Deleuze, Japanese Cinema, and the Atom Bomb The Spectre of Impossibility

David Deamer establishes the first ever sustained encounter between Gilles Deleuze's Cinema books and post-war Japanese cinema, exploring how Japanese films responded to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From the early days of occupation political censorship to the social and cultural freedoms of the 1960s and beyond, the book examines how images of the nuclear event appear in post-war Japanese cinema.

Each chapter begins by focusing upon one or more of three key Deleuzian themes – image, history and thought – before going on to look at a selection of films from 1945 to the present day. These include movies by well-known directors Kurosawa Akira, Shindo Kaneto, Oshima Nagisa and Imamura Shohei; popular and cult classics – Godzilla (1954), Akira (1988) and Tetsuo (1989); contemporary genre flicks – Ring (1998), Dead or Alive (1999) and Casshern (2004); the avant-garde and rarely seen documentaries. The author provides a series of tables to clarify the conceptual components deployed within the text, establishing a unique addition to Deleuze and cinema studies.

List of tables
List of images
Acknowledgements

Introduction: event, cinema, cineosis

1. Special images, contingent centres

Movement-images: Bergson, sensory-motor process
The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Ito Sueo, 1946)
Children of the Atom Bomb (Shindo Kaneto, 1952)
Godzilla (Honda Ishiro, 1954)

2. Horizons of history

Action-images: Nietzsche, history
Terror of Mechagodzilla (Honda Ishiro, 1975)
Lucky Dragon No. 5 (Shindo Kaneto, 1959)
Barefoot Gen (Masaki Mori, 1983)
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (Hayao Miyazaki, 1984)
Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988)

3. Traces: symptoms and figures

Impulse-images; reflection-images: Peirce, semiosis
The Naked Island (Shindo Kaneto, 1960)
Dead or Alive (Takashi Miike, 1999)
Ring (Nakata Hideo, 1998)
Kwaidan (Kobayashi Masaki, 1964)
The Face of Another (Teshigahara Hiroshi, 1966)
Navel and A-bomb (Eikoh Hosoe, 1960)
Tetsuo (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989)
Face of Jizo (Kuroki Kazuo, 2004)

4. Consummation (and crisis)

Mental-images: Bergson, memory
I Live in Fear (Kurosawa Akira, 1955)
Rashomon (Kurosawa Akira, 1950)
Dreams (Kurosawa Akira, 1990)
Rhapsody in August (Kurosawa Akira, 1991)

5. Impure anarchic multiplicities

Time-images: Deleuze, syntheses of time
Casshern (Kiriya Kazuaki, 2004)
The Pacific War (Nagisa Oshima, 1968)
A History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (Imamura Shohei, 1970)
Black Rain (Imamura Shohei, 1989)
Hiroshima (Sekigawa Hideo, 1953)

Conclusion: spectres of impossibility

Notes
Index
Select bibliography
Select filmography

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