Japanese cinema spaces and film environments

 About the conference

 About the conference

In recent years a significant strand of research in cinema studies has been devoted to understanding cinema experience in terms of the logic of exhibition practices. Yet, many film historians take their subject still very literally: they primarily write histories of films, but not histories of cinemas. This is particularly true in the case of Japan. Significant works have been published in the past decades that have helped expand the knowledge about Japanese film history outside of Japan. We know a lot about certain filmmakers and their films, about specific genres, the studios and the movies of a specific period, yet very little is known about where and how these films have been shown and who was watching them. We know little about the cinemas in Japan. The aim of this conference was to take a closer look at the movie theatres in Japan and to shed light on the Japanese exhibition market.

The conference was organized by the Institute of East Asian Studies of Vienna University and the Austrian Japan-Society for Science and Arts in cooperation with Kinema Club. Kinema Club is an informal community of scholars, artists, and fans interested in Japanese moving image media established in the early 1990s. One of its most important activities are the workshops and conferences that have been held since 1999. There were ten Kinema Club conferences organized until 2011: Michigan (1999), Hawai‘i (2003), NYU (2004), McGill (2004), Tōkyō (2005), NYU (2005), Yale (2006), Frankfurt (2007), Harvard (2009) and Hawai‘i (2010). KC-XI was the second Kinema Club conference held in Europe.