ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to demonstrate how incorporating video can greatly enlighten the study of national cinemas in a transnational context, and of their meanings and uses in the global media landscape over the past three decades. It does this in the form of two case studies of directors who went from toiling in the relative obscurity of V-Cinema to gaining international festival exposure, critical notice, and a sustained form of global distribution. Tracing their trajectories reveals the workings of the gatekeeping processes discussed in Chapter 2, as well as of the qualities paradoxically inherent in the domestically focused V-Cinema model that allowed for their emergence, as discussed in Chapter 4.
The case study on Kurosawa Kiyoshi chronicles the elaboration of what is perhaps V-Cinema’s widest-reaching proponent, the J-horror genre adopted by Hollywood filmmaking through remakes such as The Ring and The Grudge. The case study on Miike Takashi investigates further the formation of the conflicted discourse on “Asian extreme cinema” and how this, coupled with the swift adoption and consolidation of the DVD format in the first years of the twenty-first century, created international demand for films from Japan and East Asia in genres and styles that had been typical for V-Cinema.
