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Film Viewing in Postwar Japan, 1945-1968: An Ethnographic Study

Online ISBN:
9781399501057
Print ISBN:
9781399501033
Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press
Book

Film Viewing in Postwar Japan, 1945-1968: An Ethnographic Study

Jennifer Coates
Jennifer Coates
University of Sheffield
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Published online:
21 September 2023
Published in print:
31 October 2022
Online ISBN:
9781399501057
Print ISBN:
9781399501033
Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press

Abstract

How can we understand what cinema means to others? One of the biggest issues in audience and reception studies is the ultimate unknowability of the processes going on in the mind and body of another person as they watch a film. This has implications for our understanding of how these processes contribute to meaning making, in relation to how viewers understand the events and images onscreen to relate to, inform, or contrast with their own lives and understandings of the world. This book approaches the question of viewers’ relationship to film from a different angle, asking instead what it means to engage discursively with one another through cinema. Film Viewing in Postwar Japan draws from four years of interviews, participant observation, questionnaire surveys, and written communications with over 100 study participants in the Kansai region of Western Japan. This is an in-depth study of memories of cinema-going among the generations who regularly attended film theatres between 1945-1968, the peak period of production and cinema attendance in Japan. Through investigating the role of film viewership, broadly conceived, in the formation of a postwar sense of self, the reader will benefit from rare access to the voices of grass-roots viewers, who often tell a different version of cinema history and its effects than that available in extant scholarship.

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