Trauma and sensation: a study of the youth icon in All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001)

Through an analysis of All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001), this paper adopts the contemporary paradigm of cinematic affect in the study of contemporary Japanese cinema. Contextualizing the film within the rise of the Japanese New Independent in the 1990s, it argues that contemporary Japanese cinema exists as an assemblage of auteurist works that revisit Japanese culture and identities with cinematic iconography. This paper combines a historical profile of film director Iwai Shunji and a critical review of the Deleuzian-influenced paradigm of cinematic affect from which it theorizes an ‘affective icon’ for the appreciation of Iwai’s film, embodied with the traumatic expression of the youth icon.