The Cinema of Origins: Japan's Cinematic Awakening (1896-1908)
In 1896, a Frenchman's mechanical dream arrived on Japan's shores. The Lumière brothers' Cinématographe—that ingenious combined camera, projector, and printer—was about to collide with a nation still processing the violent rupture of its feudal past. Twenty-eight years earlier, the 265-year Tokugawa Shogunate had collapsed, ending Japan's self-imposed isolation and unleashing a transformation so rapid, so total, that it bordered on the apocalyptic.
This wasn't just technological adoption. It was cultural vertigo.
The Cinema of Origins in Japan represents one of the most fascinating paradoxes in film history: a medium born of Western industrial modernity was immediately conscripted to document and preserve the very traditions it would help destroy. For a dozen years, Japanese filmmakers pointed their cameras at Kabuki stages and Nō theaters, creating a hybrid art form that cinema purists would later denounce as reactionary. But this "theatrical slavery" wasn't weakness—it was survival strategy, cultural negotiation, and the necessary foundation for one of cinema's most innovative national traditions.
This is the first chapter of that story. The beginning. When cinema arrived as foreign spectacle and struggled, fitfully, toward indigenous art.
The Nation That Couldn't Slow Down
Fukoku Kyōhei: Enrich the Country, Strengthen the Military
To grasp why cinema took the shape it did in Japan, you must first understand the psychic state of the Meiji nation. The Meiji Restoration (1868) wasn't reform—it was controlled detonation. The ruling elite, witnessing the West's military and industrial supremacy, embarked on a project of forced modernization so comprehensive that it made Peter the Great's Westernization of Russia look cautious.
The mandate was Fukoku Kyōhei—"Enrich the country, strengthen the military." Everything served this imperative. Legal systems were modeled after France and Germany. The navy was built on British templates. Industrial technology was imported from America. The telegraph, the railway, the photographic camera—these weren't consumer goods. They were weapons in a cultural arms race.
The social hierarchy that had defined Japanese life for centuries was abolished virtually overnight. The Samurai class, stripped of their swords and stipends, became anachronisms in their own country. The capital moved from Kyoto to Tokyo, physically severing the new Japan from its feudal heart. Urbanization accelerated. A new class of shimin (urban citizens) emerged, hungry for modern leisure and spectacle.
The Japanese eye was being retrained. For centuries, visual culture had been dominated by ukiyo-e woodblock prints—flat, shadowless, stylized compositions that rejected Western perspective. Now, suddenly, photography and Western painting techniques flooded the market, introducing linear perspective, chiaroscuro, and a fundamentally different way of organizing space.
When cinema arrived in 1896, the Japanese audience was already fluent in cultural code-switching. They could navigate both worlds. They had to.
The Timeline of Transformation
Consider the compression:
1868: Meiji Restoration begins. Feudalism legally ends.
1872: First railway completed (Tokyo to Yokohama).
1877: Last samurai rebellion crushed.
1889: Meiji Constitution established (Western-style parliamentary system).
1894-95: First Sino-Japanese War (Japan defeats China, claiming modernization success).
1896: Cinema arrives.
Barely twenty-eight years from feudalism to film. One generation from sword to cinematograph. The psychological whiplash was extreme.
As film historian Donald Richie notes: "In 1896, it was barely 20 years after the start of the Meiji Era, which is to say the moment when Japan opened up to the rest of the world... The Japan that saw the kinetoscope and the cinematograph of the Lumière Brothers appear was a Japan discovering modernity and barely emerging from feudalism."
Film didn't arrive as entertainment. It arrived as proof—proof that Japan could absorb, master, and deploy Western technology with the same speed and efficiency it had demonstrated in railways, telegraphs, and military hardware.
The Technology Arrives: Peep Shows and Projection (1896-1897)
Edison's Kinetoscope: The Solitary Viewer
The official beginning is 1896. Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope—that coin-operated peep-show device—made its way to Japan through import and rapid reverse-engineering. The Kinetoscope wasn't cinema as we understand it. It was a solitary experience. One viewer, one machine, thirty seconds of looped action viewed through a small eyepiece.
But it was enough. It proved the principle: motion could be captured, preserved, replayed. Entrepreneurs saw profit. Engineers saw challenge. The question wasn't whether Japan would adopt the technology—it was how fast they could master it.
