Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano's "Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s" defines "classical Japanese cinema," constructed largely in the 1920s and early 1930s, as a product not of single directors, but as an industry-manufactured approach to filmmaking that heavily emphasized modern... [more]

Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano's "Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s" defines "classical Japanese cinema," constructed largely in the 1920s and early 1930s, as a product not of single directors, but as an industry-manufactured approach to filmmaking that heavily emphasized modern national character and identity. Her efficient study focuses on six key aspects of Japanese modernity manifested in its early cinema: Tokyo urban space, the middle-class film, modern sports and the athlete star, the woman's film, Shochiku Kamata style, and historical discourses in film criticism. Her dissection on Shochiku is especially insightful, for Wada-Marciano argues that the filmmaking practices of the studio – the only one of the major five to remain in Tokyo after not having its facilities demolished in the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake – were vital in promulgating the image of urban Tokyo in the contemporary drama (gendaigeki), in contrast with Kyoto's Japanese period pieces (jidaigeki). For the first time, modern audiences could view themselves – salarymen, housewives, and schoolchildren – in the very films they watched, helping foster a nostalgic and fictive national Japanese identity despite cinematic influences from the West or the cinema's "transformative power over community." Wada-Marciano forms a dialogue between film studies and other areas of study to create a compelling new narration of studio history, filmmakers' practices, and the image of urban Japan itself. [show less]