Ainu Culture Past and Present. Royal Anthropological Institute
«Ainu. Caminos a la memoria» se proyectará el 21 de marzo de 2017 en el Royal Anthropological Institute en asociación con la Japan Society.
El acto forma parte del programa Ainu Culture Past and Present que llevarán a cabo ambas instituciones a partir de enero de 2017. La proyección contempla un visionado conjunto de una selección de imágenes rodadas por Neil Munro para dar paso después a una visión más contemporánea con «Ainu. Caminos a la memoria». El evento contará con la asistencia del director Marcos Centeno para hablar del documental, el pueblo ainu y una sesión de preguntas y respuestas con los asistentes.
Co-organised by the Japan Society and the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI), this is the third and last in the current series of screenings that revisit Japanese films housed in the RAI’s collection. On this occasion, we are delighted to present two documentaries considering the Ainu people in Japan in terms of ritual, memory and identity.
The main film of the evening is The Ainu Bear Ceremony, a short documentary (27 minutes) made in 1931 by Scottish anthropologist Neil Gordon Munro (1863-1942). A pioneer scholar of the Ainu people in Hokkaido, Munro recorded this traditional Ainu ceremony, now no longer performed, in which a bear was ritually killed and eaten by the participants. Screened will be the shortened, RAI edited 1961 version of The Ainu Bear Ceremony, which removed certain intertitles and images from the original film.
The evening will continue with a screening of extracts from Marcos Centeno Martin’s documentary Ainu. Pathways to Memory (2014, Japanese, English and French with English Subtitles). This film not only aims to recover the history of the Ainu people often erased from the official record and scarred by discrimination, but also to explore what being Ainu means today.
Alongside the screenings, the event will also include a discussion of the films with George Barker from the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) and Dr Marcos Centeno Martin from SOAS University of London. They will consider the legacy and impact of the Munro documentary and the logic behind the RAI’s 1961 edit as well as the situation of the Ainu people in contemporary Japan. A Q&A with the audience will follow the screenings and the discussion.
Ainu. Caminos a la memoria 