The Influence of Tradition in Japanese Cinema essays

The Influence of Tradition in Japanese Cinema essays Japanese culture has arisen as a mixture of the East and the West. Japanese have been able to keep their traditional aesthetic features while they also embraced western style, which was filtered through Japanese tradition. The presence of the Benshi ( a commentator who narrated the action of the film) could be a suitable example of the situation. The beliefs of Japanese people are East originated. Shintoism and Buddhism give lots of importance to the spirits and supernatural forces which are also cultivated in the Japanese mythology. Some of the Japanese directors have been able to combine a western visual art form (cinema) with their traditional beliefs different from the western examples of the same subject matter. In contemporary cinema this particular subject matter (ghosts/demons) mostly taken into the consideration as an element of the horror, but in Japanese cinema they are the elements of the drama ( particularly the spirit itself ) as well as a horrifying object. That is to say according to their beliefs, spirits are the ones who are suffering either because lack of the prayers that let them pass to the Land of the Dead, or because of the evil feelings/behaviors while they were in the Land of the Living. Dramatic situations of the suffering souls are represented in a poetic way, as the general look of the Japanese cinema relies on empty spaces, plainness, and landscape appearances. These features also exists one of their basic ordinary life rituels; tea- ceremony. The tea- ceremony room is decorated almost empty with a plain style and prefarably located with a view of a garden. This proves that ordinary life rituels influces the aestetic features of the Japanese cinema. These i nfluences becomes the resources of the national cinema of Japan. The narration in the Japanese cinema mostly relies on the style which ables to transfer the ideas ( of the director) through the atmosphere of the fil...