Period Drama Research Articles

The Mythology of Time in Modern Foreign period dramas: between Retrotopia and Metamodern Sensibility

. The purpose of this article is to analyze the specifics of the mythologizing of time in the historical period dramas "Downton Abbey" and "The Crown" in the context of the transition from the postmodern paradigm to a new metamodern sensibility. The article summarizes the experience of domestic and foreign studies of the metamodern tendencies of the modern TV series and analyzes the theoretical issues of the mythological temporality of TV series production. On the basis of the theoretical concept of retrotopia by Z. Bauman, the concept of layers of cinematic temporality by N.E. Marievskaya and the critical discourse analysis of S. Jäger, the features of the mythologization of horizontal, vertical time, as well as the biographical time of characters in selected period dramas have been analyzed. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the problematization and analysis of the discursive environment of the deployment of the temporal mythology of the modern period drama. The modern historical period drama demonstrates the specifics of turning to retrotopia, as it seeks to represent the current problems of the present through an imaginary past. In the case of the “Downton Abbey”, this happens through the harmonization in the viewer's mind of nostalgia for an imaginary English aristocratic past and an unstable future. In the case of the “The Crown”, the presentation of the private life of the British royal family against the backdrop of historical events contributes to the formation of a more multidimensional image of the present and responds to the demands of the mass audience in the emotional representation of historical events. The result of this representation is a kind of mythology of time, which arises between the cultural demand for retrotopia and the development of modern technologies for the production of cinematographic products, which makes it possible to fully realize the intention of modern metamodernist discourse to achieve a “new sensibility”. This allows us to consider the modern historical period drama not only as a "commercial project", but also as a tool for the development of historical culture, an instrument of cultural orientation in social space and time.

“Pink-tinted glasses”: looking and affirmation in Gentleman Jack

This article examines how the 2019 period drama Gentleman Jack generates its affirmative project of lesbian televisual representation. GJ turns negative realities of gender and sexuality nonconformity in the nineteenth century to productive, affirmative use through what we view as a highly effective strategy of visually engaging viewers as witnesses to and coconspirators in Lister’s journey through Lister’s fourth wall breaks and the camera’s prioritization of her perspective. We analyze GJ’s various overlooked characters and reinscribed power hierarchies, which we argue results from both prioritizing Lister’s perspective and fans’ tendencies to view Lister through “pink-tinted glasses” as a result of cathexis with Lister. Through close reading of scenes illustrating social censorship, Lister’s nonconforming gender performance, the labor behind Lister’s wealth, and marriage’s promise of happiness, we assert that the series misses subtle opportunities to critique the hierarchies on which Lister’s exceptionalism relies. Pulling from Janet Lea’s reception analysis, this article further asserts that fans interpret GJ politically as well as for entertainment, and the elements to which they most strongly cathect reflect what fans most desire from LGBTQ + representational politics. Ultimately, we argue that if these continue to be the priorities of LGBTQ + fans and activist organizations today, the characters overlooked in Lister’s pursuit of her own happiness offer audiences the opportunity to reflect on who may be sidelined or undercut in contemporary pursuits of LGBTQ + affirmation.

Coisa Mais Linda

<i>Coisa Mais Linda</i>

The Material World of Outlander : Objects Through Time

Abstract: Based on a series of historical fantasy novels by Diana Gabaldon, Outlander (Starz, 2014–) has become an international sensation. At a time when audiences are increasingly drawn to period drama as a vehicle through which to engage with the past, Outlander has emerged as an important media text for exploring the role and formation of public history in contemporary popular culture. Focusing on its material culture, this article situates Outlander within broader scholarly debates regarding the historiographical potential (and limitations) of representing the eighteenth-century world via the twenty-first-century screen. Arranged across three sections, we explore how Outlander objects function at narrative, production, and extratelevisual levels. In reimagining onscreen the material eighteenth century, we argue that the show poses critical questions about the role and representation of history through things . We look to the ways in which objects are perceived and experienced by characters in Outlander , as well as to the show's expansion into a material world beyond the televisual, specifically its dialogues with Scotland's heritage industry and evolving global fan cultures. In doing so, we draw on recent developments in material and temporal studies within eighteenth-century scholarship, locating Outlander as a multimedial text with ongoing and real-life material, genre, and historiographical implications.

