Articles

This article contextualises the history of kaijū scholarship and looks particularly at the swell of publishing that has emerged in the last decade. It argues that the release of a series of new Godzilla films has led to a greater focus on the kaijū film, but that there is recurrence of critical themes that have persisted throughout scholarship on giant monster movies since the 1960s. This provides a literature review to understand how kaijū media has been critiqued, defined and challenged in response to the near three-quarter century history of kaijū cinema to consider if studies of the kaijū media provide the impetus to look at the kaijū as deserving of its own field of study. If zombie studies and vampire studies can occupy their own emerging fields of study, why not the kaijū? If the figure of the kaijū asks the biggest questions of our cultures, then do the giant monsters not deserve their own field? But, if this is an emerging field of study, the article poses, it needs to be more than kaijū film studies.

The kaijū eiga has long had a noted place in cult film canons. It is considered a paracinematic experience par excellence (Sconce 1995, Mathijs and Sexton 2011), and has a privileged place within bad film canons (Medved and Medved 1979). However, since kaijū films have often fallen outside conventional mainstream distribution, generally in exploitation and low-budget cycles, there is often a fragmented picture of this horror/sci-fi sub-genre. For many audience members, it would be difficult to name many more kaijū than Godzilla or King Kong. This feature article explores how kaijū fan communities play a key role in defining the kaijū film. Due to its fragmentation outside official distribution channels, fans play a key role in curating the kaijū film. Letterboxd lists of kaijū films can cover anything from the ‘classics’, Toho’s Godzilla films and other Japanese kaijū eiga, to collections of over 2000 works featuring giant monsters of every kind, covering everything from major studio movies to fan films. Rumours circulate among fans of lost classics, such as Tokyo 1960 (Teodorico C. Santos, 1960), a Filipino version of the original Godzilla film (Ishirō Honda, 1954), while digitised VHS rips of obscure Taiwanese films like War God (Zhànshén, Chan Hung-man, 1974) are shared online. Drawing on notions of fan labour and curation, the article examines how canon formation can be an ongoing process of collecting, sharing and validation that can completely disregard notions of quality but also draw attention to complex dynamics of national and transnational boundaries.

This article explores questions of the value of fan scholarship in academia. Taking a look at the labour of anonymous and named kaijū fans, the article examines the place of fan scholarship in academic work and the composition and identities of many kaijū fan-scholars. It considers how the study of seemingly ‘trash’ cinema remains marginal in terms of its acceptance in academic study, but also how fans have tended to reject the work of scholars of their favourite films and TV shows, dismissing it either as too highbrow or as condescending of those films and their own identities. Most problematically, though, such work has been accused of overlooking, or sidelining, the contributions of fan-scholars to wider discussions about the giant monster film. Hence, this article considers how fan scholarship can or must, from an ethical standpoint, contribute to processes of knowledge production. Furthermore, it examines questions of fan labour and genrification in the construction of the kaijū canon online and how this relates to cultural value within academia and beyond. This questions dynamics of insider/outsiderhood in relation to both academia and fandom and the labour of both in understanding their subjects.

Eric Valette’s 2008 remake of Miike Takashi’s 2004 J-horror film Chakushin ari / One Missed Call calls into question a simple East/West economic and contextual binary often assumed in cases of transnational remakes, regarding the purity of an original ‘exotic’ Other and the debased, impure ‘corporate’ American remake. One Missed Call cannot be so easily placed into national cinema categories when we explore the production and financial origins of the film however, given the transnational nature of the remake’s content and production. This article explores how transnational remakes engage with transnational flows of production and influence, thinking about how transnational modernity works with what Koichi Iwabuchi terms ‘cultural odor’. The article challenges the presence of an ‘original’ in the transnational franchising of the One Missed Call films, contending that Ring (Nakata Hideo, 1998) and The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002) have functioned as metatexts in both Miike’s and Valette’s versions of One Missed Call. In so doing, the article examines the characteristics of transnational media production on an economic and political basis.

