News and Opinion

Preserving Kyoto's Film Culture

The other day, I made a trip to Kyoto on Yale business. While there, I had the chance to meet with Moriwaki Kiyotaka, senior curator for film at the Museum of Kyoto. Markus Nornes and I are updating our Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies in preparation for a possible Japanese edition and I thought I'd check up on the Museum. Unfortunately, it does represent some of the problems film studies and archiving face in Japan. While their collection of materials is superlative (centered on the Ito Daisuke collection), their reading room no longer exists and scholars are only allowed to view the collection on a case by case basis. But it was great hearing from Moriwaki-san about how the Museum, despite these difficulties, is making use of what it has and even rethinking the role of archives. The Museum is not simply trying to preserve the artifacts of Kyoto's film culture, a culture largely centered around jidaigeki, but engineering opportunities for the knowledge of that film culture to live on in younger generations. Thus it is attempting, for instance, to put young anime and manga artists in touch with older film veterans so that the current fad for samurai and period manga/anime can actually feed off of a longer history.

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