Literature, Jewishness, and Period Drama in Radu Jude’s Scarred Hearts

The article offers an in-depth discussion of Radu Jude’s 2016 film Scarred Hearts, adapted from Max Blecher’s autobiographical novel with the same title (1937), as well as other of his writings. The article is structured in four parts. The first references André Bazin’s celebrated essay on Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, bringing it to bear on a discussion of the unorthodox relation between Jude’s film and its literary sources. The second section of the article discusses Jude’s decision to foreground the protagonist’s—and the novelist’s—Jewish identity. Set far from home, in France, in an isolated sanatorium for tuberculosis, Blecher’s novel was unconcerned with public events such as the rise of the anti-Semitic far right all over Europe; they didn’t intrude—not even as background noise. Transposing the story to a Romanian sanatorium, Jude decided to have the young Jewish protagonist go through his experiences with terminal sickness and literature, with love and friendship, against an implied background of rising anti-Semitism, of increasingly widespread support for the local Iron Guard, as well as for Hitler. In its third section, the article discusses Radu Jude’s approach to period drama, analyzing his mix of period detail and anachronism. The fourth section discusses Jude’s intermedial game-playing and general artistic playfulness.

The History Bubble

The History Bubble

Deucetopia? Mapping spatio-temporalities in HBO’s The Deuce

ABSTRACT Set during the burgeoning of theatrically exhibited hardcore pornography and the concomitant transformations of sex work in New York’s Times Square, HBO series The Deuce presents a fictionalized account of these transformations. The attention paid to the series thus far has analyzed it in narrative terms. By instead foregrounding the neighbourhood that provides the series with its title and analyzing The Deuce spatio-temporally – in relation to its historical, narrative and virtual spaces and their respective times – a polysemic text emerges. Rather than merely functioning as a fictionalized period drama, through charting both the transformation of and the characters’ relationship to these spaces over time, the series activates nostalgia to allegorically express ambivalence towards the ‘progress’ embodied in the gentrification endemic to neoliberal, late capitalism in the post-industrial spaces of the early twenty-first century, as well as the anxiety experienced by premium television services in the shifting landscape of televisual programming in our era of cable cord-cutting and industrially disruptive streaming services. In an environment where ‘progress’ and ‘transformation’ have been rendered synonymous with the disruption of industries and institutions, media scholars must historicize recent texts in their present moment, particularly when those texts sound an alarm.

&lt;em&gt;Portrait of a Lady on Fire&lt;/em&gt;: A “Manifesto about the Female Gaze”

What to make of the arrival of an LGBT period drama from the time of Louis XV into the twenty-first century? Very much, as Veronica Esposito writes in her consideration of this French historical romantic drama.

No Crips Allowed: Magical Negroes, Black Superheroes, And the Hyper-Abled Black Male Body In Steven Spielberg's Amistad and Ryan Coogler's Black Panther