This paper explores the transnationalism of Miike Takashi’s approach to film genres. Film genre has often been held as a stabilizing and internationalizing paradigm of film production, distribution, and reception, likewise with the increasingly transnational focus of Miike’s work that has accompanied his growing notoriety and fame with critics and cineastes, predominantly those outside Japan, where his fame is marginal. The paper also explores ways in which Miike’s transnational approach to genre problematizes and intervenes in transnational cinematic struggles by offering challenges to existing and homogenizing structures of genre and language. By looking at Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) as the definitive example of Miike’s transcultural generic work, the argument will examine the role of “gatekeeper auteurs” such as Tarantino and Eli Roth, in establishing Miike as the nomadic figure in world cinema.

Miike Takashi and Kim Ki-Duk are established figures at the forefront of the Asia Extreme movement. Despite the superficial associations between the two film-makers and the pan-Asian faux-genre of extreme cinema, there are a number of connections that link Miike and Kim as artists beyond the violent or potentially misogynist content of some of their films. While critical reactions to both filmmakers make a case for the location of both squarely in the realms of the Asian Extreme mainstream, textual features see both subscribing to characteristics that can be located within key South-East Asian concerns of national identity and gender (despite Miike and Kim's specific positioning within their respective national characteristics). Paying close attention to the national positioning of both filmmakers, as well as to their transnational, western reception, this article argues that, within the boundaries of separate and distinct national identities, Miike and Kim both explore similar themes of fractured identity, cultural dislocation, gender and the failures of language. Through close analysis of Miike's Black Society (kuroshakai) trilogy (1995, 1997, 1999) and Kim's The Isle/Seom (2000) and Bad Guy/Nabbeun namja (2001), the article explores the transnational meaning and stylization that link these two significant film-makers beyond the limits of the Asia Extreme discourse.

Previously one of the most prominent figures of the American indie explosion of the late 1980s and 90s, Hal Hartley has subsequently become one of American cinema's most elusive figures (Hill). While many of his contemporaries have embraced Hollywood, Hartley has rejected America altogether, moving to Europe to pursue alternative interests in art cinema, video art, and theatre, staging a version of Louis Andriessen's La Commedia in Amsterdam in 2008, as well as overseeing a retrospective of his work at the ERA New Horizons Festival in Wroclaw, Poland in 2007. Hartley claims that he had "accomplished all [he] wanted to achieve in the film business by 1997" (Hartley 2009), thus turning his hand to what he perceives as more challenging and experimental work. Given what we might see as a serious artistic goal and vision in Hartley's intentions, as well as in his work, it is surprising that academic interest in Hartley's work has been scant (Deer; Anderson; Wise; Wood), or has situated his work within the broader sphere of independent cinema, where he remains a significant footnote (Andrew 279-312; King passim; Levy 191-197; Merritt 324, 361, 421; Pierson passim), despite a notable cult following. This paper seeks to redress that lack and engage with what was perhaps Hartley's most distinctive and memorable stylistic feature, especially in his writing, where, as he notes, "the dialogue is the action" (Hartley, Kaleta 70): the focus on and use of tropes of repetition. The paper explores Hartley's use and manipulation of repetition throughout his films, especially his early work, from The Unbelievable Truth (1989) to No Such Thing (2001). Repetition is seen as a fundamental component of Hartley's authorship, as well as a key alienating device employed to remind the viewer of both the constructed basis of the film text and behavioral aspects of compulsions to repeat. This emphasis often feeds into performance, perhaps the overwhelming obsession of much of Hartley's work, where repetition emphasizes difference in performance style, characterization, and social themes. In order to examine this emphasis, the paper draws on a number of theorists of formal, social, and psychological modes of repetition, eternal return, and notions of the absurd. Additionally, the paper discusses links between Hartley's use of repetition and the influence of theatre--specifically, the Theatre of the Absurd's emphasis on negation and the destructive effect of repetition.