Introduction. The Misleading Discovery of Japanese National Cinema

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.

Japan and the “Transnational Cinema”

“…; How has the global cultural flow shaped Japanese creativity? (Kawashima 2019;Muñoz-Garnica 2018;Martinez 2018;Centeno Martín 2018). In addition, the film industry has developed complex structures, and the way it operates cannot be completely understood without taking into account its increasing transnational characteristics in production, distribution and consumption (Mestre Pérez 2018; Schoneveld 2019).…”

“…In addition, the film industry has developed complex structures, and the way it operates cannot be completely understood without taking into account its increasing transnational characteristics in production, distribution and consumption (Mestre Pérez 2018; Schoneveld 2019). Questioned, in that sense, is the extent to which films can still be regarded as products of a national domestic market when they are distributed and consumed in the transnational or even global market (Centeno Martín 2018;Martinez 2018). Additionally, Frisch (2019) points out the possibility that Japanese aesthetic and cultural traditions might provide useful tools to renew film theories that have traditionally been dominated by the Western canon of writings and create theoretical frameworks from a transnational perspective.…”