The End of Japanese Cinema: Industrial Genres, National Times, and Media Ecologies by Alexander Zahlten

This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of the book that still has to be considered the most, if not the only comprehensive history of Japanese cinema in the English language. While Japanese Film: Art and Industry (1959, co-authored by Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie, and slightly updated in its 1982 edition) was criticized for its auteurist and Cold War-era attitudes, its immense achievement and authoritative status is impossible to ignore. Its very existence seems to have effectively prevented any study of comparable scope from emerging, while the field of Japanese film studies itself has expanded considerably during the last few decades. This lasting anxiety of influence is visibly imprinted on Alexander Zahlten’s first monograph, The End of Japanese Cinema, both in its provocative title and in its book design that borrows from Anderson and Richie the intricate charts that delineate apprenticeship lineages and studio affiliations and blurs out all names, as if to suggest the need to eschew these industrial relations that have been hitherto considered an inextricable part of structuring Japanese film history.