MEMORY AND LANDSCAPE IN POST-WAR JAPANESE CINEMA

World War II in Japan was a unique and transformative event that involved the physical and spiritual reconstruction of the country. Landscape —as an aesthetic category— and memory —as a collective entity— are concepts that allow us to listen to peoples after deep historical crises. In this sense, this publication examines the main currents of Japanese cinema from a historical and aesthetic reading and analysis, and innovates in the reading of post-crisis societies by incorporating an original interdisciplinary vision. “There is no nation whose sense of time and space remains unchanged after a fundamental catastrophe. Postwar Japanese cinema, through the aesthetic development of its spatial and temporal identities, poetically conjugates the notions of trauma, origin and identity. The detailed writings that this book brings together analyze this film corpus around the concepts of memory and landscape, but not only as a typification of plots, elements of drama or iconography, but especially as audiovisual ideas of modern consciousness in crisis, a way that since West or from our periphery we contemplate with a familiar strangeness”. Pablo Corro. PhD, director of the Master in Film Studies. Institute of Aesthetics UC.