Introduction. The Misleading Discovery of Japanese National Cinema

Marcos Centeno Martín

doi:10.3390/arts7040087

Abstract

The Western ‘discovery’ of Japanese cinema in the 1950s prompted scholars to articulate essentialist visions understanding its singularities as a result of its isolation from the rest of the world and its close links to local aesthetic and philosophical traditions. Recent approaches however, have evidenced the limitations of this paradigm of ‘national cinema’. Higson (1989) opened a critical discussion on the existing consumption, text and production-based approaches to this concept. This article draws on Higson´s contribution and calls into question traditional theorising of Japanese film as a national cinema. Contradictions are illustrated by assessing the other side of the ‘discovery’ of Japanese cinema: certain gendaigeki works that succeeded at the domestic box office while jidaigeki burst into European film festivals. The Taiyōzoku and subsequent Mukokuseki Action films created a new postwar iconography by adapting codes of representation from Hollywood youth and western films. This article does not attempt to deny the uniqueness of this film culture, but rather seeks to highlight the need to reformulate the paradigm of national cinema in the Japanese case, and illustrate the sense in which it was created from outside, failing to recognise its reach transnational intertextuality.

Highlights

The Misleading Discovery of Japanese National CinemaMarcos P
Since the postwar discovery of Japanese cinema in Western Europe and the U.S, there has been a tendency to define it as an example of national cinema through essentialist visions, understanding its uniqueness as a result of its isolation from the rest of the world
National cinema is assessed in relation to its local aesthetic and philosophical traditions, and authors interrogate how and if it reflects the nation itself

Summary

Introduction

Since the postwar discovery of Japanese cinema in Western Europe and the U.S, there has been a tendency to define it as an example of national cinema through essentialist visions, understanding its uniqueness as a result of its isolation from the rest of the world. There are two methods for establishing a coherent imaginary of national cinema: First, looking outward, beyond its borders, comparing it to other cinemas, highlighting its difference and considering it in terms of its degrees of otherness This approach was generally applied in terms of opposition to Hollywood in order to assess how ‘national cinema’ challenges the institutional mode of representation.. This work proposed aturn to the Orient’ that consisted of interrogating those aesthetic and philosophical developments that differed from those evolved in the West, a methodology applied by Bordwell and Thomson (1976).3 They were major contributions, since they highlighted the value of Japanese cinema as opposed to those critics who lamented its apparent delay in adapting Western narrative codes, these ideas brought some paradoxes, such as describing Ozu and Mizoguchi’s classicism as modernist because it did not fit within Western aesthetic and narrative development. This point was never developed in his book, Burch opens interesting possibilities for studying Japanese specificity from its singular adaptation of Western codes

The ‘Kimono Effect’

Imagining a ‘Nation’

Cultural Products beyond National Boundaries

Transculturality in the Domestic Market

Nikkatsu’s right

Conclusions