No Crips Allowed:Magical Negroes, Black Superheroes, And the Hyper-Abled Black Male Body In Steven Spielberg's Amistad and Ryan Coogler's Black Panther Charles I. Nero (bio) Initially, it might seem odd to discuss shared racial tropes in Amistad and Black Panther. Not only were the movies created over two decades apart, the films belong to entirely different cinematic genres. Steven Spielberg's Amistad (1997) is a historical period drama that is based on the true story of an armed insurrection aboard a 19th century slave ship. Ryan Coogler's Black Panther (2018) is a fantasy film that focuses on a futuristic advanced mythical kingdom in Africa that produces superheroes. Nevertheless, these films are connected by their subject matter and a recurring strategy. At their cores, both films emphasize Black resistance to the white supremacy that trans-Atlantic slavery and European imperialism necessitated. Both films deploy as strategy the hyper-abled Black male body as a tool for resisting white supremacy and colonialism. I call attention to the hyper-abled Black male body in these two films specifically to focus on the Black disability that trans-Atlantic slavery produced. I am writing along the lines of Nirmala Erevelles brilliant reading of Hortense Spillers's now-classic essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," in which producing and maintaining slavery required the impairment of Black bodies. The racialization of slavery meant that Blackness was always impaired, or, as Erevelles concludes, it was "at the historical moment when one class of human beings was transformed into cargo to be transported to the New World that Black bodies become disabled and disabled bodies become black."1 On the one hand, Amistad reflects upon the trans-Atlantic slave experience, while Black Panther showcases a Black nation that was spared this terrible ordeal; yet, both create magical worlds in which Black people are hyper-abled. Subsequently, in this essay, I examine the limits of the hyper-abled Black body as a tool of resistance; I also raise the question of whether such a dependence upon a specific gendered type--hyper-abled masculinity--reproduces a logic of white supremacy that equates Blackness with physicality, yet simultaneously denies Black intellect, therefore refuting political agency, or the rights of citizenship. [End Page 52] Amistad Prior the film's debut in 1997, Steven Spielberg and the film's producer, African American dancer and actress Debbie Allen, held blockbuster aspirations for Amistad. Both believed that Amistad could build upon the success of Schindler's List, Spielberg's historical period blockbuster from 1993. The commercial and critical success of Schindler's List had cemented Spielberg's status as a "serious filmmaker," though Spielberg was long credited with developing films that defined Hollywood filmmaking during the 1970s-1990s: namely, Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E. T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Poltergeist (1982), the franchises that stemmed from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Jurassic Park (1993). Despite the success of these previous films, Amistad was not the powerhouse that Spielberg and Allen had imagined. Instead, Amistad barely recouped its investment and it failed among critics, arguably because the film confused audiences. A possible source of this confusion was because of the decision to transform a genuine story of resistance into an "interracial buddy film," a subgenre that became popular during the Civil Rights Movement and subsequently expanded to include Hollywood cop film franchises, such as Lethal Weapon (beginning in 1987), Beverly Hills Cop (beginning in 1984),48 Hours (beginning in 1982), Independence Day (1996) and Men In Black (beginning in 1997). These films celebrate the developing bonds between Black and white men who overcome their racial differences and learn to work together to solve a crime, prevent corruption, or even save the planet from alien invasion. At stake in these movies are the interracial relationships between the crime-fighting duos; certainly, the buffed bodies of the captured Africans suggested this possibility. The fitness of the Beninese actor Djimon Hounsou, who played Cinque, the leader of the insurrection, was especially notable. Previously known as a fashion model, Hounsou's first cinematic appearance was as "eye candy" in the pop star Janet Jackson's video "Love...

When German Series Go Global

The article takes a closer look at the current industry discourse on the transnational circulation of German series. At its centre is a case study of the 1980s period drama Deutschland (2015-2020), based on interviews with key executives and creatives. What is it that makes such ready-made TV fiction go transnational, according to the involved practitioners and in this specific case? Textual factors in particular are examined, such as the thematic and aesthetic extension of the historical-political ‘event’ miniseries through Deutschland. Furthermore, the article explores factors in respect to production, including screenwriting and financing, in the context of the dynamic TV landscape in Germany and Europe.

Conflicting Masculinities: Men in Television Period Drama. KatherineByrne, Julie AnneTaddeo, and JamesLeggott, eds. I.B. Tauris, 2018. 320 pp. $99.00 cloth.

Conflicting Masculinities: Men in Television Period Drama. KatherineByrne, Julie AnneTaddeo, and JamesLeggott, eds. I.B. Tauris, 2018. 320 pp. $99.00 cloth.

