechanical tasks. In Gas, the integrity of the male body is destroyed as work is fragmented into single movements performed in tempo with the machine. In the sci-fi play R. U. R., this crisis is imagined to lead to the end of human reproduction and species being.

The critique of industrialization as a threat to species being registered how sexuality was transformed by machine labor. Despite their sexual conservatism, these early-twentieth-century texts showed the necessity of rethinking the relationships of “man to woman” and “man to nature.”