Abstract

Many films, both narrative and documentary, explore the relationship between history and politics or ethics. This may be accomplished when fictional narrative films enact ethical arguments regarding history in cinematic form, when documentary films explicitly seek to uncover lost histories of political oppression, or films may experientially and aesthetically stage ethical experience with respect to historical meanings and contexts. There are some cases where such ethical-historical experience is explored through the specific aesthetic form of the film in relation to its narrative. Ask This of Rikyū is one such example. In this paper, I will suggest that film can explore the relation of aesthetic experience to the ethico-political character of history, opening up ways of responding aesthetically to concrete political conditions. Ask This of Rikyū accomplishes this by interrogating the possibility of a wabi-cinema, established with respect to its title character...