Domesticating desire: Fantasy and social change in Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs

This article argues that Todd McGowan’s revision to classic psychoanalytic film theory (2007) gives us a means of better understanding the ideologic commitments of Downton Abbey (2010–15). Instead of addressing this question through examination of the politics of the series’ representations or through examination of the genre of the period drama, I use McGowan’s film theory to consider how the series constructs its viewer through ideological operations. Downton Abbey, this article demonstrates, answers the viewer’s desire with fantasy and thus assures viewers of the omnipotence and rightness of the ideological structures under which we live. A comparative examination of Upstairs, Downstairs () reveals that the earlier series – despite thematic and generic similarities – resists solving the viewer’s desire and thus has the radical potential to construct a viewer who is more likely to question ideology. A final comparison of the last minutes of each series demonstrates Downton Abbey’s investment in the fantasy of tradition as well as a current cultural reluctance to productively confront significant social change.

Downton Abbey

Downton Abbey Julie Anne Taddeo Downton Abbey 2019 Directed by Michael Engler Distributed by Carnival Productions; Perfect World Pictures https://shop.pbs.org/downton-abbey-the-movie 122 minutes For six seasons (ITV, 2010-15), the world fell in love with the aristocratic Crawley family and their household staff featured in the ITV production Downton Abbey. At the height of its popularity, as many as 15 million viewers tuned in to a Sunday evening episode, and visitors to Highclere Castle, the model and setting for the series, continue to number at 50,000 a year. Downton Abbey-branded teas, china, jewelry, makeup, ornaments, stuffed dogs, and cookbooks, among other items, have allowed fans to consume this series in multiple ways long after it bade farewell in 2015. Since it first aired in 2010, Downton Abbey has become a crucial part of TV history, heralding a new "golden age" of the period drama genre not witnessed on our small screens since the 1970s. Its international success not only spurred a butlering industry in China (Buckley & Kan 2017) but, more importantly, is indicative of how many people now get their history: from televisual historical fictions. Further, the material culture the series has generated (its extensive wardrobe, kitchen equipment, dinnerware, furniture, etc.) remains on display in an exhibition currently touring throughout the US, meticulously curated to become a part of history itself. Therefore, it's no surprise that social media fan sites were abuzz with anticipation for the release of the Downton Abbey movie, four years after the TV series signed off. Facebook and Twitter feeds shared and mused about the movie trailer and posted photos of costumed fans once again holding Downton-themed parties. Downton's creator and writer, Julian Fellowes, had ended the TV series with the Crawley family still comfortably ensconced at the Abbey in 1925, yet anxious about the future and the place of both master and servant in it. The film leaps ahead to 1927—sandwiched between the General Strike of 1926 and the Crash of 1929—two significant historical moments Fellowes seems determined to ignore. With only two hours, instead of an eight-episode season, to fill, he instead creates a fairly a- political event around which excitement and drama as well as humor, can be generated: the visit of King George V (Simon Jones) and Queen Mary (Geraldine James) to the Abbey, as part of a Royal tour of the country (based loosely on a tour stop the Royal couple actually made in 1912 to a different estate in South Yorkshire). The film's opening scene is reminiscent of Downton's inaugural TV episode—the telegram delivering the news of the Abbey's heir's death on the Titanic has now been replaced with a letter originating in London, headed by steam train, then bicycling postboy, to the Yorkshire estate, announcing the impending visit. The intricate workings of the postal service, followed by the days-long preparations of the feast, the proper laying of the table, and the dressing of the ladies of the Abbey, are just some of the period details intended to satiate our longing for an elegant bygone era. The staff are just as excited to be waiting on the Royal Family as the Earl (Hugh Bonneville) and his wife and daughters are to dine and dance with them, and when the former are told the King's servants will cook and serve the meal in their place, their disappointment is palpable. To modern viewers, the extra work might seem like a burden—wouldn't they enjoy a day off?—and only Daisy (Sophie McShera) utters anti-monarchist views but, not surprisingly, eventually gets caught up in the excitement herself. Mr. Molesley (Kevin Doyle), who since the series ended, has embarked on a teaching career, relishes his temporary return to service at the Abbey, providing corny comic relief over his faux pas of speaking directly to the Royals. With so many characters, it's impossible for the film to flesh out anyone's story line, but we get a few glimpses into some favorite characters: the Bates, now parents and finally without any legal battles hanging over their heads, are growing contentedly into...

