Culture Talks: Kuwata & Japanese Cinema

Be prepared to think and see differently while learning something new from experts on campus. 

Culture Talks are a new series of short talks from University of Warwick academics inspired by the exhibition, Takuro Kuwata, Tea Bowl Punk. 

In this talk, Professor Alastair Phillips will take Kuwata’s synthesis of traditional Japanese methodologies with punk aesthetics as a departure point, and explore similar combinations and contrasts in the realm of cinema.

"We’ll explore the screen practice of Yasujiro Ozu and his use of objects, including domestic ceramics, in his late classical films and then contrast this mode of film making to two separate instances of formal innovation. 

Firstly, experimental cinema of the 1960s involving the resculpting of the human face and identity and secondly, the punk aesthetic in Japanese independent cinema of the 1980s and the shift to a cinema involving the incorporation of the body and technology in new plastic forms." 

— Professor Alastair Phillips

Professor Alastair Phillips is a lecturer and researcher within the University of Warwick’s Film and Television Studies Department. He has worked for the British Film Institute and the Edinburgh International Film Festival. He was an editor of Screen for ten years between 2014 and 2024, and currently sits on the Editorial Advisory Boards of Screen, the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema and Bloomsbury Publishing's Screen Studies platform.