Panel Discussion: Dialectics without Synthesis

Naoki Yamamoto is Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara, with research interests in film theory, Japanese cinema and popular culture, Marxism, documentary film, avant-garde art, and 20th-century philosophy. Besides his new book on Japanese film theory, he has also edited Tenkeiki no Mediologī [Mediology in Postwar Japan] (with Toba Kōji, Shinwasha, 2019), an anthology on media theory and practice in 1950s Japan.

Aaron Gerow is Professor of East Asian cinema and culture at Yale University. His books include Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895-1925 (2010); Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies (co-authored with Markus Nornes, 2009 [Japanese version 2016]); A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan (2008); and Kitano Takeshi (2007). His co-edited anthology Rediscovering Classical Japanese Film Theory—An Anthology (in Japanese) appeared in 2018.

Masha Salazkina is professor of Film Studies and Concordia University research chair in Transnational Media Arts and Cultures at Concordia University. Her book In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexico (University of Chicago Press, 2009) positions Eisenstein’s unfinished Mexican project and theoretical writings within the wider context of post-revolutionary Mexico and global cultures of modernity. She also co-edited the collections Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema and Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures (both from Indiana University Press).