Calling #TimesUp on the TV period drama rape narrative

This article explores the rape plotlines in Poldark (2015–), Outlander (2014–) and Banished (2015), which mostly take place prior to #MeToo and offer a pre-watershed insight into a time when rape could still be romanticised and eroticised in a way which might not, or at least should not, be possible after October 2017. However, these plots opened up conversations about consent, rape myths and rape fantasy and hence form part of the dialogue and increasingly public awareness about sexual violence which made #MeToo possible in the first place. How fans respond to rape narratives pre- and post-#MeToo is also considered.

Proposing a Post-heritage Critical Framework:The Crown, Ambiguity, and Media Self-consciousness

This article proposes a new critical framework through which to analyze television period drama, recognizing elements that indicate a more progressive point of view than many previous scholarly responses have acknowledged. It begins by assessing the seminal works of Andrew Higson and Claire Monk in the field of period drama, adopting the latter’s term of “post-heritage” to identify an alternative critical perspective. The five guiding elements of the proposed post-heritage framework are then outlined, with reference to pertinent critical works that identify these in period dramas and other production. A preliminary case study of The Crown is then offered, through which the post-heritage framework is demonstrated as an aesthetic methodological process. The Crown’s use of the media within its narrative and conceptual ambiguity are considered particularly closely. The article concludes by suggesting the wider applications for the post-heritage critical framework, and potential further study relating to The Crown.

Let's Talk about Sex: Period Drama Histories for the Twenty-first Century

Downton Abbey's international success has inspired a resurgence of interest in the period drama genre. This article examines how Downton, like other period dramas which target largely female audiences, historicises sex, and how, in engaging with contemporary topics from reproductive freedom to rape, Downton and other popular costume dramas which have followed in its wake, in particular Call the Midwife and Poldark, allow viewers to interact with these small-screen histories on an emotional level. Furthermore, the period dramas discussed in this article do in fact challenge the perceived conservative impulses of the genre as a whole and open up progressive possibilities.