The Cinématographe: The Communal Spectacle
The real transformation came in 1897 with the Lumière Cinématographe. Unlike the cumbersome, stationary Kinetoscope, the Cinématographe was portable, elegant, and crucially—projectable. Film could now be shown to dozens, hundreds of viewers simultaneously. Cinema became communal, theatrical, spectacular.
The first commercial screenings began in major urban centers: Osaka, Kyoto, Tokyo. The programs were short—ten to fifteen minutes total—featuring European "actualities": workers leaving factories, trains arriving at stations, babies eating breakfast. Simple documentation of the mundane rendered miraculous through mechanical reproduction.
The Japanese response was electric. Newspapers breathlessly reported on the "motion photographs" (katsudō shashin). The immediate appeal wasn't narrative—it was novelty, technological wonder. Here was modernity made visible, made consumable, made Japanese through the simple act of watching.
But watching wasn't enough. Within months, Japanese entrepreneurs were attempting to create their own content.
The Pioneer Problem: Expense and Access
The leap from exhibition to production was expensive and technically formidable. Film stock and cameras had to be imported from Europe or America. A single camera cost more than a year's salary for most workers. The chemicals needed for developing were scarce. The humid Japanese climate degraded both film stock and equipment rapidly.
Two figures emerged as critical pioneers:
Tsunekichi Shibata, a photographic equipment merchant, is credited with filming the first Japanese-made content in 1897. His footage—street scenes, military parades, snippets of daily Tokyo life—was crude but revolutionary. It proved that Japanese hands could operate Western machines to capture Japanese reality.
Shirō Asano, an engineer and importer, solved the technical nightmare of developing and printing film in a humid, under-resourced environment. His engineering skill transformed cinema from expensive gimmick to viable commercial product.
These pioneers weren't artists. They were entrepreneurs, engineers, merchants who saw profit in spectacle. Their motivation was commercial, their methods experimental. Art would come later—much later.
The First Impulse: Documentation and Propaganda (1897-1904)
Actualités: Recording the Transformation
The earliest Japanese-made films weren't fiction. They were documentation—what the French called actualités. The camera's first function was archival: capture the new before it became the normal.
Film subjects included:
The Emperor's procession through Tokyo
Construction of the new Ginza district
Modern military drills and parades
Street scenes showing the mixture of kimono and Western dress
Exhibitions of new technology (railways, factories, electrical lighting)
The camera was a tool of national memory. It preserved the transitional moment—that vertigo-inducing period when feudal Japan and modern Japan existed simultaneously, visibly, on the same streets.
As film scholar Isolde Standish observes: "Primitive Japanese cinema often has documentary value; fiction would only appear in 1908. At first, these were street scenes, theater scenes."
This documentary impulse served the Meiji project perfectly. Film could prove Japan's modernization to both domestic and international audiences. It was propaganda without appearing to be propaganda—simply showing the modern nation was sufficient.
The Russo-Japanese War: Cinema as Nationalist Tool (1904-1905)
The most significant early use of film came during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). This conflict—Japan's first major war against a Western power—was a crucial test of the Meiji project. Could a former feudal nation defeat a European empire?
Yes. Decisively.
And film documented it. Japanese camera operators accompanied the military, filming departures, battles (staged and real), and triumphant returns. The footage was exhibited in theaters across Japan, creating shared nationalist fervor. Film became an instrument of the state, formalizing cinema's role as tool of modernity and empire.
The irony is profound: a technology invented in France was used by Japan to document its victory over Russia, proving to the West that Japan had successfully Westernized. The medium and the message reinforced each other perfectly.
The Archive That Burned
Here's the tragedy: almost none of this early footage survives.
The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 destroyed most of Tokyo's film archives. Nitrate film—the standard until the 1950s—was chemically unstable, highly flammable, and degraded rapidly in humid climates. Poor storage conditions, fires, and the deliberate destruction of war propaganda during the American Occupation (1945-1952) obliterated the visual record.
Film historians must reconstruct this period from fragments: written descriptions in newspapers, production company records, government documents, and a handful of surviving actualités preserved by institutions like the National Film Archive of Japan.
The Cinema of Origins exists primarily as text, not image. We know what was filmed. We can't see it. This absence is itself historically significant—a reminder that film preservation wasn't valued, that the medium was seen as ephemeral, disposable, commercial, not art.
