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Japanese Transnational Cinema • Marcos P Japanese Transnational Cinema Transnational Japanese • Marcos P. Centeno-Martín and P. • Marcos Morita Norimasa Japanese Transnational Cinema Edited by Marcos P. Centeno-Martín and Norimasa Morita Printed Edition of the Special Issue Published in Arts www.mdpi.com/journal/arts Japanese Transnational Cinema Japanese Transnational Cinema Special Issue Editors Marcos P. Centeno-Mart´ın Norimasa Morita MDPI • Basel • Beijing • Wuhan • Barcelona • Belgrade • Manchester • Tokyo • Cluj • Tianjin Special Issue Editors Marcos P. Centeno-Mart´ın Norimasa Morita University of London Waseda University UK Japan Editorial Office MDPI St. Alban-Anlage 66 4052 Basel, Switzerland This is a reprint of articles from the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Arts (ISSN 2076-0752) (available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/arts/special issues/Japanese Transnational Cinema). For citation purposes, cite each article independently as indicated on the article page online and as indicated below: LastName, A.A.; LastName, B.B.; LastName, C.C. Article Title. Journal Name Year, Article Number, Page Range. ISBN 978-3-03936-156-4 (Hbk) ISBN 978-3-03936-157-1 (PDF) Cover image courtesy of Nikkatsu and Almudena Garc´ıa Navarro. c 2020 by the authors. Articles in this book are Open Access and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows users to download, copy and build upon published articles, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. The book as a whole is distributed by MDPI under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. Acknowledgements: this special issue is an outcome of a wide project entitled “Japanese Transnational Cinema” led between Birkbeck, University of London and Waseda University, which counted on the collaboration of colleagues from European, Japanese and American universities as well as the generous support from DAIWA Anglo-Japanese (Ref: 197/13307) and Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation (Ref. No. 5558) and MEXT-Top Global University Project to whose generosity the editors are deeply indebted. Contents About the Special Issue Editors ..................................... ix Preface to ”Japanese Transnational Cinema” ..............................xi Marcos P. Centeno-Mart´ınand Norimasa Morita Japan and the “Transnational Cinema” Reprinted from: Arts 2020, 9, 50, doi:10.3390/arts9020050 ....................... 1 Marcos P. Centeno-Mart´ın Introduction. The Misleading Discovery of Japanese National Cinema Reprinted from: Arts 2018, 7, 87, doi:10.3390/arts7040087 ....................... 7 Dolores P. Martinez From ‘Scottish’ Play to Japanese Film: Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood Reprinted from: Arts 2018, 7, 50, doi:10.3390/arts7030050 ....................... 21 Simon Frisch The Aesthetics of Flow and Cut in the Way of Film: Towards Transnational Transfers of East Asian Concepts to Western Film Theory Reprinted from: Arts 2019, 8, 119, doi:10.3390/arts8030119 ...................... 33 Ferran de Vargas Japan’s New Left and New Wave. An Ideology’s Perspective as an Alternative to That of National Cinema Reprinted from: Arts 2019, 8, 1, doi:10.3390/arts8010001 ....................... 45 Griseldis Kirsch Gendering the Japanese Empire: Ri Koran¯ as ‘Transnational’ Star? Reprinted from: Arts 2019, 8, 153, doi:10.3390/arts8040153 ...................... 59 Kentaro Kawashima Metamorphosis as Origin—Koji Yamamura’s Short Animation Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor Reprinted from: Arts 2019, 8, 54, doi:10.3390/arts8020054 ....................... 67 Rosanna Mestre P´erez Japan in Spain. Japanese Culture through Spanish Eyes in the Film Gisaku Reprinted from: Arts 2018, 7, 93, doi:10.3390/arts7040093 ....................... 75 Miguel Mu ˜noz-Garnica Intertextuality and Mise en Abyme in Nobuhiro Suwa’s H Story and A Perfect Couple. Between European Modernity and Japan Reprinted from: Arts 2018, 7, 57, doi:10.3390/arts7040057 ....................... 89 Erin Schoneveld Naomi Kawase’s “Cinema of Place” Reprinted from: Arts 2019, 8, 43, doi:10.3390/arts8020043 .......................103 v About the Special Issue Editors Marcos P. Centeno-Mart´ın is Lecturer in Japanese Studies and coordinator of the Japanese Programme at Birkbeck, University of London. Before that, he worked for the department of Japan and Korea at SOAS, where he taught several courses on Japanese Cinema and convened the MA Global Cinemas and the Transcultural. Centeno Mart´ın has also served as Research Associate at Waseda University and Research Fellow at the Universitat de Valencia.