Dr. Atomic by John Adams and Peter Sellars

Reviewed by: Dr. Atomicby John Adams and Peter Sellars Andrew Martinez Dr. Atomic. By John Adams and Peter Sellars. Choreographed by Emily Johnson. Santa Fe Opera, New Mexico. 07 14, 2018. The work of Dr. Atomicbegan the moment I exited the Hertz rental-car parking lot at Albuquerque International Sunport. The sunny, one-hour drive to Santa Fe along the Turquoise Trail was interrupted by short, intermittent showers. It was a markedly wet summer in Santa Fe, but the rain did not diminish the magnificence of New Mexico's terrain. The endless stretch of blue horizon, the terra-cotta mesas, and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains—all assembled at 7,000 feet above sea level—appropriately functioned as an immersive backdrop for Santa Fe Opera's (SFO) production of Dr. Atomicand the reparative community work it set out to address for the Indigenous and marginalized populations who live near the Trinity nuclear test site. The 2018 production of Dr. Atomicportended new approaches to achieving justice and parity in its form as a period drama and as a prolepsis of the current moment. The SFO's premiere of Dr. Atomicwas as much a house cleaning as it was a homecoming. Certainly, the significance of the New Mexico–specific opera coming to Santa Fe was expertly anticipated and celebrated by the company's marketing department, but the event also became an opportunity to confront the histories and present-day experiences of pain and suffering that New Mexico citizens have endured since that rainy summer night in July 1945 when the first atomic bomb was detonated. Through meaningful collaborations with local and Indigenous communities, the SFO's production of Dr. Atomicdeparted from its 2005 San Francisco Opera iteration as a period opera and became a more contemporary rendering of nuclear power and its threat to humanity. A 2,400-pound silver orb was the only set piece, suspended in a way that eclipsed the open-air view of the Santa Fe landscape beyond the stage. This particular view had a clear line of sight out to the Los Alamos laboratory where the 1945 bomb was developed and where nuclear weapons continue to be designed today. The cast of the production was joined by people from the Tesuque, San Ildefonso, and Santa Clara pueblos, as well as the folks known as "the downwinders," who live near the bomb's test sites and suffer from extreme cancers and other related health concerns due to exposure to radiation fallout. Dr. Atomicinitiated the first partnership between the SFO and the pueblo communities. A new inter-tribe corn dance was created expressly for the production and functioned alongside the John Adams score and Peter Sellars libretto as a coeval text. The summer dance, usually reserved for the pueblos, featured fourteen adults and children accompanied by five male musicians playing percussion instruments. The ritual demonstration was presented a half hour before the opera began. The dance was then reprised in the second act at the part of the story when it is decided that, due to national security, there would not be an evacuation of the surrounding areas and people. In this scene, dancers and downwinders held vigil and stared out into the audience as irrevocable decisions were made about their fate. Additionally, choreographer Emily John-son, of Yup'ik descent, layered movement danced by four Indigenous artists amid Sellars's staging. Their movement trajectories were like atoms, coming together and splitting apart, around and through the scientists and military personnel. Additional programming for Dr. Atomicincluded pre-show conversations with downwinders and pueblo community members and provided rich testimony about life and the land decades after the atomic bomb was detonated at Trinity. Speakers from the Tularosa Basin Downwinders shared their current decades-long plight to lobby for recognition, reparations, and healthcare resources from the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which was passed in 1990. On another part of the SFO property, activists from the A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition interrupted the traditional "tailgate" picnic in the parking lot to protest Dr. Atomic. This was in response to the Trump administration's 2018 Nuclear Posture Review directive for the Los...

Compound Cinematics: Akira Kurosawa and I by Shinobu Hashimoto (review)

