Japanese Cinema In The Digital Age

Digital technology has transformed cinema’s production, distribution, and consumption patterns and pushed contemporary cinema toward increasingly global markets. In the case of Japanese cinema, a once moribund industry has been revitalized as regional genres such as anime and Japanese horror now challenge Hollywood’s preeminence in global cinema. In her rigorous investigations of J-horror, personal documentary, anime, and ethnic cinema, Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano deliberates on the role of the transnational in bringing to the mainstream what were formerly marginal B-movie genres. She argues persuasively that convergence culture, which these films represent, constitutes Japan’s response to the variegated flows of global economics and culture. With its timely analysis of new modes of production emerging from the struggles of Japanese filmmakers and animators to finance and market their work in a post-studio era, this book holds critical implications for the future of other national cinemas fighting to remain viable in a global marketplace. As academics in film and media studies prepare a wholesale shift toward a transnational perspective of film, Wada-Marciano cautions against jettisoning the entire national cinema paradigm. Discussing the technological advances and the new cinematic flows of consumption, she demonstrates that while contemporary Japanese film, on the one hand, expresses the transnational as an object of desire (i.e., a form of total cosmopolitanism), on the other hand, that desire is indeed inseparable from Japan’s national identity. Drawing on a substantial number of interviews with auteur directors such as Kore’eda Hirokazu, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, and Kawase Naomi, and incisive analysis of select film texts, this compelling, original work challenges the presumption that Hollywood is the only authentically “global” cinema.

The Japanese Cinema Book provides a new and comprehensive survey of one of the world's most fascinating and widely admired filmmaking regions. In terms of its historical coverage, broad thematic approach and the significant international range of its authors, it is the largest and most wide-ranging publication of its kind to date. Ranging from renowned directors such as Akira Kurosawa to neglected popular genres such as the film musical and encompassing topics such as ecology, spectatorship, home-movies, colonial history and relations with Hollywood and Europe, The Japanese Cinema Book presents a set of new, and often surprising, perspectives on Japanese film. With its plural range of interdisciplinary perspectives based on the expertise of established and emerging scholars and critics, The Japanese Cinema Book provides a groundbreaking picture of the different ways in which Japanese cinema may be understood as a local, regional, national, transnational and global phenomenon. The book's innovative structure combines general surveys of a particular historical topic or critical approach with various micro-level case studies. It argues there is no single fixed Japanese cinema, but instead a fluid and varied field of Japanese filmmaking cultures that continue to exist in a dynamic relationship with other cinemas, media and regions. The Japanese Cinema Book is divided into seven inter-related sections: · Theories and Approaches · * Institutions and Industry · * Film Style · * Genre · * Times and Spaces of Representation · * Social Contexts · * Flows and Interactions

This book studies the key genres in contemporary Japanese cinema through analysis of their key representative films. It considers both those films whose generic lineage is clearly definable (samurai, yakuza, horror) as well as the singularity of several recent trends in the country's filmmaking (such as magic realist filmmaking).

This volume collects contributions written by eight authors interested in different research areas in East Asian Studies. Divided into a Japanese and a Chinese section, it explores topics ranging from East Asian literatures to contact linguistics and sociology. The Japanese section contains four essays about contemporary Japanese cinema and different aspects of Japanese modern and contemporary literature (i.e. the literary motif of kame naku, ‘crying turtle’, yuri manga, and tenkō bungaku, the ‘literature of conversion’). The Chinese section concerns two main macro-topics: on the one hand, it focuses on issues related to cultural contacts between Italy and China; on the other hand, it deals with Chinese migration to Italy, highlighting socio-historical aspects and cultural production.

This book explores the rich complexity of Japan’s film history by tracing how cinema has been continually reshaped through its dynamic engagement within a shifting media ecology. Focusing on techniques that draw attention to the interval between frames on the filmstrip, something that is generally obscured in narrative film, Lee uncovers a chief mechanism by which, from its earliest period, the medium has capitalized on its materiality to instantiate its contemporaneity. In doing so, cinema has bound itself tightly with adjacent visual forms such as anime and manga to redefine itself across its history of interaction with new media, including television, video, and digital formats. Japanese Cinema Between Frames is a bold examination of Japanese film aesthetics that reframes the nation’s cinema history, illuminating processes that have both contributed to the unique texture of Japanese films and yoked the nation’s cinema to the global sphere of film history.

Like its predecessors, Directory of World Cinema: Japan 3 endeavours to move scholarly criticism of Japanese film out of the academy and into the hands of cinephiles the world over. This volume will be warmly welcomed by those with an interest in Japanese cinema that extends beyond its established names to equally remarkable filmmakers who have yet to receive such rigorous attention.

This book explores the phenomenon of V-Cinema, founded in Japan in 1989 as a distribution system for direct-to-video movies which film companies began making having failed to recoup their investment in big budget films. It examines how studios and directors worked quickly to capitalize on niche markets or upcoming and current trends, and how as a result this period of history in Japanese cinema was an exceptionally diverse and vibrant film scene. It highlights how, although the V-Cinema industry declined from around 1995, the explosion in quantity and variety of such movies established and cemented many specific genres of Japanese film. Importantly the book argues that film scholars who have long looked down on video as a substandard medium without scholarly interest have been wrong to do so, and that V-Cinema challenges accepted notions of cultural value, providing insight into the formation of cinematic canons and inviting us to rethink what is meant by "Japanese cinema".

Go beyond Kurosawa and discover an up-to-date and rigorous examination of historical and modern Japanese cinema In A Companion to Japanese Cinema, distinguished cinematic researcher David Desser delivers insightful new material on a fascinating subject, ranging from the introduction and exploration of under-appreciated directors, like Uchida Tomu and Yoshimura Kozaburo, to an appreciation of the Golden Age of Japanese cinema from the point of view of little-known stars and genres of the 1950s. This Companion includes new resources that deal in-depth with the issue of gender in Japanese cinema, including a sustained analysis of Kawase Naomi, arguably the most important female director in Japanese film history. Readers will appreciate the astute material on the connections and relationships that tie together Japanese television and cinema, with implications for understanding the modern state of Japanese film. The Companion concludes with a discussion of the Japanese media’s response to the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami that devastated the nation. The book also includes: A thorough introduction to the History, Ideology, and Aesthetics of Japanese cinema, including discussions of Kyoto as the cinematic center of Japan and the Pure Film Movement and modern Japanese film style An exploration of the background to the famous story of Taki no Shiraito and the significant and underappreciated contributions of directors Uchida Tomu, as well as Yoshimura Kozaburo A rigorous comparison of old and new Japanese cinema, including treatments of Ainu in documentary films and modernity in film exhibition Practical discussions of intermediality, including treatments of scriptwriting in the 1930s and the influence of film on Japanese television Perfect for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students studying Japanese and Asian cinema, A Companion to Japanese Cinema is a must-read reference for anyone seeking an insightful and contemporary discussion of modern scholarship in Japanese cinema in the 20th and 21st centuries.