Japanese Film and the Challenge of Video

Tom Mes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• ISBN:
  9781000855289
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the phenomenon of V-Cinema, founded in Japan in 1989 as a distribution system for direct-to-video movies which film companies began making having failed to recoup their investment in big budget films. It examines how studios and directors worked quickly to capitalize on niche markets or upcoming and current trends, and how as a result this period of history in Japanese cinema was an exceptionally diverse and vibrant film scene. It highlights how, although the V-Cinema industry declined from around 1995, the explosion in quantity and variety of such movies established and cemented many specific genres of Japanese film. Importantly the book argues that film scholars who have long looked down on video as a substandard medium without scholarly interest have been wrong to do so, and that V-Cinema challenges accepted notions of cultural value, providing insight into the formation of cinematic canons and inviting us to rethink what is meant by "Japanese cinema".

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Text, Style, and Language
• 1. Scholars, Canons, and Videotape: Unboxing Japanese Cinema
• 2. Parallel Canons: Japanese Cinema in the Eyes of the World, 1951–2000
• 3. Video Revolutions: Models of Video Distribution in Japan and the U.S.A.
• 4. V-Cinema: A Domestic Model in Transnational Context
• 5. Accidental Auteurs: The Director in V-Cinema
• 6. Slaughterhouse V
• Bibliography
• Index