Great Society: Masanori Oe’s Experiments in Film, 1967-1969

We seek funding from the Japan Foundation for expenses of a dual-city event that will consist of screening six of filmmaker Masanori Oe’s experimental films from the late 1960s and presentations about those films by Oe and film curator Go Hirasawa, who is the coordinator of a program of 1960s Japanese films touring Europe and the United States. On February 11, 2017 Collaborative Cataloguing Japan in Philadelphia, PA will host the screening and presentation, which will be followed by a discussion. On February 17, 2017 the Block Cinema at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL will host the screening, presentation, and discussion. The screening of Oe’s films at Northwestern will be one day of a two-day program that will feature films by other experimental filmmakers working at this time. These screenings will introduce American audiences to the world of Japanese experimental filmmaking during the 1960s and provide opportunities to re-examine the historical intersections of global experimental filmmaking – particularly in experimental documentary and news-films - in this moment. The event at Northwestern, in particular, will provide greater context for the conteporaneous exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, Provoke: Photography in Japan between Protest and Performance, 1960–1975 (1/28–4/30/2017), which covers the relationship between experimental photography and the social and political environment of the late 1960s.