Film Journals: An Update: Animation Magazine . ; Black Film Review . ; Cineaction! . ; Columbia Film View . ; Field of Vision . ; Film Theory . ; Film History . ; Illusions . ; Motion Picture . ; The New Magic Lantern Journal . ; On Film . ; Opsis . ; The Perfect Vision . ; Persistence of Vision . ; Picture House . ; Premiere . ; Re/Search .

1988 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-32
Author(s):  
Anthony Slide
Author(s):  
Sangjoon Lee

This book explores the ways in which postwar Asian cinema was shaped by transnational collaborations and competitions between newly independent and colonial states at the height of Cold War politics. The book adopts a simultaneously global and regional approach when analyzing the region's film cultures and industries. New economic conditions in the Asian region and shared postwar experiences among the early cinema entrepreneurs were influenced by Cold War politics, US cultural diplomacy, and intensified cultural flows during the 1950s and 1960s. The book reconstructs Asian film history in light of the international relationships forged, broken, and re-established as the influence of the non-aligned movement grew across the Cold War. The book elucidates how motion picture executives, creative personnel, policy makers, and intellectuals in East and Southeast Asia aspired to industrialize their Hollywood-inspired system in order to expand the market and raise the competitiveness of their cultural products. They did this by forming the Federation of Motion Picture Producers in Asia, co-hosting the Asian Film Festival, and co-producing films. The book demonstrates that the emergence of the first intensive postwar film producers' network in Asia was, in large part, the offspring of Cold War cultural politics and the product of American hegemony. Film festivals that took place in cities as diverse as Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Kuala Lumpur were annual showcases of cinematic talent as well as opportunities for the Central Intelligence Agency to establish and maintain cultural, political, and institutional linkages between the United States and Asia during the Cold War. This book reanimates this almost-forgotten history of cinema and the film industry in Asia.


STUDIUM ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 245-272
Author(s):  
Marcos Centeno Martín

Resumen La construcción del cine japonés como cine nacional ha partido a menudo de una visión esencialista que ha ignorado la dimensión transnacional de esta filmografía. Por un lado, el descubrimiento occidental de ciertos autores japoneses en los años cincuenta condujo a la articulación del paradigma del cine nacional japonés a partir de películas dirigidas a asombrar al público europeo con imágenes exóticas de Japón. Los grandes maestros, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi y Ozu fueron escogidos como representantes de una supuesta japonesidad cinematográfica ignorando el peso de Occidente en sus obras. Por otro lado, el estudio de este corpus tradicionalmente ha evolucionado con herramientas teóricas desarrolladas en Occidente y necesita renovarse con conceptos de la tradición cultural, estética y filosófica propia. Pero además, es necesario evaluar cómo se implementaron los elementos del lenguaje fílmico en Japón para entender su relativismo respecto a la historia general del cine. Sus usos y formas no siempre han coincidido con los desarrollos occidentales, de forma que conceptos fílmicos occidentales no han tenido exactamente el mismo significado en el contexto japonés. Palabras clave: cine japonés, cine nacional, transnacionalidad teoría fílmica, cine de postguerra   Abstract The construction of Japanese cinema as a national cinema has often drawn on a essentialist vision neglecting the transnational nature of this filmography. On the one hand, the Western discovery of certain Japanese authors in the fifties triggered the articulation of the paradigm of the Japanese “national cinema” from films aiming to astonish European audiences with exotic images of Japan. The great masters, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and Ozu, were chosen as main representatives of the apparent cinematographic japaneseness neglecting the weight of the West on their works. On the other hand, the study of this corpus has been traditionally evolved with theoretical tools developed in the West and need a renewal with concepts taken from Japanese philosophical, aesthetic and cultural tradition. Moreover, it is necessary to assess how the film language elements were implemented in Japan in order to understand its relativism regarding the general film history. Their usages and forms were not always equivalent to those in the West and as a consequence, Western concepts ended up having different meanings in the Japanese context. Key words: Japanese cinema, national cinema, transnationality, film theory, postwar cinema


2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 33-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Casetti

