Japanese Cinema

Introduction

This overview discovers Japanese movies annals, mentioning to various aspects of the film commerce in Japan. It focuses on key matters in five stages of development of Japanese cinema.

The first section interprets the dawn of Japanese cinema from 1896 to 1940, from the quiet time span to the first Golden Age of Japanese movies with the appearance of 'talkie' movies. It includes illumination of three distinctive but basic elements of Japanese cinema: the use of benshi off-stage narration; its relation to customary kabuki theatre; and the reality of two film-making capitals, one in Tokyo and the other in Kyoto. The next section examines the peculiarity of Japanese movie during wartime and troubles under the American occupation (1940-1952). The third chapter reviews the second Golden Age of 1952-1960, mentioning to works by controllers such as Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi. The fourth section devotes an overview of the quiet downfall and inertia of the Japanese movie commerce for the following two decades. And the last chapter analyses the situation surrounding contemporary cinema since 1980 (Joaas, 67-123).

Dawn of Japanese cinema

The history of Japanese cinema starts in 1896, when the kinetoscope, an creation of Edison in 1889, reached in Japan for the first time. At the time Japan was evolving successfully into a modern, more westernised territory, almost 30 years after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and persons were inquisitive about new inventions from western countries. The initial performance of the kinetoscope had a peculiar feature, as it was presented with an offstage narrator. This narrator utilised to work as gidayu-gatari, an off-stage narrator for traditional Japanese theatrical performances. This set a prototype for other ones to pursue even before the new pattern of amusement of movies was introduced. The following year, the cinematographe, created by the Lumière brothers in 1895, was presented to the Japanese audience. Being a quiet movie, it was presented again with an off-stage narrator who was really a tekiya or expert street peddler. Thereafter it became the norm for Japanese cinema to incorporate an off-stage narrator (Hirano, pp 45-89).

These off-stage narrators for quiet movies are called benshi. It is said that the reality of benshi is a exclusively Japanese phenomenon. It is profoundly related to traditional Japanese well liked oral performances such as ningyo joruri puppet displays and the more commercial bunraku puppet displays, to customary rakugo comic storytelling, to kodan chronicled storytelling and to the tekiya or crooked peddler. To addition up, the Japanese public was aurally literate in storytelling and was well known with off-stage narrative performances. It was thus rather natural for Japanese audiences to have an off-stage narrator interpreting the individual features' sentiments or what was occurrence on the computer display, instead of reading subtitles. In other words, Japanese audiences received the motion picture, a technology brought from the West, as a performing art in the context of their native theatrical tradition (Hauser, 88-121).

Benshi was undoubtedly the crop of well liked oral presentation tradition; although, it should be mentioned that there was a ...