Read more
Zusatztext Our image of a monolithic, fascist Japan during WWII was partly the product of propaganda cinema from both Japan and the West; the reality was far more complex. Sean O’Reilly uncovers this complexity by looking at interwar and wartime films representing the Bakumatsu period, the 19th century transition from feudalism to the nation state system. His compelling analyses reveal the wide spectrum of relationships spectators held toward tradition, nation and war. Bakumatsu has recently made a comeback in film and television. O’Reilly invites us to use the insights of his study to understand how present-day audiences are also re-viewing their collective past. Informationen zum Autor Sean D. O’Reilly is Assistant Professor at Akita International University, Japan, where he teaches courses on Japanese history, cinema (including one course on the history film genre), and popular culture. He graduated from Harvard University’s History and East Asian Languages program with a secondary field in Film and Visual Studies. Vorwort Analyzes the complicated relationship between history films, audiences, reviewers and censors for the critically important years from 1925-1945. Zusammenfassung Re-Viewing the Past: The Uses of History in the Cinema of Imperial Japan analyzes the complicated relationship between history films, audiences, reviewers and censors in Japan for the critically important years from 1925-1945. First contextualizing the history of the popular “Bakumatsu” period (1853-1868), the moment of Japan’s emergence as a modern nation, Sean O'Reilly paves the way for a reinterpretation of Japanese pre and postwar cinema. Setting a film in the Bakumatsu period offered ‘cultural breathing room’ to both filmmakers and viewers, offering a cinematic space where apolitical entertainment and now-forbidden themes like romance still reigned. Some filmmakers—and viewers—even conceived of these films as being a form of resistance against Japan’s growing militarism. As comparisons between the popularity of such films versus that of state-sponsored propaganda films show, audiences responded enthusiastically to these glimmers of resistance. O'Reilly argues that we should turn our attention to the much more popular films of the time that were major hits with audiences in order to understand what resonated with wartime spectators, and to speculate about why this might have been the case. Including clips of these rare films, a so-far neglected area of Japanese film history is now firmly situated in context to offer a thought-provoking, multidisciplinary approach. Inhaltsverzeichnis 1. Introduction2. Valorizing the Villains: the First Bakumatsu Boom and 1927’s Sonno joi 3. History as Nonsense: Historical Parodies of the Bakumatsu4. Serial History: the Case of Kurama Tengu5. Consuming History, Hating the Enemy6. Romancing History7. Transwar JapanBibliographyIndex...
