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Stephen Barber: Film's Ghosts

Stephen Barber

Film's Ghosts
Tatsumi Hijikata's Butoh and the Transmutation of 1960s Japan

Softcover, 248 pages

PDF, 248 pages

Tokyo during the 1960s was in a state of uproar

Tokyo during the 1960s was in a state of uproar, full of protests, riots, and insurrection. Tatsumi Hijikata – the initiator of the 'Butoh' performance art and the seminal figure in Japan’s experimental arts culture of the 1960s – created his most famous works in the context of that turmoil. Central to Hijikata's vital 1960s work are his many films, from experimental projects undertaken in collaboration with artists, to horror and sex films made for Japan's ailing studios, to his participation in the corporate, state-power spectacle of the Osaka World Expo ’70.


Based on original interviews with Hijikata’s collaborators as well as new research, Film’s Ghosts illuminates Hijikata’s world-renowned, spectral 'Dance of Utter Darkness', Butoh, and explores Hijikata's films directly against the backdrop of 1960s urban culture in Tokyo, with the rise of its screen-constellated mega-towers, its fierce protests and riot-police battles, its ascendant security-guard and surveillance industries, and its experimentations in art, sex and terrorism.


An essential book for readers engaged with film and performance, urban cultures and architecture, and Japan’s experimental art and its histories.

Content
  • 11–56

    Conjuring Hijikata’s Ghosts in Film: Human Sacrifice and Wargames

  • 57–98

    Motion Photography: Kamaitachi

  • 99–136

    Tokyo’s Transmutation, Hijikata’s Dance

  • 137–172

    Horrors, Deaths, Revolutions

  • 173–234

    1970: Hijikata at Osaka’s World Expo

  • 235–240

    Film and the Dying Dance

  • choreography
  • dancing
  • performance
  • cultural history
  • body
  • performing arts
  • Japanese aesthetics

My language
English

Selected content
English

Stephen Barber

Stephen Barber is currently a Fellow at the Centre for Apocalyptic and Postapocalyptic Studies at Heidelberg University, and usually he is a Professor of Art and Film, and Co-Director of the Visual Culture Research Centre, at Kingston University in London. He is the author of three already-published books with Diaphanes - White Noise Ballrooms, 2018, Film's Ghosts, 2019, and The Projectionists, 2020 - and several forthcoming ones, including Wasteland/Apocalypse. He has also translated two books of writings by Antonin Artaud for Diaphanes, with the titles Artaud 1937 Apocalypse, 2018, and A Sinister Assassin, 2023. His books have been described as 'brilliant, profound and provocative' by The Times newspaper in the UK.
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