Is Genre a useful category for the understanding of films made in Essay

Is Genre a useful category for the understanding of films made in China and lacquer - Essay ExampleA scholar that suggests that there is an Ameri flock music genre would be immediately attacked by his colleagues for oversimplifying an obviously complex, multifaceted gamut of movies. So the question of whether there is a Chinese or Nipponese genre of film may be answered in the affirmative if unmatchable sees genre in merely the reference short-hand manner. If, that is, the audience is American or British. The definition of genre in this sense will be having a preponderance of Chinese or Japanese actors, and in either Mandarin or the Japanese spoken communication. This is preferably simplistic, and might be regarded as offensive or even racist, but it does reflect one of the most simple definitions of genre.China can be divided between Hong Kong, the mainland controlled by the nominally communist government and then Taiwan, which represents a whole other development both politi cally and artistically. So it can be said that a Chinese genre is redundant beyond the audience-expectation type of definition. Turning to Japanese cinema, while more culturally homogenous, Japan also presents difficulties for the simple definition. Donald Richie, the leading Western scholar of Japanese cinema, states that many Japanese films indeed have a sense of what he calls Japaneseness. He describes this as the jubilance of evanescence.4 This evanescence is shown by Japanese film-makers at bottom a paradoxical desire to have their films be temporary rather than permanent. Thus Richie quotes the director Ozu, who stated, the attractive thing about film is this transience, this mist-like vanishing quality.5 The director Naruse goes even further, suggesting that films should eer vanish a few weeks after release, perhaps this is what films should be, things that live on only in the audiences memory, or vanish into thin air.6The wish to have their films vanish into thin air is r ather ironic for two reasons. First, it counters the traditional advantage that film is said to have over theatre its permanence as opposed to mutability. Second, in darkly humorous irony, this rather intellectual wish has been granted to the vast absolute legal age of Japanese film-makers, whether or not they desired the honor. Thus the majority of Japanese films (more than 90% of pre-WWII movies) have vanished because they did not survive the film chemistry or the war of the time. Even with film production since 1945, a majority of Japanese films now no longer exist and can only be referenced within the memories of actors, writers etc.