The Theater's Shadow: Cinema as Filmed Performance (1897-1908)
The Problem: No Native Film Language
Western cinema developed its narrative language by adapting theatrical traditions while simultaneously discovering techniques unique to the medium: editing, camera movement, close-ups, cross-cutting. This evolution was possible because Western filmmakers had models—popular theater, vaudeville, melodrama—that could be translated into cinematic form.
Japan had different traditions. And those traditions were non-negotiable.
Kabuki and Nō: The Inescapable Influence
Japanese cinema's first narrative impulse was documentary: film the stage. Not adapt the stage—film the stage.
The earliest "fiction" content consisted of excerpts from Kabuki and Nō performances, shot from a fixed position replicating the privileged view of a theater patron. The camera was stationary, respectful, passive. It recorded but did not interpret.
Kabuki, the popular theatrical form, offered immediate visual appeal. The elaborate makeup (kumadori), magnificent costumes, stylized movement, and the famous hanamichi (the runway stage extending into the audience) were inherently cinematic spectacles. Filming Kabuki required no adaptation—just documentation.
Nō, the aristocratic, spiritual drama, was filmed as cultural preservation. Nō's slow, hypnotic formalism, its masked performers, its minimalist staging—all of this was antithetical to cinematic dynamism. But Nō represented Japan's feudal soul. Filming it was an act of cultural nationalism, proof that modernity wouldn't erase tradition.
Film historian Joseph Anderson writes: "Its cinema comes from the theater. The pioneers' first reflex was to film Nō theater and Kabuki theater."
This wasn't artistic failure. It was cultural logic. Why create new content when Japan possessed the world's most sophisticated theatrical traditions? Film's function was preservation, not innovation.
Momijigari (1899): The Archival Impulse
The clearest example of this approach is Momijigari (Viewing the Autumn Leaves), filmed in 1899. A fragment of this film survives—one of the oldest pieces of Japanese cinema in existence.
Momijigari documents a performance by two legendary Kabuki actors: Ichikawa Danjūrō IX and Onoe Kikugorō V. The film was commissioned not for public exhibition but as an archival experiment—a way to preserve the actors' technique for posterity after their deaths.
Think about that motivation. Film wasn't art. It was technological taxidermy—a way to immortalize performance without understanding that the act of filming changed performance.
The film is static, theatrical, and technically primitive. But it's also historically invaluable. It captures a lost performance style, preserves the spatial logic of Kabuki staging, and demonstrates cinema's initial subservience to established art.
The Actor Question: Dignity and the Camera
Kabuki actors were cultural royalty. They enjoyed social prestige, economic security, and artistic autonomy. The onnagata—male actors specializing in female roles—were particularly revered for their skill in embodying idealized femininity through highly codified gesture and voice.
Film, by contrast, was vulgar. Commercial. Technically crude. A fairground novelty operated by merchants and engineers, not artists.
Convincing established actors to work in film was nearly impossible. The camera was beneath their dignity. This created a profound problem: how could Japanese cinema develop compelling performances without access to Japan's most skilled performers?
The solution was slow and painful. Film had to prove itself artistically and economically before theater actors would deign to participate. This wouldn't happen fully until the 1910s and 1920s, when the Pure Film Movement and rising salaries made cinema respectable.
In the meantime, early film relied on amateur performers, young actors seeking to break into theater, and the occasional aging star willing to experiment for extra income.
The Benshi: Cinema's Third Element
The Narrator as Star
Here's where Japanese cinema diverged radically from Western practice. Western silent film developed techniques—editing, intertitles, close-ups—to convey narrative without sound. Japanese cinema developed the Benshi.
The Benshi (also called katsudō benshi—"moving picture narrator") was a live performer who stood beside the screen, providing narration, dialogue, sound effects, and contextual explanation during film screenings. The Benshi wasn't a translator of intertitles. The Benshi was the film's voice.
This wasn't a transitional practice. It was the dominant form of Japanese cinema exhibition from the 1900s through the late 1930s. Even after the introduction of sound in the late 1920s, Benshi remained popular, often narrating over sound films to "improve" them.
The Benshi's Functions
The Benshi's role was multifaceted and essential:
1. Character Voices: The Benshi provided distinct voices for every character on screen, using different vocal registers, accents, and emotional tones to differentiate between heroes, villains, men, women, children, and supernatural beings.
