Presented by the Centre for Cinema Studies and Cinema Thinks the World\, the Critical Thinke rs Series features research talks by notable and emerging scholars in Cinem a and Media Studies. Join us for the second talk in the Spring Series by Ha rrison Wade\, Cinema and Media Studies PhD student in UBC’s Department of T heatre and Film.
This talk offe rs a close reading of Obayashi Nobuhiko’s essay movie Casting Blossoms t o the Sky (2012)\, which makes up part of his late war trilogy. The mov ie 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 put ting 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 fi reworks festival. The movie\, in the usual Obayashi style\, flashes freneti cally through time and space\, weaving these threads together with explicit ly anti-realist digital effects. In proposing fireworks are like bombs in t his style\, Casting Blossoms raises important questions about digita l thinking and formalism\, two methodologies that share a commitment to sep arating 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 to ols cannot.
Ha rrison 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 J ewison Fellowship in Film Studies. Their dissertation draws from film theor y and formalist methodologies to read non-photorealistic CGI in contemporar y 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 f ound in The Malahat Review\, Contemporary Verse 2\, and SA D Mag\, among others.
This event is free and there is no need to RSVP.