Japan’s film industry has gone through dramatic changes in recent decades, as international consumer forces and transnational talent have brought unprecedented engagement with global trends. With careful research and also unique first-person observations drawn from years of working within the international industry of Japanese film, the author aims to examine how different generations of Japanese filmmakers engaged and interacted with the structural opportunities and limitations posed by external forces, and how their subjectivity has been shaped by their transnational experiences and has changed as a result. Having been through the globalization of the last part of the twentieth century, are Japanese themselves and overseas consumers of Japanese culture really becoming more cosmopolitan? If so, what does it mean for Japan’s national culture and the traditional sense of national belonging among Japanese people?

The Japanese Cinema Book provides a new and comprehensive survey of one of the world's most fascinating and widely admired filmmaking regions. In terms of its historical coverage, broad thematic approach and the significant international range of its authors, it is the largest and most wide-ranging publication of its kind to date. Ranging from renowned directors such as Akira Kurosawa to neglected popular genres such as the film musical and encompassing topics such as ecology, spectatorship, home-movies, colonial history and relations with Hollywood and Europe, The Japanese Cinema Book presents a set of new, and often surprising, perspectives on Japanese film. With its plural range of interdisciplinary perspectives based on the expertise of established and emerging scholars and critics, The Japanese Cinema Book provides a groundbreaking picture of the different ways in which Japanese cinema may be understood as a local, regional, national, transnational and global phenomenon. The book's innovative structure combines general surveys of a particular historical topic or critical approach with various micro-level case studies. It argues there is no single fixed Japanese cinema, but instead a fluid and varied field of Japanese filmmaking cultures that continue to exist in a dynamic relationship with other cinemas, media and regions. The Japanese Cinema Book is divided into seven inter-related sections: · Theories and Approaches · * Institutions and Industry · * Film Style · * Genre · * Times and Spaces of Representation · * Social Contexts · * Flows and Interactions

The Global Film Book is an accessible and entertaining exploration of the development of film as global industry and art form, written especially for students and introducing readers to the rich and varied cinematic landscape beyond Hollywood. Highlighting areas of difference and similarity in film economies and audiences, as well as form, genre and narrative, this textbook considers a broad range of examples and up to date industry data from Europe, Africa, Asia, Australasia and Latin America. Author Roy Stafford combines detailed studies of indigenous film and television cultures with cross border, global and online entertainment operations, including examples from Nollywood to Korean Cinema, via telenovelas and Nordic crime drama. The Global Film Book demonstrates a number of contrasting models of contemporary production, distribution and consumption of film worldwide, charting and analysing the past, present and potential futures for film throughout the world. The book also provides students with: a series of exploratory pathways into film culture worldwide illuminating analyses and suggestions for further readings and viewing, alongside explanatory margin notes and case studies a user friendly text design, featuring over 120 colour images a dynamic and comprehensive blog, online at www.globalfilmstudies.com, providing updates and extensions of case studies in the book and analysis of the latest developments in global film issues.

East Asia largely functions as a single film and media market, but behind it exists a multifaceted world of coproduction crossing linguistic and national borders. In Coproducing Asia, Stephanie DeBoer guides readers through a rich genealogy of regional film and media coproduction, all the while introducing innovative methods for their examination across decades, locations, and scales of production in East Asia and beyond. Beginning with the present and moving back in time, Coproducing Asia paints a picture of the assemblages of coproduction in East Asia and their negotiation of Cold War geopolitics and imperial legacies along with the emergence of China as a global market. Addressing wide-screen international romances of the early 1960s, technology transfers of Cold War action cinema, Sino–Japanese “friendship” TV collaborations, Asian omnibus film and video, and more recent China-centered blockbusters, DeBoer deftly contextualizes each case study while accounting for the difficulties involved in the cultural, creative, and industry mediations associated with coproduction. Based on rarely seen archival research as well as interviews with producers in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Shanghai, Coproducing Asia provides compelling frames for understanding the significance of film and media coproduction in East Asia, making clear that it is not only a site of technological transformation but also an arena for competing senses of regional location and place.

This book studies the key genres in contemporary Japanese cinema through analysis of their key representative films. It considers both those films whose generic lineage is clearly definable (samurai, yakuza, horror) as well as the singularity of several recent trends in the country's filmmaking (such as magic realist filmmaking).

