The production of modernity in Japanese cinema: Shochiku Kamata Style in the 1920s and 1930s

This project explores the creation of modernity in the production of Japanese cinema by focusing on the Shochiku Kamata films in the period of 1920 to 1936. Shochiku intertextualized the Tokyo landscape and its emerging middle-class culture in the gendaigeki/contemporary film genre, offering an image of the middle class at the center of Japanese modernity. Embedded in the films is the tension between the assimilated Hollywood style of filmmaking and the Japanese need for a cohesive national subject. The films thus represent the intersection of the cultural influences from Western modernism and Japanese nationalism. During this period, Shochiku Kamata studios developed their trademark Shochiku Kamata Style (SKS) which I propose was a conscious attempt to create a distinct vision of Japanese modernity.; Apart from Noel Burch's To the Distant Observer very little has been written about Japanese cinema of this period. Most of the studies have focused on the auteur directors and the already recognized canon of films. This project is the first study of the period's films that are lesser known in the West, but which are altogether significant in the context of Japanese cinema. I address not only the visual components of Shochiku Kamata Style but the historical production of cinema within Japanese popular culture as well. My project contains chapters on: (a) Japanese cinema's relation with modernism and nationalism; (b) the role of realism in Japanese cinema and modern culture; (c) vernacular meanings of film genre; (d) the creation of urban space in filmic texts; (e) national subjectivity; and (f) women's film and the images of moga/modern girls.; Throughout this project, I examine cinema as a site for negotiations of global and local hegemonies within the contentious formation of Japanese modernity. I intend to offer a measure of cultural specificity towards understanding Japanese modernity apart from the "universality" of Western definitions of modernity. Thus, while I find meaning in historical instances of Japanese cinema's aesthetic negotiation with the dominant influence of Hollywood cinema, I insist upon contextualizing that influence as but one cultural norm among others, that are no less significant.