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

David Deamer

Jul 2014 · Bloomsbury Publishing USA

About this ebook

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.

Ratings and reviews

Yes it is godadzilla 1964

Is it godzilla?

About the author

David Deamer is Associate Lecturer in film at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He has published in Martin-Jones and Brown's Deleuze and Film; Bell and Colebrook's Deleuze and History; Deleuze Studies; and the online A/V Journal, of which he was co-founder. He blogs on Deleuze and cinema at www.daviddeamer.com.