Through a Nuclear Lens

France, Japan, and Cinema from Hiroshima to Fukushima

Hannah Holtzman

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781438497839, 9781438497846
• eBook ISBN: 9781438497853
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: French History

Examines the increasingly reciprocal nature of Franco-Japanese cultural exchange through films that center on nuclear issues.

The Franco-Japanese coproduction Hiroshima mon amour (1959) is one of the most important films for global art cinema and for the French New Wave. In Through a Nuclear Lens, Hannah Holtzman examines this film and the transnational cycle it has inspired, as well as its legacy after the 2011 nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi. In a study that includes formal and theoretical analysis, archival research, and interviews, Holtzman shows the emergence of a new kind of nuclear film, one that attends to the everyday effects of nuclear disaster and its impact on our experience of space and time. The focus on Franco-Japanese exchange in cinema since the postwar period reveals a reorientation of the primarily aesthetic preoccupations in the tradition of Japonisme to center around technological and environmental concerns. The book demonstrates how French filmmakers, ever since Hiroshima mon amour, have looked to Japan in part to better understand nuclear uncertainty in France.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 From Japonisme to the Nuclear Era
• 2 Learning to See with Japan in Hiroshima mon amour
• 3 Tu n’as rien vu: Japanese Responses to Hiroshima mon amour
• 4 Things That Quicken the Heart: Sensing the Nuclear in Chris Marker’s Japan
• 5 Interaction and Solidarity through a Digital Nuclear Lens
• 6 Reframing Hiroshima mon amour after Fukushima
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Back Cover