When we first meet the hero of Teshigahara's 1966 film The Face of Another, we literally look right through him, for we see him via x-ray cinematography, his vocal chords vibrating the words that come across the soundtrack. A chemist who suffered a disfiguring burn in a laboratory explosion (clearly a reference to the Atomic bomb), he is being outfitted with a new face, one that will permit him to alter his personality---and his identity---in perverse, Nietzschean fashion. The title and theme of this film, scripted by existentialist novelist Kobo Abe, defines the lines of inquiry to be followed in a conference taking place Feb 21-24 at the Whitney Humanities Center. First, what does the cinematic face of Japan show us, and what does it hide? Second, in what "other" faces has Japanese cinema recognized itself, and how has its face been worn abroad? Third, as geographic and scholarly borders become more porous where do we stand in this play of speculations?

The first face of Japanese cinema was arguably a mask - the noh exoticism of Ugetsu, Throne of Blood, and other films of the 1950s. Suddenly, masterworks by Kenji Mizoguchi, Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu provided fascinating alternatives to crude Hollywood spectacles with their insipid narratives. One after the next, exquisite and powerful Japanese films purveyed serious humanist themes (the bitter fruit of a ruinous war) in a style deriving from a deep artistic heritage. Awestruck, Western scholars went immediately to work probing the national essence in Rashomon, Sansho Dayu, and Tokyo Story where they readily found and celebrated exotic practices and tastes. The apparent contradiction between this universal appeal and the particularity of that vision was smoothed over by a commonplace formula of the times: to be truly international a cinema must first be truly national. This mainstream version of Japan as a "cultural nation," visibly asserting its distinctiveness in Western museums, theatres, gardens, and art galleries, as well as in the cinema, was abetted in Japan by institutionalized attitudes about its unique character, an unabashed cultural pride seemingly ratified by astounding economic success. In short, Japan presented the best case for a viable national film culture utterly distinct from Hollywood. Influential books in English and French coming off the presses of the exciting new field of cinema studies dwelt on the purity of that Japanese look.

As cinema studies matured, Japan became western cinema's "privileged Other," first as a repository of trasnscendental cultural values and then, after the 'political turn' of the 1960s and 1970s, for its alterative presentation of the sign. The new, political-modernist version of film studies favored a new set of Japanese films, which presented a different visage to the West. Resolutely "anti-humanist," an avant-garde stood up to the ideological depredations of Hollywood-Mosfilm: Ozu and Mizoguchi were displaced by Oshima and Yoshida as paragons of a non-bourgeois film style. Both these faces impressed Western viewers with their vivid and pure forms, mysterious and inviting in one case, challenging in the other, but always identifiably "Japanese." Now, in a Post-modern era of disillusion with "revelations" whether spiritual, political or artistic, gone are the fierce critiques of militarism and bourgeois society that informed those two successive understandings of Japanese cinema. In their place come irony, absurdity and genre manipulation, in their madcap (Itami) and deadpan (Kitano) forms. And so if Japanese cinema is not the unadulterated soul of a nation, nor an exemplary refusal of signification, what more complex understanding can we achieve of the tangled, transnational history of cinema and Japan?

From Mizoguchi to Kitano, the pure face of Japanese cinema, limned from within or projected from without, was always an affectation, a carefully cultivated presentation associated with a genre of films designed primarily to be ogled at foreign festivals. Viewed from a more demotic perspective, the vast majority of the hundreds of films Japan produces each year betray a massive importation of elements and conventions from Hollywood, Europe, and other Asian cinemas. In fact Japanese cinema was international before it was national. The first films to be exhibited there had been produced abroad while the first Japanese productions depended on foreign-made equipment and advisors. Even the spread of cinema as a key element in Japanese mass culture during the Taisho and Showa eras resulted not from Japanese traditions but from vernacular modifications of industrial and textual practices developed by Hollywood studios in the 1910s. Cinema-going itself formed part of a cultural orientation that scandalized the keepers of authentic Japaneseness, while ambitious filmmakers in Japan found themselves confronted by the superior technology and scope of Western cinema. Interested in being "modern" as well as being "traditional," Japan found modernity to be a category occupied in advance by the Other. The internal history of Japan's cinematic gaze on modernity is far more complex than recognized abroad, but it leads to a situation that many would find familiar. Japanese cinema's third face neither displays or refuses tradition but mirrors a familiar look: our own (or, better, the look of international cinema).

Inspired by Yale's initiative, "Translating the Globe," our conference aims to contribute to understanding this more complex, multi-faceted Japan. We insist on a bi-directional approach that scans this East Asian archipelago in relation to the wider world, not insisting on venerable cultural endurance but sensitive instead to movement and change. Our chief rubrics, "Outside-In" and "Inside-Out," refer not only to topological configurations but to vectors of vision and colonialism. "Outside-In": The first task of the conference is to consider how "foreign elements" have been inserted into or appropriated by even the most nativist Japanese films, retracting the monocultural myth so as to survey a more varied terrain of international relations. In this perspective, those elements are not simply foreign but part of the sometimes dysfunctional systems that constituted Japanese modernity itself. Categories of inside and outside are as unstable as the elements that are assigned to them in the modern history of Japan. Colonies became "home islands" as the Japanese empire expanded and, as Yomota Inuhiko will detail in his address, Korean-Japanese play a crucial role in the postwar cinema. Then "Inside-out": from the broadest historical perspective, we must remember that one of Japan's first modern exports was its people, who settled into colonies and "Japan towns" around the Pacific Rim. Japanese cinema found diasporic audiences in North and South America after the end of empire. More broadly, its audio-visual culture grows in the old colonies of Korea and Taiwan, and contemporary cosmopolitan audiences across the world are attracted by these audio-visual analogues of Japan's successful non-Western modernity.

As literary scholarship has increasingly shown, that intense audio-visual visage for which modern Japan is noted could not exist without a prior and concurrent "writing" that shapes and emits a trans-cultural field of sign-play. Throughout the twentieth century, all forms of literature in Japan kept the world in view, if only to hold it at bay. Writers formed part of an intellectual elite, "eurocentric" even in their resentment of the power of the west, and "cinematic" even in their attempts to usurp the power of visual representation. Meanwhile, writers in other countries have had recourse to Japan as a sign of our global future - "techno-orientalism" in Ueno Toshiya's neologistic phrase. This conference hopes to raise, and refuses to exorcise, the specter of inauthenticity in these global/local (as well as colonial) interchanges. No culture today can avoid the temptations and demands of the global; nor can scholarly writing ignore it.

Alongside the conference we offer a short compendium of recent Japanese cinema that touches on some of the issues raised above: the contemporary Korean-Japanese experience in Chong; youth culture's attempt to come to terms with "transasian" Japan in Swallowtail Butterfly; the exploration of specifically Japanese beauty in Maborosi; the exploration of radical otherness in the "experimental horror" film Cure. We are also delighted to welcome critic and well-known filmmaker Harada Masato and two of his films, Kamikaze Taxi and Inugami, that push the diametrically opposed limits of Japan at its most internationalized and insular.

-- Dudley Andrew and Michael Raine