In The End of Japanese Cinema Alexander Zahlten moves film theory beyond the confines of film itself, attending to the emergence of new kinds of aesthetics, politics, temporalities, and understandings of film and media. He traces the evolution of a new media ecology through deep historical analyses of the Japanese film industry from the 1960s to the 2000s. Zahlten focuses on three popular industrial genres: Pink Film (independently distributed softcore pornographic films), Kadokawa (big-budget productions as part of a transmedia strategy), and V-Cinema (direct-to-video films). He examines the conditions of these films' production to demonstrate how the media industry itself becomes part of the politics of the media text and to highlight the complex negotiation between media and politics, culture, and identity in Japan. Zahlten points to a different history of film, one in which a once-powerful film industry transformed into becoming only one component within a complex media-mix ecology. In so doing, Zahlten opens new paths for uncovering similar broad processes in other large media societies.
A Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
By:
Alexander Zahlten
Imprint: Duke University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9780822369448
ISBN 10: 0822369443
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 06 October 2017
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1. Establishing Pink Film 25 2. Pink Times and Pink Spaces 63 3. Kadokawa Film 96 4. The Radicalization of Kadokawa Film 122 5. V-Cinema 152 6. Subgenres: Violence, Finances, Sex, and True Accounts 176 Conclusion: Present Histories 204 Notes 225 Bibliography 273 Index 285
Alexander Zahlten is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University and coeditor of Media Theory in Japan, also published by Duke University Press.
Reviews for The End of Japanese Cinema: Industrial Genres, National Times, and Media Ecologies
The End of Japanese Cinema is an innovative account of some significant currents within modern Japanese film which have tended to be marginalised. -- Alexander Jacoby * Sight & Sound * Deeply thought-provoking. . . . Alexander Zahlten's study represents a major scholarly contribution to the fields of Japanese film and media studies and allied disciplines. The End of Japanese Cinema is a remarkable achievement in the scholarship of film and media, both from and in Japan. -- Rea Amit * Film Quarterly * Provocative. -- Etsuo Kono * Japan News * A rich historical analysis. Recommended. -- S. Pepper * Choice *
