The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan [Paperback]

"[I]nteresting... Cazdyn ... explores some thought-provoking points..."oTerry Hong, Push> (NAATA newsletter) "[T]hose who can find it in themselves to give a project as daring as Cazdyn's a chance will be pleasantly surprised. In prose more lucid than the antitheory grumps might have led one to expect, Cazdyn, rubbing Japanese film up against Japanese geopolitics, produces many fascinatingoto borrow his termo'flashes' ... [S]o bright is this book with insight and intelligence that it just might serve to win over a diehard theory-phobe or two."oDavid Cozy, The Japan Times "[E]ven readers unsympathetic with theory will find much of interest in this book. The author is extremely knowledgeable about Japanese history, culture, and literature, and he writes with attention to particulars. Every page contains illuminating observations on the relation between Japanese filmmakers within a deep cultural context. Those familiar with Japan's masters of narrative film will find here intelligent criticism. What even aficionados of things Japanese will find illuminating is the information Cazdyn offers on documentary filmmakers in Japan, especially since WWII."oR. Ducharme, Choice "Let me go out on a critical limb early in 2003: The Flash of Capitaloengaging, challenging, maddeningowill be one of the year's best studies of modern Japan... The Flash of Capital itself is such 'luxurious reading,' one that will push you where you never intended."oRalph Cassell, Asahi Shimbun/International Herald Tribune "Eric Cadzyn's new book brings together global economics and aesthetics to write a new history of Japanese film. The result is a stimulating and challenging attempt to produce a new foundation for the field."oChris Berry, Screening the Past "[A] breathtakingly ambitious work... The Flash of Capital is an important contribution to the literature on Japanese film. It raises the stakes and changes the frames for discussion of Japanese film and visual studies and participates in displacing the boundary between academic professionalism and political intervention in area studies."oMark Anderson, Journal of Asian Studies "[A] welcome contribution to the field... One can only look forward to what Cazdyn decides to do next."oScott Nygren, Journal of Japanese Studies "[P]rovocative... The Flash of Capital is a valuable contribution to the field of film studies by a scholar well versed in historical and theoretical discussions in the field of Japanese studies in North America... [Cazdyn's] lively observations of contemporary Japanese media culture may suggest one of the possible ways in which film scholars can engage in politics as public intellectuals in the age of globalization."oChika Kinoshita, Film Quarterly Listed in Journal of Asian History, Asian Cinema Weekly, Critical Inquiry, Journal of East Asian Studies, TLS email book alert, and boundary 2.

In Japan, perhaps uniquely, the history of capitalism coincides neatly with the history of film. What links these two histories and what their relationship reveals about film culture and everyday life in Japan, is the subject of this original and provocative work. Looking at a hundred-year history of film and capitalism, "The Flash of Capital" theorizes a cultural history that illuminates 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. Eric Cazdyn focuses on three key moments of historical contradiction: colonialism, post-war reconstruction, and globalization. In great classics of Japanese film, in 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 colonizer and colonized, between the individual and the collective, and between the national and the transnational. Through a close reading of cinema within its 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. Richly illustrated, this innovative work of cultural history and criticism will be of interest to those concerned with Japanese film history, the culture and political economy of Japan, and anyone seeking explanations of historical change that challenge conventional distinctions between the aesthetic and the geopolitical.