Japanese Film and the Challenge of Video

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-032-38797-0
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 196 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 310 g

Reihe: Media, Culture and Social Change in Asia

This book explores the phenomenon of V-Cinema, founded in Japan in 1989 as a distribution system for direct-to-video movies which film companies began making having failed to recoup their investment in big budget films. It examines how studios and directors worked quickly to capitalize on niche markets or upcoming and current trends, and how as a result this period of history in Japanese cinema was an exceptionally diverse and vibrant film scene. It highlights how, although the V-Cinema industry declined from around 1995, the explosion in quantity and variety of such movies established and cemented many specific genres of Japanese film. Importantly the book argues that film scholars who have long looked down on video as a substandard medium without scholarly interest have been wrong to do so, and that V-Cinema challenges accepted notions of cultural value, providing insight into the formation of cinematic canons and inviting us to rethink what is meant by "Japanese cinema".

Zielgruppe

Academic

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mes, Tom

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Stadt- und Regionalsoziologie
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Regionalwissenschaften, Regionalstudien
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein Empirische Sozialforschung, Statistik
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Scholars, Canons, and Videotape: Unboxing Japanese Cinema

2. Parallel Canons: Japanese Cinema in the Eyes of the World, 1951-2000

3. Video Revolutions: Models of Video Distribution in the U.S.A. and Japan

4. V-Cinema: A Domestic Model in Transnational Context

5. Accidental Auteurs: The Director in V-Cinema

6. Slaughterhouse V

Über Autor(innen)

Tom Mes is a Lecturer at Keio University, Japan