Boel Ulfsdotter: An Invitation to Travel - The Image of Japanese film in the West 1945-1975

ABSTRACT

An Invitation to Travel – The Image of Japanese Film in the West 1945-1975 is a reception study which presents the events and efforts that influenced the reception of Japanese film in France, Great Britain and the United States, after World War Two.

Chapter One presents the research questions informing this study and the choice of a historical materialist reception method to answer them. It discusses the historically located Western cultural concepts involving the aesthetics of Japonisme, the ‘yellow peril’ discourse and the notion of ‘Japaneseness’, as well as the Japanese film industry’s need to devise a new strategy of doing export business with the West in relation to the changed post-war context. Considering the fact that reception studies have previously been applied mainly to Classical Hollywood Cinema, this study applies the same methods on Western reception of a foreign national cinema in a conscious attempt to evaluate its scientific scope.

The thesis discusses the preparations on the part of the Japanese to distribute their films in the West through different modes of transnational publicity in Chapter Two. The thesis then proceeds to deal with the groundbreaking introduction of this first non-occidental national cinema from three different angles; publicity (Chapter Three), exhibition (Chapter Four), and critical reception (Chapter Five).

Chapter Three analyses the image induced by the Japanese film industry through Western poster design and explores Western responses based on concepts involving Japonisme and stereotypes of the ‘yellow peril’ in both commercial (capitalistic) and non-commercial (communist) aesthetic contexts.

Chapter Four looks into the history of Western exhibition of Japanese film in the countries involved in this study and identifies divergent attitudes between institutional and commercial screenings. It also locates possible changes in exhibition policy over time.

Chapter Five establishes the main players in the critical reception of Japanese cinema in the West and examines national divergences in attitude towards this ‘new’ national cinema. In order to do so, it necessarily discusses the development of Western auteurism in the late 1950s, and its effect on the film periodicals in the countries involved.

            The conclusion in Chapter Six presents the outcome of the effects of publicity, exhibition and critical reception in the previous chapters through a discussion of canon formation and the evaluation of Japanese film in the West. The thesis argues that the extant Western canon on Japanese film is inconclusive and that it could be exchanged, in part, for at least three other versions of the same national cinema, enough to make the current image of Western post-war Japanese film history seem utterly unsatisfactory. By looking back again at its components, this study indicates several areas that warrant further research in order to extend the existing Western conceptualization of Japanese film history.

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