Description:
Combining film studies and ethnographic research methods within a memory studies framework, Coates examines the impact of cinema cultures on the everyday lives of viewers.
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.
Brief description: Dr Jennifer Coates is Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Sheffield, UK. She is the author of Making Icons: Repetition and the Female Image in Japanese Cinema, 1945-1964 (2016) and co-editor of Politicizing the Screen: Japanese Visual Media (2021) and Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture (2019).
Review Quotes:
It is no longer be possible to talk about ethnographies of film without putting Jennifer Coates' work at the top of the list. This riveting work makes us feel what the movies of the Golden Age of Japanese cinema meant and how important they were to the people who saw them.
--David Desser, University of Illinois