Nagisa Oshima, The Dawn of Asia, part 1, 1964, Japan, film still, courtesy of Oshima Productions LTD
The Dawn of Asia, parts 1–6 (1964), Nagisa Oshima, Japan, 318 min. Japanese with English subtitles
2 pm: The Dawn of Asia, parts 1–2
5 pm: The Dawn of Asia, parts 3–4
8:30 pm: The Dawn of Asia, parts 5–6
July 20: With a presentation by Go Hirasawa and Sabu Kohso
The Dawn of Asia is a TV drama consisting of thirteen episodes about the trans-China/Japan collaboration of revolutionaries in the early twentieth century. It was Nagisa Oshima’s rare attempt to direct a TV drama in a social atmosphere in which Japan was embracing postwar prosperity as well as the effects of permeating mass media. Making an effort to reach out to the mass audience through a seemingly conventional method of filmic representation, Dawn of Asia takes up the epic of trans-Asiatic solidarity while challenging nationalism on both sides.
Go Hirasawa is a curator and researcher working on underground and experimental films and avant-garde art movements in Japan during the 1960s and 70s.
Sabu Kohso is a political and social critic, scholar, and activist. Kohso has written extensively on the Fukushima disaster from the perspective of global anti-capitalist struggles.
TV Politics is a film program that revisits some of the most significant attempts to articulate a radical approach to the politics of television since the mid twentieth century. It revisits film works conceived for the purpose of rethinking what television could be, while at the same time seeking to provide a different kind of analysis of social and cultural reality.
