The End Of Japanese Cinema: Industrial Genres, National Times, And Media Ecologi [Paperback]

InThe End of Japanese CinemaAlexander Zahlten moves film theory beyond the confines of film itself, attending to the emergence of new kinds of aesthetics, politics, temporalities, and understandings of film and media. He traces the evolution of a new media ecology through deep historical analyses of the Japanese film industry from the 1960s to the 2000s. Zahlten focuses on three popular industrial genres: Pink Film (independently distributed softcore pornographic films), Kadokawa (big-budget productions as part of a transmedia strategy), and V-Cinema (direct-to-video films). He examines the conditions of these films' production to demonstrate how the media industry itself becomes part of the politics of the media text and to highlight the complex negotiation between media and politics, culture, and identity in Japan. Zahlten points to a different history of film, one in which a once-powerful film industry transformed into becoming only one component within a complex media-mix ecology. In so doing, Zahlten opens new paths for uncovering similar broad processes in other large media societies.

A Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

InThe End of Japanese CinemaAlexander Zahlten traces the evolution of a new form of holistic media studies—media ecology—through historical overview and analysis of Japanese film and industry from the 1960s to the 2000s.

Alexander Zahlten is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University and coeditor ofMedia Theory in Japan, also published by Duke University Press.

"Thanks to the studio system and the canonical work of auteurs, there was a time when everyone knew the greatness of Japanese film—when everyone knew exactly what Japanese cinema was. This gave way to a sense of decline, if not an end, after the demise of the new wave. In his provocative new book, Alexander Zahlten direcl³h