Welcome!

Welcome to the course blog for Japanese Film (Spring 2014).  The blog will be a place where resources can be cited and linked, and various types of communications and ideas can be presented.  If you have an item of interest for the class, you are welcome to post it in this blog.  Each student in the course will have a personal blog for the posting of "blossays" (blog essays), and anything else they may wish to post.

This course fulfills the "national cinema" requirement for the Film Studies minor.  Please read the short introduction to the Wikipedia article on national cinema:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_cinema

As you can see, this is a term that sounds as though it should have some ponderous theoretical meaning, but essentially refers to works produced in a particular nation, or subset of a nation.  (We'll avoid the problematic nature of the term "nation" for now.)  Needless to say, these films are now part of a global cultural marketplace, and are thus subject to numerous "readings" by different audiences--this will be part of the fun of thinking about these films.  

A major part of this course will involve analyzing how our films function as machines for the production of meaning--specifically, the "national imaginary," or how nations/cultures/societies represent, define, and understand themselves.  Thus, the question of "identity," for example, will be very important; to borrow some familiar phrasing, the films will address, explicitly and/or implicitly, the question: "What does it mean to be Japanese?"