Gender Trouble at the Cinema

Abstract

This chapter explores the gender of the early postwar cinema audience, and its implications for the sharp decline in cinema attendance that set in after 1958. During the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945-1952), female audiences, particularly children and teenaged girls, became the imagined market for censored cinema content designed to support the democratic re-education of the Japanese populace. Yet an ethnographic approach gives a more conflicted picture of the cinema audience who viewed these narratives, demonstrating that an easy inference of mass female viewership from female-oriented film content, marketing, and censorship is not supported by the memories of many female viewers. Analyzing the memories of female viewers who engaged with the cinema and its stories between 1945 and 1968, this chapter posits some nuanced suggestions for the steep decline in cinema attendance into the 1960s. Contrasting the political goals that the Occupation forces expressed for cinema culture with the everyday restrictions experienced by female cinema-goers, this chapter reveals some structural limitations of using cinema narratives to generate political change. In the next chapter, the relationship between a political or politicized sense of self, and cinema narratives, is further explored, using the example of a dedicated politicized film club.