Godzilla Conquers the Globe:

Japanese Movie Monsters in International Film Art

Large-scale posters advertising movies of the Japanese film genre known as kaiju eiga (monster movies) are on display in the main reading room of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the first Godzilla movie. The fourteen large posters are from the collection of Professor Gregory Pflugfelder, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. A symposium is forthcoming in the fall of 2004. Additional movie flyers are in the display cases in the main reading room.

This genre was the first Japanese cultural product to win a truly global audience. From these materials it is clear that the iconography of this genre varied globally: Godzilla, a dinosaur-like monster, frequently appears as “King Kong” in Italian posters, and as “Frankenstein” in German advertisements. The exhibit focuses on the ways the Japanese films appeared in places other than the more familiar American and Japanese venues.

The exhibition continues downstairs in the Rare Book & Special Collections reading room and the Kress Seminar Room, with items held in Starr and from private collections related to historical views of “monsters” of all sorts. Additional movie posters are on view in the Kress Seminar Room. For fuller information on the posters, visit http://www.columbia.edu/cu/ealac/dkc/calendar/godzilla/

The main reading room part of the exhibition is open throughout the library's working hours. However, the portion of the exhibition in the Rare Book and Special Collections Reading Room and the Kress Seminar Room may only be viewed from 9 am to 1 pm. For complete information on access hours, visit the Library's schedule at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/services/hours/index.html?library=eastasian