Introduction

Abstract

This chapter proposes a new approach to Japanese cinema that focuses on aesthetics to reveal historical transformations. Lee recasts the “presentational” aspects of Japanese film as attractions that enact cinema’s contemporaneity, and which may be traced through instances in which focus is pulled to the interval between frames—cinema’s prime attraction. The chapter outlines how the interval functions as a topos for investigating cinema’s shifting identity as it engages with changing local media ecologies and international media flows.

What happens between each frame is so much more important than what exists on each frame.

Norman McLaren (McLaren, quoted in Sifianos, “The Definition of Animation,” 62. Emphasis in original).

It’s between frames where cinema speaks.

Peter Kubelka (Kubelka, “The Theory of Metrical Film,” 141).