` His research interests revolve around Japanese documentary film, Hani Susumu, film theory, transnationality, postwar avant-garde and the representation of minorities. Norimasa Morita is Professor in film and literary study and served as Dean of the School of International Liberal Studies and Vice-President for international affairs at Waseda University. He obtained his Ph.D. from University of Kent, Canterbury, in 1991 and has been teaching and researching mainly film and literary theory at Waseda University. His research interests include realism in film and literature, postmodernism, and adaptation practice and theory, and the topics of his recent publications include non-English adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, fictionalisation of historical figures and events, and Japanese writers and filmmakers in Great Britain. vii Preface to ”Japanese Transnational Cinema” The aim of this Special Issue lies in expanding contemporary discussions on Japanese Cinema and its transnational aspects by applying new critical methodologies and stances and in revealing the contradictions inherent in the way the old paradigm of ‘National Cinema’ has traditionally been articulated. In order to do so, this publication highlights the limitations of assessing Japanese film as a cinematic phenomenon confined to its national borders. Throughout this issue, the concept of transnationality is not confined to a single definition and is instead used as an analytical framework which allows authors to surpass narrow perspectives that neglect the complex nature of Japanese film in terms of its esthetics, narratives, and theoretical approaches as well as production, consumption, and distribution systems. This volume casts light on the extraordinary international flows of images, stories, iconographies, and theories between Japan and other countries, and assesses the dialectic relationship between two apparently contradictory aspects: external influences and Japanese uniqueness, revealing how ‘uniquely Japanese’ films may ironically contain foreign codes of representation. Thus, the articles presented here bring a more comprehensive understanding of how global cultural flows have shaped local creativity. Some authors adopt additional transnational perspectives through which they analyse how Japan is represented as ‘other’ from outside and how the rest of the world is represented by Japan, or propose a renewal of film theories on Japanese cinema that have traditionally been dominated by Western writings. Overall, manuscripts included in this publication help the reader to understand different ways in which Japan expands beyond Japanese Cinema and Japanese Cinema expands beyond Japan. Marcos P. Centeno-Mart´ın,Norimasa Morita Special Issue Editors xi arts Editorial Japan and the “Transnational Cinema” Marcos P. Centeno-Martín 1,* and Norimasa Morita 2,* 1 Department of Cultures and Languages, School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London, London WC1E 7HX, UK 2 Graduate School of International Culture and Communication, Waseda University, Tokyo 169-8050, Japan * Correspondence: [email protected] (M.P.C.M.); [email protected] (N.M.) Received: 27 March 2020; Accepted: 12 April 2020; Published: 17 April 2020 Since the Western “discovery” of Japanese cinema in the 1950s, there has been a tendency among both Film Studies and Japanese Studies scholars to draw on essentialist visions of Japanese Cinema, understating its uniqueness as a consequence of its isolation from the rest of the world. In other words, Japanese Cinema has often been regarded as an inseparable part of Japan’s unique culture, and film scholars have been making tremendous efforts to prove that Japanese Cinema developed independently of Western forms of cinematic representation. One of the earliest examples of this “Oriental turn” can be found in Burch’s influential text To the Distant Observer (1979), which highlighted how the evolution of Japanese film was thickly informed by its own cultural heritage and developed in correlation with its artistic, aesthetic, and philosophical traditions. This critical tendency of trying to find in Japanese cinema a way of filmmaking alternative to Hollywood’s was consistent with what filmmakers of New Waves and Third Cinemas in the 1960s and 70s aimed at and practiced. Any film critics and historians emphasising “national” essence in Japanese films are prone to conceptual mistakes: such reductive views lead to the underestimation of filmmakers’ full artistic creativity. Such an arbitrary stance results in neglecting the complex interactions of local, transnational and global cinematic components. Cinema has been international since its inception, and in this sense Japanese cinema, one of the oldest in the world, is not an exception. The paradigm of “National Cinema” started to be increasingly called into question from the late 1980s (Higson 1989; Elsaesser 1989), and soon new methodological approaches to Japanese
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