Star gazing: Sight lines and studio brands in post-war Japanese film posters

Abstract

ABSTRACTParatexts are the materials that surround a target text (e.g. a film), but they are more than marketing campaigns and bonus features; they manage context and manipulate meaning-making. Film posters act as ‘entryway paratexts’, texts that prepare and inform audience expectations before they encounter the primary media. A poster's main purpose is to usher potential spectators from the street into the theater by visually transporting moviegoers into the storyworld of the film before they even move an inch. Japanese film posters of the 1950s and 1960s — the second Golden Age of studio cinema — did little to deliver a sense of narrative space. Instead, posters act almost solely as celebrity vessels that transported spectators not to filmic worlds but to brand and genre consciousness, both visual metonyms for individual studios. As promotional devices, the advertisements were primarily designed around the figure of the star, who, in turn, promoted his or her parent production house, at the expense of storyworld creation. Overemphasis of star image in the film posters of postwar Japan conveyed an orchestrated gaze that played a part in both the gendered polarization of movie-going audiences and dwindling ticket sales.