Received an Honorable Mention for the 2017 British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) Best Monograph Award From Shortbus to Shame and from Oldboy to Irreversible, film festival premieres regularly make international headlines for their shockingly graphic depictions of sex and violence. Film critics and scholars alike often regard these movies as the work of visionary auteurs, hailing directors like Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier as heirs to a tradition of transgressive art. In this provocative new book, Mattias Frey offers a very different perspective on these films, exposing how they are also calculated products, designed to achieve global notoriety in a competitive marketplace. Paying close attention to the discourses employed by film critics, distributors, and filmmakers themselves, Extreme Cinema examines the various tightropes that must be walked when selling transgressive art films to discerning audiences, distinguishing them from generic horror, pornography, and Hollywood product while simultaneously hyping their salacious content. Deftly tracing the links between the local and the global, Frey also shows how the directors and distributors of extreme art house fare from both Europe and East Asia have significant incentives to exaggerate the exotic elements that would differentiate them from Anglo-American product. Extreme Cinema also includes original interviews with the programmers of several leading international film festivals and with niche distributors and exhibitors, giving readers a revealing look at how these institutions enjoy a symbiotic relationship with the “taboo-breakers” of art house cinema. Frey also demonstrates how these apparently transgressive films actually operate within a strict set of codes and conventions, carefully calibrated to perpetuate a media industry that fuels itself on provocation.

Go beyond Kurosawa and discover an up-to-date and rigorous examination of historical and modern Japanese cinema In A Companion to Japanese Cinema, distinguished cinematic researcher David Desser delivers insightful new material on a fascinating subject, ranging from the introduction and exploration of under-appreciated directors, like Uchida Tomu and Yoshimura Kozaburo, to an appreciation of the Golden Age of Japanese cinema from the point of view of little-known stars and genres of the 1950s. This Companion includes new resources that deal in-depth with the issue of gender in Japanese cinema, including a sustained analysis of Kawase Naomi, arguably the most important female director in Japanese film history. Readers will appreciate the astute material on the connections and relationships that tie together Japanese television and cinema, with implications for understanding the modern state of Japanese film. The Companion concludes with a discussion of the Japanese media’s response to the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami that devastated the nation. The book also includes: A thorough introduction to the History, Ideology, and Aesthetics of Japanese cinema, including discussions of Kyoto as the cinematic center of Japan and the Pure Film Movement and modern Japanese film style An exploration of the background to the famous story of Taki no Shiraito and the significant and underappreciated contributions of directors Uchida Tomu, as well as Yoshimura Kozaburo A rigorous comparison of old and new Japanese cinema, including treatments of Ainu in documentary films and modernity in film exhibition Practical discussions of intermediality, including treatments of scriptwriting in the 1930s and the influence of film on Japanese television Perfect for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students studying Japanese and Asian cinema, A Companion to Japanese Cinema is a must-read reference for anyone seeking an insightful and contemporary discussion of modern scholarship in Japanese cinema in the 20th and 21st centuries.

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".

This book offers insightful analysis of cultural representation in Japanese cinema of the early 21st century. The impact of transnational production practices on films such as Dolls (2002), Sukiyaki Western Django (2007), Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (2009), and 13 Assassins (2010) is considered through textual and empirical analysis. The author discusses contradictory forms of cultural representation – cultural concealment and cultural performance – and their relationship to both changing practices in the Japanese film industry and the global film market. Case studies take into account popular genres such as J Horror and jidaigeki period films, as well as the work of renowned filmmakers Takeshi Kitano, Takashi Miike, Shinya Tsukamoto and Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

This book provides a political and cultural exploration of the Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea since its inception in 1996. By paying a particular attention to the organizers' use of an Asian regionalization strategy, SooJeong Ahn reveals how the festival staked out a unique and influential position within a rapidly changing global landscape. Very little primary empirical research has been conducted to date on non-Western film festivals, though PIFF and Tokyo and Hong Kong have swiftly grown more exciting and influential as testing grounds for global cinema innovations. The initiation, development and growth of PIFF should be understood as resulting from productive tensions in the festival's efforts to serve local, regional and national constituencies. The book also reflects the complexities of rapid transformation in the South Korean film industry as it has reached out to the global market since the late 1990s. SooJeong Ahn worked for the Pusan International Film Festival between 1998 and 2002 and has completed a Ph.D. on film festivals at the University of Nottingham. Her recent publications include "Re-imagining the Past: Programming South Korean Retrospectives at PIFF," in Film International (Vol. 6, 2008), "Placing South Korean Cinema into Pusan International Film Festival: Programming Strategy in the Global/Local Context," in What a Difference a Region Makes: Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in North-East Asia (2009); "Re-mapping Asian Cinema: The Tenth Anniversary of PIFF in 2005" in Cinemas, Identities and Beyond (2010).