2019
HD video
26′ 30″
Student Bodies is a work of pedagogical horror that approaches the fraught history of capitalist modernity and radical culture in East and Southeast Asia through the figure of the student body. Beginning with the students of Satsuma and Choshu from Bakumatsu-era Japan, who were the first students from the country to study in the West, the work considers the student body as both collective and singular, metaphor and flesh, standing in for the body politic of the region across the successive periods of “miraculous” development, crises and recoveries through to the present day.
The “star capitalist pupil” of the United States, as Chalmers Johnson said of Japan in the postwar period, becomes in the next moment, the dead student protester on the streets, with each reincarnation exploding established analytical frameworks based on class, culture or the nation-state. In the film, such monstrous transformations of the student body through history are given voice by unseen “ghosts” whose utterances are comprehensible only through the subtitles. With each turn of the student body as a carnal signifier, the film attends to the didactic/dialectic rhythms that shape up the student to become both the embodiment of the pedagogical system that produces it and its contradiction.
