Centeno Martin, Marcos Pablo and Raine, M., eds. (2020) Developments in Japanese documentary film. New Media. Basel, Switzerland: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute.
Abstract
Book synopsis: "Developments in Japanese Documentary Film" seeks to challenge the predominance of fiction film in the literature on Japanese Cinema. This Special Issue proposes new approaches to history and theory from non-fiction genres and adjacent formats that contribute to identifying, analysing and categorising distinctive schools, artistic and intellectual movements, and trends in the history of Japanese documentary film. Japanese film culture is one of the oldest and most prolific in the world. Today, few people are surprised by the scope of its fiction-film industry, which has won major prizes at global film festivals since the 1950s and more recently has played an important role in the global flow of genre cinema. However, the production of documentary films in Japan has not received the attention it deserves: some critics have overemphasized the stylisation originating in the country’s theatrical tradition (Richie 1990) without acknowledging the significance of documentary cinema, from prewar proletarian films and wartime propaganda to Sixties radicalism and the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival that has been so influential, especially in Asia. Japan has left one of the most important legacies in terms of non-fiction films in the world, with 130,000 works since the end of World War II (Maruyama 2010). This constitutes a huge cultural heritage that invites further work to catalogue and draw out significant themes and developments. "Developments in Japanese Documentary Film" seeks to challenge the predominance of fiction film in the literature on Japanese Cinema. This Special Issue proposes new approaches to history and theory from non-fiction genres and adjacent formats that contribute to identifying, analysing and categorising distinctive schools, artistic and intellectual movements, and trends in the history of Japanese documentary film. We invite 4000–6000 word (excluding bibliography) scholarly articles on the theme by 5 January 2019. Potential areas for exploration include: documentary schools and trends, documentary art and intellectual movements, documentary avant-garde, documentary film as a wartime (counter) propaganda tool, boundaries between fiction and non-fiction films, history of "semi-documentary", conflicts between subjectivity and objectivity, theoretical discussions on documentary, realism and representation in non-fiction formats, film representation of history, such as the representation of disaster, documentary and activism, documentary and other arts/media, and authorship in documentary cinema.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Book |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | ISSN: 2076-0752 |
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | Japanese cinema, documentary film, non fiction |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication |
| Depositing User: | Marcos Pablo Centeno Martin |
| Date Deposited: | 10 Jan 2022 14:14 |
| Last Modified: | 09 Aug 2023 12:48 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/31544 |
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