Description
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
- Scholars, Canons, and Videotape: Unboxing Japanese Cinema
- Parallel Canons: Japanese Cinema in the Eyes of the World, 1951-2000
- Video Revolutions: Models of Video Distribution in the U.S.A. and Japan
- V-Cinema: A Domestic Model in Transnational Context
- Accidental Auteurs: The Director in V-Cinema
- Slaughterhouse V
Through Global Northern Eyes
Through East Asian Eyes
Through Japanese Eyes
Home Video Distribution: A Tale of Two Systems
‘The Lowest Discursive Status’: Direct-to-Video Production and Distribution in the U.S.A.
‘Neither Film Nor Television’: Gestation and Development of V-Cinema
Internationalization of V-Cinema
J-Horror, Restraint, and Kurosawa Kiyoshi
The Yakuza Film, Excess, and Miike Takashi