Abstract Over the past ten years, film theory has been openly challenged by the tenets of film history, cultural studies, aesthetics and philosophy. The decline of so called “Grand Theory” has made possible the emergence of a new paradigm. This relative eclipsing of film theory is the sign of a three-fold problem within cinema studies. First, film in its new formats and with its new supports is no longer a unique and consistent object which can be subjected to specific forms of research. Film theory’s weakness is thus a sign that “film,” as an object, is now dispersed. Second, cinema has always been at the crossroads of a great number of different fields. Its history is an amalgam of the history of media, the performing arts, visual perception, modern forms of subjectivity, etc. Film theory’s weakness is symptomatic of the urgent need to rethink a history that was never unique or unified. Third, in our post-modern era any recourse to rationality seems to be a trap, the object of study itself being refractory to any kind of schematization. Film theory’s weakness is indicative of the need to maintain an open approach to the subject. Through these three issues, we are witnessing the emergence of a new theory, both informal and dispersed, which is manifested in a variety of discourses that are content to gloss the phenomenon in order better to understand the cinema and facilitate its social recognition.


Tanaka Kinuyo ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 187-203
Author(s):  
Yuka Kanno

Yuka Kanno uses the final chapter of the book to examine Girls of Dark (Onna bakari no yoru, 1961), a film which follows the lives of ex-prostitutes in a rehabilitation facility. Within an exclusively female community as diverse in age as personality, Japan’s first lesbian film character emerges, defying traditional representations of lesbianism in Japanese popular culture. Kanno argues that this unusual character is pivotal to understanding of the desire, solidarity and conflict which characterises the female community in the film. The female continuum is presented as both diegetic and relational by including the narrative space of the film and that embodied by the three women who collaborated to produce it: Tanaka Kinuyo (director), Yana Masako (novelist), and Tanaka Sumie (scriptwriter). Using queer and feminist theory, Kanno’s fascinating and innovative discussion seeks to relocate the concept of women’s cinema within Japanese film history and film theory.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-85
Author(s):  
Hana Washitani

Japanese gentō (originally a translation of the English term “magic lantern”) is a still-image projection system that enlarges images on a transparent slide or film and projects them onto a large screen. Most studies argue that the magic lantern, stereopticon, or gentō thrived from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries and that their use declined in the early twentieth century with the arrival of the motion picture. This article examines the revival and redevelopment of gentō in mid-twentieth-century Japan, focusing on its use in 1950s social movements (including labor, social welfare, and political protest movements) and exploring how independent gentō works represented the landscapes, histories, and everyday lives threatened by the presence of U.S. military forces in Japan. It also examines the representation of female gender and sexuality in these gentō works, looking at the ways they depict women as both symbols of a victimized and humiliated homeland and as threats to the order of paternalistic family and society in Japan.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Justin Gautreau

The book’s introduction traces the emergence of so-called motion picture fiction in the pages of industry fan magazines. Such novels as Robert Carlton Brown’s My Experience as a Film Favorite (published in Photoplay in 1913 and 1914) and, later, Edward J. Clode’s My Strange Life: The Intimate Life Story of a Moving Picture Actress (published in 1915 as a standalone book) positioned readers to imagine themselves as stars at a time when the film industry was promoting itself as a place of romance and opportunity. The function of motion picture fiction, however, took a swift turn following a string of celebrity scandals in the 1920s. After laying out the structure for the rest of the book and touching on other studies on the Hollywood novel, the introduction highlights the Hollywood novel’s relevance to and resonance with film theory and more contemporary scandal in the entertainment industry.


Author(s):  
Babak Geranfar

The question of the relation between Film and philosophy has been at the center of many intellectual debates since the foundation of cinema. It has been paraphrased and articulated in many disciplines such as Philosophy of Film, Film-Philosophy, Philosophy of Motion Pictures, Philosophy of Moving Images, even Film Theory. Nevertheless, as much as the technical aspects of the movies developed rapidly, the philosophical questions around it became more and more specific and the answers became more fallible by the end of the day. If you could agree before with some of the ontological conclusions of Bazin, Deleuze, Badiou or Cavell about celluloid-based Film, you certainly cannot share that agreement to generalize that to the kind of digital imagery that we call ‘Film’ today, nor can you justify the Hologram or 3D IMAX footage as constituents of a motion picture. The irony is that the old question, ‘what is Film?’, is as often and as rapidly revised as the question, “what is philosophy?”.


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