The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society) [Paperback]

Eric Cazdyn (Author)

Book Description

Series: Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society | Publication Date: November 4, 2002

The Flash of Capital analyzes the links between Japan’s capitalist history and its film history, illuminating what these connections reveal about film culture and everyday life in Japan. Looking at a hundred-year history of film and capitalism, Eric Cazdyn theorizes a cultural history that highlights the spaces where film and the nation transcend their customary borders—where culture and capital crisscross—and, in doing so, develops a new way of understanding historical change and transformation in modern Japan and beyond.
Cazdyn focuses on three key moments of historical contradiction: colonialism, post-war reconstruction, and globalization. Considering great classics of Japanese film, documentaries, works of science fiction, animation, and pornography, he brings to light cinematic attempts to come to terms with the tensions inherent in each historical moment—tensions between the colonizer and the colonized, between the individual and the collective, and between the national and the transnational. Paying close attention to political context, Cazdyn shows how formal inventions in the realms of acting, film history and theory, thematics, documentary filmmaking, and adaptation articulate a struggle to solve implacable historical problems. This innovative work of cultural history and criticism offers explanations of historical change that challenge conventional distinctions between the aesthetic and the geopolitical.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Cazdyn’s work is original, unique, and provocative. He asks hard questions, makes surprising connections, and as a result forces us to rethink the relationship of the aesthetic and the social in Japanese modernity.”—Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, author of Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema

“This book redesigns the way in which Japanese cinema must be approached, taking into account the ‘longer term’ dynamics of economic formations as well as the way Japan is stitched into ‘global’ contemporary processes.”—Paul Willemen, author of Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory

From the Publisher

"This book redesigns the way in which Japanese cinema must be approached, taking into account the ‘longer term’ dynamics of economic formations as well as the way Japan is stitched into ‘global’ contemporary processes."—Paul Willemen, University of Ulster, Coleraine

"Cazdyn’s work is original, unique, and provocative. He asks hard questions, makes surprising connections, and as a result forces us to rethink the relationship of the aesthetic and the social in Japanese modernity."—Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, author of Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 328 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (November 4, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822329395
• ISBN-13: 978-0822329398
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,039,813 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars read, watch, re-read, May 23, 2003

By 

matthew levine (San Diego, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society) (Paperback)

Cazdyn's book is useful both for giving an overview of what to watch for when approaching one of the selected movies for the first time and he (Cazdyn) also succedes in giving a thought-provoking outer context (ie the transformation of 'capital' in modern japan). it is important to understand that this theory of the films as economic-artefacts (not in a crude cause and effect sense, mind you) is accomplished through the very readings Cazdyn performs on them. The first step is a basic historicism that aims to survey and then go one step past existing Western reactions to key Japanese films. However, we begin to see quite early in our reading (note that i say early in the reading not early in the book, for this is a work that definitely benefits a non-synchonic pursual) that Cazdyn's ability to make these 'new' points as very much indebted to his invocation of a historical-materialist framework. Like Marx's re-read the economy of 18th C England to prove a point, so Cazdyn is rereading the economy of 20th C Japan!

It is therefore very ironic that the non-academic responses to this book so far have focused on how it is full of theory talk. yes, the jargon can seem a little think but Cazdyn is definitely not making po-mo points!