The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society) - Softcover

Cazdyn, Eric

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822329395 ISBN 13: 9780822329398

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2002

Synopsis

The Flash of Capital analyzes the links between Japan’s capitalist history and its film history, illuminating what these connections reveal about film culture and everyday life in Japan. Looking at a hundred-year history of film and capitalism, Eric Cazdyn theorizes a cultural history that highlights the spaces where film and the nation transcend their customary borders—where culture and capital crisscross—and, in doing so, develops a new way of understanding historical change and transformation in modern Japan and beyond.
Cazdyn focuses on three key moments of historical contradiction: colonialism, post-war reconstruction, and globalization. Considering great classics of Japanese film, documentaries, works of science fiction, animation, and pornography, he brings to light cinematic attempts to come to terms with the tensions inherent in each historical moment—tensions between the colonizer and the colonized, between the individual and the collective, and between the national and the transnational. Paying close attention to political context, Cazdyn shows how formal inventions in the realms of acting, film history and theory, thematics, documentary filmmaking, and adaptation articulate a struggle to solve implacable historical problems. This innovative work of cultural history and criticism offers explanations of historical change that challenge conventional distinctions between the aesthetic and the geopolitical.

About this title

From the Publisher:

"This book redesigns the way in which Japanese cinema must be approached, taking into account the ‘longer term’ dynamics of economic formations as well as the way Japan is stitched into ‘global’ contemporary processes."—Paul Willemen, University of Ulster, Coleraine

"Cazdyn’s work is original, unique, and provocative. He asks hard questions, makes surprising connections, and as a result forces us to rethink the relationship of the aesthetic and the social in Japanese modernity."—Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, author of Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema

From the Back Cover:

"Cazdyn's work is original, unique, and provocative. He asks hard questions, makes surprising connections, and as a result forces us to rethink the relationship of the aesthetic and the social in Japanese modernity."--Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, author of "Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema"

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0822329395
• ISBN 13: 9780822329398
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 328