Date:                     March 4 (Saturday), 9:30 -11:30 am, 11:45 am - 1:00 pm
Location:               Harvard Film Archive Cinemathèque, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge
Presenters:              Ann Adachi (Collaborative Cataloging Japan initiative)
                                Haden Guest (Director, Harvard Film Archive)
                                Go Hirasawa (Curator, Researcher, Meiji Gakuin University)
                                Alexander Zahlten (Harvard University)
                
March 3 Screenings at the Harvard Film Archive:
Motoharu Jonouchi, Gewaltpia Trailer, 1969, JAPAN, 16mm, 13min.

March 3 Screenings at the Harvard Film Archive:
Motoharu Jonouchi, Gewaltpia Trailer, 1969, JAPAN, 16mm, 13min.
Motoharu Jonouchi, Shinjuku Station, 1974, JP, 16mm, 14min.
Rikuro Miyai, Phenomenology of Zeitgeist, 1967, JP, 35min, double projection, 16mm transferred to digital video
Masanori Oe and Marvin Fishman, Great Society, 1967, 18min, english, 16mm x 6 transferred one digital video
 
The workshop is being held in conjunction with a March 3 (Friday) screening at the Harvard Film Archive of newly restored & digitized Japanese experimental films. A retrospective of 8mm films from the PIA Film Festival will be screened at the HFA during March – May 2017.
 
Workshop outline:
As media theorist Georges Did-Huberman puts it, “The archive is burning.” This workshop addresses the immense shifts taking place in the way moving images from Japan are preserved and presented. It explores the consequences they have for film as an art and as an object of research.
 
The workshop will focus on the stress points of the preservation and accessibility of film from Japan. At different junctures in history, the Japanese film industry, arguably the largest film producer in the world, has only been able to preserve a fraction of its heritage. While Japan’s experimental and non-corporate film production has been formative in world cinema, it faces even larger challenges in terms of preservation and circulation.
 
What does the shift to digital storage, projection, and video streaming mean for these – historically, artistically – immensely valuable works? What are the conceptual and very concrete challenges curators, researchers, and audiences face in keeping this immensely influential body of work accessible and relevant?
 
To speak to these questions the workshop assembles some of the central figures involved in the curation, preservation, and research of film from Japan.
 
The workshop will be held in conjunction with a screening of newly restored, digital versions of Japanese experimental films from the 1960s. It will be followed up with a six-part retrospective of newly digitized 8mm films from the PIA Film Festival archives, to be held from March to May 2017 at the Harvard Film Archives.
 
The workshop is made possible by the kind support of the Harvard Film Archive and the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies.