Marcos Centeno

University of Valencia. Honorary research fellow Birkbeck University of London

This chapter examines the work of Haneda Sumiko (1926-) one of the pioneering and most prolific documentary filmmakers in post-war Japan. Born in occupied Manchuria, Haneda´s filmmaking career started in the 1950s when she joined Iwanami Productions to make educational films and PR documentaries. She directed her first film in Iwanami in 1957, went...

This chapter examines the transnational and transmedia strategies that were implemented by the Japanese film industry to create the early youth icons of late 1950s and early 1960s. They illustrate how the very term “Japanese cinema” is increasingly outdated and needs to be revisited. Thus, the main objective is to problematize the paradigm of “nati...

The Handbook of Japanese Media and Popular Culture in Transition brings together new research and perspectives on popular media phenomena, as well as shining a spotlight on texts that are less well known or studied. Organized into five thematic sections, the chapters span a diverse range of cultural genres, including contemporary film and televisio...

In the twentieth century, Japan produced an extraordinary documentary film heritage around the rural world which has not received sufficient attention. This article identifies three different approaches to the rural in Japanese film history: first, the wartime interest in place as providing an “authentic essence” of a national identity. Second, the...

The Japanese Cinema Book is a monumental work in which the editors, Hideaki Fujiki and Alastair Phillips, have assembled an ambitious anthology of 40 chapters, written by leading scholars with a variety of approaches to Japanese cinema. The book deliberately tackles the study of Japanese cinema in its broadest sense, not only through film and media...

Images showing how Ainu physical traits significantly differed from their neighbors in the Far East fueled the widespread idea in the West that the Ainu had European ancestors. This triggered an exceptional interest in Ainu culture among the European as well as American audiences between the Meiji period and the outbreak of the “Chinese Incident” i...

Pese a haberse adelantado a los escritos en otras lenguas europeas, los textos en castellano sobre Japón que se remontan al siglo XVI han experimentado una evolución con altibajos a lo largo de la historia. Aun teniendo un carácter pionero, no evitaron un sonado retraso en el desarrollo español de la japonología y los estudios japoneses en el últim...

The documentary mode has not had the recognition it deserves in the western historiography of Japanese cinema [...]

Durante los quince años de conflicto en Asia (1931-1945), se experimentó un extraordinario auge de la industria del noticiario cinematográfico en Japón, impulsada por los incidentes en China en los años treinta y por las necesidades de propaganda, especialmente a partir de 1940, cuando todos los noticiarios se fusionaron en Nippon News. Las imágene...

Since the Western “discovery” of Japanese cinema in the 1950s, there has been a tendency among both Film Studies and Japanese Studies scholars to draw on essentialist visions of Japanese Cinema, understating its uniqueness as a consequence of its isolation from the rest of the world [...]

This article seeks to cast light on some of Hani Susumu’s theoretical and practical contributions to post-war Japanese documentaries. The article will also show how he created a documentary school at Iwanami Eiga based on authors’ closeness to the filmed object. This is crucial in order to understand the tendencies that developed in non-fiction fil...

Book synopsis: From melodramas to experimental documentaries to anime, mass media in Japan constitute a key site in which the nation’s social memory is articulated, disseminated, and contested. Through a series of stimulating case studies, this volume examines the political and cultural representations of Japan’s past, showing how they have reinfor...

From melodramas to experimental documentaries to anime, mass media in Japan constitute a key site in which the nation’s social memory is articulated, disseminated and contested. Through a series of stimulating case studies, this volume examines the political and cultural representations of Japan’s past, showing how they have reinforced personal and...

Reveiw of Guarné, Blai and Hansen, Paul (eds) (2017) Escaping Japan: Reflections on Estrangement and Exile in the Twenty-First Century, London: Routledge, ISBN 9781138235243, paperback, 9781315282770 ebook, 255 pages.

Este texto busca explorar una pequeña parte del inmenso repertorio de imágenes de la Guerra del Pacífico: las imágenes de la toma de Nankín por el ejército japonés, filmadas por operadores nipones en diciembre de 1937 y su uso posterior por la propaganda norteamericana. Esta iconografía de la Guerra del Pacífico es un objeto de estudio particularme...

The Western ‘discovery’ of Japanese cinema in the 1950s prompted scholars to articulate essentialist visions understanding its singularities as a result of its isolation from the rest of the world and its close links to local aesthetic and philosophical traditions. Recent approaches however, have evidenced the limitations of this paradigm of ‘natio...

The Western ‘discovery’ of Japanese cinema in the 1950s prompted scholars to articulate essentialist visions understanding its singularities as a result of its isolation from the rest of the World and its close links to local aesthetic and philosophical traditions. Recent approaches however, have evidenced the limitations of this paradigm of ‘natio...

Resumen La construcción del cine japonés como cine nacional ha partido a menudo de una visión esencialista que ha ignorado la dimensión transnacional de esta filmografía. Por un lado, el descubrimiento occidental de ciertos autores japoneses en los años cincuenta condujo a la articulación del paradigma del cine nacional japonés a partir de película...

This essay seeks to participate in the rediscovery of the re-discovery of the Japanese documentary avant-garde through the figure of Susumu Hani (1928- ), who had a key role for both his theoretical and practical contributions. Hōryūji (1958) represents one of the boldest attempts to develop subjectgivity among new left filmmakers. This unique docu...

This text seeks to assess Yasujiro Ozu´s filmmaking method in relation to that of Susumu Hani, which was theorized and put into practice through documentary films during the fifties. These filmmakers belonged to different generations and while Ozu, staring his career in the 1920s, has been recognized as the early master of Japanese classicism, Hani...

Senior teaching fellow in film studies Soas, university of london 100@soas.ac.uk Resumen Los autores japoneses desarrollaron desde los sesenta, formas originales de enten-der '¿qué es el cine?', no siempre equivalentes a las planteadas en Occidente. El cineasta y teórico Susumu Hani examinó la vinculación entre la imagen fotomecáni-ca () y la reali...

This text proposes an updated analysis of Susumu Hani’s Bad Boys (1960) through the director’s theoretical contribution and the re-reading of his script. This film, made within the limits of reality and fiction, was instrumental in the cinematic language of the sixties in Japan. Hani implemented herein a style that he developed during his earlier d...

This work assesses the representation of the Ainu people through the early travelogues made in Japan during the 1910s, focusing on those made by Benjamin Brodsky. Considering filmic representation of the Ainu people in relation to their social context, the analysis reveals how these images projected a deceptive ethnicity belonging to a time prior t...

The discrimination suffered by the Ainu people in Japan contrasted with the European fascination for the Ainu culture between the late 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. In fact, the Ainu were featured among the earliest thirty-three films shot in Japan by European and North American explorers. This text deals with these earliest f...

This text interrogates the imaginary of Spain in the film Andalucia: Revenge of the Goddess (Andarushia Megami no Hōfuku, Hiroshi Nishitani, 2011). The relations between film and tourism are tackled with a methodology inverse to that usually used. In contrast to the literature dealing with the impact of film on tourism, this work assesses the impac...

Spanish newsreels were an extraordinary witness of the worldwide circulation of images of the Pacific War. Between 1941 and 1943, they showed the Japanese side of the conflict by employing a strategy that had started in the Spanish Civil War—appropriating footage from different sources. Thus, Japanese news shot by Nihon eiga-sha operators reached S...

Film representation of the Ainu people is as old as cinema but it has not remained stable over time. From the origins of cinema, Ainu people were an object of interest for Japanese and foreign explorers who portrayed them as an Other, savage and isolated from the modern world. The notion of “otherness” was slightly modified during wartime, as the A...

Spanish newsreels were an extraordinary witness of the worldwide circulation of images of the Pacific War. Between 1941 and 1943, they showed the Japanese side of the conflict by employing a strategy that had started in the Spanish Civil War—appropriating footage from different sources. Thus, Japanese news shot by Nihon eiga-sha operators reached S...

Telephone: 0044 7821 171234 Bio Centeno Martín, Marcos, Ph.D., is lecturer in Film Studies at SOAS, University of London, where he teaches Japanese Cinema and World Cinemas. His research focuses on documentary film and the representation of ethnic minorities in Japan. Abstract The discrimination suffered by the Ainu people in Japan contrasted with...

Book synopsis: Kaum eine Kinematographie weist eine solche Variation von Körperdarstellungen auf wie die japanische. Der Körper scheint nicht festgestellt. Er ist variierbar, überformbar, kann prothetisch ergänzt werden, ohne dass dies mit einer emotionalen Wertung verbunden wäre. Diese ›andere Körperlichkeit‹ betrifft nicht allein die dargestellte...

Book synopsis: Los trabajos reunidos en este volumen exploran la intersección entre los estudios culturales y la teoría crítica a partir de la consideración de los productos, las corrientes y las prácticas culturales surgidos en Japón desde la mitad del siglo pasado hasta la actualidad. A través del estudio de casos, los autores revisan dramas tele...

The origins of cinema coincided with the growing interest in Ainu culture in the West. It is not surprising that the Ainu people appeared in the first images filmed by the cinematograph in Japan. This essay focus the analysis on the Ainu sequences included in Brodsky’s travelogues, tour documentaries: Beautiful Japan (1918) and A Trip through Japan...

This work is a historical study of the representation of the Ainu people through ethnographic documentaries made in Japan before the Pacific War. The corpus has been divided into three sections: first, the Ainu in the first Lumière actualités filmed in Japan. Second, in the actualités of Pathé productions and the reference to the lost documentary o...

Between the fifties and sixties, the image of the Ainu people in documentary cinema experienced a significant rupture with the early ethnographic footage and the propaganda documentaries of the Pacific War. From the postwar era, Japanese filmmakers faced a double problem: the touristic commercialization of the Ainu image and the rejection of the ex...

The urban space of Tokyo is a recurrent landscape used by many filmmakers throughout history to show various changes in Japanese society. The purpose of this diachronic film analysis is to extrapolate a sociological view of Tokyo in the frame of Modernity and the new concept of Postmodernity, the redefinition of the historical period beginning in t...