Shin Godzilla is a weird meditation on the problems with Japanese bureaucracy | Ars Technica

Shin Godzilla is a weird meditation on the problems with Japanese bureaucracy | Ars Technica

In this reboot, Godzilla is a giant metaphor that shoots lasers.

When Godzilla finally does hit the shoreline, there's a major shock in
store for fans—the creature looks nothing like the terrifying toothface
we have known. Instead it's a bloated, wiggly, bug-eyed beast who can't
even walk upright. Sure, it's big enough to leave a considerable trail
of destruction and radioactivity in its wake. But it looks almost like a
joke version of the Big G, made even more unfamiliar by the use of CGI
enhancements. What doesn't feel like a joke are all the scenes of
coastal destruction and death as the nuclear-powered kaiju worms its way
through the urban landscape. These are deliberate evocations of the
Fukushima disaster, echoing a long tradition in Godzilla films of recreating nuclear horrors and other disasters that Japan has endured.

Soon, we discover that the major human conflict in this story isn't
between Japan and the monster; it's between two generations of Japanese
leaders with very different approaches to solving crises. 

One of the really creative parts of this film is the way writer/director Hideaki Anno (creator of Evangelion) has given Godzilla the power of rapid evolution. The kaiju may be more powerful in some ways, but this Godzilla also
feels more like a metaphor than many of its predecessors. At one point,
Godzilla stands stock still for days in the middle of Tokyo, its
indestructible body rearing up like a warning over the glittering,
radioactive mess of the city. For fans of Anno's metaphysical kaiju
anime Evangelion, this will be a familiar scene. Like Shin Godzilla, the Evangelion
movies are full of ambiguous giant monsters called Angels who spend as
much time looming over Earth in a judgey way as they do attacking it.
Also like Evangelion, Shin Godzilla is full of occasionally incomprehensible worldbuilding that hints at cosmic issues we may never understand.

 

Kinema : : A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media

Kinema : : A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media



SISYPHUS IN THE SAND PIT: ON THE ICONIC CHARACTER OF SAND, AND HOW THE "ANTI-NATURAL MAN" CATCHES WATER IN WOMAN IN THE DUNES


While filming Woman in the Dunes (WITD), director Hiroshi
Teshigahara repeated that this adaptation of the acclaimed Kobo Abe
novel had three main characters: not just a man and a woman but also the
sand. Decades later he would remark: "The sand has its own identity."⁽¹⁾



My study examines how this sand with an autonomous character attracts water, and thereby redeems the anti-natural man. I have three principal, interconnected objectives as a focus:

1) Locate Woman in the Dunes as a key text in the emergent
genre of environmental film, i.e. audio-visual narratives that represent
or revision the human-nature relationship;


2) Read the film as an allegory about human freedom and community that
is both Japanese and archetypal in its revising of the myth of Sisyphus,
and in its treatment of gender;


3) Contribute to a theory of visual narrative by exploring how
Teshigahara constructs both the literal narrative (entrapment), and the
metanarratives of human-nature relationships and existential dilemmas,
primarily through visual means.

The Face of Another: Double Vision - From the Current - The Criterion Collection

The Face of Another: Double Vision - From the Current - The Criterion Collection

Pitfall: Outdoor Miner - From the Current - The Criterion Collection

Pitfall: Outdoor Miner - From the Current - The Criterion Collection

Woman in the Dunes: Shifting Sands - From the Current - The Criterion Collection

Woman in the Dunes: Shifting Sands - From the Current - The Criterion Collection

The Spectral Landscape of Teshigahara, Abe, and Takemitsu - From the Current - The Criterion Collection

The Spectral Landscape of Teshigahara, Abe, and Takemitsu - From the Current - The Criterion Collection

The Frontier Within - Essays by Abe Kobo | Columbia University Press

The Frontier Within - Essays by Abe Kobo | Columbia University Press: Richard F. Calichman is professor of Japanese studies at the City College of New York, CUNY. His Columbia University Press books include Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan (2008); Contemporary Japanese Thought (2005); and What is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi (2005).