Serial Filmmaking in Japan: Introduction

Abstract

In recent years an expanding field of academic enquiry has centred upon issues of serial film and media production and formats (including: Forrest 2010; Herbert 2017; Herbert and Verevis 2020; Henderson 2014; Hudelet and Cr emieux 2020; Jess-Cooke 2009; Jess-Cooke and Verevis 2010; Johnson 2013; Kelleter 2017a; Klein and Palmer 2016; Kramer and Rudiger 2015; Krutnik and Loock 2017; Loock and Verevis 2012; Perkins and Verevis 2012; Smith and Verevis 2017; Verevis 2006; Verevis 2017). In the main, this work has been focused on either Hollywood cinema, or on the transnational and transcultural facets of remaking and adaptation flowing from and to Hollywood. This special issue – ‘Serial Filmmaking in Japan’ – seeks to demonstrate how Japan might usefully become the focus for a recentring of these debates (Iwabuchi 2002). We use Japan as a representative of the many nations that have their own histories, traditions and cultures of serialisation. As the articles in this issue demonstrate, film production in Japan provides an especially productive example with a wide range of industrial structures that encourage adaptations, remakes, series and other serial formats. Moreover, like extant work in the field of seriality studies, these essays seek to emphasise the possibility of serialisation as both an industrial and an aesthetic principle, at once showing ‘the dependency of culture on serial reproduction’ (Kelleter 2017b, 14), and tracing how various formatting practices ‘[do] not simply follow an original but [recognise] new versions as free adaptations or variations that actualise an implicit potentiality at the source’ (Verevis 2017, 149). Taking up this type of approach to explore some examples of Japan’s serial film worlds, this special issue demonstrates the ways in which serial media formats are