Manga and Japanese cinema

Michael Raine michael-raine
Mon Nov 24 09:51:39 EST 1997


At 01:05 97/11/24 -0600, Junko Tanaka wrote:
>
>PS: I remember reading an article drawing similarities between Ozu films
>and manga (in EIGAGAKU, if my memory serves). Since Kurosawa's works are
>full of live-action and Ozu's far from it, it's interesting that films by
>both directors have manga-like or manga-tizable qualities.
>
>
and JCS wrote:
>What interests me in all this is the question of primacy and authority. What
>is the authoritative version of these artforms?  And how does that change as
>different generations become introduced to them through different media?

It's not quite the same medium, but _Heibon_ used to summarize current
films in a kind of photo-novella form, at least in the late 1950s. One of
the films they summarized was Tokyo boshoku... raises some interesting
questions about Ozu and textuality! More importantly, it demonstrates that
at that time at least, "popular media" were popular precisely to the extent
that the "properties" they contained were translatable into other forms. In
the argument that I'm putting together at the moment, those media extended
all the way from art cinema through star discourse to brands of chocolate!
They were linked and separated by the bundle of interpretive strategies
they accommodated. Questions of primacy and authority were beside the
point, as witnessed by the wealth of series (not only in Japan) and the
disregard for films once they had finished their exhibition runs. 

Michael




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