Reviewed by: Compound Cinematics: Akira Kurosawa and I by Shinobu Hashimoto Matthew Fullerton Compound Cinematics: Akira Kurosawa and I. Shinobu Hashimoto. Hardcover, $21.95. Vertical. Mar 31, 2015. 256 Pages. ISBN 9781939130570. “A work’s quality is the author’s personality, and liking it or not a matter of taste” (27) When Shinobu Hashimoto (b. 1918) shared this wisdom, he was in his late eighties and reflecting on a long and successful career in the Japanese film industry. The results of his reflection, Compound Cinematics: Akira Kurosawa and I, detail the collaborative screenplay-writing he did with Team Kurosawa, including Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952) and Seven Samurai (1954). Originally published in 2006 in Japan, it is an insightful foray into both Hashimoto and Kurosawa’s screenwriting philosophies and how the two men were initially attracted to each other and eventually drifted apart. It is also an honest portrait of an exciting period in Japanese cinema: Hashimoto reflects on Kurosawa screenplays with praising and critical lenses. As an example of the latter, he claims that a change from the ‘writer leading off approach’, in which one screenwriter researched and wrote the first scene before handing it off to a second writer (usually Kurosawa) who then handed it to a third (Hideo Oguni, for instance) for edits and critiques, a method Kurosawa felt prevented him from cutting corners while Hashimoto believed it contributed to the successes of Ikiru and Seven Samurai, would ultimately alter the quality of Kurosawa’s work. To prove his point, Hashimoto weighs different screenwriting methods, making Compound Cinematics not only an important film [End Page 39] history document, but also a learning tool for seasoned and aspiring screenwriters. Chapter One sets the scene for Hashimoto meeting Kurosawa by focusing on his introduction to screenplay-writing: while convalescing during the war, he wrote a script and sent it to Mansaku Itami (1900–1946), Japan’s leading scenario-writer. This landed him a three-year apprenticeship, which gave him the distinction of being Itami’s only student. After the death of his master, whose parting lesson was to do an adaptation, Hashimoto turned to an Akutagawa short story, which would become the ‘backbone’ for an absurdist jidaigeki, or period drama. This screenplay would lead him to his first meeting with Kurosawa, who had wanted to make a jidaigeki after the lifting of their ban by the U.S. Occupation. But Kurosawa found the script too short, and Hashimoto, intimidated by the older and taller director, offered to include another Akutagawa story – Rashomon - an idea he would immediately consider too rash. Nevertheless, he persevered; but the completed screenplay was an ‘abomination’ in Hashimoto’s view because of a ‘rookie error’(55) in his treatment of the protagonist. Kurosawa then wanted to work with him at polishing it, but a herniated disc would prevent him from assisting. Kurosawa finished it alone, though he gave Hashimoto co-writing credits. Screenplay work for Ikiru, the second of the three films discussed in Chapter Two, would be Hashimoto’s full introduction to Team Kurosawa’s ‘three-way manuscript’ method, in which Kurosawa, Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni sequestered themselves at an onsen, a traditional Japanese hot spring and spa. Passing the days writing “as if punching a time clock” (80), they employed the ‘writer leading off approach’. As lead-writer, Hashimoto now had an insider’s perspective on Kurosawa’s approach to draft work, which he described as “beyond […] meticulous” (86), and Kurosawa compared to a marathon. To finish a 300-word screenplay, for instance, team members would ‘can’ (kanzume, 134) themselves for three weeks at an onsen, a pace of work linked to the importance Kurosawa attached to a scenario as a film’s clear blueprint. At its heart, however, a typical Team Kurosawa screenplay was structured rather traditionally, with boxes for introduction, development, climax, and conclusion, the indispensable scenario assemblage known as kishotenketsu. After Ikiru, Kurosawa’s initial idea was a realistic jidaigeki in which the samurai protagonist commits suicide following a trivial mistake. Lead writer Hashimoto was immediately tasked with historical research focusing on a typical day in the life of a samurai. This proved problematic as there were few primary sources dealing...

“Disarmed”: Disability, Trauma, and Emasculation in Contemporary Japanese Cinema

Disability, especially when war-related, is dangerous ground for entertainment films. Depictions of battle-scarred living bodies are necessarily political, since they cannot avoid commenting on the conflict of which they are a stark visual reminder. Yet depictions are politically multivalent: seeing the disabled has a wide range of effects on audiences. Unsurprisingly, then, disabled survivors of the war have rarely appeared on postwar screens. But the trend of avoiding the messy reality of war-related disability, and disabled bodies more generally, has ended, as the emphatic success of period drama Love and Honor (2006) can attest. In the new century, many films have tackled this once-taboo topic, winning success at the box office or, like Caterpillar (2010), at film festivals. In this article, I analyze depictions of disabled war survivors and other disabled bodies in recent Japanese films, drawing a contrast between Love and Honor and the aforementioned Caterpillar; I explore what motivated this more visceral retelling of both war trauma and general disability, and why each succeeded either commercially or critically. The trend towards depicting disability coincides perfectly with Japanese cinema’s resurgent success against Hollywood. Visceral depictions of traumatized bodies that are symbolically—or literally—disarmed have resonated with domestic audiences, perhaps because disability not only emasculates, it can also empower: the disabled, many believe, can speak with greater authority on the war or the human condition than anyone else. But what will they (be made to) say?

Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage

Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage