Manchuria Railway Documentaries

Collection of documentary films produced by the South Manchurian Railway Company (Mantetsu) in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo as the first part of a broader study of films produced in and about Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s. Taking up a common description of these cinematic images as maboroshi (illusory, dreamlike, lost) and historical studies of Manchukuo as an “imagined empire,” I propose to read these films as part of a phantasmagoria that had enchanted various utopian fantasies, that obscured and contributed to harsh realities, and that has recently resurfaced as haunting memories.

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