On the “Movement” Cinema:

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  • FUJITA Shuhei
    Department of Informatics, Tokyo University of Information Sciences

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Other Title
  • 「運動」の映画をめぐって
  • ｢運動｣の映画をめぐって : 10フィート運動と｢市民｣の言説
  • 「 ウンドウ 」 ノ エイガ オ メグッテ : 10フィート ウンドウ ト 「 シミン 」 ノ ゲンセツ
  • The Ten Feet Movement and the Discourse of Citizens
  • 10フィート運動と「市民」の言説

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Abstract

 After the Toho strikes, the filmmaking and screening sponsored by labor unions had been conducted as “movement.” In the early 1980s, a citizens’ group started a media campaign to make and screen three anti-nuclear weapons films, using the unreleased film archives in the US, and it was called “the Ten Feet Movement.” The films promoted as “movement” occupy a central place in the history of non-theatrical films in Japan, and this paper examines the question of what “movement” means for cinema by drawing attention not only to the film text but also to various discursive practices such as collective actions and cross media development, referring to the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. It leads to the conclusion that the Ten Feet Movement was an attempt to construct the discourse of “citizens” and to set up real spaces for “citizens” to exist. In this movement, Japanese militarism before the Second World War, Shinto nationalism, conservatives, and patriarchy were “articulated,” all of which were represented negatively through the cruel moving images of the surviving victims (Hibakusha) and charred bodies, and then “citizens” were constructed by “the chain of equivalence” between different social groups, most notably Hibakusha, Christians, house wives (women), workers, college students, and Koreans residing in Japan. It is assumed that this mechanism functioned in the movement cinema led by labor unions, where the discourse of “workers” or “the people” was constructed beyond the differences of occupations, wages and ages, and where a variety of their activities related to the screening created real places for “workers” or “the people” to interact with each other.

Journal

  • eizogaku

    eizogaku 101 (0), 69-91, 2019-01-25

    Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences

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