1st Edition
Hibakusha Cinema Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film
First Published in 1996. This collection of works is in response to American film scholar and long-term resident of Japan, Donald Richie, words:’ The Japanese failure to come to terms with Hiroshima is one which is shared by everybody in the world today,’ from over thirty years ago, when responding to the Japanese subgenre of cinema which had dealt with the atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Three decades on, the question lingers, does this appraisal remain valid? Hibakusha Cinema is an attempt - perhaps momentarily - to reorient critical focus upon a rarely discussed, yet important feature of Japanese cinema. The essays collected here represent a mix of Japanese and western (pan-Pacific) scholarship harnessing multidisciplinary methodologies, ranging from close textual analysis, archival and historical argument, anthropological assessment, literary and film comparative analyses to psychological and ideological hermeneutics.
Biography
Mick Broderick is author of Nuclear Movies (1991), is completing a PhD in apocalyptic narrative and currently works for the Australian Film Commission in Sydney, Australia. He has published widely on nuclear themes in film, and was invited by Physicians for Social Responsibility to co-curate The Atomic Age in Film Series, a retrospective of nuclear cinema screened in Los Angeles throughout 1995.
