Film screening and discussion: Gojira (1954)

For the 70th anniversary of the most enduring film monster of all times, the JRC screens the original 1954 Gojira by Ishiro Honda. 

Defining the genre of kaijū-eiga 怪獣映画 (monster films), Gojira introduced Tsuburaya Eiji's tokusatsu techniques and "suitmation", the animation of monsters by creature suits rather than by stop-motion. By giving shape to the traumatic experience of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Gojira became an indictment of nuclear warfare.

JRC members Satona Suzuki, Filippo Cervelli, and Fabio Gygi will discuss the legacy of Godzilla, its place in film history and the series of monster films that it spawned.

About the speakers

Fabio Gygi is the Chair of the Japan Research Centre and a senior lecturer in anthropology at SOAS University of London. He is interested in the intersection of material culture and medical anthropology, with a focus on how medical and social categories are formed around practices of disposal. 

He is the co-editor of ‘The Work of Gender: Service, Performance and Fantasy in Contemporary Japan’ and has written about animism, dolls, robots and Marie Kondō. His most recent publications are ‘Falling in and out of Love with Stuff: Affective Affordance and Horizontal Transcendence in Styles of Decluttering in Japan’ (Japanese Studies) and ’The Afterlife of Dolls: On the Productive Death of Terminal Commodities” (Ars Orientalis).

Satona Suzuki is currently a senior lecturer in Japanese and Modern Japanese History at SOAS University of London. Trained as a historian at the Department of History at SOAS, her main interests are the rise of modern Japan with an emphasis on imperialism, militarism, ideology and the relationship between politics and religion (Buddhism). 

She also teaches Advanced Japanese using current issues in Japan, including constitutional revision, security and gender. As these issues often closely relate to Japan's imperial legacy and the postcolonial impasses between Japan and its neighbouring countries, she is keen to connect 'then' and 'now' in the global context.

Filippo Cervelli received his PhD in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford, and is currently Lecturer in Modern Japanese Literature and Popular Culture at SOAS University of London. 

He has written on the literature of Takahashi Gen’ichirō, Ōe Kenzaburō, Abe Kazushige, on post-Fukushima fiction, and on manga and animation. He recently co-edited an interdisciplinary special issue on representations of nerds and loneliness.

Registration

This event free, open to the public, and held in person only. The film will be screened in Japanese with English subtitles. If you would like to attend, please register using the link above.

• Organiser: SOAS Japan Research Centre
• Contact email: centres@soas.ac.uk