2. Narrative Explanation: The Benshi clarified plot, provided backstory, explained cultural references, and contextualized historical or geographical settings that foreign audiences wouldn't understand.
3. Emotional Amplification: The Benshi didn't just describe action—they interpreted it, guiding the audience's emotional response. A Benshi could make a mediocre film compelling through sheer performative skill.
4. Cultural Mediation: Early cinema showed many foreign films—American and European content dominated exhibition. The Benshi translated not just language but cultural codes, making foreign narratives comprehensible to Japanese audiences.
The best Benshi became celebrities, earning higher salaries than directors or actors. Audiences often chose films based on which Benshi was narrating, not which actors were performing or which studio produced it. The Benshi had interpretive authority—their narration could override or contradict the visual information on screen.
The Benshi's Legacy: Delaying Cinematic Evolution
From a purist perspective, the Benshi was a problem. The narrator's presence meant that Japanese filmmakers didn't need to develop sophisticated editing techniques, visual storytelling, or narrative clarity. Why use intertitles when the Benshi could explain everything verbally? Why develop close-ups to convey emotion when the Benshi could simply tell the audience what characters were feeling?
Film scholar David Bordwell argues that the Benshi's dominance delayed Japanese cinema's development of classical Hollywood editing patterns. Japanese silent films remained visually simpler, relying on longer takes and theatrical staging because the Benshi compensated for visual ambiguity.
But this critique misses the point. Japanese cinema wasn't failing to evolve into Hollywood cinema—it was evolving into Japanese cinema. The Benshi tradition created a unique aesthetic, one that privileged the marriage of performance and image, that understood film as collaborative live experience rather than fixed, self-contained text.
When sound finally arrived and the Benshi was forced into obsolescence, Japanese cinema lost something irreplaceable. The transition was painful, resistant, and left permanent marks on Japanese film style—a lingering preference for understated performance, extended takes, and narrative ellipsis that assumes an active, interpretive audience.
The Slow Break: Toward Narrative Fiction (1904-1908)
The Economic Pressure: Original Content as Profit
By the mid-1900s, the Japanese film industry faced an economic reality: foreign films were cheaper to import than to produce domestically, but audiences increasingly wanted Japanese content. The solution was to create original narrative films—but that required a shift from documentation to storytelling, from filming theater to creating theater for film.
The transition was awkward, experimental, and slow. Early attempts at original fiction were crude, theatrical, and narratively incoherent. But they proved that demand existed.
Shōzō Makino: The First Filmmaker
The pivotal figure in this transition is Shōzō Makino (1878–1929), often called the "Father of Japanese Cinema."
Makino began his career as an assistant to a Kabuki theater impresario, learning stagecraft, narrative structure, and business. In 1908, the Yokota Shōkai production company handed him a camera and essentially said: make content.
Makino's genius was pragmatic. He understood that while Kabuki actors were expensive and difficult, Kabuki stories were not. The historical narratives, the tales of samurai loyalty and revenge, the dramatic conflicts—these could be adapted, simplified, and staged specifically for the camera without requiring expensive theater stars.
Makino began to:
Simplify sets (outdoor locations rather than elaborate stage constructions)
Focus action (shorter, more concentrated dramatic moments)
Stage for the camera (understanding the difference between theatrical space and cinematic frame)
His 1908 production, Honnōji Kassen (The Battle of Honnōji), is often cited as the birth of narrative Japanese cinema. The film depicts the historical assassination of the warlord Oda Nobunaga—a story every Japanese audience knew intimately. Makino didn't need to explain context. The Benshi and cultural knowledge provided that. He just needed to visualize conflict, movement, spectacle.
Honnōji Kassen was technically primitive by Western standards—static framing, theatrical staging, minimal editing. But it was original. It was narratively coherent. It was cinema, not filmed theater.
Makino's work established the jidaigeki (period film) as Japanese cinema's foundational genre. He would go on to direct over 260 films and mentor the next generation of directors, including the great Daisuke Itō and Masahiro Makino (his son).
The Generic Split: Past vs. Present
As original production increased, Japanese cinema crystallized around two competing genres, each representing a different national anxiety:
Jidaigeki (Period Films): Set in feudal Japan, typically the Edo period (1603-1868). These films romanticized the samurai code, explored themes of loyalty and honor, and offered nostalgic retreat from modernity's chaos. Jidaigeki was Japan's mythic past—sanitized, idealized, frozen in amber.
