Japanese Horror Cinema And Deleuze

Using theories of national, transnational and world cinema, and genre theories and psychoanalysis as the basis of its argument, Japanese Horror Cinema and Deleuze argues that these understandings of Japanese horror films can be extended in new ways through the philosophy of Deleuze. In particular, the complexities and nuances of how films like Ju-On: The Grudge (2002), Audition (1999) and Kairo (2001) (and beyond) form dynamic, transformative global networks between industries, directors and audiences can be considered. Furthermore, understandings of how key horror tropes and motifs apply to these films (and others more broadly), such as the idea of the “monstrous-feminine”, can be transformed, allowing these models to become more flexible.

Japanese Horror and the Transnational Cinema of Sensations undertakes a critical reassessment of Japanese horror cinema by attending to its intermediality and transnational hybridity in relation to world horror cinema. Neither a conventional film history nor a thematic survey of Japanese horror cinema, this study offers a transnational analysis of selected films from new angles that shed light on previously ignored aspects of the genre, including sound design, framing techniques, and lighting, as well as the slow attack and long release times of J-horror’s slow-burn style, which have contributed significantly to the development of its dread-filled cinema of sensations.

Using theories of national, transnational and world cinema, and genre theories and psychoanlaysis as the basis of its argument, Japanese Horror Cinema and Deleuze argues that these understandings of Japanese horror films can be extended in new ways through the philosophy of Deleuze. In particular, the complexities and nuances of how films like Ju-On: The Grudge (2002), Audition (1999) and Kairo (2001) (and beyond) form dynamic, transformative global networks between industries, directors and audiences can be considered. Furthermore, understandings of how key horror tropes and motifs apply to these films (and others more broadly), such as the idea of the “monstrous-feminine”, can be transformed, allowing these models to become more flexible.

David Deamer establishes the first ever sustained encounter between Gilles Deleuze's Cinema books and post-war Japanese cinema, exploring how Japanese films responded to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From the early days of occupation political censorship to the social and cultural freedoms of the 1960s and beyond, the book examines how images of the nuclear event appear in post-war Japanese cinema. Each chapter begins by focusing upon one or more of three key Deleuzian themes – image, history and thought – before going on to look at a selection of films from 1945 to the present day. These include movies by well-known directors Kurosawa Akira, Shindo Kaneto, Oshima Nagisa and Imamura Shohei; popular and cult classics – Godzilla (1954), Akira (1988) and Tetsuo (1989); contemporary genre flicks – Ring (1998), Dead or Alive (1999) and Casshern (2004); the avant-garde and rarely seen documentaries. The author provides a series of tables to clarify the conceptual components deployed within the text, establishing a unique addition to Deleuze and cinema studies.

This book is the first collection of essays to offer detailed examinations of the role that close attention to individual films plays in the philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s work on cinema. In the last two decades, Deleuze's two books on film have had an enormous influence on Film Studies, profoundly affecting thinking about movement, time, history, and other topics. Theoretically ambitious and philosophically rich but clearly written by a broad range of established and emerging international film scholars, the chapters in this volume will both contribute to, and in places challenge, the vibrant field of Deleuzian film studies. Topics covered range from the relationship of Deleuze to film criticism; the role of theories of movement; and studies of works by major filmmakers including Federico Fellini, Werner Herzog, Vincente Minnelli, and Orson Welles. This book will be of interest not only to specialists in Deleuze but to anybody engaged with the close study of film and its philosophical ramifications.

Over the last two decades, Japanese filmmakers have produced some of the most important and innovative works of cinematic horror. At once visually arresting, philosophically complex, and politically charged, films by directors like Tsukamoto Shinya (Tetsuo: The Iron Man [1988] and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer [1992]), Sato Hisayasu (Muscle [1988] and Naked Blood [1995]) Kurosawa Kiyoshi (Cure [1997], Séance [2000], and Kaïro [2001]), Nakata Hideo (Ringu [1998], Ringu II [1999], and Dark Water [2002]), and Miike Takashi (Audition [1999] and Ichi the Killer [2001]) continually revisit and redefine the horror genre in both its Japanese and global contexts. In the process, these and other directors of contemporary Japanese horror film consistently contribute exciting and important new visions, from postmodern reworkings of traditional avenging spirit narratives to groundbreaking works of cinematic terror that position depictions of radical or ‘monstrous’ alterity/hybridity as metaphors for larger socio-political concerns, including shifting gender roles, reconsiderations of the importance of the extended family as a social institution, and reconceptualisations of the very notion of cultural and national boundaries.

This anthology explores the resilience and ubiquity of the Gothic in cinema from its earliest days to its most contemporary iterations.