I have been working on the ways in which a new rhetoric of youth, body, and subjectivity was articulated in commercial Japanese cinema in the 1950s, leading to the famous "Japanese New Wave" around 1960. I think it is important to look beyond the famous "Shochiku New Wave" of Oshima, Yoshida, and others to the "pre-new wave" at the other studios, as well as to put new ideas about film authorship in the context of developments in literature and celebrity culture, as well as independent and avant-garde film production. At its most ambitious, this project aims at an institutional and economic history of Japanese cinema in the period of high economic growth, seen through the lens of the changes in film style that those conditions produced.

Looking further back into Japanese film history, I am developing a project on wartime film culture. Focusing in particular on the documentary (bunka eiga) and the propaganda film (kokusaku eiga, also kokumin eiga), I am trying to reconstruct the place of Japanese cinema in the preparation of citizens oriented toward "total war." I would like to turn the emphasis of this project away from identifying ideology (too simple) and weighing complicity (too complex) toward trying to understand how cinema exists as both agent and symptom of broader social processes. In particular, I would like to trace the ways in which the specific qualities of film as a medium were used to mobilize national subjects in the transnational action genre known as the "People's Film."

More recently, I started a project on Japanese Political Modernism -- the theoretical and practical critique of existing forms of narrative cinema that characterized independent films of the late 1960s and early 1970s, especially those produced by Art Theater Guild (ATG) and/or exhibited in ATG's cinema, the Shinjuku bunka. In future work I hope to connect the popular genre cinema produced at Japanese film studios to these "serious" films, as well as to the wider context of formally adventurous poster art and underground theatre. Rather than insist on the exclusivity of categories of high and low, we should recognize in Japan as well as in the West the reciprocal specification of the one by the other, producing a style of cinema that I am calling the "popular baroque."

Outside of Japanese cinema, I will be developing a long-standing interest in the history of film theory. In particular, I would like to make the philosophy of Charles Peirce the basis for generating a different notion of film as sign than the one that has so far been put forward in film studies. Although Peirce was more interested in "semeiotics" as philosophy of science than as aesthetics, I think his ideas can help us rethink the relation of the audio-visual image and its object (usually called "indexicality") as well as for rethinking the idea of "medium" in film, video, and digital media.

Finally, I am interested in using computers and digital media in film studies. I have developed a web site to support classes in film analysis, am using mpg2 data streams to automatically extract information about form (shot length, composition, etc) from a large corpus of films, and have an interest in subtitling, both as an historical practice and as an aesthetic problem in the relation between text and image in the cinema.