Japanese Transnational Cinema

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. In other words, 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. One of the earliest examples of this "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. This critical tendency of trying to find in Japanese cinema a way of filmmaking alternative to Hollywood's was consistent with what filmmakers of New Waves and Third Cinemas in the 1960s and 70s aimed at and practiced.Any film critics and historians emphasising "national" essence in Japanese films are prone to conceptual mistakes: such reductive views lead to the underestimation of filmmakers' full artistic creativity. Such an arbitrary stance results in neglecting the complex interactions of local, transnational and global cinematic components. Cinema has been international since its inception, and in this sense Japanese cinema, one of the oldest in the world, is not an exception. The paradigm of "National Cinema" started to be increasingly called into question from the late 1980s (Higson 1989;Elsaesser 1989), and soon new methodological approaches to Japanese cinema, too, started to be proposed by various scholars (Gerow 1993;Andrew and Raine 1993;Iwamoto 1993), which helped bring understanding of the contradictions and fault lines of "distant observers" and cast light on the dialectical relationships in filming practice, and film theory and criticism between Japan and the rest of the world.During the last decade, the concept of transnationality in cinema has pervaded Film Studies, and in 2010 a new journal, Transnational Cinemas, was launched to host the ongoing discussions in this field. Ezra and Rowden (2006) pioneered the theorization of transnational film, which has been followed by studies engaged in nailing down the meanings of transnational cinema (