Shokutaku Jigoku Visions of Family Meals in Japanese Cinema

Cooking and dining scenes have been a ubiquitous presence in Japanese cinema since its inception, and the relationship between Japanese people and food has been frequently exploited to play out family dynamics, rites of passage, etc. Therefore, the dining room often becomes the place where drama unfolds in striking contrast with this supposedly safe environment. This paper focuses on three films where dining scenes are particularly relevant – Ozu Yasujirō’s The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952), Morita Yoshimitsu’s The Family Game (1983) and Miike Takashi’s Visitor Q (2001) – in order to analyse how Japanese cinema has documented the transformation of family relations in time.

Thinking, Feeling and Experiencing the “Empty Shot” in Cinema

This article introduces the unique Asian film technique of the “empty shot” ( kong jingtou 空镜头) from the perspective of Chinese philosophical thought and aesthetics. In Chinese cinema, the “empty shot” is understood as a shot comprised of nonhuman subjects, distinct from both the establishing shot and the cutaway. Perhaps due to the lack of understanding of its philosophical grounding, the “empty shot” has not received much attention in Anglophone film studies, and has been criticized as an overgeneralised concept. This article first relates the “empty shot” to the more widely accepted “pillow shot” in Anglophone studies of Japanese cinema. This article aims to make visible a non-anthropocentric worldview conveyed through the “empty shot”, and to make space for the potentialities of this film device, which may also be found in non-Chinese cinemas. It explains the “empty shot”’s central features: firstly, its visible scenes are imbued with invisible emotion, leaving space for the audience to feel what the characters are feeling. Second, it facilitates the generation of qi or “air” in a film, indicating the circulation of qi in a process of dynamic transformation between “actual” and “virtual”. Thirdly, the “empty shot” communicates with the audience, allowing them to more fully experience natural scenery and to encounter other beings while suspending everyday experiences, existing biases, and the separation between self and other.

The Japanese Cinema Book – FUJIKI Hideaki & Alastair PHILLIPS (eds)

Japanese film studies is an academic discipline and research community focusing on the multifaceted aspects of Japanese cinema. Deeply interdisciplinary, it employs theories, critical approaches and methods from different fields such as film studies and cultural studies to understand Japanese films as works of art, cultural products and social practices. What makes a film “Japanese”, and even what is a film, are far from easy questions, particularly in the globalised, transnational and digitalised world in which we now live, but nevertheless are issues that define the disciple and its historiography. Yomota Inuhiko puts it simply in [...]

The FPA, US Propaganda, and Postwar Japanese Cinema

This chapter recounts how Nagata Masaichi, president of Daiei Studio in Japan, pitched the idea of founding the Federation of Motion Picture Producers in Southeast Asia (FPA) and an annual Southeast Asian Film Festival. It discusses the consensus among American foreign officers stationed in Asia that communists had infiltrated the Japanese film industry since the end of the US occupation of Japan in April 1952. It also describes the activities of the “Reds” in the Japanese motion picture industry that is considered a threat to the United States' strategic Cold War interests in the Asia-Pacific region. The chapter cites Rashomon, which won the award for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars and elicited simultaneous respect and jealousy from other nations in the region. It elaborates how the unprecedented success of Rashomon rapidly established Nagata's presence in the Japanese film industry.