The history of Japaneese Cinema and war shaping the history
- 2. De fi ning Japanese Cinema Japan was still an imperial power with many territories and cultures under its jurisdiction. Prewar period, “Japanese” that were directed and produced by Japanese in Taiwan, or Korea, or Manchuria ( North east china and far east of Russia).
- 3. Silent Era The fi rst fi lm to be shot in Japan by a Japanese person was in the year 1897 Geisha no teodori. Since that time, there have been two golden ages of fi lm in Japan, as it became the great fi lm nation of East Asia. The fi rst golden age was from the late 1920s through the early 1930s, and the second was from the 1950s through the 1960s.
- 4. The fi rst real fi lm studio appeared in Japan in 1912, roughly the same time as the establishment of fi lm studios in Hollywood, many that continue to exist today. Even at this point, studios in the two countries were completely di ff erent things —in Japan, fi lmmaking was a small-scale cottage industry. Japanese cinema remained resolutely local. It also did not serve as a medium for political conspiracy and power struggles
- 5. CONNECTIONS WITH LITERATURE In the early days of cinema in Japan, stories from kodan (oral narratives) dominated f lm as a source for jidaigeki entertainment (period cinema) with all the fantastic and contradictory elements of that genre. when mass literature, f ction that began as print, in particular serialized in newspapers and magazines, overtook kodan as the basis of cinema around the mid-1920s. Kawabata Yasunari’s Dancing Girl of Izu is one of the iconic works of “pure literature,” and if you compare the six adaptations of it that have been f lmed since then,.
- 6. CONNECTIONS WITH TRADITIONAL THEATER Theater and music have contributed the most to the establishment of Japanese cinema. Kabuki a traditional Japanese theatre has in fl uenced cinema to a great extent . in the prewar period were in fl uenced by Kabuki in numerous ways, from fi lm actors using Kabuki stage names, their dress and makeup, to their movements
- 7. Between 1920's and 1030's Japanese cinema reached its fi rst peak in the shift from silent cinema to talkies. Jidaigeki stars formed independent, competing production companies and brought in young, experimentally minded directors and screenwriters, giving them new opportunities Auteurs like Mizoguchi Kenji and Ozu Yasujiro developed their own individual styles. The newly formed Toho studio, which established itself through the development of sound technologies, joined Shochiku and Nikkatsu, as the third major studio.
- 8. Pacifc War in 1941,Japan produced nearly fi ve hundred fi lms annually, second only to Hollywood. Of course, once the importation of Eastman Film from America was cut of, wartime restrictions limited the distribution of raw fi lm stock and the number of fi lms produced dropped sharply. The second peak began in the 1950s, following the end of the American Occupation, when Nikkatsu started producing fi lms once more.