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Introduction. The Misleading Discovery of Japanese ‘National Cinema’.
Version 1
: Received: 18 September 2018 / Approved: 18 September 2018 / Online: 18 September 2018 (09:49:29 CEST)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Centeno Martín, M.P. Introduction. The Misleading Discovery of Japanese National Cinema. Arts 2018, 7, 87. Centeno Martín, M.P. Introduction. The Misleading Discovery of Japanese National Cinema. Arts 2018, 7, 87.
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 andproduction-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 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.
Keywords
National Cinema; Transnational Japanese Film; taiyōzoku; mukokuseki;’kimono effect’; youth icons; postwar film festivals.
Subject
Arts and Humanities, Film, Radio and Television
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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