Monsters are very popular in Japanese film culture, in which the first Gojira (Godzilla) film was released in1954, during the postwar period. The monsters in different films are often as destructive as natural disasters: they are as gigantic as skyscrapers, some can breathe fire, some have enormous strength, they could easily destroy the cities they walk through, creating chaos, the monsters themselves are the catastrophe. In reality, Japan is one of the countries who suffer from earthquakes the most, which the monsters could be resembling of; however, there is one more thing that acts the same, which is war, more specifically the two atomic bombs thrown onto Nagasaki and Hiroshima, creating a monstrous disaster in these two civilian cities. It may be difficult to judge rights or wrongs during a war, but the civilians in the two cities did suffer from the catastrophe. It is also difficult for us to “feel” what the casualties had gone through, thus, visual imaginations of a catastrophe have appeared as the monster film, Gozilla, to remind us of the destructive power of war.
By Chu Kin Nok
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A good attempt at summarizing Tsuitsui’s argument on the monster genre in film. Based on your reading and discussions in the tutorial, what do you think is the purpose of showing destruction on screen? How does it add/change our perception of a city, a nation, a community and history in general?
I think the purpose is let the audience imagine how the city or the world would look like when everything is gone, in which this kind of scenery won’t be seen easily unless there are strikes from natural disasters or wars. It kinda changes my perception of a city, like would Hong Kong still be a city if every building is removed? Must “city” be a place full of buildings? When towns, cities or a whole country are being reduced to nothing, what should we call them?
It really depends on what exactly being “reduced to nothing” is. Absolutely nothing? Then it is simply tabula rasa. No more buildings but where are the people? Cities without human density are not quite cities either. Cities have historically been invariably built on human economy and enterprise. The contemporary city is even more so dependent on the global economy. Consider the many levels of construction and destruction. In cities, the occurrences are simultaneous. Amid the density (of buildings, people, objects and materials etc.) and land scarcity, construction is built upon the clearance of what comes before i.e. destruction of something, someplace…