ABSTRACT
The explosive growth of home video in 1980s Japan gave an ailing film industry, suffering under competition from television since the early 1960s, a new outlet for its products. The runaway success of video as a business scheme attracted outside investors; new production outfits arose to channel this money stream into the production of feature films for the video market. Bypassing theaters entirely, this created a parallel film industry known as “V-Cinema.” By the early 1990s, over a hundred new films were released directly on video each year. This upsurge in production offered opportunities for film directors, technicians, and creative talent, and opened the doors for newcomers. A domestic business strategy of modest artistic ambition, V-Cinema’s proponents have paradoxically gone on to redefine Japanese cinema for global audiences and give rise to new directors and new genres (like J-horror). V-Cinema defied film historians to broaden the canon formed more than half a century ago and to account for new contexts, methods, and styles. By describing the historic rise of Japanese direct-to-video filmmaking, this chapter argues that V-Cinema challenges accepted notions of national cinema and canonization and of cultural value as assigned to films.
