Presented by the Centre for Cinema Studies and Cinema Thinks the World, the Critical Thinkers Series features research talks by notable and emerging scholars in Cinema and Media Studies. Join us for the second talk in the Spring Series by Harrison Wade, Cinema and Media Studies PhD student in UBC’s Department of Theatre and Film.
“You Draw Fireworks like Bombs”: Digital Form in Obayashi Nobuhiko’s Casting Blossoms to the Sky
This talk offers a close reading of Obayashi Nobuhiko’s essay movie Casting Blossoms to the Sky (2012), which makes up part of his late war trilogy. The movie is a tangle of threads: after the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, a reporter is invited by her ex-boyfriend to visit Nagaoka, where he’s putting on a play with his high school students about the WWII bombing in the area. They cross paths as they talk to residents, played by actors, about Japan’s invasion of Manchuria and bombing of Pearl Harbor and the local fireworks festival. The movie, in the usual Obayashi style, flashes frenetically through time and space, weaving these threads together with explicitly anti-realist digital effects. In proposing fireworks are like bombs in this style, Casting Blossoms raises important questions about digital thinking and formalism, two methodologies that share a commitment to separating a whole movie into its discrete parts, and so this talk focuses on what these approaches might be able to do and find in cinema that other tools cannot.
About Harrison Wade:
Harrison Wade is a PhD Candidate in Cinema and Media Studies and recipient of a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. They graduated from the University of Toronto with a BA in Cinema Studies and English, where they received the Norman Jewison Fellowship in Film Studies. Their dissertation draws from film theory and formalist methodologies to read non-photorealistic CGI in contemporary art cinema, but they have also written on feminist experimental shorts, phenomenology, and classical Hollywood performance. Harrison has an essay film published in [in]Transition and writes poetry, which can be found in The Malahat Review, Contemporary Verse 2, and SAD Mag, among others.
This event is free and there is no need to RSVP.
