News and Opinion

Aoyama Shinji’s “Nouvelle Vague Manifesto” Revisited

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I am back at Yale after a summer in Japan, and one of the pleasant surprises awaiting me when I returned was a copy of issue 6 of the magazine Nang. Nang is a magazine focused on Asian cinema that is only available on paper in expertly designed printed editions. Published twice a year by editor-in-chief Davide Cazzaro, it will continue for a total of ten issues, with each issue focused on a theme and supervised by a guest editor. Issue 6 was dedicated to the subject of “Manifestos” and was guest edited by Darcy Paquet.

I contributed to the issue through the republication of my English translation of Aoyama Shinji’s 1997 “Nouvelle Vague Manifesto; Or, How I Became a Disciple of Philippe Garrel.” I had previously published that online in Adrian Martin’s journal Lola, where you can still read it here. I had supplied an introduction to that manifesto (seen here), one that worked a lot off of my essay on Aoyama in Yvonne Tasker’s Fifty Contemporary Film Directors (I have posted that on the Yale repository here). For Nang, Darcy was hoping that several of the persons involved could revisit the manifesto from today’s perspective, but Aoyama-san was just too busy to write something, and I felt someone else should offer a more novel view. So I just provided a new one-page introduction, and my former student Ryan Cook of Emory wrote up a quite interesting analysis that reconsiders Aoyama’s relation to Hasumi Shigehiko. 

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