Gendai-geki (Contemporary Films): Set in modern Meiji or Taishō Japan. These films depicted urban life, social problems, family dramas, and the psychological costs of modernization. Gendai-geki forced audiences to confront the present—poverty, changing gender roles, Western cultural influence, loss of tradition.
This split was ideological. Filmmakers had to choose: celebrate the lost past or critique the chaotic present. Most production companies specialized in one or the other, creating distinct studio identities that would define Japanese cinema for decades.
The generic division also reflected class anxieties. Jidaigeki appealed to working-class audiences who felt alienated by modernity, while gendai-geki attracted middle-class urban viewers interested in social realism and psychological drama.
Studio Consolidation: The Birth of Nikkatsu (1912)
The Chaos of Competition
The Cinema of Origins was economically chaotic. Dozens of small production companies competed for audience attention, exhibition space, and imported film stock. Quality was inconsistent. Distribution was fragmented. Exhibition was unregulated—film screenings happened in theaters, storefronts, makeshift tents, anywhere a projector could be set up.
This chaos was profitable for entrepreneurs but unsustainable for the industry. The solution was consolidation.
The Big Four Merge
In 1912, four major pioneering companies merged to form Nippon Katsudō Shashin Company—better known as Nikkatsu, Japan's first major film studio.
The four companies were:
Yokota Shōkai (Shōzō Makino's employer)
Yoshizawa Shōten (one of the earliest importers of film equipment)
Fukuhōdō (a major exhibitor)
M. Pathé (the Japanese branch of the French Pathé company)
Nikkatsu's formation centralized production, standardized technical quality, and created a vertically integrated business model—production, distribution, and exhibition under one corporate umbrella.
This consolidation ended the Cinema of Origins. Film was no longer a novelty, a fairground curiosity, or a technological experiment. It was an industry.
The Seeds of Reform: The Pure Film Movement Begins
The Problem of Artistic Legitimacy
By 1910, Japanese cinema had achieved commercial success but not artistic respect. Critics, intellectuals, and filmmakers returning from Europe observed that Japanese film lagged behind Western cinema in technical sophistication, narrative complexity, and performance style.
The primary targets of criticism were:
The Benshi's dominance (which delayed development of visual storytelling techniques)
The use of onnagata (male actors playing female roles, maintaining theatrical convention)
The static camera (fixed theatrical perspective rather than dynamic cinematic framing)
These critics formed the core of what would become the Jun'eigageki Undō (Pure Film Movement)—a reform effort that demanded cinema develop its own aesthetic, independent from theater.
The reformers argued that film could never be true art as long as it slavishly imitated theatrical conventions. The use of onnagata was particularly contentious—their stylized, exaggerated gestures broke the illusion of screen realism that Western cinema was perfecting.
The push to use actresses in film was therefore both social reform (challenging gender restrictions) and aesthetic revolution (demanding realistic performance styles). The debate would dominate the 1910s and 1920s, fundamentally transforming Japanese cinema.
But that transformation belongs to the next chapter. The Cinema of Origins ended with the question posed but unanswered: could Japanese cinema break free of the theater's shadow and become an independent art?
What Remains: Legacy and Loss
The Historical Void
The material legacy of the Cinema of Origins is heartbreakingly sparse. Of the hundreds of films produced between 1897 and 1908, fewer than a dozen fragments survive. The rest are lost—destroyed by fire, chemical decay, earthquakes, war, and institutional neglect.
This absence is a wound in film history. We can describe early Japanese cinema, analyze its industrial structure, trace its cultural influence—but we can't see it. The images are gone.
What remains:
Momijigari (1899): A fragment showing Kabuki actors performing.
Actualités from 1907-1908: Brief street scenes and military footage.
Written descriptions: Extensive documentation in newspapers, studio records, and Benshi training manuals.
The Cinema of Origins exists primarily as archive, not artifact. Film historians piece together its story from fragments, cross-references, and institutional memory.
The Foundation That Endured
But the loss of images doesn't mean the loss of influence. The Cinema of Origins established patterns that would define Japanese cinema for the next century:
1. The Theatrical Influence: The interplay between stage and screen remained central to Japanese film aesthetics. Even after cinema developed its own language, the influence of Kabuki and Nō persisted in performance style, staging, and narrative structure.
