The Everyday Aesthetician: Methods of Encoding Experience in Japanese Cinema (2009)

Undergraduate: Joshua Phelps

Faculty Advisor: Norris Johnson
Department: Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

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This study analyzes and interprets three influential Japanese films, as a basis for conclusions about the encoding of everyday experience into aesthetic systems in Japan. Each film dates from the postwar era (the so-called “golden age” of Japanese cinema) and each film is by a different major Japanese director: Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1951), Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953), and Suna no Onna (Woman in the Dunes, Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964). All three films are recognized internationally and all are among the most critically acclaimed films of Japanese cinema.

Two themes of everyday life were selected for analysis, and interpretation: “light and shadow” and “dream and madness.” These two themes were selected for discussion because they are common themes of everyday experience.

The roles of light and shadow and dream and madness are analyzed in each of the three films and the analysis shows that both themes are presented aesthetically in the films. These findings support the conclusion that in the postwar Japanese cinema, the rhetoric by which the most common of human experiences were characterized and understood entailed primarily aesthetic implications.