context: movies > general points

My Difficulties

I've seen a lot of J films - but mostly the arthouse classics, recent horror successes and some big crime films. I've not seen a lot of their hit movies - this may be akin to discussing US movies having seen lots of, say, Ford, Lang and Wilder, then some by Tarantino, Romero and Raimi. Still, that is the kind of thing that is available, and that is what most of the books focus on. I have no real idea how much our idea of key points of J film history matches that of a Japanese cinephile. I console myself with the knowledge that my readership is Western, and they probably don't get the chance to see so much outside my own experience. I have gone to the Japanese Embassy to view some movies that never got played here otherwise - including some huge pretty modern hits, including one terrific boy-girl body swap comedy kind of like Big in style.

Also, 90% of pre-1945 Japanese films no longer exist - this is because of the Tokyo earthquake, firebombing and nuclear weapons in WWII, occupation forces burning films, and no real interest in preserving such items until comparatively recently.

Another problem for me is that I started this site because of my passionate interest in what made Japanese arts different from the arts I had grown up with: however, the differences between older Japanese arts and the West were much, much clearer and larger than those in an imported form like cinema. Having said that, I absolutely love Japanese film, so I was never going to skip the subject...

forwards: presentation/representation