Routledge Handbook Of Japanese Cinema Joanne Bernardi Shota T Ogawa by Joanne Bernardi, Shota T. Ogawa 9781138685529, 1138685526 instant download after payment.

The study of Japanese cinema has long played a vital role in the academic discipline of film studies as a major non-Western tradition and a paradigmatic national cinema. Needless to say, from the outset, discursive attempts to define Japanese cinema have been shaped by the circulation of films as material objects. Widely circulated in 16mm prints across campuses, film circles, and art houses around the world from the 1960s throughout the 1970s, post-war feature films by canonical directors like Ozu Yasujirō, Mizoguchi Kenji, and Kurosawa Akira contributed to the development and emerging profile of film studies in higher education. Even after the advent of VHS consumer formats in the 1980s, such titles dominated teaching and scholarship grounded in auteur criticism, national cinema, and world cinema. Over the past two decades, however, DVDs of previously inaccessible films, enhanced marketing of canonical films, streaming access, and innovative film festival programming have created new audiences for Japanese cinema, and new directions for teaching and research. At the same time, the broader field of cinema studies has experienced a sea change in response to an increase in venues for archival research, shifting geopolitics, the emergence of a multidisciplinary research community across several continents, and the proliferation of new media formats and means of access brought about by digital technology.1 Correspondingly, the discovery, preservation, and research of films produced and exhibited in colonial Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan—an outcome of increased contacts across East Asia in the post-Cold War era—have exposed the blind spot in discussing Japanese cinema within the strict confines of a national framework or along the East–West axis.2 The challenges of reframing Japanese cinema vis-à-vis the transnational dynamics of colonialism, trans-Pacific immigration, and globalization have, in turn, facilitated closer engagement by film researchers with the adjacent fields of modern history, cultural studies, media studies, and archive studies.