Sitting in a university classroom in 2017, with my phone in my hand and my tablet on the table, I can definitely say that my interaction with the first Godzilla film, Gojira was infinitely different to that of the original audience in 1954.
Being a 20-year-old woman that has lived in Australia her whole life, how I interpreted Godzilla would have also been different to those original Japanese viewers in the 50s. For one I had to experience the dialogue of the film through subtitles, and as accurate as they can be, there are always certain emotions, ideas, and expressions that simply get lost in translation.
Not to mention that I was on my phone the entire time.
The livetweeting of Godzilla by dozens of young university students must be a novel idea of @CL_Moore. This added yet another layer that distanced us from the original experience of Godzilla. It meant that I was busy trying to keep up with my fellow students’ hilarious tweets, rather than be submersed within the cinematic experience of the film.
This meant that I missed parts of dialogue of the film, and so had to rely on my own understanding of the film and its possible conventions to figure out what was happening.
However, as an Australian in 2017, I’m obviously lacking some of the cultural understandings that the original Japanese audience would have had access to in 1954.
I have watched a few black and white films in my time, but none were ever in a language other than English. I’ve also watched a few Godzilla films, but mostly modern ones that focus on action, and generally lack the overarching moral lesson that this original Godzilla was focused on.
I also fairly regularly watch subtitled animes, but even this cultural experience did not lend me any insight into what I was missing in those moments of dialogue.
So, due to my fairly large consumption of modern Japanese animated shows and films, I can simultaneously sit on my phone and watch a subbed anime, because I can easily comprehend the conventions and predictable patterns present in this medium.
But due to my lack of exposure to 1950s Japanese films conventions, I could not draw upon my own cultural or personal framework to comprehend what I was missing in those moments when I was looking at my phone and not the film.
Overall, watching the original Godzilla gave me the opportunity to reflect on where my personal framework lacks, and how I can continue to build my cultural experiences.
Digital Asia 
I like how you made a clear distinction between audiences when the film first came out, and how we watched it in the classroom. The fact that we were live tweeting during the duration of the film, definitely distanced us and I think we would have struggled to watch it the way that audiences did in the 50’s, especially due to the historical connection it would have had. The honest way you said that you hadn’t had much experience with historical Japanese films, is so important and well explained as this transparency is very much needed in auto-ethnographic studies.
Nice post! 🙂
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