Riding the Filmic Tidal Front: Chinese Independent Documentary and Japan

Riding the Filmic Tidal Front: Chinese Independent Documentary and Japan
A Talk by Tamako Akiyama
Friday, February 20, 6:00pm – 7:30pm
Michelson Theater, 721 Broadway, 6th floor

This talk examines Chinese independent documentary through the metaphor of the tidal front—a dynamic zone where different cinematic, cultural, and institutional currents collide, intermingle, and resist stabilization. Rather than framing Japan as a fixed national context or a site of unilateral influence, the lecture focuses on moments and sites of encounter where Chinese and Japanese filmmakers, films, and audiences have come into contact, often in Japan but not reducible to it.

Drawing on the concept of the pathos of countercurrents, the talk explores how non-linear exchanges—across film festivals, translation, subtitling, open-ended archiving practices, and informal networks—have generated alternative documentary practices and meanings that diverge from prevailing political, institutional, and historiographical frameworks. Though unstable and difficult to formalize, these encounters have been crucial to the formation and circulation of Chinese independent documentary.

Grounded in the speaker’s long-term engagement as a researcher and translator closely involved in processes of filmmaking and circulation, the lecture rethinks transnational cinema not in terms of influence or reception, but as a set of lived contact zones in which documentary’s aesthetic tension and affective force emerge.

Image credit: The image is from Zhao Liang’s documentary I Am So Sorry (无去来处) (2021). Set on the coast of Fukushima, it shows a Noh performer dancing atop a seawall constructed after the earthquake and nuclear disaster.
© Zhao Liang

This is an in-person event, open to the public. Prior registration is required. Non-NYU attendees will receive emailed instructions for building access and may be asked to present a government-issued photo ID upon arrival. NYU attendees must present their NYU ID.

Tamako Akiyama is a visiting scholar at NYU Tisch School of the Arts and an Associate Professor at Kanagawa University. A scholar, translator, and subtitler, her work brings together film studies, translation practice, and long-term engagement with Chinese independent cinema. Since the 1990s, she has been closely involved in film festivals, subtitling, interpretation, and research related to Chinese-language cinema, working as a translator and long-term interlocutor alongside filmmakers in processes of production, presentation, and circulation. Her major translations include Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Dust in the Wind: Hou Hsiao-hsien Talks about Films (Misuzu Shobo, 2021), as well as subtitles for works by Wang Bing and Wang Jiuliang. She co-edited (with Ma Ran) Chinese Independent Cinema Observer, Issue 1: Sino-Japanese Connections in Independent Film Cultures (1989–2020) and contributed to Introduction to Chinese Cinema (Iwanami Shoten) and Chinese Cinemas in Translation and Dissemination (Routledge).