2. The Generic Division: The jidaigeki/gendai-geki split became Japanese cinema's primary organizational structure, creating distinct traditions that continue today (samurai films vs. contemporary dramas).
3. The Benshi Legacy: The narrator's presence created an audience expectation of interpretive performance, of collaborative meaning-making between screen and viewer. This influenced the development of Japanese sound cinema, which retained a preference for understated performance and elliptical narration.
4. The Preservation Impulse: Cinema's initial function as archival tool—documenting modernity, preserving tradition—remained embedded in Japanese film culture. The documentary impulse never disappeared; it became foundational.
5. The Makino Lineage: Shōzō Makino's mentorship created a direct artistic lineage. His students and proteges became the next generation's masters, creating a continuous tradition from the Cinema of Origins through the Golden Age of the 1950s.
The Question That Opens the Next Chapter
The Cinema of Origins ended with cinema achieving commercial viability but not artistic legitimacy. The industry was structured, profitable, and popular—but artistically derivative, technically conservative, and aesthetically constrained.
The next decade—the Silent Era proper (1908-1920s)—would be defined by a single question: could Japanese cinema free itself from theatrical convention and develop a visual language unique to the medium?
The answer would split the industry, create competing studio aesthetics, and produce some of cinema's most radical formal experiments. But that struggle—the Pure Film Movement's battle against the onnagata, the Benshi's resistance to obsolescence, the emergence of directors like Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujirō Ozu—belongs to the next essay.
For now, understand this: the Cinema of Origins was not a failed beginning. It was a necessary foundation. It proved that Japan could master Western technology while maintaining cultural identity. It established the industrial structure that would support artistic innovation. It created an audience hungry for moving images, trained in the grammar of cinematic spectatorship.
The images may be lost. But the tradition they built endures.
Next in this series: The Silent Revolution: The Pure Film Movement and the Birth of Japanese Cinema (1908-1923)
Resources, Further Reading, Further Viewing
Essential Viewing
Since almost no films from this period survive, the best way to understand the Cinema of Origins is to study:
For Kabuki and Theatrical Influence:
Gate of Hell (Jigokumon, 1953) – Directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa. While much later, this film deliberately employs Kabuki staging and color design to show what early filmed theater might have looked like. Criterion Collection Spine #653
For the Benshi Tradition:
A Page of Madness (Kurutta Ippēji, 1926) – Directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa. A late silent film that demonstrates the visual complexity Japanese cinema achieved once it moved beyond theatrical staging. Benshi narration was essential to its original screenings.
For Historical Context:
The Criterion Collection's "100 Years of Japanese Cinema" – Essay collection providing comprehensive historical overview.
Donald Richie's documentaries on Japanese film history, which include rare surviving footage from the 1900s-1910s.
For the Meiji Transformation:
The Last Samurai (2003) – Yes, it's Hollywood. But it's also surprisingly accurate about the Meiji government's forcible modernization and the psychological dislocation it caused. Watch it for context, not for Japanese cinema history.
Recommended Books
Anderson, Joseph L., and Donald Richie. The Japanese Film: Art and Industry. Princeton University Press, 1982. The foundational English-language study of Japanese film history. Essential reading for understanding the Meiji Era pioneers and the Benshi phenomenon.
Richie, Donald. A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History. Kodansha, 2005. Accessible overview that places the Cinema of Origins within the larger Japanese film tradition.
Bordwell, David. Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. Princeton University Press, 1988. Provides crucial theoretical context on theatrical traditions and the Benshi's structural influence on Japanese film style.
Standish, Isolde. A New History of Japanese Cinema: A Century of Narrative Film. Continuum, 2005. Scholarly analysis focusing on the sociological and cultural shifts of the Meiji period.
Nishiyama, Yasuo. Japanese Cinema and the Cultural Landscape, 1910-1945: The Beginnings of Art Cinema. Intellect, 2011. Detailed analysis of the transitional period following the Cinema of Origins and the initial phase of the Pure Film Movement.
High, Peter B. The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years' War, 1931-1945. University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. While focused on later periods, includes crucial context on film as nationalist propaganda, tracing back to the Russo-Japanese War footage.
Documentaries
Two in the Wave (2010) — Emmanuel Laurent's documentary about the Truffaut-Godard friendship and rupture
Godard, l'amour, la poésie (2007) — Documentary covering Godard's entire career with focus on political period
