Kunigami Diss Final2
OF CLOUDS AND BODIES: FILM AND THE DISLOCATION OF VISION IN BRAZILIAN AND JAPANESE INTERWAR AVANT-GARDES A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by André Keiji Kunigami August, 2018 © 2018 André Keiji Kunigami OF CLOUDS AND BODIES: FILM AND THE DISLOCATION OF VISION IN BRAZILIAN AND JAPANESE INTERWAR AVANT-GARDES André Keiji Kunigami, Ph. D. Cornell University 2018 Of Clouds and Bodies: Film and the Dislocation of Vision in Brazilian and Japanese Interwar Avant-gardes examines the political impact of film in conceptualizations of the body, vision, and movement in the 1920s and 1930s avant-gardes of Brazil and Japan. Through photographs, films, and different textual genres—travel diary, screenplay, theoretical essay, movie criticism, novel—I investigate the similar political role played by film in these “non-Western” avant-gardes in their relation to the idea of modernity, usually equivalent to that of the “West.” I explore racial, political, and historical entanglements that emerge when debates on aesthetic form encounters the filmic medium, theorized and experienced by the so-called “non-Western” spectator. Through avant-garde films such as Mário Peixoto’s Limite (1930), and Kinugasa Teinosuke’s A Page of Madness (1926); the theorizations of Octávio de Faria and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō; and the photographs and writings by Mário de Andrade and Murayama Tomoyoshi, this dissertation follows the clash between the desire for a universal and disembodied vision, and the encounter with filmic perception. I argue that the filmic apparatus, as a technology and a commodity, emphasizes an embodied and localized experience of vision and time that revealed the discourse on cultural-historical iii difference—the distinction between West and Rest, or modern and non-modern—as a suppressive modulator of material power dynamics embedded in racial, class, and gender hierarchies enjoyed by the cosmopolitan elite in the “peripheral” spaces.
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