Japanese Film in Global Context

There’s a Japanese film industry, and then there’s ‘Japanese Cinema’ – a construct we imagine and create through the stories we tell about it. In the past, ‘Japanese Cinema’ has been imagined in the West as a story of auteurs (Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa), esoteric national styles (Ozu’s tatami-inspired low- level frame), and bizarre genres (Pink eiga and kaiju films), and certainly these stories are there for the telling. This course aims to tell a different story – one that puts Japanese film and filmmakers squarely in the context of global film, as one participant in a transnational conversation about film style, narrative, and industries that has continued since the earliest days of cinema. In this course, we will chronologically trace the various intersections of Japanese cinema with industries and filmmakers in Europe, the United States, and East Asia. We will discuss the transcultural give and take of film form, theory, and storytelling, beginning with the late 19th Century screenings of Lumière films on their portable projector/camera, the Cinématographe, and ending with regional co-productions and the impact of media convergence and digital distribution