Japan and the “Transnational Cinema”

Marcos P Centeno Martín,Nori Morita

doi:10.3390/arts9020050

Abstract

Since the Western “discovery” of Japanese cinema in the 1950s, there has been a tendency among both Film Studies and Japanese Studies scholars to draw on essentialist visions of Japanese Cinema, understating its uniqueness as a consequence of its isolation from the rest of the world [...]

Highlights

Since the Western “discovery” of Japanese cinema in the 1950s, there has been a tendency among both Film Studies and Japanese Studies scholars to draw on essentialist visions of Japanese Cinema, understating its uniqueness as a consequence of its isolation from the rest of the world
Japanese Cinema has often been regarded as an inseparable part of Japan’s unique culture, and film scholars have been making tremendous efforts to prove that Japanese Cinema developed independently of Western forms of cinematic representation
“Oriental turn” can be found in Burch’s influential text To the Distant Observer (1979), which highlighted how the evolution of Japanese film was thickly informed by its own cultural heritage and developed in correlation with its artistic, aesthetic, and philosophical traditions

Summary

Introduction

This Arts Special Issue expands contemporary discussions of transnational Japanese cinema by proposing new theoretical frameworks, analytical methodologies and critical approaches. Perspectives that neglect the extraordinary transnationality and even global nature of Japanese film in terms of its aesthetics, narratives and theoretical approaches, as well as its production, consumption and distribution systems.

Objectives

Results

Conclusion